“You think poor and destitute white people don’t exist?”
I do, and they suffer all kinds of disadvantages, and they still have white privilege. Just as highly educated, wealthy black Americans exist, and they experience privilege along those dimensions but are still treated differently because of their race.
Each type of privilege is like enjoying good health in one bodily system. If you have heart disease but are otherwise healthy, that’s a real challenge. Yet some other folks have heart disease AND emphysema. It’s not negating the challenge of the heart disease when we note that you don’t have to cope with emphysema too, and that breathing freely is a privilege not everyone enjoys.
How do I come to this conclusion? I’m listening to people and believing them when they describe an experience I can never have.
I’ve lived in poor white Appalachia for 30 years, so I’m pretty familiar with the problems here. I’m also plenty pasty white, as my avatar pretty plainly shows. I’m not asking you to take my word for anything - I’m simply suggesting that you should find out more about the idea of white privilege before you dismiss it out of hand because of your close study of the nuances of Cops. That’s all.
656 @Pizzagirl
No need to apologize - I am aware of my privilege. You could probably close the gap if you opened your mind a little. (Joking, but also serious.)
“1) There is documentary evidence that she personally authorized the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation techniques” program in 2002, prior to any opinion from the Justice Department. I very much doubt she will ever get the chance to defend herself in court, but the idea that she might be implicated in war crimes is not exactly “tin foil hat” type craziness.”
That does not mean that she would be a worthless or useless speaker on a college campus, or that she would have nothing to offer about such topics as foreign policy or for that matter, making it as a woman in a man’s world and/or making it as an African-American in a white person’s world.
You’re falling into exactly what we are decrying - that you need to agree with every aspect of a person’s worldview before you should be subject to having to listen to them.
You do realize that I did not link to the FIRE “disinvitation database”, right?
I have never understood that argument. So you concede that one group of individuals did on some unspecified number of occasions try and silence a legitimate voice? But you are ok with that because they were not successful most of the time? How does that even work?
As much as I hate to continue this diversion to the "check your privilege" tangent, sheer professionalism prevents me from letting this pass without comment.
In this case I have to continue in the same spirit of @Ohiodad51 's indictment.
The author of the study in question, Roland Fryer, is a professor of economics at Harvard and happens to be African-American himself. More significantly, he is the winner of the John Bates Clark medal. For those who don’t know, this is one of the highest honors an economist can receive. As an honor, it’s just a bit behind the Nobel Prize. To even be considered for the medal, a person has to be thought of as one of the top minds in economics of their generation, not to mention being charming, witty, and rather exceptionally good looking
I think I can reasonably assure you that Fryer is not someone who’d you think would be predisposed to finding the results he found. However, he is a first-tier economist and has too much integrity to hide from what his analysis shows. To dismiss his work out of hand because it isn’t to your ideological liking is anti-intellectual flat-eartherism.
I actually thought the Washington Post article was very well written and reasonably sophisticated and balanced - far more so than a typical newspaper article. I have no idea how an honest reading of this article leads anyone to conclude that they can just dismiss Fryer’s study. Of course there are issues with Fryer’s study. Hell, many of the “issues” that the article points out were raised by Fryer himself. His study is just the first step towards understanding the issues of police shootings and racial bias, not the last. It may even eventually prove to be fatally flawed.
But his work is much better than the naive analyses that have permeated the national conversation, and the conclusions of this painstaking analysis seem to be in a similar vein as other analyses that have also found that a large number of police involved shootings of black males were done by police officers who were minorities themselves. The issue is complicated.
However, that does not mean that you can leap from Fryer’s results to the conclusion that there isn’t racial bias in police use of force. Fryer himself finds lots of evidence of this.
Let’s turn it around - do you think the Rutgers students who protested Dr. Rice’s scheduled commencement address (and the Honorary Doctorate and her $50k speaking fee) should not have been able to express their opinions?
Here’s an contemporaneous quote on this issue from Scott Lemieux (Lawyers, Guns & Money blog):
“To reiterate, commencement speeches are not about debate or the free exchange of ideas. They’re not like bringing a speaker onto campus; if the Model UN or College Republicans want to bring Rice in to deliver a talk that’s an entirely different issue. Commencement speeches are about honoring the speaker, often with the tuition money of students. The idea that students and faculty should shut their yaps and not give their opinion about who is worthy of such honors stands the idea of free speech on its head. We’re not talking about who has the right to speak; we’re talking about who should be honored by the university. These are very different questions.”
The fact that in many communities, Asians may share the privilege doesn’t mean that white privilege doesn’t exist. It doesn’t have to be “whites vs. everybody else.” It can be “whites vs. some other groups.”
And Asians have issues of their own to deal with, not the least of which is being frequently mistaken for a foreigner in your own country.
Your link mentioned FIRE. MEntiond what I just addressed.
Concede? What do you mean concede? I am interested in reality. Whatever reality is. I love the way you frame these questions.
I think Condi Rice should be able to speak. Maybe not at a graduation. I would like to think a commencement address unites the participants, not divides the participants. Otherwise, let her talk.
I have to go, I am going to have lunch with a conservative who does not twist what I say into pretzels.
@al1#666
"However, that does not mean that you can leap from Fryer’s results to conclude that there isn’t racial bias in police use of force. Fryer himself finds lots of evidence of this. "
That is EXACTLY what @hebegebe attempted to do back in post #645, and that’s what led to that article being posted.
The students of course should be able to express their opinions. I understand Rice withdrew, which mooted the issue, but had she been disinvited do you think that would be a problem?
Reread the last sentence he wrote in the quote above, and then look back at what he was responding to. I don’t feel I have misrepresented what he said at all.
I added some further clarification of my point after you posted. To answer your question - no, my position wouldn’t change even if Rutgers had withdrawn the invitation. Dr Rice is a famous public person - our ability to hear her opinions and perspectives is not substantively burdened in any way by her not speaking at the Rutgers commencement ceremony.
@NickFlynn: Would your opinion change if she were a person with a smaller stage? What about the difference in being able to directly question someone, such as at the Q&A that often follows speeches?
I should also ask, what about the lessons learned from the fact of disinvitation? Is the advancement of the heckler’s veto really a valuable lesson we want to impart more, rather than less?
The issue though isn’t whether Dr. Rice has the ability to express herself in the public sphere. She is a woman of consequence, and no small means. Of course she has a public megaphone.
But the issue is what does the campaign (by students and faculty) to bar her from speaking at Rutgers, or the serial attempts to stop or disrupt conservative pundits/critics/authors, say about the intellectual culture of at least some portion of the University community?
Oh, I know! (raising hand) It says – “I can’t possibly listen to or learn from someone who is accomplished, thoughtful and knowledgeable, if I disagree with any part of their opinions! And if you make me, I’ll throw a temper tantrum!”
There’s zero thoughtfulness in such a response. A thoughtful approach would have been - ok, and can there be some kind of respectful Q&A forum held separately so we students can share with her our concerns and have some kind of dialogue so at the end of the day we each understand better where the other comes from, and maybe gain some insight into the philosophies that drove her decision-making. But that would require adherence to civility, agreement that such a forum would be respectful, and that’s just too hard for some people.
To the Q posed of me upthread - of course students should be “allowed” to protest. It’s a free country. It’s unfortunate that they don’t see the distinction between protesting, say, the invitation of Rice and the invitation of Hitler, but you can always count on people to turn the rhetorical heat really high. In fact, I hear tell one of the presidential candidates is super-good at that, but maybe that’s just a rumor.
Way back many pages ago, I conceded that issue of invited speakers on campus was a fairly complex issue that involves a lot of balancing - as opposed to the rest of the nonsense in the U of C letter (trigger warnings, safe spaces.) There are real issues here, and in my opinion, the whole Dr Rice / Rutgers incident is not really a good starting point for any kind of substantive discussion because it’s a commencement address/honorary degree award, not just an invitation to give a speech. I’m not the one who brought it up originally, I just responded. Prior to this thread going down this cul-de-sac, there were some good posts on the more general topic, I thought.
Honestly, like most reasonable people, I don’t have a fully thought-out coherent overall programmatic solution that perfectly balances all the various free speech issues that can arise. I think it’s a really complicated problem that doesn’t have a perfect one-size-fits-all solution. That’s why declarative statements like “we are fully committed to the idea of freedom of intellectual debate” don’t actually help to clarify policy at all, they are just posturing in lieu of actually engaging with the real issues. The tricky issues are all about the details, and how you balance everyone’s right to express themselves in a fair way.
That’s fair. You are right, a commencement speaker is a little different from a debate on some aspect of foreign policy. Nonetheless, even without any discussion of foreign policy, it’s hard for me not to think that someone such as Rice would be an interesting speaker because she’s had tremendous access to experiences most of us haven’t, AND in her particular case succeeding at a very high level in spite of not having either male privilege or white privilege.
@NickFlynn@Hanna The “point” about Cops wasn’t meant to be entirely serious. I was simply pointing out an example that everyone is familiar with. It was meant to be slightly amusing, but I’m glad you took it so seriously. The issue is that there are millions of poor white people in Appalachia, Oklahoma, Kansas, etc. And I know for a fact that these people do not feel they are privileged. I know this because half of my extended family is living in poverty in northern Oklahoma. So are you denying these peoples “lived experience”, as your side of the argument loves to say? This is what you say I’m doing with POC. That seems slightly hypocritical. By the way, not all POC agree that white privilege exists, so am I just supposed to ignore what these people think as well?
“But the issue is what does the campaign (by students and faculty) to bar her from speaking at Rutgers, or the serial attempts to stop or disrupt conservative pundits/critics/authors, say about the intellectual culture of at least some portion of the University community?”
It tell me that they have different priorities and concerns than you do. You know, freedom of speech and expression and all that. Your support for freedom of speech seems to end exactly at the point that someone expresses an opinion that you don’t agree with. That’s fine, but you need to find some other justification because it’s clearly not really about “freedom of speech” for you, or you would acknowledge that there is always a balance of competing interests.
