history 101

17 Responses to history 101

1. Pornstar says:

   May 23, 2012 at 4:31 pm

   Maybe i haven’t gotten out around the internet enough, and certainly not over to Fox, but i haven’t heard much of a shitstorm about this from the right. Maybe people really aren’t all that bothered by it.

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2. Expat says:

   May 23, 2012 at 5:13 pm

   Perhaps because already – and certainly in the not so distant future Amy – left/right won’t map to non-white/white.

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3. Pornstar says:

   May 23, 2012 at 5:37 pm

   No, you can’t call party line by race, certainly. Every now and again i’m stuck on a saturday night with Fox News on closed caption (nothing i can do about that), and i’m struck that the majority of anchors and reporters on duty that night seem to be black, asian, or latino. Look at the shit Cory Brooker is getting, and he’s a Dem.

   Long ago on CiF when WeAretheWorld was still around, it used to freak out at the fact that most borned babies weren’t white, and that white people were going to start to have more babies. I said that they as the didn’t really seem inclined to do so, perhaps they weren’t terribly bothered at being a minority at sometime in the not so distant future.

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4. Tommydog says:

   May 23, 2012 at 8:03 pm

   Well, if you like dark eyed, raven haired beauties, non white kids might be the result.

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5. Elena says:

   May 24, 2012 at 6:07 am

   Good cartoon.

   So when do we stop calling non whites “minorities”.

   Interestingly enough, Jews do not consider themselves a minority,even though of course in this country they are.

   The term has such derogatory connotations (poor, needing a hand-out, educationally backward) no wonder people run away from it.

   And although I disagree with Tommydog on just about every economic topic there is, I think his comments on CIF recently about affirmative action were quite good.

   Time to look at all these programs if they still exist.

   We have to complete a ferociously complicated form for some study group on the demographics of some of the clients we serve.

   I don’t mind classifying them according to need or health.

   But why does anybody want to know what color or race they are?

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6. Pornstar says:

   May 24, 2012 at 6:39 am

   Elena -

   I don’t think that we classify people as minority by religious affiliation here. After all, we don’t call Muslims or Buddhists or Hindus or Sikhs minorities here either. To call Jews a race is a whole nother can of worms…..

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7. NatashaFatale says:

   May 24, 2012 at 12:00 pm

   The only sensible thing I can think to say in a couple of sentences about affirmative action is that viewing it as entirely good or bad is the purest imaginable crock of the pure stuff. Unfortunately that’s where half the discussions about it start and where most of the other half end up. If we’re going there, I hope we can manage to do a better job of it.

   Back when it started, anybody who supported it would have been aghast at the suggestion that it was meant to endure forever. It was meant to be a temporary solution to an otherwise unsolvable problem: now that de jure segregation is illegal, how do we end de facto segregation in the workplace (mostly) in the shortest practical time (i.e., in less than several generations)? I cannot remember a single argument in favor of retaining it one minute past the point when that goal is met. Unless we wish to redefine its original purpose — anybody? — then we have to accept that someday it needs to end, especially if it accomplishes what we hoped it would way back when.

   Three points about this. One, that if it never achieves that goal, then it has been an utter failure and needs to be wholly rethought.

   Two, we now have a lot of argument about whether that point has been reached, and a whole lot less discussion about a much more interesting question: how, eventually, are we to know that it has succeeded?

   Three, that it is outright brain-dead stupidity to suppose that it will succeed (or has succeeded) universally and simultaneously across the board. I don’t think it’s logical to agree with this last point without concluding that it has to end somewhere before it ends everywhere. Therefore it is out of court to conclude that every proposal to end any particular application of it amounts to a project to re-segregate the workplace, no matter how many of the old gang of usual suspects are still hoping for exactly that. Among the unpleasant consequences of accepting this is the fact that sooner or later we’ll be driven into apparent agreement with people who make our skin crawl.

   ***

   Elena raises a point we’ve been living with at least since the seventies.

   But why does anybody want to know what color or race they are?

   There have been two irreconcilable strands of thought about this since almost forever.

   The first holds that any reference to anybody’s race must ultimate be used to discriminate against somebody. This is the French view: there are no minorities, only citizens. It hasn’t always worked out for the best (to put it mildly) but we have to remember why they went that way — it would not have been possible for Petain to have collaborated in the holocaust if he hadn’t first compiled lists of jews and gypsies.

   The second holds that large-scale (especially large-scale, and especially unintended, large-scale) discrimination becomes invisible — therefore intractable — where there are no statistics to analyze.

   “…at least since the seventies.” Back then I was writing job costing software for construction companies that were supposed to comply with both of two conflicting federal edicts. The first (in the French manner) forbid them from tracking their employees’ race. The second required them (if they received any federal funds at all, which all such companies do) to submit quarterly “certified payrolls”, which were breakdowns by race of all job classifications. They “complied” with both by embedding race in the salutation field in employee records: “Mr.” might be white, while “Mr” (no period) was black, and so on. Then we’d write a certified payroll program that knew how to read the data, and go to bed wondering which federal agency was going to come after us.

   Forty years on we have “demographic codes” that accomplish the same muddled purpose.

   On the whole I come down on the side of reporting that data in summary (only). Even if my purpose is simply to claim that affirmative action is no longer needed, I will need statistics to prove it. Anybody who says that affirmative action has accomplished its goal but we should not obtain evidence of that is talking through their hood. Anybody who says that affirmative action must continue forever (or even just for now) but also says we should take that on faith is a different kind of charlatan.

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8. Bluthner says:

   May 24, 2012 at 11:00 pm

   When I was a boy it was not at all unusual or extraordinary to speak to older men and women whose own grandparents were not only born as, but came of age as, chattel slaves. And not until I myself came of age did institutions of the state cease to work long, hard, and openly to ‘keep the niggers down’. So to pretend that discrimination is ancient history is to pretend that the slate was only in need of a light dusting to wipe it ‘clean’. Which is delusional.

   To pretend that affirmative action was and is not a blunt and inefficient mechanism is also delusional.

   To suppose that human primates anywhere will anytime soon reach a point where they will, in the main, judge each other entirely on the content of each other’s characters rather than on the color of their skin, or rather on the notions and fears they attribute to the content of other groups’ collective cultural characters, which is what skin-color always stands in for, is, sadly, probably also delusional, but it is a delusion we can’t really live without.

   We find ourselves, as Natasha so eloquently points out, faced with both the need to live as if we are not a country of battling groups, as well as the need to recognize that if any of those groups (which of course do not actually exist) is kept too far and too efficiently from whatever goodies are on the table, then the table is quite likely to be knocked over.

   Trying to describe the United States without invoking cognitive dissonance is like watching that guy who walks down my street most days conversing, loudly and passionately with adversaries none of the rest of us can see, and pretending he’s actually hooked up, hands free, to a cell phone. He ain’t. But he knows that everyone else feels safer supposing that it is so.

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9. Tommydog says:

   May 25, 2012 at 8:01 am

   Some years ago I helped a black friend with a start-up. It was an interesting experience; ironically much of the initial management team was white but as the company grew we attracted more and more blacks to the firm that wanted to work for a minority owned business. Most of our contract awards were because it was an MBE firm; I was focused more on operations and finances which with the rapid growth (15 to 150 employees in 7 months) were the same headaches no matter who owned it. I did, in contract negotiations, sometimes observe the prejudice that the prime contractors might express toward this black owned business. This might typically be expressed to me while we were taking short breaks and I was away from the team – with the person seeming oblivious to the fact that I was on the “black” side of the negotiating table. So certainly prejudice exists.

   However, we need to look at how affirmative action actually exists rather than in some theory. It is mostly being gamed by well educated people who were likely doing very well in any event and not in much need of help. My black boss had a masters degree and a good job, but by forming his own business in pursuit of local government contracts he enabled them to check a box and enrich himself. Elizabeth Warren hardly needed preferential treatment by claiming to be an Indian, but there were apparently advantages to doing so. My own children are minorities because my wife looks rather Mediterranean, but they are hardly disadvantaged, but can claim to be so if they wished. The engineering and construction world is full of minority owned firms managed by well educated people, often born abroad, and who had good jobs, but realized they could become quite wealthy once they learnt how to manipulate the system.

   The notion of diversity has become skewed. If I complete and EEO1 report that breaks down the workforce by aggregate employee classification (management, technical, clerical, sales, etc) and then by sex and ethnicity I will discover that an East Indian helps make us legally diverse, but a Pakistani does not. Nor does an Afghan add to our diversity (nearby Fremont, CA is sometimes called Little Kabul). Also not adding to our diversity are Iranians, Lebanese, Romanians, or Russians (unless they were born in Argentina of which there are more than a few). Technically, a Brazilian, Spaniard or Portuguese doesn’t either, but that is hard to police. Someone born in China with their degree in engineering but whose ancestors never swung a pick on the Continental Railroad does add to our diversity.

   If minority preferences were intended to help poor blacks and Indians get a leg up, then limit it to that, because as it actually exists it is a farce.

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10. NatashaFatale says:

    May 25, 2012 at 3:11 pm

    Dog,

    It is mostly being gamed by well educated people who were likely doing very well in any event and not in much need of help.

    We could quibble about the “mostly” and in fact I think I will, but the rest is undeniably true, and it gets truer the closer you get to see it work in practice. More to the point, it gets truest where it has hung on after it achieved its original objectives. Every business competes for every competitive advantage it can find or create, and it’s lunacy to expect them to ignore opportunities like those offered by hiring and promotion preferences. That was the underlying idea behind the affirmative action from the very start: remove the incentive to hire your kid’s fraternity brothers while freezing out everyone else, replace it with a greater incentive to diversify, and that’s exactly what businesses will do. Suddenly they will feel the urge integrate, not as social policy but because it’s the obvious business decision to make, and soon there will be posters on every bulletin board praising the wonders of diversity in the workplace.

    (Forgive a digression here. We both know the magic of the words “business decision” but not everyone does. Companies sometimes make non-business decisions, but rarely when there’s a contrary business decision to be made. If you want businesses to behave in particular ways — and especially to not behave in others — you find ways to make desirable behavior good business. This has always been so. It’s so with environmental and safety regulations, it’s so with laws against restraint of trade and fraud, it’s so with investment tax credits to encourage capital expenditures in slow times. And you can always tell when these policies have succeeded because that’s when everybody embraces them just because it is the obvious business decision to make. Digression ends.)

    What is true for companies as a whole is just as true for individuals working in them, and it gets truer the bigger the company. Big company Management has always been mostly made up of people who were given one kind of leg up or another, and very few of them have ever acknowledged it. (This is the part that has always rankled with me: I don’t mind that your uncle made you VP of Engineering, because that’s the way the world is, but will you please stop it with the noise about how you came up hard and earned your place with the gumption you showed at intramural volleyball…)

    Nowhere was this ever truer than in construction. Construction contract awards are now micromanaged as you describe for two reasons: first, because they can be (since they always involve federal funds) but second, because nowhere north of Colonel Cornpone’s plantation were minorities and women so rigorously and effectively excluded. This is where we could use some long memories. (From the mid-seventies I remember working in one company that really did try to hire women but were defeated by their own amazing bad luck. Every woman they hired turned out to be so uncoordinated that eventually she fell into the large pond at the back of the yard. Of course many of us were skeptical at first that they actually fell in unaided but they always confirmed it when they uncoordinatedly stumbled into the office to quit.)

    In Chicago — and I’m sure in other places but Chicago is what I saw firsthand — the entire industry was the most effective kind of conspiracy imaginable: one where nobody ever even considered that he spent his whole life conspiring with everyone he knew to keep the minorities out. Management did it partly because these were family businesses from segregated neighborhoods but mostly because the unions insisted. The unions insisted because they really did democratically represent their members, who were all white male ethnics from those same neighborhoods, convinced to the man that they were besieged by blacks and women determined to steal the bread from their families’ mouths.

    This is now largely fixed, thanks entirely to federal intervention. The pettifogging remains of that intervention linger ludicrously on. Just tell me how we end them without triggering a seismic spasm of collective backsliding and I’ll be the first to sign your petition.

    So now to my quibble about your “mostly” — “It is mostly being gamed by well educated people who were likely doing very well in any event…” That is true, but it is only true where real discrimination is already over. For instance, it is true in the very large defense contractor where I spend most of my time. There everyone endures compulsory classes in “diversity training” (written entirely by lawyers and HR drones) which teach that the consequences of saying nigger or bitch are fatal (and they really are). One such class in Mississippi was interrupted by a throwback with a shotgun, who killed four or five of his fellow students to demonstrate his non-acquiescence to political correctness, but that was an isolated case. Mostly these things just bore people to death, but only because almost everyone now understands what they can’t do if they want to keep their jobs.

    The company does this because it’s a requirement for getting federal business: it’s one of them there business decisions that Management always makes in its own best interests. A hundred and twenty thousand people work there. Has there been a universal reformation in the character of these hundred and twenty thousand sentient souls that would make further regulation superfluous? Most people I know genuinely believe that there has been: we just didn’t know that we could work side by side with them but now we do…

    There remain places where this utopia is as far away as it ever was.

    There are now (I hope, far more) places where it has arrived, and the whole affirmative action apparatus has degenerated into the silly dance you describe so accurately.

    You say, “If minority preferences were intended to help poor blacks and Indians get a leg up, then limit it to that…” I agree totally (if we also include women) but I confess to being utterly stumped by how we narrow the focus to the discrimination that remains without also reintroducing it where it’s been effectively suppressed. I do know that for such an effort to succeed, we would need far better conversations than we’re getting now. This is in no way meant to criticize anything you’ve said so far, which I think is a good start toward just such a conversation.

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11. Expat says:

    May 25, 2012 at 5:15 pm

    I live in Vermont, probably the whitest state in the nation and as such my experience is often dismissed on these pages. You may be interested to know however that for the past 8 years our small but growing firm was majority owned by an LA based venture capital outfit – a baby Bain – the founder and managing partner of which, the guy we had to keep happy every month, was black and born and raised in Little Rock. Of course he in turn had to keep the limited partner fund managers at CalPERS, Credit Suisse and others happy. I suspect they were when we recently sold to a bigger corporation – as of course was our managing partner when he realized his carried interest.

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12. Expat says:

    May 25, 2012 at 5:54 pm

    I don’t mind that your uncle made you VP of Engineering, because that’s the way the world is, but will you please stop it with the noise about how you came up hard and earned your place…..

    I agree but how many successful companies still operate that way Natasha? For sure I bump into small family subcontract firms that do on, for example, Long Island and in New Jersey, but in today’s global economy they are being forced to the wall by more meritorious and less nepotistic competition.

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13. Expat says:

    May 25, 2012 at 6:06 pm

    Off topic – sort of – but if you like wry

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14. Expat says:

    May 25, 2012 at 6:25 pm

    Totally off topic – need to get Kevin to do a piece on the SpaceX Dragon and its significance – or not.

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15. Pornstar says:

    May 25, 2012 at 6:46 pm

    Expat -

    Just saw that on the news tonight about the Space X Dragon.

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16. Squirrel says:

    May 26, 2012 at 3:28 am

    Oooooh!!!!

    Pencils!

    Squirrel loves pencils. Maybe I could start an ‘artisanal pencil-sharpening service’ here? Hadn’t thought of it, but a friend always calls on me to sharpen hers. (Squirrel having been very scathing about mechanical pencil sharpeners; has always used a sharp penknife from childhood.) She was, years ago, very surprised to see Sq. fish out a whole box of everything from 2H to 4B when asked to draw something for her. Seems she had never known that there was much more to life with a pencil than a mere HB. Can’t see her forking out a tenner, though.

    And what’s this with concentrating just on a sharp point? Squirrel has drawing pencils with points and spade-shaped ends, there’s more to a pencil than just a sharp pointy end asa well!!!! And we’ll say nothing about that very uneven, untidy, ‘collar’ of that pencil in the video. Very poor work for $15, Squirrel thinks.

    (Sq’s love of pencils may be genetic. Squirrel ancestors on mum’s side came from Cumbria, where the shepherds first spotted graphite and used it for marking their sheep. They still make pencils there, but they’re not easy to find down here; it’s all Staedltler or, more recently, Faber-Castell.)

    Er. . .sorry. Bad attack of Squirrel enthusiasm.

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17. sibusisodan says:

    May 26, 2012 at 7:42 am

    Squirrel,

    Have you been to the pencil museum in Keswick? Lots of fun!

    And to everyone else, esp tdog & nat – excellent, thoughtful discussion. Thanks.

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