Race Discussions

I think that Ali Baba's comments on appearance (comment #8 on Guest Post:Parker) are right on. However, his last paragraph is exactly the point I've been trying to make all along, that there are things far deeper than appearance.

In a society where more than 50% of prison inmates are black complaining about the race of the winner of American Idol is perhaps the stupidest, most irresponsible thing to do.

Parker, it doesn't matter whether you can tell where someone is from by looking at them. They themselves know where they are from, and they also know the characteristics of their own racial group. If their group is undereducated, has low life expectancy, high incidence of single parenting, etc, they know it even if you don't. It's the reality of race, not the appearance, that needs fixing.

In my first post I criticized conservatives for claiming that colorblindness is the solution - that as long as we don't make assumptions about anyone in public, we've solved the problem of race. I think that is narrowminded; to pretend that race is a "random" incidence is sheer denial. Race is causally related to the historical conditions of someone's family, and has therefore enormous statistical impact on their chances of success in society. Parker says, I don't think can make very many accurate assumptions of culture based soley on the color of a persons skin. The only logical conclusion of this argument is a dangerous form of racism, however. Because if there aren't significant differences in the heritage of blacks and whites, then the only way to explain the discrepancy is to say that somehow the chromosome that makes skin dark also makes the person within that skin more predisposed to crime. That's not a road you or me or anyone wants to go down.

Colorblindness works when you're choosing who to sit next to on the T, but it doesn't work when you're defining educational policy. While an individual black teenager may be on his way to a Harvard education, the statistical facts are that most need some sort of intervention (governmental or not) to bring them to real equality with the white kid who was born in the hospital bed next to theirs.