Thursday, December 24, 2020

Through the Lens of Salience

From The Economist:

"In America the big liberal shift took place in the mid-1960s. To deal with the legacy of slavery, liberals began to concede that you need to treat the descendants of slaves as members of a group, not only as individuals....

“To say that whiteness is a standpoint”, [Robin] DiAngelo writes, “is to say that a significant aspect of white identity is to see oneself as an individual, outside or innocent of race—‘just human’.”

This is a long post about the tension between the center-left individualist identity and far-left groupishness identity. I am going to give examples of how the far left makes tactical errors by viewing individuals, especially individuals who think of themselves as individuals, through a groupish lens. Then I'm going to critique individualism, which is not as individual as most people think it is. Finally, I am going to define my group and how I think it can do better.

I.

After the election, everyone had access to the same data but were drawing different conclusions. Consider the following headlines:

From MSN Newsweek: "Donald Trump Made Gains in Every Demographic Except For White Men". 

Meanwhile, Vox writes: "Election results: White people make up the majority of Trump voters". 

Not to be outdone in the hyperbole department, Charles Blow at the New York Times writes: "Exit Polls Point to the Power of White Patriarchy".

Here's an angle I'd like to see explored: why are White people the most diverse voting bloc? The chart below shows the last two presidential votes by race, the longer the bar the more that race supported a given candidate.


White people are closest to the center, which means they had the most people voting for both parties. No one talks about going after the "white vote" because it is not a monolithic group. People who work on campaigns know that simple truth, yet so many of the far left continue to make that mistake.

Here is another interesting angle: Why are Black Americans the most uniform voting bloc? Nikole Hannah Jones wrote a long Twitter thread about that very topic. 

When you identify with a racial group, you tend to associate others by their racial group. This can lead to oversimplification.

II.

Consider this blog post titled "White Rage, White Guilt." The writer works in a bookstore and describes the post-George Floyd jump in sales for books like  So You Want to Talk About Race and How to Be an Antiracist. The store quickly ran out of books and the employee had to field calls from distressed white women who didn't want to have to wait.

The author then makes this leap in logic:

"And yet, despite all of the learning that supposedly took place via these books, in early November 2020 exit polls stated that among white women, Trump still held their support: An estimated 55 percent of white women voted for Trump."

Forget for a moment the historic inaccuracy of exit polls, which overrepresented in-person (read: Trump) voters and think about how, in 2020, we can observe the behavior of a few white women in an upperclass, well-educated clientele and think it is a good sample of all registered voters nationally. 

Another example comes from an Op-Ed in the New York Times called "‘Reach Out to Trump Supporters,’ They Said. I Tried." After the 2016 election, the writer, Wajahat Ali, went around the country speaking to Trump supporters.

"My standard speech was about how to “build a multicultural coalition of the willing.” My message was that diverse communities, including white Trump supporters, could work together to create a future where all of our children would have an equal shot at the American dream. I assured the audiences that I was not their enemy...

Those in the audience who supported Mr. Trump came up to me and assured me they weren’t racist. They often said they’d enjoyed the talk, if not my politics. Still, not one told me they’d wavered in their support for him. Instead, they repeated conspiracy theories and Fox News talking points about “crooked Hillary.” Others made comments like: “You’re a good, moderate Muslim. How come others aren’t like you?”

In Ohio, I spent 90 minutes on a drive to the airport with a retired Trump supporter. We were cordial to each other, we made jokes and we shared stories about our families. But neither of us changed our outlook. “They’ll never take my guns. Ever,” he told me, explaining that his Facebook feed was filled with articles about how Mrs. Clinton and Democrats would kill the Second Amendment and steal his guns."

I really admire his effort, although I think it was a mistake to make conversion a part of his speech. Ali continues:

"What was my reward? Listening to Mr. Trump’s base chant, “Send her back!” in reference to Representative Ilhan Omar, a Black Muslim woman, who came to America as a refugee. I saw the Republican Party transform the McCloskeys into victims, even though the wealthy St. Louis couple illegally brandished firearms against peaceful B.L.M. protesters."

(This mistake happens on the right too. Most Democratic candidates showed strong support for socialist programs, as well as advocacy for woke culture, which caused many Trump voters to vote against the moderate Biden, including many Latinos. The fact that Biden has been a centrist for his whole career didn't matter, voters took the socialist movement and applied it to the individual.)

The book store owner is wrong because she viewed white women as a monolithic voting bloc, when White people are the most heterodox voting racial group. While there was probably some ideological churn, for the most part it was White Democrats who didn't pay attention to pre-Floyd police brutality who bought your books, not Trump voters. 

Ali is wrong because he assumed the people who talked to him were representative of the broader category of Republicans and Trump voters. The types of people who denigrated  Ilhan Omar and enshrined the McCloskeys are not the type of people who willingly hold polite conversations with a liberal Muslim man.

III.

Is it wrong to categorize people by their race? And why are White people more reluctant to identify by their race?

As a White American, it's hard to understand what it's like to be a person of color in a predominantly white culture that constantly reminds you of your race. For people of color, especially Black Americans, it creates an us/them distinction, which has the effect of unifying "us".

John Turner developed a self-categorization theory. He said that what causes us to adopt one self-categorization as opposed to another is the "relative salience" of that category. What makes a category salient? When a comparable or contrasting category is present.

In The Nurture Assumption, Judith Harris writes:

"Thus, the social category adult is not salient when you're in a roomful of adults, but as soon as some children enter the room it becomes salient....

"When a particular social category is salient and you categorize yourself as a member of it - that is when the group will have the most influence on you. That is when the similarities among the members of a group are most likely to increase and the differences between groups to widen."

For the most part, White Americans are surrounded by other White Americans, making race less salient. So there is less unity, group bonding, and consistent voting patterns. 


The above slide is from a mandatory diversity training session. Look at the bullet points about the racial makeup of politicians; US Congress: 90 percent white, US Governors: 96 percent white, top military advisers: 100 percent white, etc. The implication seems to be that these White people are looking out for all White people, regardless of political affiliation. 

For whoever wrote these slides, race is a salient category. They look at Congress, see a bunch of white faces, and conclude, "these people represent them, not us." White people look at Congress and see good guys (Democrats/Conservatives) and bad guys (Conservatives/Democrats), regardless of race.

Part of what makes diversity training like this so unsuccessful is that the language is made for groupish identitarians and instead is delivered to individualistic people. It tells them: "Your identity is wrong. Stop thinking of yourself as a center-right, small government, civil liberties, Southern Baptist, Dallas Cowboys fan and start thinking of yourself as a White person."

IV.

I think the decline of religion and civic participation has created a need for group bonding, which makes the allure of Robing DiAngelo's message so seductive. 

White Americans are told that it is a privilege to not wear our race as an identity, a privilege that leads to ignorance and harm toward BIPOC populations. Unlike persons of color, White people can never be united as victims of oppression, but the antiracists offer them something better. They can distinguish themselves from the bad (racist) whites and show they are the good (ally) whites. Instead of race, the salience becomes ideological: wokeness.

Race never informed how White Americans voted because it was not a part of their identity; it wasn't a salient category. Antiracism has now created a wedge among White people: the antiracist allies and the people who are sick of being called racist.

For the antiracist, this isn't even about assuaging white guilt as much as it is giving one's self over to the thrilling feel of belonging to a community that unites over a common enemy: racists. And Dr. Kendi made this distinction very easy: a racist is anyone who is not an antiracist.

V.

John Wood Jr. wrote a long post contrasting antiracism with nonviolence. Coleman Hughes gave a similar talk contrasting antiracism with humanism. They both used Martin Luther King Jr. to bolster their arguments against antiracism.

Dr. King's diagnosis of racism was that the problem was stereotyping. It is wrong to take an individual black person and attribute a whole category of stereotypes against them. "Black people are dumb, lazy, less human, etc." His prescription (which later became more nuanced and antiracist) was a color-blind humanism. Instead of stereotyping, he argued, Black people should be seen as individuals and judged one at a time, by their own merits, so they can be seen as human. Just like everyone else. We will reach equality when we see past color.

This individualist view draws from the constitution, saying "that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights." This leads to the conclusion that all men and women, of all colors, deserve equal rights under the law.

Antiracism has a different diagnosis of racism, starting with defining the term not as treatment but as outcomes. It blames disparities on power. 

Interestingly, the antiracist prescription is stereotyping. It says that black people should be stereotyped, not as dumb or lazy, but as victims of oppression that experience racism each day and deserve special treatment to account for past harm. Additionally, White people should not think of themselves as individuals but should stereotype themselves as members of an oppressive class that benefit from unearned privilege each day. We will reach equality when we have captured power from the privileged and distribute it to the oppressed.

I believe that this is part of people's resistance to antiracism. The individualistic center-left finds all stereotyping to be categorically wrong and it feels especially offensive when they are told to stereotype themselves. The resistance isn't about giving up power, it's about giving up a core belief about stereotyping being a bad thing.

VI.

David Shor is a data scientist who specializes in elections. He spoke recently about the fickle nature of people labeled moderates: 

"There’s a paper by the political scientist David Broockman that made this point really famous — that “moderate” voters don’t have moderate views, just ideologically inconsistent ones.

 "there’s a big mass of voters who agree with [Democrats] on some issues, and disagree with us on others. 

"So this means that every time you open your mouth, you have this complex optimization problem where what you say gains you some voters and loses you other voters."

This isn't just helpful for understanding moderates, but groups in general. Without a doubt, there were 2016 Trump voters who spoke to people like Ali (whom I quoted earlier) and changed their mind and voted for Biden in 2020. There were 2016 Trump women who read Ibram Kendi and were happy to pull the lever for Biden/Harris. 

But the opposite also happened. There were 2016 Clinton voters who saw BLM protesters burn down a police department and switched over to a Trump vote in 2020. Some 2020 events pushed moderates and some pulled them. They are not a monolithic group and they certainly aren't motivated by appeals to their race and gender.

Most moderate voters don't think of themselves as moderate voters. They think of themselves as voters who are left on certain issues, right on others. Can you imagine a consistently liberal voter telling moderates they need to stop thinking of themselves in such a nuanced way and instead view themselves as moderates, grouped together with a bunch of randos who don't share their unique policy positions?

VII.


I saw the above tweet and I laughed. But then I grew a little despondent when I thought of all the people retweeting it who take it a little too seriously. If you cannot tell the difference between Reagan's presidency and FDR's presidency, I don't think you can be trusted to run a diversity seminar. 

The last emoji (Biden) is the same image of every other White president. I wonder how many of the groupish identity leftists know that Biden is just the second Catholic ever elected to the White House (the only other one was assassinated while in office)? My wife is white and Catholic. Has she really been represented at the executive level because of her skin color? Or are her Catholic values about to be represented for the first time in her life once Biden takes office? If you failed to consider this, it's probably because religion is not a salient category for you.

I spend a lot of time criticizing the excesses of intersectionality, but my main critique is that, when put into action during events like diversity trainings, it doesn't go far enough. I think the Enlightenment, center-left liberals would do well to recognize that their individualism is really a deeper groupishness than most intersectional trainings ever reach.  

I am not an individual. I am a member of so many groups and categories that the terms "male" and "white" not only intersect but conflict with all of my individual variables. My problem with this postliberalist thinking isn't that it views me as a member of a group rather than as an individual, it's that it doesn't properly account for the totality of my groupishness. 

I'm a White male so I have privilege when it comes to things like earnings, right? Yes, but I'm also an introvert, meaning I make less because of a behavioral trait I have no control over. I also score high in agreeableness, which means I'm bad at salary negotiation, which also suppresses my earnings. 

I'm Caucasian, which means I have inherited wealth from my colonizer ancestors who oppressed indigenous people. But I'm Irish and Polish, meaning my ancestors have been historically oppressed by other Caucasians.

This isn't a woe-is-me complaint where I try to say I've had it as hard as descendants of slavery. I'm just saying I should not be grouped in with highly privileged people just because we share skin pigment.

As a legal framework, intersectionality is obviously important. But when the idea is put into diversity training sessions it usually becomes a bad regression model that fails to capture the richness of humanity. And it is causing unnecessary tension because most people lack the empathy to truly understand their outgroup's perspective.

VIII.

I can't help but be reminded of Scott Alexander's "Conflict vs. Mistake Theory" post. Mistake theorists believe in the maxim "never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." Conflict theorists believe in zero sum battles for power. Neither one is good at empathy.

"Mistake theorists naturally think conflict theorists are making a mistake ... conflict theorists naturally think mistake theorists are the enemy in their conflict."

If people are not on your side it is more likely because they don't see the same two sides as you, not because they are against you. The groupish far left sees the salience of race and the power of groups and wants to communicate to those in power how their power affects those who struggle. The individualistic center values their personal agency and does not want to be placed in a category as vague as race or gender.

The far-left sees resistance to antiracism as evidence of White people not wanting to give up their power and being complicit in perpetuating racism. The center-left sees stereotyping as foundational to antiracism and cannot engage with something that violates a sacred value.

My problem with the conflict theory view of the groupish left is that they diagnose problems through the lens of power and the prescription always seems to be "We just need to get the good guys in power." 

(While conflict theory has its roots in Marxism, it is not exclusive to the left. "Drain the swamp" Trumpists are saying we need to replace the corrupt elites in politics with the good, nationalists politicians.)

I am among a small group of thinkers that believe the solution to a power imbalance is not to swing the other way but to create an equilibrium. 

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