Senate "Race" Relations (was "U.S. Society and Black Men")

*nods*

Ah. So all you’re asking for is for prerequisites or how/why I consider some social sciences advanced? I want to make sure before I respond.

I can provide that assuming that you already accept that some social sciences, or at a minimum, some of the foundational theories are advanced. You provided examples of quantum mechanics and physics, but haven’t yet provided an example of a social science, or if you have, I have missed it.

 

He doesn't need to provide a social science example. It's not his position that they are too advanced. It's yours. You need to show how these topics are advanced. You need to define how you decide when a topic is advanced.

 

I’m attempting to establish a basis of agreement: if he believes that social sciences can be advanced vs if he believes that they cannot be. I’m trying to meet him where he is.

I’ll give a basic example and one of my favorite topics: intersectionality. Intersectionality theory is a lens by which to analyze systems of power, privilege, and discrimination, focused on how different identities interact with each other. For instance, a black woman who experiences discrimination for being both black and a woman, forming its own unique experience.

That example requires a knowledge of the black experience and its historical context, geographical context, events, and ramifications in addition to the knowledge of feminism, the history of women’s rights in a modern context, and (in my opinion) feminist legal theory and progression of feminism in western policy.

That’s just the background, not even one I think is sufficiently comprehensive. All of those individual concepts are fields of study and could be classes on their own. Am I saying that a high school student can’t understand the definition of intersectionality theory without this prior knowledge? No. They can understand on a surface level; there’s pros and cons to understanding something on only a surface level though. Especially something that directly impacts how individuals behave in the world.

People don’t leave a biology class and start viewing others humans as sacks of meats and water. People don’t leave a math class and vote on which candidate understands algebra better. The humanities and social sciences directly impact how people interact with other people and behave in society at large. It’s the reason why some of you WANT this class to be taught: you believe it has beneficial real world effects.

One of My reservations is that it could be mishandled. Which some of you are behaving as if this is some preposterous absurd opinion to have, while having criticized public education before in not only this very thread, but on these boards over the past few years.

 

You're kidding right? Do you know how many times justification to make laws against genderqueer folk have the logic of "it's simple high school biology?"

 

I think you are very much over-complicating this. You are correct that a deep or academic understanding requires all these things. We could make a similarly deep dive of any subject matter. At some point, though, we can just concede that even though the deepest understanding of cooking would require discussions of the human microbiome, evolution, animal husbandry, microbiology, the endocrine and metabolic systems, chemistry and biochemistry to know the effects of adding thermal energy to proteins, (et cetera), it ultimately is a net benefit for children to know how to cook a hamburger for themselves if hungry. Similarly, while someone may not be able to debate Michael Eric Dyson about intersectionality, even much younger children than high schoolers can grasp the fact that although people are the same in some ways, they are different in some ways, and those differences can dictate how they are treated.

Also, though, where does downside risk enter into your analysis? You acknowledged that there is a real danger to people acting without knowledge of social inequities. But all of your expressed concern is about people having some "victimization" or other misapplied knowledge. Does that make sense? Doesn't people's ignorance influence their behavior too? Can you explain how you deal with those risks?

 

Are we still talking about high schoolers or people in general? Trying to understand so that I may answer.

 

If you then go on to say that they can understand it without that prior knowledge and it can be understood on a surface level, then you're quite explicitly outlining that there is a level of it that can be taught without it being considered particularly 'advanced'. The example I gave was not because quantum mechanics needs all that to be appreciated at the deepest levels, it's that without that one simply can't do quantum mechanics. It isn't functional without that. They're not just "nice to have", they're required.
If there's a surface level understanding available from what a high school student would know, then that's establishing that there's not additional prerequisites to introducing it (though there's also a touch of irony that you point to "a knowledge of the black experience" as a prerequisite when hemming and hawing of the appropriateness of having an African-American Studies class).

Contrasting the quantum physics example with something like, say, astronomy. We teach astronomy to elementary school students, long before they understand the requisite physics and calculus that would be needed to do something like derive how stars work. But they can still be taught what a star is, that the sun is a star, that the planets orbit the sun, that the earth is a planet, and that planets are round. So there's plenty of astronomy that can be taught (and at least in California is specifically in the curriculum) even though there's other concepts that are too advanced. We have an "elementary school level astronomy", and a "Jr high level astronomy" well before it gets to what would be in a general education college level astronomy course and the sort of astronomy courses that someone majoring in physics or astronomy would take, where things that may be a semester at a college level to fully derive conclusions are simply taught as statements at all the earlier levels.

So what still hasn't been demonstrated is how the social sciences are sufficiently advanced that no form of them could be taught in high school.

People routinely take superficial biology lessons (either because that's the level of depth the course had, that's the level they actually understood it, or it was mistaught... how that became their understanding isn't relevant to the idea that those lessons have impacts) in order to hold dehumanizing views of other people. Vivec raises one great point with people who have a very bad understanding of basic biology like to say "it's basic biology" when ignoring that gender on a biological level is far more complicated than X and Y chromosomes.
People taking a math class and voting on which candidate understands algebra better would be a world of improvement, frankly, because bad understandings of math absolutely do play a role in how people vote (and more broadly, who they continue to trust). The last three years have cast a huge light on how many people did not take away the right things from math classes, and were arguing that sensible policies to deal with COVID were unnecessary because they didn't know how to do things as simple as fractions and percentages. Anti-mask rhetoric was propped up by people who didn't understand basic science (like arguing that masks both couldn't block something as small as a virus and simultaneously that masks would block oxygen or trap CO2). I've been explicit in the past that I think high schools should prioritize teaching statistics over calculus specifically because statistics is a more useful math for real world effects, and I've been a defender of geometry because one of the functions of geometry is to be a framework to teach students logic and how to develop an argument.
It's just flatly wrong to say that the understanding that people have about math and science doesn't play a role later in life; it absolutely directly impacts how people interact with other people and behave in society at large.

All things "can be mishandled". It's the non-uniform standards that are relevant here. Do you think it's inappropriate to talk about the American presidents because it could be mishandled such that someone comes away with the lesson that white men make the best presidents? The argument of "white people built America, so everyone else should get out" is explicitly coming from mishandled history, and often that stems from a teaching that focused more on prominent individuals rather than broader social dynamics.

The issue isn't that you have reservations that it could be mishandled, it's that because of how inconsistently those reservations seem to get applied that it comes across as disingenuous. And there's also a very big difference between "we need to push public education to be better" and "we need to reconsider if we should teach things because public education is flawed".

 

Only 60% of the country has any exposure to college level coursework at all, whereas around 90% have a high school diploma or equivalent. To a great extent, talking about high schoolers is talking about adults. It's why the "they should wait till later" argument is especially difficult. There is no later for many people.

 

Gotcha. This is a good point. Partially, this is why I don’t disagree with it being taught.

 

According to the latest issue of the American Legion magazine, in the last 30 years there have been many upgrades to medals previously awarded to minorities. 22 Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders were awarded the Distinguished Service Cross in WW2 and have been upgraded to the Medal of Honor (the highest award there is in the US military). 30 Black WW2 veterans also upgraded to the Medal of Honor. 24 Jewish and HIspanic personnel who served in WW2, Korea, and Vietnam upgraded to the Medal of Honor. Records currently under review include 105 Jewish Americans, 73 African Americans, 23 Native Americans, 12 Hispanic Americans, and 1 Asian American.


The same issue had an interesting article about military segregation in the Korean War. President Truman ordered US forces to desegregate in 1948 and the Air Force and Navy quickly complied, but the Army dragged its heels. When the Korean War began in 1950, most regiments were still either all-white or all-black. African Americans had been enlisting in record numbers, seeing the military as an opportunity to better themselves in what was still the white man's world. Ransom Wayman was a WW2 veteran who was shot 6 times and was captured and imprisoned by the Chinese in Korea, and still said the army was the best job he ever had.

Black regiments were led by mostly white officers, and not the cream of the crop. Leadership of a Black unit was usually seen as a penal regiment for underperforming white officers, and a disproportionate number of them were raised in the deep south. One of these white officers, Melvin Blair, accused his Black soldiers of "running like rabbits" during the US retreat from Kunu-ri. Black warrant officer Thomas Pettigrew was in Blair's command post at the time and described Blair as "hysterically and incoherently giving orders" to defend the post and he denied the Black units had run.

In WW2, the all-black 92nd Division was accused of abandoning their posts under fire, and 17 black officers and 378 enlisted men were tried for cowardice. Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP legal team successfully appealed a number of those cases. Marshall continued similar work in the Korean War and remarked that the charges "little varied from war to war. First come reports from the front of some heroic deed done by Negro soldiers... and then suddenly the reports change. As if in a concerted effort to discredit the record of Negro fighting men, the tales we begin to hear are of incompetency, failure, and cowardice - accounts which would make it appear that Negroes are not capable of combat duty and should be restricted to labor battalions."

The presence of many all-black units on the front lines early in the war lead to there being more black PoWs during the Korean War than any other war since the Civil War. Chinese captors divided the white prisoners from the blacks and tried to foment discord between them, with little success. One Black soldier remembered, "They told us there was no segregation in communist countries, and then they segregated us."

Eventually, Major General George Kean decided that the problem was not with Black soldiers, but with segregated units. He ordered the all-Black 24th Infantry Regiment disbanded and its personnel redistributed among traditionally white regiments. The first Medal of Honor awarded during the Korean War had been awarded to Pfc William Thompson of the 24th. While the Black soldiers generally supported integration, most of them saw the end of the 24th as a slap in the face.

Master Sgt Edward L Posey of the 2nd Ranger Company (Airborne), known as the Buffalo Rangers, said, "We were the first Black troopers to make a combat jump behind enemy lines. We fought harder, captured more ground, we had an outstanding combat record. Of all the Ranger companies, we had the highest rating... because we had to do everything twice as hard. We were motivated. We never expected to be part of the Rangers - it had been inconceivable."

 

There’s a growing narrative that these black officers killed this black man, somehow, due to white supremacy.

It’s something we can never know for certain, but I definitely feel weird that there’s this sentiment that black officers are so easily conditioned, convinced, and lack any agency to independently decide what’s right and wrong. These cops were ****s, like most cops, they just also happen to be black.

No it doesn’t mean that policing in the US isn’t inherently racist.

Whenever I hear suggestions of “internalized racism” I roll my eyes alittle.

 

I don't think the argument is particular to Black officers at all. Rather, the idea is that all of us are susceptible to being permeated by ideas that are in our social milieu. It colors our actions in ways we often are not conscious of. I have definitely found myself having unsupported/unreasoned negative thoughts or expectations about Black people, even though I myself am Black. Similarly, women sometimes endorse or agree with views that are unscientific but negative about woman. Having a single thought like this doesn't mean that things or hopeless, or that the thinker is bad person. It just shows how much negative stuff there is in the environment, and is a reminder that treating everyone fairly is a daily effort, not just something we take for granted because of who we are or what we've done in the past.

Don't you agree with that idea? There is no human being that is inherently non-racist, or non-sexist, or right all the time no matter what. People do the right thing because they make a conscious choice to do so. It takes hard work that people don't always do. We should each be willing to admit that, and call out the people who don't take that same measure of personal responsibility. Regardless of race.

 

I agree, which is even more reason why i criticize those specific officers for choosing to be complete homicidal douchebags and won’t let them off the hook even the slightest bit by claiming that they too are victims of white supremacy in a specific way that made them act the way they did.

Beyond that, and what irritates me further, when we discuss situations involving the police and this one, we let the racial aspect overtake the issues of police brutality and lack of accountability.

It shouldn’t even be a matter of discussion that these officers are black. The headline should be “Shocking Story: Police behaving like Police results in someone being killed.”

 

I think that misses a lot of important points:

1. As Merkurian has pointed out, the Black versus white officers involved are being treated differently in the media.

2. Issues of police brutality are, in this country, inherently connected to racial issues because of how police were used. It's like complaining that issues of hamburger sales in India always get tied up in discussions about culture and religion. Or that issues of wearing tattoos in Japan get tied up with discussions about organized crime. Do those issues have to be relevant? No, not inherently. But in that particular place and history it always will be. We have to respect how ideas and events evolve.

3. Even where police are brutal and use excessive force, that doesn't happen indiscriminately. Marginalized groups like minorities are more likely to face these excessive tactics. Its totally fair to discuss why.

4. I infer from your prior discussions that you are particular about the use/implications of the term "victim." Instead I'll say: we are all influenced by dynamics like white supremacy. It is very important to point out that you can be negatively impacted even if you are in a position of relative power (like a police officer). Everyone won't be motivated to change until everyone knows why its a problem.

 

I’m not saying that the racial aspect should never be discussed. but everytime we see the police do something abhorrent, which is often, the answer can’t always be “racism”.

Context matters. Unless you’re saying that racism is a factor no matter the context; this is something I can’t get on board with.

 

you're trying to negate what the black cops did?

 

I am trying to understand why all wrongdoing is not being criticized. It is my belief that no one should be excused for their misdeeds, regardless of some identity or demographic characteristic. I want the same punishments and discipline meted out to people regardless of their race, because it should be based on the particulars of their behavior.

 

The problem with keeping this as a solely race topic is that it ignores a lot of the causes of police brutality: that police exist to protect capital and in capitalist countries exist as a means to oppress the proletariat. Is it true that racism is a factor here, absolutely. But the problem here is that we're not trying to bring police brutality of black people down to the levels of police brutality to white people. We, at least I do I don't know about others, want to fundamentally change the way policing is done. But as long as it's only about race, we'll never make any meaningful changes. This is why I was trying to make the police brutality thread the main thread on this beating.

 

I don't think that's necessarily how things work. Work that started on racially discriminatory voting laws has ended up creating rules that benefit everyone and overhauled the whole system. Similarly, I don’t think starting this conversation with the racial injustice will prevent us from tackling other, associated problems. Done right, it should lead right to them.