Andrew Sullivan asks why the question of whether Hillary can win black votes is not focused on as much as the question of whether Obama can win rural, working-class, white votes. I think the answer is that the media pretty much assumes that there's not much doubt as to whether the black vote will vote Democrat no matter what. And in reality, I think that's a pretty safe assumption. But the double standard does reflect, I think, a somewhat condescending attitude on the part of the media, because clearly the media does not treat it as a safe assumption that working-class voters will vote Democrat no matter what. And remember that we've been talking about Democratic voters this entire time, so the working-class voters we're talking about are largely union members and other voters who have been reliably Democratic.

Why, one wonders, would the media not think it's safe to assume that these loyal Democrats will not stay with their party if Obama gets nominated, but that black voters will stay with their party if Clinton gets nominated? Could it perhaps be that the media thinks these rural, working-class voters are a bunch of racists who don't just prefer Clinton to Obama but rather can't accept the possibility of a black president? Maybe?

Labels: 2008, Brian, politics, race

Editors note: This is a guest post by a friend of mine who will be commenting here and occasionally writing a guest post under the name "Satya." She was introduced to me by one of my smartest, most talented colleagues as "my smarter, more talented sister." Unlike most of us who pontificate about Obama while remained firmly planted on our asses, Satya has actually spent the last year working for the Obama campaign.

~by Satya

Barack Obama's landmark speech on race was not the best he has given thus far. His speech at the JJ dinner in Iowa, despite reaching most people via YouTube, surpassed this week's speech, and many still continue to hail his 2004 DNC keynote address as his finest.

What was remarkable about Barack's speech this week was the content. His critics accuse him of sounding great, but being light on content. This speech was all content. He apprised white people of things they either don't know, aren't cognizant of, or combination of the two because of white privilege.

His interview after with ABC News really drove this point home when he explained to Terry Moran about how differently white and black people react to the news of major crime. He explained it to him, as I [as a person of color] have many times in a nonthreatening way, how one's initial reaction to news of the major crime is to worry that the perpetrator might be of your subculture. Barack then clearly illustrated to him the privileges of being white in America by asking him if he would ever be worried about resembling someone who had done something bad.

Jon Stewart, as always, nicely summed up Barack's big gamble now. He has treated us like adults, put forth subtleties and difficult questions for us to digest. He got his message across, despite being asked idiotic question like, "Are you a black man or an American first?"

(Funny how being black is like being Muslim...you're still not allowed to have multiple identities if you're American.)

Labels: 2008, Barack Obama, Jon Stewart, politics, race, Satya

Buck already covered Obama's speech and voiced a pretty much identical opinion to my own. But I just wanted to note this: at this point, we have seen Obama give probably the best speech on the confluence of race and politics, as well as the best speech on the confluence of religion and politics, that we have seen in at least a generation, not to mention one of the greatest speeches at a party convention, which itself might be described as one of the best speeches on the confluence of partisanship and politics. He's also written one of the few political books by politicians that people seem to actually like.

Yes, those are all just words. But they're also ideas - ideas of great substance that possess a power and a depth and a level of nuance that most politicians dare not express. Obama's presidency would make history in a number of obvious ways, but I'm beginning to suspect that its greatest contribution might just be that it creates a successful model for other politicians to treat Americans as though they are actually intelligent human beings. Or maybe this will just be unique to him. Either way, this is a moment to savor.

Labels: 2008, Brian, politics, race, religion

A new Rasmussen poll has this to report concerning the recent "news" about Obama and his pastor:

Overall, voters are evenly divided as to whether Obama should resign his membership in the Church—42% say that he should while 40% disagree.

Is it just me, or is that sentence truly sickening? We're really a country that feels that comfortable telling a politician to resign his membership in a church?

Just out of morbid curiosity, do any readers here really, truly, actually care about this at all?

This is a pretty good rundown of the absurd media coverage of this story, particularly about 4:20 into it when it shows a pretty great exchange among Chris Wallace, Sen. Dodd, and Sen. Schumer on Fox News Sunday.

All this looks like it could be leading to this becoming the new attack on Obama: saying "What do we really know about Barack Obama?" over and over again.

Is that unfair? I'd say so. Is it racially charged? Absolutely. Does it make Geraldine Ferraro look like a moron? Clearly.

But I guess this is just the way it goes. Unless, by some chance, voters choose to reject it and actually vote for the guy running the kind of campaign they always say they want to see run.

On a lighter note, here is Tracy Morgan commenting on the racial politics of this presidential campaign on Saturday Night Live. Pretty quality.

Update: This news that Obama will be giving a major speech tomorrow on Wright in particular and racial politics in general makes me excited. (And honestly, how often can anybody - even political junkies - say they get excited to hear about a politician giving a speech? This is that whole "hope" thing people keep talking about.)

Later Update: This is spectacular.

Labels: 2008, Brian, media, politics, race

There are moments when it becomes acutely irritating that Urbanagora is populated almost entirely by white men, even while acknowledging that certain members of this particular group of white men still constitute "the other" in certain areas (religion, sexual orientation, marital status). I had such a moment after watching this diavlog between Ezra Klein of the American Prospect and Christopher Hayes of the Nation, which covers a wide range of topics but tends to focus on identity politics and the Democratic primary.

The whole thing is a pretty illuminating discussion, but here's a snippet I found particularly interesting. It's about 8 minutes long, but for those who don't have that much time to spare, it basically begins with Chris Hayes talking about this editorial by Gloria Steinem that ran just before the New Hampshire primary, which basically weighed how hard women in our society have had it vs. African Americans and coming down on the side of women having it worse.

Hayes responds to this by saying that if you look at the progress that African Americans have made materially, it's very minimal (they continue to have high rates of incarceration, poverty, joblessness, lack of education, etc.). At the same time, if you look at the progress they've made culturally, it's been much more significant in terms of what sorts of things can be said in polite company and what social and cultural consequences there are for being a racist or saying things that are racist. And when you take that same approach looking at the progress of women, it's pretty much the exact opposite: materially, women have made great strides in terms of access to education and closing the wage gap and breaking through various glass ceilings; whereas culturally, our society seems to have taken dramatic steps backwards (think Maxim, the Man Show, etc.).

Ezra Klein then adds a little to this point by pointing out how much easier it has been for Barack Obama to kind of step outside of his "box" merely by being "out of the ordinary" in terms of the stereotype of black men: he's well-educated, articulate, and all the rest; and therefore society at large embraces him as a symbol of progress and hope. For Hillary Clinton, it's much more difficult for her to step outside of her gender and therefore critics of Clinton can say things in a sexist way that a critic of Obama could absolutely never say in the equivalent racist way. Klein attributes this in part to the point Hayes made earlier: because women have been much more successful at ingraining themselves in the power structure of our society, they present much more of a threat to the traditional order. To put it crudely, Hillary Clinton reminds white men of their female supervisor whom they feel uncomfortable with. Whereas the privilege that white men enjoy is not particularly threatened by black men, who continue to suffer the material effects of institutionalized racism. It's therefore much easier and even compelling to embrace a black man like Obama than a white woman like Clinton.

After typing all this, I realize that I've pretty much done nothing but sum up the discussion between Klein and Hayes rather than contribute much in the way of my own thoughts, but I guess I'd just say that this is a big part of why, even though I'm an Obama supporter, I wouldn't be saddened if Hillary managed to win the nomination: a big portion of the progress that women have yet to make in this country deals much more with cultural attitudes than material benefits, and the opposite is true of African Americans. And while electing a woman as President will help to make progress on the cultural sexism front, electing a black man as President will do little to make progress on the material racism front (and quite likely would even hurt that progress to some extent, as white people will congratulate themselves for electing a black man and start thinking the civil rights movement has come much further than it really has).

I'm dreading the onslaught of attacks on this post from the more conservative-minded contributors to this blog who will find this whole discussion either boring or irritating, placing far too much focus on race and sex than on practical policy considerations. But to head that argument off at least a little, I would point out that the policy distinctions between Hillary and Obama are rather minimal, which allows for these sorts of consideration to come much more to the forefront. They are also just genuinely important considerations, I think, but particularly so given that this is a primary contest between two candidates who largely agree on policy.

Also, not that I think anybody will listen to this, but I would again say that the entire discussion between Klein and Hayes is quite interesting, and if you've got an hour to kill (as I do, thanks to a wonderful faculty retreat at Georgetown which has given me a really long weekend), you should check it out.

Labels: 2008, Brian, gender, politics, race

John published a set of three articles on NRO Online that I consider to be well worth reading and discussing, since it connects several topics that I've been talking about in here for some time--real differences between groups of humans, the impact that those differences have on cultures and the directions that improvement in human beings should take. With any luck, they should lead to a spirited discussion in here.

Folks, please, please, please, read all the articles and hit one or two of his links before you explode in outrage. He talks about the reasons for your gut reaction within the articles, as a matter of fact.

Speaking the Unspeakable

Racy Questions, Continued

Watson Was That Again?

The world will be a better place, soon. In order for it to be so, we have to be willing to look at hard facts about it.

Tom

Labels: intelligence, John Derbyshire, race, Tet, transhumanism

So a Republican state representative in Florida gets arrested for soliciting prostitution after he allegedly agreed to pay an undercover police officer $20 in exchange for being able to perform oral sex on the officer*. Not that big a deal. Maybe a little amusing if you're in a sadistic mood, especially if you're a liberal who gets a good chuckle when conservative hypocrisy is exposed.

But if you're anything like me, that amusement turns quickly into a vague feeling of disgust as the story develops. After his arrest, state representative Bob Allen denied any wrongdoing to the police. His explanation? "This was a pretty stocky black guy, and there was nothing but other black guys around in the park," said Allen, adding that he feared he "was about to be a statistic" and would have said anything just to get away. And to top it off, when the officer exposed his badge and led him to a marked patrol car, Allen asked whether "it would help" if he was a state legislator.

Essentially what this means is that Allen, who has said he wants to run for re-election, believes it will be less politically damaging if the electorate thinks he is a racist than if it thinks he solicited oral sex from another man. And we all know he's probably right.

Imagining this man's shame and desperation when he was placed under arrest is almost enough to make me feel sorry for him in spite of his past hypocrisy and his subsequent cynicism, deception, and hopelessly blind ambition. Almost, but not quite.

*sentence updated for clarity

Labels: Brian, LGBT, politics, race

Below is a guest post from Ragnar, a friend who is new to Urbanagora. Give 'em hell....

~ by Ragnar

OK, I know that here in our politically correct utopia the concept of a diverse workforce is one of our most dearly held sacraments. No matter what business one finds oneself in, If Mr./Ms. One hires minority candidates from every remote corner of the world, the business will just naturally run better because of the “diverse” collection of ideas/cultures/experiences/ blah blah blahs assembled.

The company that I work for has embraced this philosophy whole hog. In fact, they would rather go to Pakistan to bring in a minority candidate with the English speaking ability of Cousin It than to hire a white boy who grew up down the block from the corporate headquarters and spent his summers playing on the company-sponsored little league team and got his first piece of tail from the foreman’s daughter at the company picnic.

Well guess what we are finding out? Our company is having a hard time keeping employees -especially our diversity candidates. Our pay and benefits are great, people are friendly, and the workplace is extremely safe, and as an integral part of the diversity initiative, they get preference on promotions (although we aren’t allowed to talk about that part). So why is the attrition rate so high?

Well here is what I think. It seems that the people who we hired from far away places develop longings to go back to those places. They get homesick and think that Puerto Rico, or Madagascar, or Timbuktu, or wherever, is just nicer that the great corn desert of central Illinois. As soon as they make a pocket full of dough, they bag ass. Sure, there are exceptions. My buddy grew up in Aruba, and he has built a very happy life here for the last 25 years. But in general, they are bagging ass, leaving our company with all the costs associated with a high turnover rate. (Please note I won’t even dare hint that a different “get-up-to-speed” curve also exists, like when your phone conversations are unintelligible, you fill the office refrigerator with plates of pickled bugs, wear war paint to work, etc.)

Sadly, the local boy who grew up here and who would love nothing better than to stay right here and raise a family rarely gets the chance. We make sure of this by making our upper managers’ bonuses hinge on the number of minority/diversity candidates they hire. Their fondest wet dream is having the resume of a one-legged Palestinian Lesbian hit their desk.

We have mandatory meetings where a diversity speaker explains to us that the diversity hiring initiative is ABSOLUTELY NOT a quota system. Of course we don’t get into the fact that over 60% of our diversity candidates have split within 5 years of their hire date.

But by God (oooh sorry) our company photo looks like a United Way commercial, and if we ever get a customer from Lower Ubangi we can probably find someone with whom they can meaningfully interact. (At least if they are still here) What good business.

Labels: affirmative action, death to the PC police, diversity, race, Ragnar

Last night I went to downtown Chicago to hang out with a sexy girl (pause) friend of mine. She lives in a beautiful apartment about 2 blocks from Lake Michigan where square feet are worth more than your own two. I left her apartment around 11:40pm to catch the train home.

I passed by the usual array of rich white faces walking their manicured dogs, sad & desolate black faces hustlin’ on the streets, and determined & methodical Hispanic faces (one was watering the flowers outside of a golden hotel). One 25 or so year old black guy came up to me and began trying to talk to me, I tried to avoid falling into his artful trap.

Then he asked me if I smoked any pot, he was courting clients for a dealer down the street. I told him that I did not but that I was curious about what it does to people's minds. He spoke with eloquence and scientific understanding of its various forms and effects. He offered his hand and said that his name was Cody, I reluctantly shook his hand replying with "Billy." His handshake was soft and sweaty, my right hand still feels dirty from it and I avoided touching my face on the train ride home (I was reading Will Durant's "The Story of Philosophy," he is my favorite historian). He followed me down the steps to the red line CTA. I notice that he walked with a bad limp in his left leg. I gave him about 75 cents and the advice to get a job because working must be easier than hustlin'. He explained that he was on the verge of getting hired and said with pride that it was an $8/hour janitorial job, but that he was near to losing the opportunity because he didn't have the $20 necessary to buy a State I.D., which the employer required. He would only look me in the eyes every 20 seconds or so. He was likely stoned, but insisted that he did not do drugs. Cody told me that he never knew his mother and that his father died about a year ago, which forced him to drop out of college.

He cried as he told me the story. His eyes were red. He said with shame that his clothes and body were all dirty and “greasy.” All the while I evaluated him and his story, trying to decipher its degree of truth. He said that he prayed often at a nearby Catholic Church. I asked him if his story was true and he swore to God that it was, he raised his right hand and looked to the sky, though it was hidden by the cracked cement ceiling of the subway. We were alone in the stairwell for about 20 minutes. Sometimes he would pound the wall with his fist to express frustration about his life. He said that most of the people at the homeless shelter have a mental illness, as though to separate himself from them, trying to maintain some dignity. I could tell that he was smart, his mind was agile and quick; I told him that I thought so. When I finally tried to leave he reminded me that I had just a minute ago asked him if his story was true, and thus I implied that I was on the verge of helping him; I appreciated his tactical play and his perception. I couldn’t stop thinking that the twenty dollar bill in my wallet had a different number on it, depending on which one of us looked at it.

I decided to give him one of the five twenty dollar bills that were in my wallet. I figured that even the 10% chance that his story was true was enough for me to help him get to his current dream of becoming an eight dollar janitor. When I opened my wallet he shielded his eyes with his arms out of politeness for my privacy. I urged Cody many times to “please do good with it, whatever it is, just do good.” He promised that he would and requested my phone number so that he could check in with me on his progress. I didn’t even feel comfortable giving him my primary email address (which is shamefully listed for all the world on this site). I wrote my secondary email address on the back of a dirty receipt that he plucked off the ground. He admitted to not understanding how to contact me via email, but had heard once that he could get a free email account through the public library. As we parted, he offered an open palm while I simultaneously offered a closed fist, he conformed to my gesture and pounded my fist with his (I did this from conscious desire to not shake hands with him again. That’s how hypocritical I am.). I suspect that I’ll be checking that email account often for the next few months, until I give up hope.

Through the entire encounter, I do not remember him smiling until I gave him my email address, maybe he felt like he made friends with someone from a different world.

I had spent so much time with Cody that I could no longer take the CTA to make the 12:40am train on time, so I took a cab. The cab driver was a light-skinned black man of about fifty years old, although the hardness of the City could have added ten years to his appearance. I asked how he liked living in Chicago, he replied in a slow voice that it is the best city in the world. He said that he has lived here his entire life. At a stop light he flexed his fingers, I could tell that they pained him from so many years of clenching the wheel. He asked about me and I told him about law school, while also trying to hide being from the suburbs. He said that he knew a lot of lawyers and that as a lawyer in Chicago you can really “get over,” though I’m still not sure over what.

He then declared that this was his City and that he was “number one.” He said that he has lots of important and rich friends. He told me about some people who have in the past turned cab drivers to people of status in society, including former Mayor Harold Washington, who he also claimed was his father (interestingly, Washington beat Daley in the 1983 Democratic primary). He told me that you can have all the degrees in the world, but if you don’t know the right people and if you aren’t in the “Chicago clique” then you won’t be able to “get over.” He called himself a “professional man.” He told me about his plans for soon becoming rich. He told me the trick to it all was “PMA.” I smiled and asked him what “PMA” meant, he explained “Positive Mental Attitude.” We talked for about five minutes after the cab ride was over. Apparently he started some professional networking organization called “The People’s March Inc.” You can email him, Robert, at thepeoplesmarch23@yahoo.com. He explained that the number 23 has, even before Jordan, been a number leading people to success. He gave me a cheap looking business card and a flier explaining his business. He asked for my card and explained to me how to print up my own when I told him that I did not have one. I apologized for only being able to tip him a dollar on a $5.25 fare, because it was the only one dollar bill I had left. As I left the cab I shouted, “Stay in touch,” but I doubt we will.

Robert will probably never stop driving his cab and he will probably never be rich, but at least his dreams will occupy his mind during his lonely nights. Wisdom and delusion in one man, I liked him as much as I liked Cody. I would hire them both and pay them as much as I could.

A couple of hard, “tuff” looking white train conductors were complete assholes to me. I had a question so I approached them and said “Hey” in a friendly voice. He said “Hey?” with a scowl. I made a second attempt with, “How’s it going?” He retorted, “How about ‘excuse me sir’?” If Cody had such an easy, mindless job I think he would have instead replied with a smile, “Hey man, what’s up?”

Both Cody and Robert have a lot of talent, all humans do. We're designed to do great things, and a few of us have, but most never will. How does a human being with all the dark caverns and catacombs of a powerful mind remain sane while working a job below his abilities? They are forced to either lose sanity or to forget about the mental potential that makes them human. “C” from A Bronx Tale said, “The saddest thing in life is wasted talent.”

My night was not unusually eventful, that’s not why I’m sharing it. My night was significant precisely because it wasn’t eventful. There are millions all over Chicago doing the same hustlin’ and hopin’. Those hustlin’ will probably never stop hustlin’ and those hopin’ will probably never stop hopin’.

I tried to take a step in this article toward acknowledging my own prejudices and my ambitions for breaching my safe shell and eventually helping a whole lot of people. But this article wasn't just about race, it was mostly about people and faith and hope and pain.

Don’t worry about me, now I’m back home in Schaumburg with my garden and $600,000 house, away from all those scary people.

Labels: Billy Joe Mills, Chicago, race

There is a mildly irritating sentiment in our society which (though I have no evidence of this) seems to be growing healthily among even liberal members of my generation that stereotyping social groups is okay because most stereotypes generally hold some truth to them. "They are stereotypes for a reason," after all. A new study coming out of the University of Chicago goes some way toward refuting that mentality.

Psychologists at the university gave female students a math test followed by a non-mathematical test. Some of the female students were casually reminded before they took the test that men consistently do better than women at standardized math tests, while some of the female students were not given such a reminder. The female students who were given the reminder did more poorly on not only the math test, but the non-math-related test afterward. This led the psychologists to some interesting conclusions about brain power, as they determined that the stereotype reminder didn't simply reduce the women's expectations for themselves, but rather took up valuable space in their brains that could have otherwise been used to process the test questions. Even women who did not buy into stereotypes performed more poorly because they were thinking too much about how they didn't want to be one of the women to perform poorly and thus grant support to the stereotype.

This is another in a long line of studies which demonstrate that reminding students of negative stereotypes of groups to which they belong makes them perform more poorly on tests. Even just being asked to fill in a bubble saying what your race or gender is (which pretty much every standardized test on the planet does) causes blacks and women to perform more poorly. Another study asked students seemingly benign questions like whether they lived in co-ed or single-sex dorms, and even this triggered thoughts of gender stereotypes and affected the students' performances. The principle can work the other way, too, as when students were asked why they chose to attend a private liberal arts college, activating what one psychologist called the students' "snob schema," making them think about how smart they are and thus causing them to perform better on the test.

None of this, of course, proves that there is no truth to stereotypes (though in many of these cases the performance gaps normally cited between genders or races are almost entirely eliminated by not triggering thoughts of stereotypes). It does, however, go a long way in demonstrating the way in which stereotypes are often times self-fulfilling prophecies, that whether they are accurate or not may not have all that much to do with the natural abilities of a given gender or race but rather with the way the stereotypes themselves have disadvantaged women and minorities. And this, of course, would lend support to the position that while stereotypes do not hold any great degree of truth, those who believe they do are in fact contributing to their damaging effects.

I think most people would agree with this conclusion when it comes to racism (I don't know of many people who still argue that whites are the naturally superior race), though I suspect many do not adhere to it when it comes to gender. There are, of course, at least some minimal natural differences between men and women due to genetics and hormones, but I personally am of the belief that the wide gulf that has been created between the genders is almost entirely socially constructed. These studies are another reason to maintain that belief.

Labels: Brian, education, gender, race, society

Every year in the United States thousands of young mothers abandon their newborn infants. In an effort to save many of these young lives, in 1998 a District Attorney in Mobile County Alabama developed a program called "A Safe Place for Newborns." Infant abandonment remains illegal, but District Attorneys in 40 states use their enforcement discretion by declining prosecution, and protecting the anonymity of the mother, so long as the following conditions are met:

Labels: Augur, crime, human nature, police/community relations, race

OK, so my DI column this week is not as confrontational as the title of this post. But it does tackle a sensitive subject: homophobia in the black community. My emphasis here is on homophobic black celebrities, whose comments can have a strong influence of millions of impressionable black youth, but it's certainly a problem within the broader African American community as well.

Check it, and if you're so inclined, wreck it.

Oh, and I spotted a comma error that was NOT in my original version. Just sayin'.

Labels: LGBT, race

Hey folks. We're trying to become legit over here at Urbanagora. To that end I've purchased www.urbanagora.com (you must type in the "www." simply using "urbanagora.com" will not work, yet) . The old URL, www.millspierce.blogspot.com, will still work, it should simply forward you to www.urbanagora.com.

But it's not all glory. There seems to be a few glitches. The cute little icons next to the "comments" and the timestamp sometimes disappear and the site statistics might get confused and not count some of the hits. Blogger is actually being cool as they will still be hosting our content so that I don't have to pay $100/year to keep the site going on an independent URL.

In general please just post or email (billyjoemills@gmail.com) any glitches that you notice, even if they are unrelated to the URL switch. I've noticed that the page doesn't look quite right in Internet Explorer because the tabs are misaligned. But just let me know about glitches so that I can play with the html. Thanks Urbanagoraland.

Labels: Billy Joe Mills, crime, gender, race, role of government, Tom is always right

The article below was published in today's edition of the State Journal Register. The author, Dave Bakke, is catching hell on the column's comments page. I encourage you all to go post and back him up.


It's not a day to forget our shame

Today, a black man will stand in downtown Springfield to declare for the presidency of the United States.

Ninety-nine years ago, less than one-half mile east of where Barack Obama potentially will make history this morning, another black man stood. Scott Burton stood there, that is, until a lynch mob put a rope around his neck and hanged him from a tree until he was dead. Continue reading...

Labels: race

...is up: Critiquing the Critics.

Labels: DI, local, media, race

New DI column's up: "Calling All Students: Ousting the Bad Seeds from ISS."

Labels: Brian, DI, local, race

Sometimes it is difficult to grasp the racial disparity which persists in this country. Segregation, especially for people in my generation, is simply history. The reality of it, while memories still linger with many middle aged and elderly Americans, is surreal. Our understanding of the time is dependent on the imagination and skill of the historians who convey it to us.

Despite being seduced at times by the Austrian School, I am not a libertarian. It seems to me that the appropriateness of applying libertarian thinking to society has always been a function of how equally access to opportunities is distributed across society. As opportunities to succeed become more diffuse through the ranks of society, the more I agree with libertarian principles. But advocating libertarianism today denies that the injustices of the past prevail and pervade society’s power structures.

The Census Bureau recently released its 2007 Statistical Abstract report, which is an electronic treasure chest for social data nerds. The charts below summarize some of the more interesting data related to race, education, and wealth.

The high school graduation rates between Whites, Blacks, and Asians all hover around the 85% mark. It’s slightly surprising how low the Hispanic graduation rates are, and they appear to have leveled off at around 60%. But I find the high school graduation rates interesting because the difference between races in college graduation rates is much greater. About 50% of Asians graduate from college, a prolific number. While it surprises me that only 28% of Whites graduate from college (I suspect this is due to my personal selection bias given that I’m from a middle class high school where nearly everyone attended some type of university), the low Black and Hispanic rates might be more surprising. Again, it’s interesting that through the high school level, graduation rates are fairly even, but numerous factors fuse to create massive differences in college graduation rates (you can download my spreadsheet for graduation rates here)

The Census data does show great disparities between the genders in earnings, $46,008 for men vs. $28,691 for women. However, being the chauvinist conservative that I am, I can rationalize this difference with legitimate economic explanations. But the disparity in earnings between the races, when grouped by level of education attained, is much more difficult to explain. White earnings (Asian data was not available) were greater than Black and Hispanic earnings at every level of education by a significant margin. There are possible explanations beyond racism, but I find none of them compelling. Perhaps minority groups prefer jobs that are more “charitable” or in the service of the public, which tend to pay less. Perhaps minority groups tend to favor jobs with greater pension and healthcare plans, and thus have lower salaries. Perhaps minority groups tends to live in parts of the country with lower costs of living, and thus lower salaries (although urban areas tend to be very expensive to live in). While these explanations might account for some of the disparity, I doubt that it could account for it all (you can view my spreadsheet for race, degrees, and salaries here).

After looking at this data, it is difficult for me to escape the conclusion that the lingering effects of historical racism and continuing racism, whether it be conscious or subconscious, still ought to influence public policy decisions. Many suggest that our public policy should be color blind…the problem is that neither our past, nor our present is color blind. The unequal distribution of economic and social opportunities creates a soft apartheid, a soft segregation in America.

Race still matters.

Labels: Billy Joe Mills, economics, education, race

is up: Chuck Hagel: The Hero Who Wasn't. Enjoy.

More importantly, the Daily Illini ran this editorial today telling students to stay home instead of attending a forum titled "Racism, Power, and Privilege at UIUC" organized by a group called STOP (Students Transforming Oppression and Privilege) which was formed in response to the "Tacos and Tequila" ZBT-TriDelt exchange which I wrote about here. The website has received, at this typing, 15 comments on the editorial, almost all of which are negative, and I join their ranks here. The Daily Illini ran not a single story announcing that the forum existed despite press releases being sent to it and now runs an editorial criticizing the event because "[a]side from mass e-mails sent out by the Chancellor, the only source of information openly available to students and faculty has been a poster." The editorial goes on to assume, without foundation, that the event is likely to "degenerate into a shouting match that will produce no progress and leave the campus community as divided as ever." Shame on the Daily Illini for this sad and cynical editorial.

Labels: 2008, Brian, DI, foreign policy, local, media, politics, race

Barack Obama is expected to announce whether he will run for President in the first week of the New Year. I expect that he will run for President given the number of people encouraging him to do so and because he knows that every extra day he spends in the Senate is an extra point of attack for his opponent. Despite the Senate appearing to be the perfect stepping stone, John F. Kennedy was the last Senator to become President, likely because Senators have clearly defined voting records that are difficult for candidates to evade and contort (i.e. artful lying).

While I would love to see an Obama v. McCain or Giuliani matchup because it would be the first time since Eisenhower v. Stevenson in 1952 and 1956 when the voters will have a choice between two legitimately great people, two people who genuinely deserve to be the single person with the most influence on how our path is carved. While I am still uncertain whether Obama has a genuine heart and a decent character, I at least have the audacity to hope that he is one of a few politicians who possesses those traits. It is rumored that behind the scenes he is essentially an arrogant, uncaring Harvardvark. You might be more willing to believe this if you trust McCain’s ability to judge character, given the infamous spat the two Senators had in early 2006.

Despite my hope for a clash of titans in the general election, I don’t think that Obama is capable of beating Clinton for two reasons: her superior fundraising ability and racism. Hillary already has some big fundraisers on board like Rupert Murdoch and the Rothschilds, plus about $14 million leftover from her latest Senate race. The bigger reason is that racism still lives. While its intensity is not as great in the North, it lives even there. Racism from all races exposes itself today at the family party and the comforts of the home, where no outsiders can hear. Racism speaks among friends and confidants, but rarely in public. While the younger generations have made tremendous strides toward genuinely strangling racism, the older generations, which are more likely to vote, still harbor deep and powerful disdain for African Americans. I know this to be true from my personal and honest observations of Northern whites and even Asians. Some things that are said in confidence between whites and Asians are never said among the company of Latinos and African Americans; I conjecture that this has a lot to do with resentment fostered by welfare and affirmative action.

However, Obama’s skin, the same trivial aesthetic that will inspire many racist votes, will inspire the black vote. It is conceivable that Obama and the black leadership will be able to register millions of potential black voters. After all, Obama did run a successful black voter registration drive a few years ago in Chicago. It is conceivable that African Americans will look back upon hundreds of years of disgrace and injustice and they will rise up to vote in unprecedented numbers. They could rightly see Obama as their first real chance at carving a share of America for their people, as they rightly should. I think they deserve that chance and I sincerely hope they take it.

To correspond with this possibility, Brian originally summoned the idea of calculating the increased percentage of black voters needed to put the Southern states “in play” for Obama. Brian collected the data, but his Political Science degree couldn’t enable him to do the calculations (love you Brian baby), so he wisely recruited me. I am somewhat confident they are correct calculations, but I think they can be simplified. I used the “Solver” function, which is an “add-in,” which is found in the “Tools” menu. It’s a powerful Excel feature which allows you to essentially set the parameters of what kind of number you want and then return that number to you, in this case that meant returning the percentage of black turnout needed to put the Southern states “in play,” which we decided would be a margin of 8% since Brian found that 8% was approximately the value needed for the Democrats to invest money into a state in an attempt to win its electoral votes. The graph below shows the results, but you can critique my Excel work by downloading the spreadsheet, please do tell me if I made any mistakes or if the calculations can be done without solver or more efficiently. Of course, these calculations do not account for the increased “racist” vote, so these numbers could be worthless, but they are fun to ponder nonetheless. Enjoy.

Labels: Billy Joe Mills, politics, race

A Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll just came out saying "more Americans express doubts about a candidate [for President] who served in Bush’s cabinet (59%) than one who is gay or lesbian (53%)." Ouch.

Other interesting results:

• 8 in 10 Americans say they would be "comfortable" or "enthusiastic" about an African-American or a woman running
• 53% say they would have "some reservations" or "be uncomfortable" with a Mormon candidate
• 19% say the same about a Jewish candidate
• 44% say the same about an evangelical Christian
  
• 66% say the same about a candidate over the age of seventy
  

Almost certainly the number of Americans out there who would actually have misgivings about these kinds of candidates is higher than any poll will ever indicate (people tend not to like to admit to their prejudices), but it's still interesting to see that people are just as uncomfortable with Mormons as they are with gays. Ironic that Mitt Romney, who is basically pinning his presidential hopes to gay-bashing, must overcome the same prejudice against himself that he is now fomenting against others.

Labels: 2008, Brian, gender, LGBT, politics, race, religion