Very interesting. On the substance, I believe al-Gharbi is likely directionally correct, however, he is making a strong claim but his argument structure is in places structurally somewhat weak.
More intriguing to me is that this is one of the rare instances where someone is making the case that the issue is class and not race. That is kind of ancillary to his argument but a truth almost never discussed in the US.
In the US, 70%, 80%, 90%, maybe more of what we argue about in terms of race is really about class or class-adjacent issues such as family-structure or poverty. Some small number of people are philosophical racists (on both ends of the political spectrum). Many more people have patterns of learned practical knowledge which occasionally have a racial bias at their core. Very few systems are systemically racist. Virtually all systems have disparate impact. Disparate impact by itself is no evidence for racism.
So why do we talk about everything racial as if it were a product of malicious racism if, in fact, it is primarily class tension?
Probably path dependency. We clearly have had in parts of the country legal and institutional racism. That was systematically demolished with abolition and the outcome of the Civil War. We then had a hundred years of residual legal racism. It is an historical oddity worth noting (see Thomas Sowell) that between 1865 and 1965, the African-American-White gaps in socio-economic measures of performance (income, education attainment, family formation, health, etc.) showed the greatest rate of convergence.
In 1965 we in large part abolished the residual legacy of legal racism.
It has been a mopping up operation since then. Structural racism (slavery) gone. Residual Legal racism (red-lining, separate but equal, etc.) gone. Most obvious forms of remaining social racism are pretty much gone in most communities. It is not just impolite or even impolitic to criticize based on race, it is virtual career suicide.
If structural, legal, and social racism are substantially gone, why do we still focus on race? I would argue because they used to be real and we are locked into that language and that logic. We are locked into a path dependency.
But at some point, sometime perhaps in the seventies, the evidence was emerging that there are still material disparate outcomes that cannot be attributed to race but are sourced in class.
Take, as an example, school disciplinary actions. It is indisputable that there are black-white differences in the nature and extent of school disciplinary actions. African-American children are expelled, suspended or otherwise disciplined at a greater rate than white students. Why?
With our history, the obvious conclusion would be that this is some holdover of the old issues. But finding overt racism is extremely difficult.
My argument is that that is because we are falling into patterns of thought and misdiagnosing the root cause. It is not race, it is class.
One of the main pieces of evidence for this is by looking at who is doing the discriminatory disparate disciplining.
Some of the schools and school districts with the highest disparate impact are democratically controlled urban school districts. Some even where the District Education Board is majority African-American, where the majority of teachers are African-American, where the majority of the students and parents are African-American, and where the Mayor and City Council are African-American.
Racism? Theoretically possible. Probable? I would argue not.
Because once you control for obvious class attributes, the disparate impact shrinks to vanishing. Controlling for income is perhaps the biggest influence. Control for family structure. Control for parental education attainment. Control for religiosity. When these attributes, more closely associated with class, are brought to bear, the disparate impact shrinks everywhere, whether urban or suburban school districts.
Just an example of why I think we mistakenly misclassify many outcomes as the product of racism when in fact they are a product of class issues.
Al-Gharbi captures some of that thinking in his essay.
Amy Cooper was asked to put her pet on a leash, in accordance with city ordinance. Rather than simply complying with the rules, Ms. Cooper tried to sic the police on the person who pointed out her violation — feigning to be in imminent danger from an “African American man.” Fortunately, the man accused of threatening Ms. Cooper recorded the incident. His sister later uploaded the video to social media, where it went viral; it has already been viewed tens of millions of times.It feels like al-Gharbi is more focused on establishing that liberals can be manifestly racist rather than emphasizing that the causal mechanism for that racism is class privilege and class assumptions which is where I focus. But its his essay and argument.
It is unclear what the appropriate consequences for something like this should be, given how dire the consequences of her actions could have been (as recent events in Minneapolis sadly confirm). However, Ms. Cooper has already paid a high price for her transgression: She has been publicly shamed and terminated from her position as a VP and Head of Investment Solutions at Franklin Templeton Investments. She has surrendered custody of her dog (whom she dragged around by the neck for most of the confrontation). Some lawmakers have called for her to be charged with making a false report to police.
A lot of ink has been spilled over this incident and others like it. One thing that has been largely missing from these stories is the political orientation of the white people who behave in this manner. It may be tempting to view this question as a distraction from the “core” issue at hand — however, I will argue, this component may actually be essential for understanding how many of these stories play out.
Consider Ms. Cooper’s threat against the person who told her to leash her dog: She was going to call the cops and “tell them there’s an African American man threatening” her life. It seems taken as a given that the police are racially biased — that they will act with overwhelming force, and without regard to the actual facts of the case, to defend a white person who appears to be in danger from a black man. Even though she was the one breaking rules, she assumed the police would target him, precisely on the grounds that he was an “African American man.”
This is not a set of assumptions that most conservatives would likely hold. They are generally skeptical of claims of racial bias in policing. While some acknowledge a few “bad apples,” they assert that law enforcement officers typically discharge their duties in a restrained and fair manner, with their responses to situations dictated by the pertinent facts of the case.
In other words, Ms. Cooper’s assumption that the cops would respond in a forceful manner against a black man without asking too many questions, strictly in virtue of his race as compared to hers — this is the kind of belief that liberals tend to hold about cops.
Indeed, based on her demographic characteristics — urban, white, female, highly-educated, of an upper-socio-economic status — it is statistically highly probable that Ms. Cooper voted for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 general election.
The peculiar intersection of race, class, and ideology that Ms. Cooper embodies is hardly unusual for cases like these. Consider: in areas of concentrated poverty that are being gentrified or that lie adjacent to wealthier areas (as is often the case in urban settings), policing tends to be much more frequent and aggressive — even for small crimes. Those calling the cops on people of color for things like taking shelter from the rain, failing to wave at a white passerby while leaving their AirBnB, sitting in their car waiting for yoga class to start, accidentally brushing up against a white person in a store, etcetera — the people regularly seeking out law enforcement for things like loud music, loitering, “suspected” criminal activity, or domestic disturbances — these are often relatively well-off, highly-educated, liberal, white denizens eager to “clean up” or “protect” the neighborhoods they choose to live in.
Moreover, it is liberals who go out of their way to embed themselves in communities of color — especially young and highly-educated professionals or artists. Granted, rents tend to be cheaper in these areas. However, many are also drawn to such neighborhoods, quite explicitly, because they are “historic,” “cultured” and “diverse.” In so doing, they put themselves in situations where they more frequently come into contact with minorities. If misunderstandings or conflicts arise (as they inevitably will in multi-cultural and gentrifying urban neighborhoods), many reflexively look to local authorities to resolve these disputes on their behalf. Like Ms. Cooper, this is often done in confidence that the police will align themselves with the white person making the call. In practice, then, they are attempting to use police to punish people of color who are insufficiently deferent to their own demands or preferences. However, it is extremely difficult for most white liberals to understand their actions in this way due to a phenomenon social scientists call “moral credentialing.”
And a very rare one at that. Most settle on the habitual race thinking and al-Gharbi clearly accords class a role which it rarely receives.
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