Great post. Your comment on Affirmative Action raises a serious issue. If beneficiaries tend to be recent immigrants from Africa or the West Indies: why should a Nigerian immigrant get a leg up on college admission over an immigrant from Korea or Russia?
The vagueness of "Hispanic" is likewise problematic: does having grandparents from Galicia (Spain) make you more deserving than someone with grandparents from Galicia (Poland)?
The bigger picture, beyond the specificities of racial check-boxes, is that whatever system is imposed to "redress" or "adjust" things, will be immediately gamed by those already in an advantageous social position.
The educated, the tuned-in, the strategic, will figure out how to shake that family tree, or get a convenient diagnosis (extra time on the SAT?), or adjust their financial situation (I know people whose parents tactically "disowned" them so they'd qualify for scholarships and grants).
If it can be scammed, it will be scammed, which is why I don't like these programs (much as like Bernstein I agree with the principle of redress for Native Americans and victims of slavery/Jim Crow)
The list of ridiculous scenarios that break this system is endless (consider Basque Country, where only one side is "Hispanic"). And yes, this is totally a gravy train system for the well-heeled to exploit. I have yet to encounter a solid retort to the concern about the system being gamed.
Although I think the compensation amounts were pathetic and pitiful, the Japanese internment compensation serves as a good model for how to compensate for harms in a precise and targeted manner.
And it's one of those things that if you know others are exploiting the system, you feel like a chump if you don't. I was asked if I had a disability on a recent job application, which specified that money was put aside for workers with disabilities. On the possible mental disabilities, it listed depression and anxiety. I've been diagnosed with fairly severe depression and anxiety, but I'm managing them and, even at my worst, I could mostly power through.
So, do I have a disability? I'm more likely to get the job if I say yes and there are probably people who have less profound cases who have checked the "yes" box. But I don't go through my life feeling significantly hindered and "no" seems closer to the truth. What do you do? (Personally, I checked the "prefer not to say" box.)
The perils of skimming. I read the whole thing astonished by the revelation that Jesse is from Morocco. Even stripped of that it was still quite a read. Than you!
Thing that gets me is how perception impacts the reality. Knew a girl whose father was Hungarian and whose mother was Chinese. Her features were a blend, obviously. Her whole life people would try to speak to her in Spanish. Her friend groups through her life self sorted to be Hispanic. Eventually she learned to speak enough Spanish to get by just to make things easier. And now unless she’s known someone a very long time she just says she’s Mexican. Changed her race due to social pressure.
Shaun King is the most famous example, I think. Only in America can a poor white boy grow up to be a rich black man through sheer determination and belief.
"Non-resident alien" is its own category within the NCES. Nigerian students wouldn't count as Black/African American unless they are citizens or permanent residents, i.e. immigrants rather than international students. I do think this is a somewhat important distinction, though your overall point is well taken. Still, some African American students whose parents are medical doctors are also able to take advantage of scholarship programs based solely on race, which is why I prefer an income-based approach to awarding scholarships with (possibly) recruitment efforts focused on students with intersecting identities (e.g. low-income and also belonging to a underrepresented racial or ethnic group).
You're totally right, thank you for bringing this to my attention. I'm not clear on how exactly the IPEDS reporting categories are used right now. Despite the ubiquity of Directive 15, it seems that some agencies create their own niche classification system as needed. I didn't get into it, but the FDA/NIH also adopted a more granular classification system after heavy pushback from the pharmaceutical industry.
The NIH released a notice in 2019 with specific definitions that include a category for economic disadvantage as well as an acknowledgement that "underrepresentation can vary from setting to setting": https://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/notice-files/NOT-OD-20-031.html
Much of the topic concerns yet /another/ among the seemingly unending set of examples of Campbell's Law, according to which (per Wikipedia) "The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campbell%27s_law).
A very good example too!
I've read Bernstein's posts at Reason's Volokh Conspiracy (which I strongly recommend), but I haven't (yet!) read the book, so I don't know if Bernstein cites the law, but I hope he has.
I appreciate Clever Pseudonym's comment that brings in Eric Hoffer's contributions.
I'd have to check, but I don't believe he does. Defining the members would be a policy choice question. You can choose to be over or under inclusive, and there is no right or wrong answer. My own position is that some reparations are far more defensible than others, and they primarily track along how recent the harm was (e.g. redlining vs transatlantic slave trade).
Redlining reparations seems feasible, since the harm was explicitly recorded and took place recently enough. I would assume that economists have already studied the issue and calculated the net loss on wealth accumulation that was a result of redlining. Then it's a matter of identifying the folks who were the property owners at the time in question, figuring out how much wealth accumulation they missed out on because of government policy, then deciding on a compensation formula to distribute among their descendants. I would not support restricting this based on race, not only because it would make administration far more complicated, but also because I assume redlining did not affect *only* black families.
> I assume redlining did not affect *only* black families.
In absolute numbers, redlining actually affected more white families than black ones, but it affected black families disproportionately. Here are some resources that address this issue:
"I would assume that economists have already studied the issue and calculated the net loss on wealth accumulation that was a result of redlining."
Nope, no agreement on that, as the links given by Apunaja show.
"The researchers studied over 16,000 loans in three cities: Baltimore, Md.; Peoria, Ill.; and Greensboro, N.C. This unique data set includes every loan made by HOLC between 1933 and 1936 and every loan insured by the FHA from 1935 to 1940 in these three jurisdictions. They found that in all three cities the HOLC refinanced many loans in neighborhoods coded red, with no evidence of discrimination against Black homeowners. The FHA, on the other hand, did not insure mortgages in the neighborhoods where Black homeowners lived and chiefly targeted newly constructed homes, which almost exclusively catered to whites, and those in wealthier neighborhoods." (2nd Apunaja link)
So how do we compensate non-issuance of mortgages? That seems to have been the most pernicious actual government policy.
Again, my general point is that once one digs into details, it all becomes enormously complicated. And therefore any attempt at reparations must have a specific, well-defined procedure for sorting out those complications.
I don't deny that it's a complicated process, but the end result will be a policy decision. If there was legislation, the law could just arbitrarily pick one economic study and herald that as the standard. Or it could give authority to a special counsel to investigate, or just let a court decide, etc etc. This type of stuff happens all the time in the legal world.
*sigh* This is not the legal world! This is the political world! Letting some unelected bureaucrat work things out would be massively unpopular with just about everyone.
The number of people who are descendants of slaves is huge.......so I think they would need to show that their families have been in the US for several centuries.
All sorts of people, including white ones, are technically descendants of slaves since slavery was close to ubiquitous.
"consider what box someone indigenous to Brazil would check . . .American Indian would not apply either, because lobbying by federally recognized tribes has relegated this definition to include only North American indigenous people." And I'm not sure it even includes Mexican and Canadian people. The notion of "indigenous" status gets slippery fast. We probably need a better name for Amerindians.
Native American classification (and the accompanying law that governs tribal sovereignty and related areas) is such a thorny mess. I didn't get into it namely for space reasons.
There’s a lot of discussion about how stupid the IPEDs race/ethnicity categories are in higher ed data, but those are the categories the feds make us report.
On the one hand, they are crazy broad--Asian American and Pacific Islander includes the majority of humans--but in my experience, smaller colleges have no use for all the categories and will end up concentrating on the two or three groups that make up the bulk of their enrollment. AAPI students generally do not make up a majority of a Mountain West community college.
Plus, theres a rise of students who are classified as multiracial across the country--unless they also marked Hispanic, in which case they are Hispanic. There’s no guarantee that two multiracial people have anything in common, even less than other classifications.
No, I said what I meant. Tracking race is obviously required for progressive "remedial" racial discrimination to happen. But even if you don't favor that solution (and I don't), you nevertheless still need to track race somehow if your goal is combating discrimination. Without the ability to track race, you'll have no way of knowing where discrimination is taking place, let alone how to address it.
"[you] still need to track race somehow if your goal is combating discrimination..."
since this is America we're talking about, we should try to use some solid old-fashioned wisdom from one of our greatest thinkers about our nation and its character:
“Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.” Eric Hoffer
Our "combating discrimination" industry, which started as a noble effort to help ADOS (and I guess Native Americans) has devolved into a public/private partnership that attempts to label us all by ethnicity and then officially decide some sort of monetary and moral reparation we deserve. (And just to lay my cards on the table: I support any and all efforts to help these 2 specific groups, and zero of the others.) It has long since blown past its business phase and is obviously a corrupt and counterproductive racket.
I'm sure our Racial Division Industrial Complex has managed to help some people (esp the public and private bureaucrat class first and foremost) but it has also injected so much toxic divisiveness, distrust and antisocial hostility into our society and politics.
Our country, with its specific history and especially its history as a land of immigrants, was always going to have issues with social cohesion and national unity, and these policies have taken a localized wound and spread it throughout the entire body.
Since I started with a quote let me finish with one from Pascal Bruckner:
"The racialization of the world has to be the most unexpected result of the anti-discrimination battle of the last half-century. It has ensured that the battle continuously recreates the curse from which it is trying to break free."
I was against affirmative action until Jesse hired Yassine to guest post
👉👳♂️👉
Great post. Your comment on Affirmative Action raises a serious issue. If beneficiaries tend to be recent immigrants from Africa or the West Indies: why should a Nigerian immigrant get a leg up on college admission over an immigrant from Korea or Russia?
The vagueness of "Hispanic" is likewise problematic: does having grandparents from Galicia (Spain) make you more deserving than someone with grandparents from Galicia (Poland)?
The bigger picture, beyond the specificities of racial check-boxes, is that whatever system is imposed to "redress" or "adjust" things, will be immediately gamed by those already in an advantageous social position.
The educated, the tuned-in, the strategic, will figure out how to shake that family tree, or get a convenient diagnosis (extra time on the SAT?), or adjust their financial situation (I know people whose parents tactically "disowned" them so they'd qualify for scholarships and grants).
If it can be scammed, it will be scammed, which is why I don't like these programs (much as like Bernstein I agree with the principle of redress for Native Americans and victims of slavery/Jim Crow)
The list of ridiculous scenarios that break this system is endless (consider Basque Country, where only one side is "Hispanic"). And yes, this is totally a gravy train system for the well-heeled to exploit. I have yet to encounter a solid retort to the concern about the system being gamed.
Although I think the compensation amounts were pathetic and pitiful, the Japanese internment compensation serves as a good model for how to compensate for harms in a precise and targeted manner.
And was feasible only because the internment was in the very recent past, and full records were available of exactly who was and was not interned.
Indeed
And it's one of those things that if you know others are exploiting the system, you feel like a chump if you don't. I was asked if I had a disability on a recent job application, which specified that money was put aside for workers with disabilities. On the possible mental disabilities, it listed depression and anxiety. I've been diagnosed with fairly severe depression and anxiety, but I'm managing them and, even at my worst, I could mostly power through.
So, do I have a disability? I'm more likely to get the job if I say yes and there are probably people who have less profound cases who have checked the "yes" box. But I don't go through my life feeling significantly hindered and "no" seems closer to the truth. What do you do? (Personally, I checked the "prefer not to say" box.)
I confessed to doing something similar here: https://ymeskhout.substack.com/p/a-scandalous-confession
The perils of skimming. I read the whole thing astonished by the revelation that Jesse is from Morocco. Even stripped of that it was still quite a read. Than you!
Thing that gets me is how perception impacts the reality. Knew a girl whose father was Hungarian and whose mother was Chinese. Her features were a blend, obviously. Her whole life people would try to speak to her in Spanish. Her friend groups through her life self sorted to be Hispanic. Eventually she learned to speak enough Spanish to get by just to make things easier. And now unless she’s known someone a very long time she just says she’s Mexican. Changed her race due to social pressure.
Shaun King is the most famous example, I think. Only in America can a poor white boy grow up to be a rich black man through sheer determination and belief.
"Non-resident alien" is its own category within the NCES. Nigerian students wouldn't count as Black/African American unless they are citizens or permanent residents, i.e. immigrants rather than international students. I do think this is a somewhat important distinction, though your overall point is well taken. Still, some African American students whose parents are medical doctors are also able to take advantage of scholarship programs based solely on race, which is why I prefer an income-based approach to awarding scholarships with (possibly) recruitment efforts focused on students with intersecting identities (e.g. low-income and also belonging to a underrepresented racial or ethnic group).
You're totally right, thank you for bringing this to my attention. I'm not clear on how exactly the IPEDS reporting categories are used right now. Despite the ubiquity of Directive 15, it seems that some agencies create their own niche classification system as needed. I didn't get into it, but the FDA/NIH also adopted a more granular classification system after heavy pushback from the pharmaceutical industry.
The NIH released a notice in 2019 with specific definitions that include a category for economic disadvantage as well as an acknowledgement that "underrepresentation can vary from setting to setting": https://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/notice-files/NOT-OD-20-031.html
Much of the topic concerns yet /another/ among the seemingly unending set of examples of Campbell's Law, according to which (per Wikipedia) "The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campbell%27s_law).
A very good example too!
I've read Bernstein's posts at Reason's Volokh Conspiracy (which I strongly recommend), but I haven't (yet!) read the book, so I don't know if Bernstein cites the law, but I hope he has.
I appreciate Clever Pseudonym's comment that brings in Eric Hoffer's contributions.
Agreed, this is an excellent example of Campbell's law
Great review! Looking forward to reading the book.
Fantastic post, very enjoyable and informative read. You're such a great writer, Yassine! Can't wait to read more of your missives.
"Bernstein goes out of his way to explicitly affirm compensatory efforts for groups like ADOS".
And how does he define members of ADOS (American Descendants of Slavery)? Does he use the one-drop rule?
I'd have to check, but I don't believe he does. Defining the members would be a policy choice question. You can choose to be over or under inclusive, and there is no right or wrong answer. My own position is that some reparations are far more defensible than others, and they primarily track along how recent the harm was (e.g. redlining vs transatlantic slave trade).
So write down your proposed policy choice. I would really like to see one (by anybody!) written out.
Because once you try to write down the details, I think you will see just how impossible such a task actually is.
Redlining reparations seems feasible, since the harm was explicitly recorded and took place recently enough. I would assume that economists have already studied the issue and calculated the net loss on wealth accumulation that was a result of redlining. Then it's a matter of identifying the folks who were the property owners at the time in question, figuring out how much wealth accumulation they missed out on because of government policy, then deciding on a compensation formula to distribute among their descendants. I would not support restricting this based on race, not only because it would make administration far more complicated, but also because I assume redlining did not affect *only* black families.
> I assume redlining did not affect *only* black families.
In absolute numbers, redlining actually affected more white families than black ones, but it affected black families disproportionately. Here are some resources that address this issue:
https://www.nber.org/digest-202102/searching-origins-redlining-black-neighborhoods - "The study shows that Whites accounted for about 85 percent of households in the redlined neighborhoods..."
https://www.governing.com/context/redlining-didnt-happen-quite-the-way-we-thought-it-did
"I would assume that economists have already studied the issue and calculated the net loss on wealth accumulation that was a result of redlining."
Nope, no agreement on that, as the links given by Apunaja show.
"The researchers studied over 16,000 loans in three cities: Baltimore, Md.; Peoria, Ill.; and Greensboro, N.C. This unique data set includes every loan made by HOLC between 1933 and 1936 and every loan insured by the FHA from 1935 to 1940 in these three jurisdictions. They found that in all three cities the HOLC refinanced many loans in neighborhoods coded red, with no evidence of discrimination against Black homeowners. The FHA, on the other hand, did not insure mortgages in the neighborhoods where Black homeowners lived and chiefly targeted newly constructed homes, which almost exclusively catered to whites, and those in wealthier neighborhoods." (2nd Apunaja link)
So how do we compensate non-issuance of mortgages? That seems to have been the most pernicious actual government policy.
Again, my general point is that once one digs into details, it all becomes enormously complicated. And therefore any attempt at reparations must have a specific, well-defined procedure for sorting out those complications.
I don't deny that it's a complicated process, but the end result will be a policy decision. If there was legislation, the law could just arbitrarily pick one economic study and herald that as the standard. Or it could give authority to a special counsel to investigate, or just let a court decide, etc etc. This type of stuff happens all the time in the legal world.
*sigh* This is not the legal world! This is the political world! Letting some unelected bureaucrat work things out would be massively unpopular with just about everyone.
The number of people who are descendants of slaves is huge.......so I think they would need to show that their families have been in the US for several centuries.
All sorts of people, including white ones, are technically descendants of slaves since slavery was close to ubiquitous.
The records to show that don't exist for the vast majority.
So this is always my question to proponents of reparations: what is the actual plan for deciding who is eligible?
You should absolutely be ashamed of having liked Limp Bizkit.
I will not be cowed
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azrIQOZmsf8
"consider what box someone indigenous to Brazil would check . . .American Indian would not apply either, because lobbying by federally recognized tribes has relegated this definition to include only North American indigenous people." And I'm not sure it even includes Mexican and Canadian people. The notion of "indigenous" status gets slippery fast. We probably need a better name for Amerindians.
Native American classification (and the accompanying law that governs tribal sovereignty and related areas) is such a thorny mess. I didn't get into it namely for space reasons.
There’s a lot of discussion about how stupid the IPEDs race/ethnicity categories are in higher ed data, but those are the categories the feds make us report.
On the one hand, they are crazy broad--Asian American and Pacific Islander includes the majority of humans--but in my experience, smaller colleges have no use for all the categories and will end up concentrating on the two or three groups that make up the bulk of their enrollment. AAPI students generally do not make up a majority of a Mountain West community college.
Plus, theres a rise of students who are classified as multiracial across the country--unless they also marked Hispanic, in which case they are Hispanic. There’s no guarantee that two multiracial people have anything in common, even less than other classifications.
> I think what you meant to say...
No, I said what I meant. Tracking race is obviously required for progressive "remedial" racial discrimination to happen. But even if you don't favor that solution (and I don't), you nevertheless still need to track race somehow if your goal is combating discrimination. Without the ability to track race, you'll have no way of knowing where discrimination is taking place, let alone how to address it.
"[you] still need to track race somehow if your goal is combating discrimination..."
since this is America we're talking about, we should try to use some solid old-fashioned wisdom from one of our greatest thinkers about our nation and its character:
“Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.” Eric Hoffer
Our "combating discrimination" industry, which started as a noble effort to help ADOS (and I guess Native Americans) has devolved into a public/private partnership that attempts to label us all by ethnicity and then officially decide some sort of monetary and moral reparation we deserve. (And just to lay my cards on the table: I support any and all efforts to help these 2 specific groups, and zero of the others.) It has long since blown past its business phase and is obviously a corrupt and counterproductive racket.
I'm sure our Racial Division Industrial Complex has managed to help some people (esp the public and private bureaucrat class first and foremost) but it has also injected so much toxic divisiveness, distrust and antisocial hostility into our society and politics.
Our country, with its specific history and especially its history as a land of immigrants, was always going to have issues with social cohesion and national unity, and these policies have taken a localized wound and spread it throughout the entire body.
Since I started with a quote let me finish with one from Pascal Bruckner:
"The racialization of the world has to be the most unexpected result of the anti-discrimination battle of the last half-century. It has ensured that the battle continuously recreates the curse from which it is trying to break free."