I think your point further clarifies that what we today call "racism" is more of what I'll call "racialism."
Racism, to me, is a true, visceral, embedded HATE of someone with a certain skin color/race. It's a pure hate--not just born out of ignorance, but a full-body force against a certain skin color/race. True white- or black-supremacist type stuff.
Today it seems "racism" is more of a generalized presumption about a person based on their skin color, and hate/dislike really doesn't even have to be a part of the "racism" of today. More like negative stereotyping, not in the other's favor.
I prefer "racialism" to describe this ignorant view--one of basic generalization or stereotyping, often generalizations of the negative-form, but mostly just ignorance.
“And honestly, a lot of people on the right were more aware of class than people on the left, and that was surprising to me.”
This is the least surprising “surprising thing” I have heard since the last time Trump was elected. I should be surprised that an academic who studies class is surprised by this, but no degree of academics demonstrating their utter cluelessness about normal American right-leaning voters surprises me any longer. Sigh.
*Of course* the right-leaners were more aware of, and more sympathetic to, class than the left-leaners. That’s almost the *whole reason* we’re having a party realignment right now. 🤦🏻♀️
Decades ago I read a book titled "Class" written by some professor at UPenn whose name escapes me. Anyway, it was a breakdown of class structures in the US and the author described the criteria, history, habits, tastes, intelligence, prejudices, etc. of each. He explained how we are all victims of our class roots and in most cases unable to rise above those limitations. But then he created this one class that he called Class X. These people, he explained were highly-intelligent and unburdened by class structures. They were free of prejudice, above the fray, able to see clearly and make their own informed decisions. And who was this Class X composed of? Well, shiver me timbers, it was first and foremost academics such as himself.
>>And I know my co-author would say that a lot of the gender stuff that
>>men are more disadvantaged wasn’t caused by a system of women
>>dominating and making things bad for men, and I think that’s a reasonable
>>point. To her, that would suggest that maybe we shouldn’t call those things
>>sexist, that they are inequalities, but not because women were in charge and
>>made them so.
This jumped out at me as an interesting way of thinking. It's like half-adopting "systemic" bias, where you look at outcomes, rather than intentions to evaluate bias, but only if those outcomes can be traced back to some intentional bias by an oppressor-class at some point of history.
I know Streib was both talking off the cuff and trying to speak on someone else's behalf, so I don't want to be too critical of him, but it really doesn't make any sense. I can see wanting to focus on current intentions, as you do want to address people currently making it worse. And I can see focusing on systemic outcomes, as you want to try to fix those, but why only worry about systemic outcomes if they can be traced back to some likely long-dead oppressor class? Someone suffering from systemic bias is suffering from it regardless of the cause and (the Cadaver Synod notwithstanding), there's only so much value in beating a dead oppressor.
This ultimately comes down to a problem I always had with the focus on system bias - why do we care about what left someone disadvantaged? Why should we, the living, be more sympathetic to someone who is disadvantaged because of racism 50-100 years ago, than someone who is disadvantaged because their father or grandfather made some bad choices? Both people are disadvantaged due to no fault of their own and no fault of ours.
"why only worry about systemic outcomes if they can be traced back to some likely long-dead oppressor class?"
Thinking about it, this focus on oppression can seriously impede attempts at equality. "Convictors" tend to overlap a good deal with people who deny that women are in some ways disadvantaged because of our biology, rather than because we're historically oppressed. So they oppose sex segregated sports.
A possible motivation for thinking this way - focusing in only on areas where disadvantage stems from humans being bad - might be that human badness feels more manageable to us than things like biology or luck. It boils things down to a fight between good and evil, and all we have to do is fight bad people which feels satisfying anyway.
It may be that many people on the "acquittal" side make these same inequalities feel manageable or tolerable by ascribing them to God's will - again, a human-like agency.
I think this can lead to a cope out explanation as well, not taking responsibility for the ancillary effects of current policy changes that drive “solutions” and “corrections”.
Did they literally ask "Is this a story about racism?" in reference to that cartoon? Because in a narrative sense it's pretty clearly *about* racism in the way that it's framed, even if the reader doesn't think the shooting was actually motivated by race. I wonder how different the responses would be if they asked "Does this scenario depict racism?" or something along those lines.
This is great and all, but the illustrated example (police shooting an innocent Black man) really avoids grasping the nettle, namely, that young black men commit a hugely disproportionate amount of violent gun crime. And no, it's not just poverty, because you can go for years in the poorest white Appalachian counties (full of theft, fraud, etc.) without ever being mugged at gunpoint.
Even among the very wealthiest Black families, young men are imprisoned much, much more than their white counterparts. "The sons of black families from the top 1 percent had about the same chance of being incarcerated on a given day as the sons of white families earning $36,000."
So, naive liberal social scientists, and BLM-wielding affluent whites in safe white neighborhoods can campaign all they want, but as long as these numbers remain what they are, the instinctive, split-second reaction to young Black men is going to be different than it is to young nonblack men. I mean, these young men could always choose to commit less crime. There's a thought. But until that happens, good luck doing anything definitive about "systemic racism" and "unconscious bias." In the words of the great Rev. Jesse Jackson: "“There is nothing more painful to me at this stage in my life than to walk down the street and hear footsteps... then turn around and see somebody white and feel relieved.”
Agree and well-expressed. Something else: While police disproportionately shooting blacks is by many deemed racist regardless of circumstances or the realities you pointed out above, one never hears charges that police disproportionately shooting males is sexist. Why is that? Because we know and accept that males commit more violence than females. Yet when it comes to race, or more specifically, black Americans, we refuse to acknowledge that one group commits more violence than another despite overwhelming evidence. How are you going to solve a problem if you can't admit it exists?
(My own observation is that individuals shot by police are disproportionately violent criminals. Go figure.)
That is an important point, to which I would add, when the author states "There’s a huge gap between black and white boys for incarceration," I think he is doing the issue a disservice by setting up a false binary. We don't have two races only in the US. There is an even huger gap between black and Asian boys for incarceration.
I found this article to be very telling of the tribal pressures exerted on its authors when they adopt the quasi nonsensical “surveyor” method, which is basically just “convictor light.” Algorithmic thinking is the very definition of racism and sexism, which the authors thoroughly debunk, but they then inexplicably go on to adopt it anyway in a lighter form perhaps because they want to keep their academic social circle intact. I found them to be rather ridiculous for this reason.
Thank heaven our justice system uses the rules of evidence and not the identity-based “surveyor technique.” There have been explorers—surveyors if you will—that go out to explore new lands with preconceived notions about what they will find. Columbus was one, and his preconceived notions led him to conclude erroneously that the New World was Asia. These lame sociologists would have us apply this lame thinking to social relations. I can get better reasoning from a random Walmart greeter.
The surveyor method seems fine to me. Being aware of patterns in events and politics is a useful heuristic (which everyone uses) but only if you make some effort to falsify the hypothesis.
The surveyor method is practically indistinguishable from the convictor model and is terribly unfair. Put the shoe on the other foot and it justifies the abuses of “driving while black.” Useful heuristic, indeed.
Isn’t it kind of dumb to look at a cartoon and make a firm decision based on that very thin information? I want to know whether it was dark out, whether the person being shot was reasonably considered to be armed and dangerous, whether he pulled his phone out suddenly or was just standing there reading Substack. To say you can make any assessment based on the cartoon alone is absurd.
Also, if you are using an algorithmic approach, one should inform one’s algorithm with actual evidence, not hunches. Roland Fryer’s research found that police are not more likely to use deadly force against Black suspects, but are more likely to use lower levels of force -- throw them against a wall, rough them up, etc. I would use that data to set my priors.
If a Fortune 500 company or major university were accused of anti-Black discrimination, my priors would be that it’s BS, because those sorts of institutions have been discriminating in favor of Blacks for half a century.
That's all true, but I think it somewhat misses the point of the research:
-people -- especially partisan ones -- *often* make judgements on the basis of very little information
-the "algorithmic approach," as practiced by convictors, isn't really scientific -- rather, they have general feelings about the high prevalence of racism and sexism in society and then induce, from there, that a given instance was caused by it. It's not a good way to determine the specifics of an individual instance, but it is useful for us to know that that's how people make these determinations
I had a similar reaction to the initial poster. Did the study have anything on responders who said, I can't conclude anything based on this cartoon? It would be interesting to see their methodology in terms of dealing with respondents who felt they had to go one way or the other because they agreed to take the test and didn't want to waste any body's time by saying that they didn't see anything conclusive.
I would agree with the “can’t conclude” answer. I was/am of the “acquittal” mind set and lean that way because I didn’t have enough information to determine, beyond a reasonable doubt, that it was racially motivated.
My major issues with “convictors’” algorithmic approach is that it fundamentally begs the question. Both ends of the A vs C categorization play with motivated reasoning but I think begging the question is a foundational aspect of convictors.
I gave a response like that for the only study I ever participated in, when they wanted me to guess the gender or other characteristics of an anonymous opponent in a paper-scissors-rock style computer game.
Noting that Convictor types give the benefit of the doubt to the accuser (per the table shown), and that this runs contrary to our system of law, is it safe to say that Convictors would believe our legal system is inherently sexist and racist? Or does that shift, depending on the sex and race of the parties involved?
Interesting to me too is that when I think of historical cases of legal systems where the onus of proving innocence fell on the accused, I think primarily of left-leaning governments such as the Bolsheviks / Soviets in Russia or the Directory in France. (True, there are right-leaning examples as well, such as the McCarthy Hearings. But that was more a hysteria that perverted the existing legal system for a period of time as opposed to an entrenched legal framework.).
So many great comments responding to this post. “Convictor types give the benefit of the doubt to the accuser (per the table shown), and that this runs contrary to our system of law,”, is my never ending heartburn with this left wing cultural shift over the past 10 years.
Applied to our system, reasonable doubt is disfavored and a preponderance of evidence is championed which turns into -in some people’s minds- guilty until proven innocence.
I think the phrase "gives benefit of the doubt to the ac user" is inherently wrong. Giving benefit of the doubt to the accuser should mean: the accuser has made a good faith claim, and believes what they're saying. What this is using that phrase to mean is: the accusation is true. That's not benefit of the doubt
Furthermore, "benefit of the doubt" ACTUALLY means that, when there is ambiguity and you don't know what the truth is, you are going to come down on that side. It's like draw odds in chess. That is not the scenario they're describing for any side there (maybe the moderate acquitter). They're talking about weighting the testimony and evidence BEFORE hearing it.
The most extreme anti-racists (oh, I hate that term)--I would guess, would tell you that racism is an undercurrent of everything and infects all behavior to one degree or another. It's the cause for bad behavior against people, but also a reason for acquittal of bad behavior (but for racism this person wouldn't have HAD to take that action).
The most extreme racists, I would also guess, would tell you that there are "simply" differences between the races and some of those differences aren't as good as other differences. A person's race is the cause of bad behavior, and blaming the race of the person is a plain explanation of what is happening
The true racists will tell you that they're NOT racist--they just see and understand the differences between the races, and they see and understand that some of these differences matter in fundamental ways.
What's interesting to me in this is that the 'center' of American society has generally agreed that people are all the same--no race is inherently superior, no race is inherently inferior. Race essentially is inconsequential to most things of substance.
That's a victory for the civil rights movement (and probably for the political Left).
But now the 'convictors' are telling us that... actually, the races aren't really the same at all. They've got distinctive histories, shared experiences among them, common cultures that are unique to their race (hence the value of affinity groups and for hiring certain races since this "diversity" has intrinsic value from those different things).
The anti-racists focus only on the good aspects of that distinctiveness, while the racists focus only on the bad aspects--but they're both aligned in focusing on the differences rather than the commonalities.
This is confusing to central society--we've come to agree that we're fundamentally all the same, and that commonality is good--but now the shift has been made to emphasize and value the smaller differences (none of which are really adequately/substantively defined or measured, I don't think).
This puts the Left and Right extremes in conflict--and the risk is that once the differences are over-valued (as they are among racists), society might focus on the negative differences rather than the positive ones.
[Not to be distracted, and not to turn everything into the "trans issue," but a similar thing has happened there, too. An over-valuing of and singular focus on "gender identity" is also the root cause of the current conflict.]
This is the, “the question is not “Did racism occur?” it is “How did it manifest?””, line of reasoning.
The issue here with race is that it has been conflated with culture. As you point out racists conflate these things all the time but how anti-racists also double down on this shit too saying they are essentially inseparable.
Maybe it'd just open up an entirely different can of worms, but I think focusing on socio-economic status seems more... defensible for everyone involved? Enough of this bickering over our intrinsic natures....
As a species we did not evolve to understand and adequately process the laws of large numbers (i.e., statistics). We survived by competently responding to anecdotes (a rustle in the bushes, rather than studying 1000 rustles in the bushes).
Can acquitters or convictors do the best at overcoming the powerful and emotional effects of anecdotes on decision-making and try, given the information they have available to them, to put the question in the context of all of the statistics available to them?
I'd also like to see this issue placed into the context of Daniel Kahneman's work, which shows the many errors people make in decision-making. That would be fascinating.
In her answers to your second “push back” question, it seems like Streib is still treating “racially correlated inequality” and “racism” as if they are synonymous. You offered the out, and she seems to get that it’s *possible* for there to be “sex inequality without sexism”, but then goes right back to using the concepts interchangeably, e.g. when she claims that acquittors are usually denying that any inequality exists. Granted I didn’t write a whole book about it and I’m more like you than like the people who’ve never heard of “sexism”, but the real life acquittors I know are all willing to acknowledge that racism at least used to be a big issue.
Which makes me agree with another poster that “surveyor” is really just “convictor lite”. She still heavily *defaults* to the belief that racial/gender inequality is due to *ism. It’s still “guilty until proven innocent”, even if she’s more open to the possibility of innocence than pure convictors.
"One is that I think we could separate out identity politics and convicting. I don’t think those have to be the same. We could think about individual instances of racism and sexism, and think about that choice of “Is this racist or sexist?” without referring to people’s own identities when making that choice."
I thought identitarianism is the practice of boiling everything down to identity, so the question of whether an action is racist or sexist would be decided based on the identities of those involved in the scenario itself, not on the identities of the people making the judgement about the scenario.
I feel pretty confident that if we went back to the early 00s during the Bush years, we would find a reversal version of this, where the "conservatives" were the default Convictors and the "liberals" were the default Acquiters. The way it feels to me is that the overarching aesthetics of society generate a shape kind of like:
`topic of great importance to society + situation + justification process`
- The times we live in tell us what topics are of great importance (the Patriot act, war on terror vs racism, sexism, wokeness)
- The situations come up all the time, but we don't notice ones that aren't tagged as important.
- The justification process is the same whether your priors are aligned for or against the hegemonic view of society.
Also, I'd be curious to play the same experiment out with Abortion, Sex before Marriage, Listening to Heavy Metal to see the conservatives become the default Convictors.
The "algorithmic method" sounds an awful lot like what would be called "stereotyping" if the shoe was on the other foot.
I think your point further clarifies that what we today call "racism" is more of what I'll call "racialism."
Racism, to me, is a true, visceral, embedded HATE of someone with a certain skin color/race. It's a pure hate--not just born out of ignorance, but a full-body force against a certain skin color/race. True white- or black-supremacist type stuff.
Today it seems "racism" is more of a generalized presumption about a person based on their skin color, and hate/dislike really doesn't even have to be a part of the "racism" of today. More like negative stereotyping, not in the other's favor.
I prefer "racialism" to describe this ignorant view--one of basic generalization or stereotyping, often generalizations of the negative-form, but mostly just ignorance.
“And honestly, a lot of people on the right were more aware of class than people on the left, and that was surprising to me.”
This is the least surprising “surprising thing” I have heard since the last time Trump was elected. I should be surprised that an academic who studies class is surprised by this, but no degree of academics demonstrating their utter cluelessness about normal American right-leaning voters surprises me any longer. Sigh.
*Of course* the right-leaners were more aware of, and more sympathetic to, class than the left-leaners. That’s almost the *whole reason* we’re having a party realignment right now. 🤦🏻♀️
Decades ago I read a book titled "Class" written by some professor at UPenn whose name escapes me. Anyway, it was a breakdown of class structures in the US and the author described the criteria, history, habits, tastes, intelligence, prejudices, etc. of each. He explained how we are all victims of our class roots and in most cases unable to rise above those limitations. But then he created this one class that he called Class X. These people, he explained were highly-intelligent and unburdened by class structures. They were free of prejudice, above the fray, able to see clearly and make their own informed decisions. And who was this Class X composed of? Well, shiver me timbers, it was first and foremost academics such as himself.
Paul Fussell. It's been on the anti-woke syllabus for a while now, though your point about Fussell's unwitting irony is also true.
It should be "And who composed this Class X?" or "And who made up. . . "
"To comprise" means "to encompass," e.g. "My collection comprises antique fishing tools, logging tools and farming tools."
Thanks Ollie! Fixed.
>>And I know my co-author would say that a lot of the gender stuff that
>>men are more disadvantaged wasn’t caused by a system of women
>>dominating and making things bad for men, and I think that’s a reasonable
>>point. To her, that would suggest that maybe we shouldn’t call those things
>>sexist, that they are inequalities, but not because women were in charge and
>>made them so.
This jumped out at me as an interesting way of thinking. It's like half-adopting "systemic" bias, where you look at outcomes, rather than intentions to evaluate bias, but only if those outcomes can be traced back to some intentional bias by an oppressor-class at some point of history.
I know Streib was both talking off the cuff and trying to speak on someone else's behalf, so I don't want to be too critical of him, but it really doesn't make any sense. I can see wanting to focus on current intentions, as you do want to address people currently making it worse. And I can see focusing on systemic outcomes, as you want to try to fix those, but why only worry about systemic outcomes if they can be traced back to some likely long-dead oppressor class? Someone suffering from systemic bias is suffering from it regardless of the cause and (the Cadaver Synod notwithstanding), there's only so much value in beating a dead oppressor.
This ultimately comes down to a problem I always had with the focus on system bias - why do we care about what left someone disadvantaged? Why should we, the living, be more sympathetic to someone who is disadvantaged because of racism 50-100 years ago, than someone who is disadvantaged because their father or grandfather made some bad choices? Both people are disadvantaged due to no fault of their own and no fault of ours.
"why only worry about systemic outcomes if they can be traced back to some likely long-dead oppressor class?"
Thinking about it, this focus on oppression can seriously impede attempts at equality. "Convictors" tend to overlap a good deal with people who deny that women are in some ways disadvantaged because of our biology, rather than because we're historically oppressed. So they oppose sex segregated sports.
A possible motivation for thinking this way - focusing in only on areas where disadvantage stems from humans being bad - might be that human badness feels more manageable to us than things like biology or luck. It boils things down to a fight between good and evil, and all we have to do is fight bad people which feels satisfying anyway.
It may be that many people on the "acquittal" side make these same inequalities feel manageable or tolerable by ascribing them to God's will - again, a human-like agency.
I think this can lead to a cope out explanation as well, not taking responsibility for the ancillary effects of current policy changes that drive “solutions” and “corrections”.
I love the phrase “Red and Blue White People.” Very patriotic.
Did they literally ask "Is this a story about racism?" in reference to that cartoon? Because in a narrative sense it's pretty clearly *about* racism in the way that it's framed, even if the reader doesn't think the shooting was actually motivated by race. I wonder how different the responses would be if they asked "Does this scenario depict racism?" or something along those lines.
This tripped me up, too.
This is great and all, but the illustrated example (police shooting an innocent Black man) really avoids grasping the nettle, namely, that young black men commit a hugely disproportionate amount of violent gun crime. And no, it's not just poverty, because you can go for years in the poorest white Appalachian counties (full of theft, fraud, etc.) without ever being mugged at gunpoint.
Even among the very wealthiest Black families, young men are imprisoned much, much more than their white counterparts. "The sons of black families from the top 1 percent had about the same chance of being incarcerated on a given day as the sons of white families earning $36,000."
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/03/19/upshot/race-class-white-and-black-men.html
It's the same in every American city -- let's take Milwaukee (40% Black) in which 80+% of the homicide perps and shooters are Black: https://www.mcw.edu/departments/epidemiology/research/milwaukee-homicide-review-commission/reports/dashboards
So, naive liberal social scientists, and BLM-wielding affluent whites in safe white neighborhoods can campaign all they want, but as long as these numbers remain what they are, the instinctive, split-second reaction to young Black men is going to be different than it is to young nonblack men. I mean, these young men could always choose to commit less crime. There's a thought. But until that happens, good luck doing anything definitive about "systemic racism" and "unconscious bias." In the words of the great Rev. Jesse Jackson: "“There is nothing more painful to me at this stage in my life than to walk down the street and hear footsteps... then turn around and see somebody white and feel relieved.”
Agree and well-expressed. Something else: While police disproportionately shooting blacks is by many deemed racist regardless of circumstances or the realities you pointed out above, one never hears charges that police disproportionately shooting males is sexist. Why is that? Because we know and accept that males commit more violence than females. Yet when it comes to race, or more specifically, black Americans, we refuse to acknowledge that one group commits more violence than another despite overwhelming evidence. How are you going to solve a problem if you can't admit it exists?
(My own observation is that individuals shot by police are disproportionately violent criminals. Go figure.)
I just checked the Washington Post database on police shootings. In 2024, 9 black unarmed men were shot and killed by police.
That is an important point, to which I would add, when the author states "There’s a huge gap between black and white boys for incarceration," I think he is doing the issue a disservice by setting up a false binary. We don't have two races only in the US. There is an even huger gap between black and Asian boys for incarceration.
I just checked the Washington Post database on police shootings. In 2024, 9 black unarmed men were shot and killed by police.
I found this article to be very telling of the tribal pressures exerted on its authors when they adopt the quasi nonsensical “surveyor” method, which is basically just “convictor light.” Algorithmic thinking is the very definition of racism and sexism, which the authors thoroughly debunk, but they then inexplicably go on to adopt it anyway in a lighter form perhaps because they want to keep their academic social circle intact. I found them to be rather ridiculous for this reason.
Thank heaven our justice system uses the rules of evidence and not the identity-based “surveyor technique.” There have been explorers—surveyors if you will—that go out to explore new lands with preconceived notions about what they will find. Columbus was one, and his preconceived notions led him to conclude erroneously that the New World was Asia. These lame sociologists would have us apply this lame thinking to social relations. I can get better reasoning from a random Walmart greeter.
The surveyor method seems fine to me. Being aware of patterns in events and politics is a useful heuristic (which everyone uses) but only if you make some effort to falsify the hypothesis.
The surveyor method is practically indistinguishable from the convictor model and is terribly unfair. Put the shoe on the other foot and it justifies the abuses of “driving while black.” Useful heuristic, indeed.
Isn’t it kind of dumb to look at a cartoon and make a firm decision based on that very thin information? I want to know whether it was dark out, whether the person being shot was reasonably considered to be armed and dangerous, whether he pulled his phone out suddenly or was just standing there reading Substack. To say you can make any assessment based on the cartoon alone is absurd.
Also, if you are using an algorithmic approach, one should inform one’s algorithm with actual evidence, not hunches. Roland Fryer’s research found that police are not more likely to use deadly force against Black suspects, but are more likely to use lower levels of force -- throw them against a wall, rough them up, etc. I would use that data to set my priors.
If a Fortune 500 company or major university were accused of anti-Black discrimination, my priors would be that it’s BS, because those sorts of institutions have been discriminating in favor of Blacks for half a century.
That's all true, but I think it somewhat misses the point of the research:
-people -- especially partisan ones -- *often* make judgements on the basis of very little information
-the "algorithmic approach," as practiced by convictors, isn't really scientific -- rather, they have general feelings about the high prevalence of racism and sexism in society and then induce, from there, that a given instance was caused by it. It's not a good way to determine the specifics of an individual instance, but it is useful for us to know that that's how people make these determinations
I had a similar reaction to the initial poster. Did the study have anything on responders who said, I can't conclude anything based on this cartoon? It would be interesting to see their methodology in terms of dealing with respondents who felt they had to go one way or the other because they agreed to take the test and didn't want to waste any body's time by saying that they didn't see anything conclusive.
I would agree with the “can’t conclude” answer. I was/am of the “acquittal” mind set and lean that way because I didn’t have enough information to determine, beyond a reasonable doubt, that it was racially motivated.
My major issues with “convictors’” algorithmic approach is that it fundamentally begs the question. Both ends of the A vs C categorization play with motivated reasoning but I think begging the question is a foundational aspect of convictors.
I gave a response like that for the only study I ever participated in, when they wanted me to guess the gender or other characteristics of an anonymous opponent in a paper-scissors-rock style computer game.
The only correct answer to the cartoon question is "I don't know." I hope a lot of people answered that way.
Noting that Convictor types give the benefit of the doubt to the accuser (per the table shown), and that this runs contrary to our system of law, is it safe to say that Convictors would believe our legal system is inherently sexist and racist? Or does that shift, depending on the sex and race of the parties involved?
Interesting to me too is that when I think of historical cases of legal systems where the onus of proving innocence fell on the accused, I think primarily of left-leaning governments such as the Bolsheviks / Soviets in Russia or the Directory in France. (True, there are right-leaning examples as well, such as the McCarthy Hearings. But that was more a hysteria that perverted the existing legal system for a period of time as opposed to an entrenched legal framework.).
So many great comments responding to this post. “Convictor types give the benefit of the doubt to the accuser (per the table shown), and that this runs contrary to our system of law,”, is my never ending heartburn with this left wing cultural shift over the past 10 years.
Applied to our system, reasonable doubt is disfavored and a preponderance of evidence is championed which turns into -in some people’s minds- guilty until proven innocence.
It-drives-me-up-a-wall.
I think the phrase "gives benefit of the doubt to the ac user" is inherently wrong. Giving benefit of the doubt to the accuser should mean: the accuser has made a good faith claim, and believes what they're saying. What this is using that phrase to mean is: the accusation is true. That's not benefit of the doubt
Furthermore, "benefit of the doubt" ACTUALLY means that, when there is ambiguity and you don't know what the truth is, you are going to come down on that side. It's like draw odds in chess. That is not the scenario they're describing for any side there (maybe the moderate acquitter). They're talking about weighting the testimony and evidence BEFORE hearing it.
Class is the much-neglected step-child of progressive politics.
The most extreme anti-racists (oh, I hate that term)--I would guess, would tell you that racism is an undercurrent of everything and infects all behavior to one degree or another. It's the cause for bad behavior against people, but also a reason for acquittal of bad behavior (but for racism this person wouldn't have HAD to take that action).
The most extreme racists, I would also guess, would tell you that there are "simply" differences between the races and some of those differences aren't as good as other differences. A person's race is the cause of bad behavior, and blaming the race of the person is a plain explanation of what is happening
The true racists will tell you that they're NOT racist--they just see and understand the differences between the races, and they see and understand that some of these differences matter in fundamental ways.
What's interesting to me in this is that the 'center' of American society has generally agreed that people are all the same--no race is inherently superior, no race is inherently inferior. Race essentially is inconsequential to most things of substance.
That's a victory for the civil rights movement (and probably for the political Left).
But now the 'convictors' are telling us that... actually, the races aren't really the same at all. They've got distinctive histories, shared experiences among them, common cultures that are unique to their race (hence the value of affinity groups and for hiring certain races since this "diversity" has intrinsic value from those different things).
The anti-racists focus only on the good aspects of that distinctiveness, while the racists focus only on the bad aspects--but they're both aligned in focusing on the differences rather than the commonalities.
This is confusing to central society--we've come to agree that we're fundamentally all the same, and that commonality is good--but now the shift has been made to emphasize and value the smaller differences (none of which are really adequately/substantively defined or measured, I don't think).
This puts the Left and Right extremes in conflict--and the risk is that once the differences are over-valued (as they are among racists), society might focus on the negative differences rather than the positive ones.
[Not to be distracted, and not to turn everything into the "trans issue," but a similar thing has happened there, too. An over-valuing of and singular focus on "gender identity" is also the root cause of the current conflict.]
This is the, “the question is not “Did racism occur?” it is “How did it manifest?””, line of reasoning.
The issue here with race is that it has been conflated with culture. As you point out racists conflate these things all the time but how anti-racists also double down on this shit too saying they are essentially inseparable.
Maybe it'd just open up an entirely different can of worms, but I think focusing on socio-economic status seems more... defensible for everyone involved? Enough of this bickering over our intrinsic natures....
Right there with you on that regard.
…so they’ve accurately described what’s wrong with the jumping-to-conclusions “convictor” method of thinking, but participate in it anyway.
Hmmm, weird choice
As a species we did not evolve to understand and adequately process the laws of large numbers (i.e., statistics). We survived by competently responding to anecdotes (a rustle in the bushes, rather than studying 1000 rustles in the bushes).
Can acquitters or convictors do the best at overcoming the powerful and emotional effects of anecdotes on decision-making and try, given the information they have available to them, to put the question in the context of all of the statistics available to them?
I'd also like to see this issue placed into the context of Daniel Kahneman's work, which shows the many errors people make in decision-making. That would be fascinating.
In her answers to your second “push back” question, it seems like Streib is still treating “racially correlated inequality” and “racism” as if they are synonymous. You offered the out, and she seems to get that it’s *possible* for there to be “sex inequality without sexism”, but then goes right back to using the concepts interchangeably, e.g. when she claims that acquittors are usually denying that any inequality exists. Granted I didn’t write a whole book about it and I’m more like you than like the people who’ve never heard of “sexism”, but the real life acquittors I know are all willing to acknowledge that racism at least used to be a big issue.
Which makes me agree with another poster that “surveyor” is really just “convictor lite”. She still heavily *defaults* to the belief that racial/gender inequality is due to *ism. It’s still “guilty until proven innocent”, even if she’s more open to the possibility of innocence than pure convictors.
"One is that I think we could separate out identity politics and convicting. I don’t think those have to be the same. We could think about individual instances of racism and sexism, and think about that choice of “Is this racist or sexist?” without referring to people’s own identities when making that choice."
I thought identitarianism is the practice of boiling everything down to identity, so the question of whether an action is racist or sexist would be decided based on the identities of those involved in the scenario itself, not on the identities of the people making the judgement about the scenario.
Yeah, this confused me as well.
I feel pretty confident that if we went back to the early 00s during the Bush years, we would find a reversal version of this, where the "conservatives" were the default Convictors and the "liberals" were the default Acquiters. The way it feels to me is that the overarching aesthetics of society generate a shape kind of like:
`topic of great importance to society + situation + justification process`
- The times we live in tell us what topics are of great importance (the Patriot act, war on terror vs racism, sexism, wokeness)
- The situations come up all the time, but we don't notice ones that aren't tagged as important.
- The justification process is the same whether your priors are aligned for or against the hegemonic view of society.
Also, I'd be curious to play the same experiment out with Abortion, Sex before Marriage, Listening to Heavy Metal to see the conservatives become the default Convictors.