Reddit reviews Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life

@MaxTemkin

> 2017-06-02 02:01 UTC

> The @RLisDead interview on Chapo is 🔥🔥🔥🔥 https://soundcloud.com/chapo-trap-house/episode-113-hit-and-run-feat-rl-stephens-53117

>

> Here's the Fields sisters' book he recommends: https://www.amazon.com/Racecraft-Soul-Inequality-American-Life-ebook/dp/B007LCYZCE/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=

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I am a physicist, who enjoyed watching Destiny’s infestor antics as a postdoc and have occasionally watched him the last couple of years when I travelled. I found the falsehoods provided without source by the recent ‘debater’ to be frustrating.

I have always done very well academically, missing only a couple questions in the SAT/GRE and skipped a grade. I had the honour of having a seminar with Prof. Gates in Maryland but was not good enough to work with him as his student. Prof. Gates was one of the leaders of the first string theory revolution. The lack of African Americans in physics is something that racists point to as a reason for their racism, I can respond with personal observations:
Very few AfricanAmerican study physics in the first place, so it isn’t that they try and prove incapable.
One time I was speaking with an AfricanAmerican friend of mine from church (he was very intelligent, was an accountant and had skipped a grade) about his niece. He said something to the effect of ‘she wants to be a scientist, a chemist, isn’t that crazy?’. I use this as an example of the cultural barriers in place even for the middle class African Americans.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sylvester_James_Gates)

There have been many other summaries, here is one (and surely much better than my post here):
http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/j/jencks-gap.html I am often giving wiki links not because they are the best, but because they provide a summary with links to other places.

The standard tests (like SAT) have a significant racial basis. Basically, they are biased in favour of the intelligence displayed by ‘white' males. This is because their purpose is to measure the population of western communities and not to give an independent measure of intelligence. In fact, if there is a problem that whites of ‘white’ median intelligence have difficulty with but blacks of ‘black’ median intelligence do well on, it would be deselected and not used.
(https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/06/21/sat
http://diverseeducation.com/article/49830/
)

Additionally, all intelligence tests (SAT, GRE, IQ, etc) are made for the ‘average’ and lose applicability for people away from the ‘average’. Most IQ tests just can not be meaningfully interpreted for people outside of one std deviation. By ‘average’ I mean the median person in western countries (Europe/US) and not a world average. Most importantly, the tests assume a given cultural and academic experience and would not test intelligence in an easily interpretable manner for those with a different cultural and academic experience (the score could not be interpreted in the same way). This difference is due both to what ‘type' of intelligence is valued/useful as well as how the variation is understood. These points are noted even in the study of Australian aborigines; are strong at spatial IQ which is very important but not measured well by traditional IQ tests.
(http://wilderdom.com/personality/intelligenceCulturalBias.html
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1813596
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/recognizing-spatial-intel/)

Race is entirely a social construct. If you were going to divide people into genetic populations you would end up with very different divisions then those made by people who divide by race. Even those academics who think that genetic populations and geographic populations are correlated still say that differences between populations account for 5% of genetic differences while differences within a population accounts for 95% of genetic differences. If there are no correlation between 'race' and genetic populations or minimal correlation, then differences in measured intelligence of different groups should be accounted for by differences in environment and not genetics.
( https://www.amazon.com/Racecraft-Soul-Inequality-American-Life-ebook/dp/B007LCYZCE
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_genetic_clustering
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC515312/)

Not only the environment of an individual matters, but also the environment of his ancestors. This is not just for the obvious social reasons (does the person value academics/etc?) but also for that persons biology. You can’t just try to make a change in one generation and expect the effects of previous generations (living through famine, apartheid, jim crow, etc) to be unimportant.
(http://www.livescience.com/21902-diet-epigenetics-grandchildren.html)

The total population of people with Indian ancestry in the UK is about 1.5 million people and Pakistan ancestry is about 1.2 million people(UK divides them). The total population of people with Indian ancestry in the US is about 3 million people. This ‘regression to the mean’ argument is just ridiculous. The difference is that those who came to the US in the last couple of decades came into the upper class and so demonstrate the intelligence associated with an upper class environment while those who came to the UK came as shopkeepers/etc (Indians) or factory workers (Pakistanis). Additionally, Pakistani and Indian are classified differently in the UK (despite the two nations being an artefact of the British colonisation). In terms of economic success, Indians are the second highest ‘ethnic’ group while the Pakistanis are one of the lowest ‘ethnic’ groups.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Pakistanis
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Indian
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Americans)

I am probably not responding to all of the ridiculousness (I only listened to a bit of the end of the 'debate'), but here is a responce to at least some of it.

I don't know of any particular source to point you on that directly, but I think you should read From Slavery to Mass Incarceration by Lois Wacquant, and Racecraft by Karen and Barbara Fields, and The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander.

[From Slavery to Mass Incarceration article and PDF] (http://newleftreview.org/II/13/loic-wacquant-from-slavery-to-mass-incarceration)

Racecraft (book)

New Jim Crow

None of these sources addresses for-profit prisons directly, I don't think (I don't recall maybe New Jim Crow does) but I think they'll be informative. I know you aren't talking about race but you can't talk about poverty and incarceration in this country without talking about race. From Slavery demonstrates how the economic system of the US has always depended on the extraction of cheap or free labor from black people while socially ostracizing black bodies. This began with slavery and it tracks its evolution to mass incarceration, and ends with a note about how there is developing a for-profit prison system which is basically extracting slave labor from large numbers of blacks and repeating the same pattern. The New Jim Crow does a good job of explaining how mass incarceration is the direct result of post Civil Rights era attempts to roll back the gains made during the Civil Rights movement, and goes into detail about the suppression and theft of black productivity that it institutes.

You asked about for profit prisons, but here I am talking about black people - why? This is where Racecraft comes in because it demonstrates how the entire purpose of racial distinctions and classifications is not only to create hierarchies between black and white, but to create hierarchies between rich whites and everyone else. The effect of this for hundreds of years has been, by injecting racial divisions, to destroy the ability of the lower classes, black white or otherwise, to unite and act productively in order to achieve class equality.

Thinking about that, it follows that the drug war, and the irrational, racist fears of the crack epidemic, and extremely harsh penalties in favor of "law and order" spiraled into a system where all poor people are at risk of being scooped up and enslaved in a system where their labor can be extracted for almost no wage -they are still economically productive but they can't actually reap the benefits of their own production. But whenever we talk about the issue, notice the discussion always devolves into a discussion about "black culture" and "white privilege" and so on...Racecraft really made me believe that it's not just that race and class are "linked" - in America, they are identical issues, whose two facets are obscured from each other.

You might also want to read Discipline and Punish for a background on prison systems generally, and how they are designed to perpetuate criminality and create a criminal underclass for the exploitation of the rest of society.

No, a single cell can tell you where your ancestors came from, not whether you are white or black.

I think we are talking in circles here, so I'll just recommend Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life by Karen and Barbara Fields.

>To reiterate, you are disagreeing with the belief that people aren't equal, rather than the physical reality of racism? Because that's the question I asked.

Race doesn't exist as physical reality , the process of "othering" people is what socially constructed racism is.

>Inconsistent definition which relies on stereotyping and gross overgeneralisation, no? Feel free to expand on this too though.

Huh ? No, I generally follow the Fields' sisters explanation.

>Most people assume that racism grows from a perception of human difference: the fact of race gives rise to the practice of racism. Sociologist Karen E. Fields and historian Barbara J. Fields argue otherwise: the practice of racism produces the illusion of race, through what they call “racecraft.” And this phenomenon is intimately entwined with other forms of inequality in American life.

https://www.amazon.com/Racecraft-Soul-Inequality-American-Life-ebook/dp/B007LCYZCE