I've been wanting for a while to say in more detail and with more precision what it is that I think is wrong with the anti-"PC" discourse lately but I've been struggling because I feel that anti-PC people rarely make clear specific claims that one can take clear issue with. But this Kevin Drum post finally gave me the point that I needed. He says a bunch of things that I agree with, but on the list of things that he says is "We liberals do tend to yell racism a little more often than we should." That, I think, is wrong. If anything, it's the opposite. Liberals are excessively reluctant to "yell racism" and excessively deferential to deeply embedded structures of white supremacy.
A question of scale and proportion
Now, look, obviously it's a big country and there are some people out there who are calling something racist when it isn't. But the notion that on the whole this is a big social problem strikes me as a figment of white people's imagination.
To me, part of the story here is that we used to have a national politics that was pretty starkly divided along racial and gender lines but where most of the really high profile figures in the argument were all white men. So, like, the "liberal" role on Crossfire or an op-ed page would be mostly white men and liberal magazines had staffs full of white men. But that representational mix is changing a lot these days, and it turns out that women and non-white people perceive there to be a lot more gender and race bias than is perceived by white men. So now you have white male liberals feeling that "liberals" (who are mostly not white men) are systematically over-diagnosing bias issues. Then you get counter complaints about mansplaining (or what have you) and then resentment about ad hominem arguments.
Unfortunately, the question of "exactly how much racism is out there" and "exactly how much complaining about racism is out there" are both hard to measure. So it is difficult for me to devise a scientific proof that racism is under-diagnosed rather than over-diagnosed. But we do have survey data which shows that, in general, white Americans think anti-white discrimination is a bigger problem than anti-black discrimination. My view is that white Americans are mistaken about this, and that the big macro fact about race and racism in America is that white Americans are excessively defensive and unperceptive about racial issues.
In other news, there was a good Harvard Business Review article this week about how corporate diversity policies make white men feel threatened even though they don't seem to help women or minorities. As long as the roster of Fortune 500 CEOs and board members is so overwhelmingly white and male, I have a hard time believing that bias is being systematically over-claimed.
#Content
What do we mean by "drug legalization"?
Last week I talked to someone who was shocked to learn that I had some doubts about the merits of "drug legalization" including even legalization of marijuana. Do I really think people should be rotting in jail for selling a bag of pot or for doing some coke at a party?
The answer is: no, I don't.
But the "War on Drugs" as currently prosecuted in the United States is so bad that it can blind people to the enormous range of options between the status quo and what legalization means. Think about something that is legal, like alcohol. Alcoholic beverages are made by giant companies on an industrial scale. Those companies have lobbyists in DC and every state capitol. They run ads on television. And they make a huge share of their revenue from a smallish minority of the population who are problem drinkers. And it turns out that alcohol is pretty unhealthy for its high-volume users and also that it tends to induce those users to behave in ways that are dangerous to others.
It would be a mistake to go back to a Prohibition-era "war on booze" mentality. But it would be good to treat alcohol more like we treat tobacco -- with higher taxes and curbs on marketing -- along with more treatment for alcoholics, a probation system that takes alcohol abuse seriously, and ultimately a public culture that takes the harms of excessive drinking seriously. And we really don't want to see a world in which heroin is marketed to teenagers by Madison Avenue's top ad men and where there are powerful lobbyists agitating for low taxes on cocaine.
I don't have a comprehensive plan in mind for how heroin should best be regulated and even if I did this newsletter would be too short to explain it. But long story short, while I'm all for backing off of the "war on drugs" as currently understood I don't think we should make heroin legal in the way that beer and Fritos are legal. We don't need to be treating addicts the same way we treat violent criminals, but we also don't need to be treating people who sell dangerous addictive substances the same way we treat normal businesses. I think this is what people mean when they say "decriminalization" but I'm not exactly sure.
Song of the day
Metallica, "Master of Puppets"