Wikidworld (#163) / Racial Dynamics in American Society: Toward Some Fresh Perspectives
This demographic profile of the ski crowd at Snoqualmie on a weekday was not what I would have expected. And yet this profile could not have been random. I sensed it contained a truth worth exploring.
Since the inception of Wikidworld in July 2022, I’ve mostly focused my attention on the conservative Catholic foundations of right-wing politics in the United States since World War II. In recent months, I’ve pivoted to other topics, including a five-part series on urban-rural dynamics and climate change (the Chicago Tribune has been running all five of these articles as a connected series of Opinion pieces).
I’d like to now pivot again to address another large and fascinating topic concerning dynamics between different groups in American society. In this case, racial and ethnic groups. Embedded racial dynamics and persistent racial inequalities in the United States indicate that as a nation we remain trapped within closed systems of thought. No matter our group identity or political orientation, we attach ourselves to ideas about race and inequality that resonate emotionally.
These ideas offer moral clarity. They allow us to safely inhabit familiar assumptions about what is good and what is evil in the world. They secure us within the specific groups with which we identify. But they don’t necessarily move us forward as a society. We desperately need fresh thinking and the obliteration of some shibboleths.
I really haven’t planned out the direction of this project, so am looking forward myself to seeing where my travels take me. Here’s a good place to start, with a day trip to the Snoqualmie ski resort about 40 miles east of Seattle in the Cascade Mountains.
Several weeks ago, I drove to Snoqualmie with my son Daniel, who was in town to condition his ski game ahead of a trip with college friends to Copper Mountain in Colorado. I am not fond of cold weather, don’t ski, and were hadn’t been to Snoqualmie in two decades, when my children were baby squids. But I wanted to hang with Daniel, so I brought my computer and some books and posted up in the ski lodge while he headed off to sample the snow.
Aside from the $12 pizza slices and $20 hamburgers, the place seemed not to have changed much in 20 years. I settled into my work, periodically glancing around as people began to shuffle in for lunch. I am always attuned to demographics of any crowd environment. The sorts of people who engage in specific activities or inhabit different landscapes will of course vary enormously across income, age, gender, education, race, and ethnicity — particularly as culture and identity tend to cluster around these attributes. In relation to wealth distinctions and economic inequality, these patterned distributions in different evironments are telling.
What immediately struck me at Snoqualmie was that somewhere around 75 percent of the skiers in the lodge were Asian, and not merely Asian-American, but Asian-Asian. Many were Chinese and speaking what I assumed to be Mandarin. Some appeared to be Indian, or from some part of South Asia. Probably 20 percent of the remaining people flowing into the lodge were white, with the remaining 5 percent of uncertain origin. In the 6 or 7 hours I was hanging out in the lodge at Snoqualmie, I saw two African American skiiers (out of perhaps the several hundred who streamed through).
This was novel. This demographic profile of the ski crowd at Snoqualmie on a weekday was not what I would have expected. And yet this profile could not have been random. I sensed it contained a truth worth exploring.
A strange — but not unrelated — thing also occurred in the September 21, 2023 issue of the left-leaning New York Review of Books. The publisher, Basic Books, purchased an entire page of the magazine to promote a new book by the 93-year-old conservative economist, Thomas Sowell, who is African-American. The book — entitled Social Justice Fallacies — is a data-driven assault on the assumed truths that have sustained social justice movements and activists throughout the Western world in recent decades.
Since its publication in September 2023, Social Justice Fallacies has received suspiciously widespread acclaim, with 89 percent of the more than 1,000 Amazon reviewers awarding the book five stars. But I suspect there is something deeper going on that accounts for the reception this book has received, and that we should probe those depths.
As you can see in the image below, some of what Sowell tells us in his book is banal. The first statement about churn among the super-wealthy, for instance, means little because if they are not in the top-400 list one year, they are surely still among the top-4,000 or top-40,000.
However, the paragraph on poverty rates for two-parent black families is striking and probably quite meaningful. Meanwhile, the statement in the second paragraph about the income gap between white male workers and male Asians of Chinese, Korean, Japanese, and Indian ancestry speaks volumes.
The decision to promote in the NY Review a book that cuts so sharply against the grain for most NY Review readers might seem like a bold, and perhaps rash, move. But more likely, it suggests an inflection point. My suspicion is that left-leaning intellectuals are themselves increasingly skeptical of social justice verities, not because they don’t support the aims, but because the means employed have in so many cases generated a fierce and disabling backlash, and because this backlash has largely emerged from the successful efforts of political opportunists on the right to exploit the weak foundations of many of the unchallenged racial caste verities of the social justice movement. In particular, those surrounding the concept of systemic racism.
Probably like most NY Review readers, I remain convinced that systemic racism has and continues to exercise a perfidious influence in the United States. But white racism and systemic racism are not the same thing. Nor are systemic racism and personal racism the same thing. Similarly, the term people of color — a bucket term for those harmed by white racism — conceals more than it discloses about the experiences and situations of specific non-white racial and ethnic groups.
The meretricious conflation of these notions has not merely intensified the backlash. This conflation has weakened the support of potential allies of the social justice movement. And it has misidentified many of the policies that would most effectively improve the lives and future prospects of the people most directly harmed and handicapped by systemic racism.
I’ll close for now by pointing you to an Associated Press article on racial wealth disparities, published this morning. The story focuses on a recent Federal Reserve Bank of New York report indicating that while wealth increased within all major racial groups during the pandemic, the wealth gap between white and black Americans widened by 30 percent in this period (and by 9 percent between white and Hispanic Americans).
For many people, this report likely (and not unreasonably) reinforces the standard narrative about white supremacy and racial inequality in the United States. The NY Fed report contains a major blind spot, however, in the decision to omit inclusion of of Asians, Pacific Islanders, and other racial ethnic groups in the study because of a small sample size. The problem with this omission is that we have enormous evidence that the wealth and income achievements of Asian Americans in the 21st century is a significant part of the story. Perhaps the most vital part of the story.
To be continued.