Dak
mentat
If that is the case (the endemic, inescapable, etcetc nature of race), doesn't that make it fall under the "if it's everywhere it's essentially nowhere" sort of critique?
Dakryn's Batshit Theory of the Week
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Einherjar86
Active Member
Race is "essentially" nowhere. Race is an identity.
Race isn't everywhere, but it has the potential to infiltrate any and all vectors of everyday life. Race is never concrete either, it's always in flux - and this derives from a mixture of how races perceive themselves, how they are perceived by outsiders, how they are represented institutionally, how they have been treated historically, etc. Racial identity is constantly expanding and being added to, which makes it a ubiquitous social concern, but not a ubiquitously existing concrete entity.
Dak
mentat
Jimmy... Dead.
contemplative curmudgeon
Whenever I'm in East New York or parts of Queens I look around like "oh yea this is where black people live." as if it is what it is, like it's no problem. I think maybe it's a part of history we want to forget and force them to build their own community without us; right after they were freed from the house and fields they were told "you're free but you can't live here." and were left with nothing to fend for themselves.
Einherjar86
Active Member
I knew you meant racism, and it wouldn't. I was simply saying that if race is already constructed, then racism is a systematic effect of that construction.
Pretty much.
Dak
mentat
What I would say is "this is where high time preference people live". Areas with high time preference people look pretty much the same regardless of the skin color of those people, and therefore I think is a more useful analytical tool.
Einherjar86
Active Member
That would be true, if you could somehow ascertain whether or not most people in a given area are actually "high time preference." I would like to know how exactly one would do this, beyond saying "Well, the economic status of this area suggests that most people are high time preference." But beyond that, why is it then that these areas of "high time preference" people consist mostly of blacks?
You can't reduce the racial demographics to whether or not the people are mostly high time preference or not, even if it is the case.
You can't reduce the racial demographics to whether or not the people are mostly high time preference or not, even if it is the case.
Dak
mentat
Areas of high time preference that are mostly black are where blacks have congregated, but that doesn't mean that there are more high time preference areas that are black vs HTP/HTP areas that are white, hispanic, etc.
I would say the opposite is true. It's not a reduction if I am talking about the more broadly applicable label, as it were.
Time preferences do have a tendency to be generational, and certainly slavery affected this to some degree for American blacks, but then what about all the nonblacks that also exhibit high time preference that didn't suffer from slavery in America?
As best I can tell the reason that my brother and I appear/ed to people as "coming from money" as we have been told, is because we exhibit LTP behavior, as did our parents, though they spent their time on religion rather than material gain. So although we were materially poor, we didn't "act like it" - as in we took care of our things, worked hard, "got some learnin", etc etc.
Einherjar86
Active Member
Look Dak, I'm not saying that qualifying someone as "high time preference" indicates a racial prejudice. That isn't what I meant; but the fact remains that many of these regions that economists might be compelled to describe as consisting of mostly high time preference individuals are mostly inner-city, urban area populated primarily by blacks.
That's the historical (read: contingent) circumstance, and that is what cannot be reduced to whether or not the individuals living there are high time preference or not. It has nothing to do with how broadly applicable the label is; it has to do with how you're using "high time preference" to explain the contemporary conditions of a given region and its people.
That's the historical (read: contingent) circumstance, and that is what cannot be reduced to whether or not the individuals living there are high time preference or not. It has nothing to do with how broadly applicable the label is; it has to do with how you're using "high time preference" to explain the contemporary conditions of a given region and its people.
Dak
mentat
And many of those regions are inhabited by rural and/or urban whites or hispanics. I've been in downtown LA, I've been in the boonies of flyover country. I've spent most of my life either in the rural or innercity areas of the "Black Belt". Generally speaking, the only way to have a reasonably good guess as to whether the HTP area you are in is black or white (if you had no prior knowledge and saw no people) is the ratio of shit cars with "rims" to shit cars without rims (edit: and whether the shit cars were most import economy cars vs old "luxury" autos). Hispanics have a lot more cultural flair that give them away.
Edit: TBC -I disagree with that "mostly blacks" distinction.
Einherjar86
Active Member
I'm certain there are whites in some of those areas; but the large majority of inhabitants in the poorest sections of the country are black. This isn't to say there aren't poor white people; it's to say that an overwhelming percentage of blacks are impoverished and inhabiting those areas.
Dak
mentat
Ok, to additionally be clear - being poor doesn't mean one is HTP necessarily.
I'll be willing to grant that it's probably reasonable to assume that the ratio of HTP blacks to LTP blacks is probably greater than the ratio of HTP whites to LTP whites. But given that blacks are a minority (for now), you can't assume mostly. A hell of a lot of the country is populated by HTP whites and hispanics. Blacks are just more obvious because they tend to condense in "visible" areas.
Einherjar86
Active Member
A larger percentage of blacks fall under the poverty line than percentage of whites. This is symptomatic of our scholarly differences, but I don't see how using HTP is useful in this context. I see how you're using it and how it applies (I think), but I don't think it can explain everything you want it to.
Dak
mentat
Well it doesn't explain anything historically, only individually and immediately. That is, time preference doesn't explain itself, and it is only demonstrable. One demonstrates a high or low (or medium?) time preference. We cannot, from that demonstration, tell why one has such a time preference.
My point is that racism does not explain time preference, but time preference does explain individual behaviors. If only blacks in America had HTP, or were the overwhelming group displaying HTP, then we might could pinpoint racism and/or slavery as a cause for such. But this isn't the case. The difference in ratios might point towards slavery as a factor, but not racism as a factor (if that makes sense).
My point is that racism does not explain time preference, but time preference does explain individual behaviors. If only blacks in America had HTP, or were the overwhelming group displaying HTP, then we might could pinpoint racism and/or slavery as a cause for such. But this isn't the case. The difference in ratios might point towards slavery as a factor, but not racism as a factor (if that makes sense).
Jimmy... Dead.
contemplative curmudgeon
Einherjar86
Active Member
I don't think you can separate slavery and racism. If a certain racial demographic exists today because of slavery, then it exists because of racism. You can't really distinguish the two.
Dak
mentat
I think you can, and I'm going to point towards pretty much any other ethnic minority that experiences/d racism (all of them in any given place and time), and look at how that turns out vs American blacks and slavery. Jews are the easy ones to single out due to their continued success/LTP behavior despite intense racism.
Einherjar86
Active Member
You can have racism without slavery. But slavery as it manifested in the Transatlantic trade, the colonies, and the antebellum South, happened to be racist. I'm not saying that slavery as an institution and racism as an institution can never be separate; Roman slavery was based on nationality and imperialism, not race. I'm saying that the historical moment of slavery as it occurred in the Western world from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century was racist, and cannot be separated from race.
Dak
mentat
The slavery was racist. But you can separate the effects of slavery versus racism - because we do see the absence of certain trends in the presence of even horrifically bloody racism that appear present post slavery.
Einherjar86
Active Member
I find that second sentence confusing. Could you provide some examples to work with? What "trends" do you mean?
