In 2011, the terms racist/racists/racism accounted for 0.0027% and 0.0029% of all words in The New York Times and The Washington Post, respectively. What we see over the past decade is a continual dramatic increase in usages of “racism” and its variations. Moreover, the graph shows that this increase occurred a half decade before the arrival of Donald Trump. By 2019, they would constitute 0.02% and just under 0.03% of all words published in the Times and Post—an increase of over 700% and just under 1,000%, respectively, from 2011.
…In 2011, just 35% of white liberals thought racism in the United States was “a big problem,” according to national polling. By 2015, this figure had ballooned to 61% and further still to 77% in 2017.
For my personal sanity, I would love to see the end of all of this racial nonsense. And yes, it is clearly nonsense except in the eyes of the true believers.
So, whom should I vote for? Or, does it even matter? Other than ending this nonsense and Supreme Court nominations, I’m basically indifferent as to who occupies the Oval Office.
(the data above surprisingly seem to indicate that this nonsense predates Trump, so I guess go ahead and vote for him? Or, will Biden somehow be better?)
Lastly, apologies in advance for the political question on this normally apolitical blog.
Assuming that Biden wins, Biden will not be better than Trump because at best Biden will be Obama’s puppet and Obama is responsible for the extraordinary politicization of racial relations since January 20, 2009. Also, Michelle Obama is not better than Barack and she seems ready to meddle if Biden-Harris wins. And you can bet that if Ms. Harris becomes President she will do everything possible to further politicize racial relations to appease the criminal factions that Dems have been supporting to get rid of Trump.
BTW, if some rumors about the evidence for the prosecutions of the policemen accused of killing Floyd and Blake were correct, you should expect an extraordinary deterioration in racial relations.
Good insights, thanks!
“BTW, if some rumors about the evidence for the prosecutions of the policemen accused of killing Floyd and Blake were correct, you should expect an extraordinary deterioration in racial relations.”
The media have a batting average of approximately .000 in these high profile cases (e.g. Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner), so it’s pretty much a foregone conclusion at this point that we will see additional rioting once these recent cases are adjudicated. I think it’s just a matter of whether this will be better under Biden or Trump.
“Obama is responsible for the extraordinary politicization of racial relations since January 20, 2009”
Oh Yeah? What did Obama do specifically to exacerbate racial relations? Most black intellectuals (see Cornell West) feel Obama did very little for blacks, because he was scared of being racially bias to his white donors.
Yes, the term “racism” is used so promiscuously and with so many different meanings now that it is rapidly losing its usefulness. Which is good news for those who we might previously have all agreed were racists since it is causing the label to lose much of its stigma.
I am inclined to see the NYT and Washington Post more as reflecting this trend rather than causing it but linguistic feedback loops will always run in both directions between verbal usage and print reflection and uptake of changes in linguistic conventions.
So then, yes, those newspapers “picked up” the terms “microaggression” and “white privilege” much faster than the general public although I would be willing to bet they appeared in conservative and libertarian blogs with a much higher uptake rate albeit with disapproval. But in the modern political culture this just encourages the trend because both sides enjoy using language that irritates the other side.
And let’s not forget that entirely accurate reporting really would reflect a real increase in racial tensions and accompanying racism. According to the most recent annual FBI Report on Hate Crime Statistics (2018), violent racially biased crimes reached a peak in 2018 not seen since 2001 when statistics were dominated by the Sept.11 attack.
And, by the way, the sharp increase in white people seeing racism as a much bigger problem in the last decade is certainly due to the fact that cell phone videos now allow them to regularly see the kind of abuses in policing that black people have long been more aware of. Does anyone really believe that word counts in the NYT and Washington Post are a remotely comparable cause?
The rise in the belief in racism meets a need for explanation. Lots of statistics are now kept by race. Indeed, that is often a legal requirement (e.g., No Child Left Behind). They show a consistent, almost unchanging “gap” between black and white Americans. But why? One might think that racism would not be a preferred explanation since there is so much less overt racism and so much legal prohibition of white racism. One does not explain a constant with something that is changing.
But all the alternative explanations are considered mean. Genetic differences, of course. But also behavioral ones. To say that black people could do things differently, could “do better” just seems insulting. Kicking someone when they’re down. In the famous characterization of William Ryan, “blaming the victim”.
But the only other possibility is that it’s white people’s fault. And the only way to improve things is to rub white people’s face in it, so they will change their ways. Thus, the need for many, many stories about how bad things still are, about awful history, about structures of white privilege, etc., etc. The popularity of such explanations is a demand side thing, not a supply side thing. The supply of new, more totalizing explanations responds to the demand for them. Responds to the hunger for reasons.
When you are trying to protect a dogma that is at odds with reality, you struggle to invent explanations. That dogma is human universalism/egalitarianism taken not as a contingent good, but as a sacred moral absolute. That there are wide differences in personal traits, abilities, and behaviors not only among individuals but among groups (on average), is the reality that nobody wants to face. Refusal to acknowledge this reality is strange; it does not oblige anyone to treat others badly or justify it.
If you think that educated people are better than uneducated people and that they deserve to make more money BUT
you acknowledge “That there are wide differences in personal traits, abilities, and behaviors not only among individuals but among groups (on average)”, then as the night follows the day, you are saying that some people and some groups are better than others and that they deserve to be better off than others.
The Democratic Party is heavily dependent on the black vote. Most presidential elections are decided by only a few points difference in the vote. Blacks are 12% of the population and vote in the high 80 to 90% plus range for Democrats. Without this, Democrats would be uncompetitive in national elections.
Every election cycle Democrats need to gin up the black vote by stirring up racial fear and paranoia. They do this by seizing on some unfortunate incident and then using the media wing of their party to completely misrepresent what in fact happened. President Obama took this to new heights. President Trump, with his great appeal to blacks, which comes from treating them as real people and addressing their real concerns, is making inroads which are a mortal threat to the Democratic Party which has long taken blacks for granted. Not knowing anything else to do, the Democrats have doubled and quadrupled down on their tactic. There will never be reasonable racial peace and harmony until the Democratic Party fades, or blacks start splitting their votes. Let us hope that the current mania has reached the point of such absurdity that it dies.
Missing (so far) from the observations of the print media (and now leaching into the commercial [TV] visual media) is the obvious decline in the distinctions and qualities (qualification -not certifications) of the “presenters,” and shapers of “content.” The nature of relationships within “journalism” organizations seems to have degenerated into various kinds of monisms – that lead to expulsions. The motives to “wage influence” have long and deeply submerged motives to inform.
“racial attitudes of white liberals became radically more liberal, relative to changes observed among nonwhite Democrats”
This is perhaps the most interesting aspect of racial wokeness (observed in multiple places besides this article): it’s a phenomenon driven by (mostly educated) white liberals, not nonwhites. By the types of people that read the NYT and WaPo, not people that live in minority neighborhoods. Perhaps, we need to understand wokeness as a debating strategy rather than a change in actual racial experiences or perceptions. If you were a white liberal trying to argue for bigger government and more redistribution, how would you do it? Traditional socialism and class warfare arguments were largely discredited in the 20th Century (although younger folks seem to have forgotten or never learned that). Arguing that bigger government and more redistribution are needed to address racial disparities provides a new rationale for the old ideology.
Another interesting tidbit from the article: it’s only white liberals that have shifted from TV to internet/social media for news. White moderates’ and conservatives’ TV and internet/social media usage has remained relatively flat. So, the timing of the Great Awokening seems to coincide with white liberals moving to smart phones. Maybe, social media selects for a different type of white liberal journalist than did television, i.e., does wokeness play better over social media than on TV?