debitage

9.2.07

Class And Race Are Not The Same Thing

David Schraub tries to defend John Edwards against the charge that his advocacy for the poor is inconsistent with his wealth. He states, correctly, that "Human beings have a moral obligation to try and remedy unjust systems of which they are the beneficiary." But the point isn't that rich people shouldn't care about the poor, it's that people who care about the poor should not be, or should cease to be, rich.

Schraub draws an analogy to race:

As I clarified in that post, this is not saying that said beneficiaries are responsible for the unjust state of affairs. White people are, by and large, not responsible for the web of White privilege which gives them their advantage. Rich people should not be looked upon as evil because they amassed wealth.

However, I think we need to be a bit more hesitant to assimilate class issues to the identity politics paradigm that works so well with respect to race, gender, and some other oppressions. A key difference here, which bears on the tension between Edwards' wealth and professed ideology is this: white privilege can't be given up, but rich privilege can. Further, while racial justice must be achieved while retaining the full scope of racial diversity, the whole point of progressive class politics is to eliminate (or at least reduce) the class diversity, moving the very rich and the very poor toward middle-class-dom.

John Edwards had no say in being born white, and nothing he can do can do can change his whiteness. So he's an innocent beneficiary of white privilege, and can therefore without contradiction fight against it. However, wealth is not something that just happens to you -- especially in Edwards' case, as he's a "self-made man" rather than a trust fund baby. He took deliberate actions over a long period of time to earn that money, and he could easily divest himself of it.

White privilege isn't fungible -- Edwards can't take a racially-profiled traffic stop on himself to spare a black person from it. But wealth is fungible. While some degree of wealth is necessary to sustain him in his quest to combat the structural causes of poverty, it's absurd to think there's some justification for buying a second mansion:

... 28,000-square-foot estate that Edwards and his family call home ...

A main home has five bedrooms and six-and-a-half baths. It's connected by a covered walkway to a bright red addition known as "The Barn," that includes its own living facilities along with a handball court, an indoor pool and an indoor basketball court with a stage at one end. Nearby, the family has cleared space for a soccer field.

With a current building value of $4.3 million ...

Anyone so pampered that they couldn't go on without that kind of luxury deserves pity, not a job running the country. Edwards should perhaps schedule a meeting with Peter Singer to talk about other options for spending his $4.3 million dollars. There are lots of organizations out there -- with focuses all along the scale from relieving immediate suffering to activism about root causes -- that could make much better use of that money. What's stopping him from building a public YMCA for the underprivileged instead of a private one for just his own family?

Edwards may in fact do quite a bit to help the poor were he elected president (I haven't researched his proposals in any detail). His ownership of a ridiculous mansion does not prove that his commitment to the cause is totally vacuous. But it is not a morally innnocent happenstance comparable to his white privilege.

Stentor Danielson, 22:06, |

6.2.07

Kyoto Vs. Carbon Taxes

If you're going to knock a claimed solution to a problem, it's important to be sure that your proposed alternative actually overcomes the flaws you point out in the solution you reject. A good case study for this problem comes in a column by Anne Applebaum, who is knocking the Kyoto treaty and proposing carbon taxes instead. (Although perhaps writing a whole blog post about this column is giving it more credit than it's worth, since Applebaum makes the inexplicably ignorant claim that America needs Europe's encouragement to give up on the Kyoto Protocol.)

The first thing to note is that Kyoto and national-level carbon taxes are not mutually exclusive. Kyoto sets targets for each country, and establishes some international trading mechanisms. But each country is free to achieve its domestic carbon reductions in any way it likes -- including by implementing a carbon tax.

One of the advantages of a carbon tax, Applebaum says, is that nations can implement it on their own, without worrying about whether other nations are doing so as well. It's unclear why a country can't just as easily start working on its own Kyoto committment (or going beyond it), through whatever mechanism, without worrying about whether the treaty is in force yet. But if this is going to be one of Applebaum's points against Kyoto, she should take a closer look at the US Senate's 95-0 rejection of Kyoto, which she claims shows the political unfeasibility of Kyoto. The Senate rejected Kyoto not because it requires too much international cooperation, but because it doesn't reqiure enough international cooperation. Specifically, the Senate's issue was that Kyoto requires the first world to go it alone during the first period, imposing no emission reduction targets on developing countries like China and India.

The core of Applebaum's beef with Kyoto, however, is that it's unenforceable, complex, and prone to manipulation. And it's not just a matter of the UN's perfidy or ineptitude, since she also rejects the idea of non-carbon-tax programs within the US. One can only imagine Applebaum has never taken a look at the US tax code. Any real carbon tax system would be riddled with loopholes and special tax breaks for industries who give money to powerful legislators.

I think a carbon tax would be a useful component of climate change policy -- as long as it's made suitably progressive so that the incentive falls heavier on the people with the resources to make reductions and innovations, not on Joe Working Class who can barely afford enough gas to drive to work as it is. And I think any developed country has a responsibility to go it alone in reducing emissions even if they can't get other countries to go along. But a national-level carbon tax doesn't solve any of the flaws Applebaum sees in Kyoto.

Stentor Danielson, 10:15, |

4.2.07

Lovelock's Lit Review

Before you get to the substance of any argument, you typically need some eqiuvalent of the academic "lit review" -- a survey of the existing debate that allows you to position your own proposal in the context of what others have said about the issue. A poor lit review shows that -- whatever the intrinsic merits of your idea -- you have no clue who you're really arguing with. James Lovelock gives a good example (via Muck and Mystery) of a confused lit review on the question of how to deal with climate change.

Lovelock's substantive position is easy to pin down -- a technological fix centered on massive expansion of nuclear power*, plus other engineering projects like giant space mirrors to deflect sunlight. His understanding of how he relates to the rest of the environmentalist debate, however, is quite skewed.

"Our situation," Lovelock says, "is similar to that of a boat that suddenly loses engine power shortly before reaching Niagara Falls. What's the point of trying to repair the engine?" To save what it can, Lovelock believes, the world must embark on a completely different path. Most important, it must abandon the notion of "green romanticism."

"Green romanticism" may or may not be the dominaint strain of environmentalism -- but it is quite clearly not the current path of the world as a whole. All current proposals to deal with climate change that have any traction with the world's decisionmakers are far closer to (albeit more modest than) Lovelock's technocracy than to any romanticist back-to-the-land or "small is beautiful" proposal. I'm sorry, but if your preferred solution is advocated by George Bush and John Howard, you can't claim to be out of the mainstream.

Lovelock has nothing but ridicule for environmentalists' favorite issues, such as "sustainable development" and "renewable energy," calling them "well-meaning nonsense."

I found this put-down of sustainable development bizarre, because Lovelock's view of the term is exactly the opposite of the environmentalist view. To every environmentalist I've heard, "sustainable development" means the very kind of modestly-paradigm-changing, technology-based solution that Lovelock is pushing. Sustainable developers are his best allies, while anti-sustainable-development environmentalists charge that the concept provides cover for continuing the kind of high-tech capitalist managerialism that created our environmental problems in the first place.

Do-gooders, he adds, are concerned about pesticide residues in bananas and the link between mobile phones and cancer, all the while accepting CO2 poisoning as a necessary evil. "They strain out the mosquitoes while blithely swallowing camels," he says.

I challenge Lovelock to find me one environmentalist who thinks "CO2 poisoning" -- by which I assume he means the various negative effects of climate change, not that CO2 is itself becoming a significant toxin -- is a "necessary evil." He's free to say that the policies that other environmentalists advocate will not in fact solve the climate problem, or that paying attention to any other issue takes time and resources that are needed for action on climate. But only someone completely out of touch with the actual environmentalist debate could claim that anyone other than non-environmentalist apologists for the status quo (who, we should note, are also unconcerned about pesticides or mobile phones) think increasing CO2 is a "necessary evil."

* Even if I was a nuke enthusiast, I don't think I'd want Lovelock on my side -- his response to Chernobyl is not the usual "that was the Soviets' fault, and reactors are safer now," but rather "the death toll was only in the thousands, so why are you complaining?" (My opposition to nuclear power is less "radiation will kill us all," and more that nuclear power is incompatible with a restructuring and decentralization of our energy system, which I think is at least as important as changing the source of the power.)

Stentor Danielson, 10:50, |

Progressive Vs. Liberal Views Of Racism

I was a bit surprised to see that Lynn Gazis-Sax doesn't "get it" with respect to why Joe Biden's description of Barack Obama as "articulate" is problematic. But her explanation as to why she doesn't get it highlights a basic difference between progressive and liberal viewpoints. She notes that John Edwards is also often described as "articulate," then asks:

if it�s not condescending to use about a white man, why should it be condescending to use about a black man?

I should first note that I think describing Edwards as "articulate" is typically condescending -- it's generally coupled with observations about his physical attractiveness, and thereby used to imply that all he's got going for him is that he looks and sounds good on the surface, and hence that he lacks experience and substance. Quite similar to the most common line of attack on Obama, in fact.

Nevertheless, calling Obama "articulate" is more problematic than using that word about Edwards precisely because of the men's races. The liberal view of race, as expressed in Gazis-Sax's quote above, is based precisely on a refusal to allow the race factor to be taken into account. The liberal says that if we act as if race doesn't exist, racism will be taken care of. Colorblind equality of treatment -- achieved by asking "would I do this exact thing to someone of a different race? -- is the order of the day.

Progressives, on the other hand, recognize that our actions don't happen in a vacuum. Rather, our actions occur within a complex and racially-biased social structure, which filters and shapes their effects. A superficially race-neutral act can end up having strongly disparate effects on people of different races, because it pulls on a racially-biased string in the social network. What's more, pulling on such a string may well reinforce it. It is therefore irresponsible to refuse to take race into consideration, or to say that "I would treat someone of a different race this way" is always a sufficient justification for an act. (This is not to say that surficially equal treatment is always wrong -- indeed, in many cases it's exactly the right thing to do. But it must be chosen in light of the social structure it's interacting with, not on the basis of a refusal to consider that structure.)

So what does this mean in the specific context of Biden's remarks? The key point to recognize is that the word "articulate" has a racially-biased history attached to it. When used to describe a black person, it invokes a different set of ideas and stereotypes than when applied to a white person, because the web of connections in our culture is not colorblind. Therefore we must take into consideration the race of anyone we might consider describing as articulate -- both to ask what that word will communicate to hearers (and hence what effects it might have on reinforcing the inequities attached to it), and to ask why it was that a racially-tinged word was the one that popped into our heads.

Stentor Danielson, 10:06, |