Month: August 2021

When to Stop Counting

When to Stop Counting

Posted on by jabittan
Yesterday I wrote about the idea of scientific versus political numbers. Scientific numbers are those that we rely on for decision-making. They are not always better and more accurate numbers than political numbers, but they are generally based on some sort of standardized methodology and have a concrete and agreed upon backing to them. Political numbers are more or less guestimates or are formed from sources that are not confirmed to be reliable. While they can end up being more accurate than scientific figures they are harder to accept and justify in decision-making processes. In the end, the default is scientific numbers, but scientific numbers do have a flaw that keeps them from ever becoming what they proport to be. How do we know when it is time to stop counting and when we are ready to move forward with a scientific number rather than fall back on a political number?
Christopher Jencks explores this idea in his book The Homeless by looking at a survey conducted by Martha Burt at the Urban Institute. Jencks writes, “Burt’s survey provides quite a good picture of the visible homeless. It does not tell us much about those who avoid shelters, soup kitchens, and the company of other homeless individuals. I doubt that such people are numerous, but I can see no way of proving this. It is hard enough finding the proverbial needle in a haystack. It is far harder to prove that a haystack contains no more needles.” The quote shows that Burt’s survey was good at identifying the visibly homeless people, but that at some point in the survey a decision was made to stop attempting to count the less visibly homeless. It is entirely reasonable to stop counting at a certain point, as Jencks mentions it is hard to prove there are no more needles left to count, but that always means there will be a measure of uncertainty with your counting and results. Your numbers will always come with a margin of error because there is almost no way to be certain that you didn’t miss something.
Where we chose to stop counting can influence whether we should consider our numbers to be scientific numbers or political numbers. I would argue that the decision for where to stop our count is both a scientific and a political decision itself. We can make political decisions to stop counting in a way that deliberately excludes hard to count populations. Alternatively, we can continue our search to expand the count and change the end results of our search. Choosing how scientifically accurate to be with our count is still a political decision at some level.
However, choosing to stop counting can also be a rational and economic decision. We may have limited funding and resources for our counting, and be forced to stop at a reasonable point that allows us to make scientifically appropriate estimates about the remaining uncounted population. Diminishing marginal returns to our counting efforts also means at a certain point we are putting in far more effort into counting relative to the benefit of counting one more item for any given survey. This demonstrates how our numbers can be based on  scientific or political motivations, or both. These are all important considerations for us whether we are the counter or studying the results of the counting. Where we chose to stop matters, and because we likely can’t prove we have found every needle in the haystack, and that no more needles exist. No matter what, we will have to face the reality that the numbers we get are not perfect, no matter how scientific we try to make them.
Political and Scientific Numbers

Political and Scientific Numbers

Posted on by jabittan
I am currently reading a book about the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution and the author has recently been comparing the development of textile mills, steam engines, and chemical production in Britain in the 1800’s to the same developments on the European continent. It is clear that within Britain the developments of new technologies and the adoption of larger factories to produce more material was much quicker than on the continent, but exactly how much quicker is hard to determine. One of the biggest challenges is finding reliable and accurate information to compare the number of textile factories, the horse power of steam engines, or how many chemical products were exported in a given decade. In the 1850s getting good data and preserving that data for historians to sift through and analyze a couple of hundred years later was not an easy task. Many of the numbers that the author has referenced are generalized estimates and ranges, not well defined statistical figures. Nevertheless, this doesn’t mean the data are not useful and cannot help us understand general trends of the industrial revolution in Britain and the European continent.
Our ability to obtain and store numbers, information, and data is much better today than in the 1800s, but that doesn’t mean that all of our numbers are now perfect and that we have everything figured out. Sometimes our data comes from pretty reliable sources, like the GPS map data on Strava that gives us an idea of where lots of people like to exercise and where very few people exercise. Other data is pulled from surveys which can be unreliable or influenced by word choice and response order. Some data comes from observational studies that might be flawed in one way or another. Other data may just be incomplete, from small sample sizes, or simply messy and hard to understand. Getting good information out of such data is almost impossible. As the saying goes, garbage in – garbage out.
Consequently we end up with political numbers and scientific numbers. Christopher Jencks wrote about the role that both have played in how we understand and think about homelessness in his book The Homeless. He writes, “one needs to distinguish between scientific and political numbers. This distinction has nothing to do with accuracy. Scientific numbers are often wrong, and political numbers are often right. But scientific numbers are accompanied by enough documentation so you can tell who counted what, whereas political numbers are not.”
It is interesting to think about the accuracy (or perhaps inaccuracy) of the numbers we use to understand our world. Jencks explains that censuses of homeless individuals need to be conducted early in the morning or late at night to capture the full number of people sleeping in parks or leaving from/returning to overnight shelters. He also notes the difficulty of contacting people to confirm their homeless status and the challenges of simply surveying people by asking if they have a home. People use different definitions of having a home, being homeless, or having a fixed address and those differences can influence the count of how many homeless people live within a city or state. The numbers are backed by a scientific process, but they may be inaccurate and not representative of reality. By contrast, political numbers could be based on a random advocate’s average count of meals provided at a homeless shelter or by other estimates. These estimates may end up being just as accurate, or more so, than the scientific numbers used, but how the numbers are used and understood can be very different.
Advocacy groups, politicians, and concerned citizens can use non-scientific numbers to advance their cause or their point of view. They can rely on general estimates to demonstrate that something is or is not a problem. But they can’t necessarily drive actual action by governments, charities, or private organizations with only political numbers. Decisions look bad when made based on rough guesses and estimates. They look much better when they are backed by scientific numbers, even if those numbers are flawed. When it is time to actually vote, when policies have to be written and enacted, and when a check needs to be signed, having some sort of scientific backing to a number is crucial for self-defense and for (at least an attempt at) rational thinking.
Today we are a long way off from the pen and paper (quill and scroll?) days of the 1800s. We have the ability to collect far more data than we could have ever imagined, but the numbers we end up with are not always that much better than rough estimates and guesses. We may use the data in a way that shows that we trust the science and numbers, but the information may ultimately be useless. These are some of the frustrations that so many people have today with the ways we talk about politics and policy. Political numbers may suggest we live in one reality, but scientific numbers may suggest another reality. Figuring out which is correct and which we should trust is almost impossible, and the end result is confusion and frustration. We probably solve this with time, but it will be a hard problem that will hang around and worsen as misinformation spreads online.
Personally and Politically Disturbed by the Homeless

Personally and Politically Disturbed by the Homeless

Posted on by jabittan
On the first page of the preface of The Homeless, Christopher Jencks writes about the responses that many Americans had to the rise of homelessness in American cities in the 1970s. He writes, “The spread of homelessness disturbed affluent Americans for both personal and political reasons. At a personal level, the faces of the homeless often suggest depths of despair that we would rather not imagine, much less confront in the flesh. … At a political level, the spread of homelessness suggests that something has gone fundamentally wrong with America’s economic or social institutions.”
I think the two books which most accurately describe the way that I understand our political and social worlds are Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman and The Elephant in the Brain by Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson. Kahneman suggests that our brains are far more susceptible to cognitive errors than we would like to believe. Much of our decision-making isn’t really so much decision-making as it is excuse making, finding ways to give us agency over decisions that were more or less automatic. Additionally, Kahneman shows that we very frequently, and very predictably, make certain cognitive errors that lead us to inaccurate conclusions about the world. Simler and Hansen show that we often deliberately mislead ourselves, choosing to intentionally buy into our minds’ cognitive errors. By deliberately lying to ourselves and choosing to view ourselves and our beliefs through a false objectivity, we can better lie to others, enhancing the way we signal to the world and making ourselves appear more authentic. [Note: some recent evidence has put some findings from Kahneman in doubt, but I think his general argument around cognitive errors still holds.]
Jencks published his book long before Thinking Fast and Slow and The Elephant in the Brain were published, but I think his observation hints at the findings that Kahneman, Simler, and Hanson would all write about in the coming decades. People wanted to hold onto beliefs they possibly knew or suspected to be false. They were disturbed by a reality that did not match the imagined reality in which they wanted to believe. They embraced cognitive errors and adopted beliefs and conclusions based on those cognitive errors. They deceived themselves about reality to better appear to believe the myths they embraced, and in the end they developed a political system where they could signal their virtue by strongly adhering to the initial cognitive errors that sparked the whole process.
Jencks’ quote shows why homelessness is such a tough issue for many of us to face. When we see large number of people failing and ending up homeless it suggests that there is something more than individual shortcomings at work. It suggests that somewhere within society and our social structures are points of failure. It suggests that our institutions, from which we may benefit as individuals, are not serving everyone. This goes against our beliefs which reinforce our self-interest, and is hard to accept. It is much easier to simply fall back on cognitive illusions and errors and to blame those who have failed. We truly believe that homelessness is the problem of individuals because we are deceiving ourselves, and because it serves our self-interest to do so. When we see homeless, we see a reality we want to ignore and pretend does not exist because we fear it and we fear that we may be responsible for it in some way. We fear that homelessness will necessitate a change in the social structures and institutions that have helped us get to where we are and that changes may make things harder for us or somehow diminishing our social status. This is why we are so disturbed by homeless, why we prefer not to think about it, and why we develop policies based on the assumption that people who end up homeless are deeply flawed individuals and are responsible for their own situation. It is also likely why we have not done enough to help the homeless, why it is becoming a bigger issue in American cities, and why we have been so bad at addressing the real causes of homelessness in America. There is definitely some truth to the argument that homelessness is the result of flawed individuals, which is why it is such a strong argument, but we should accept that there are some flawed causal thoughts at play and that it is often in our self-interest to dismiss the homeless as individual failures.
Can Markets Work Without Human Sacrifices?

Can Markets Work Without Human Sacrifices?

Posted on by jabittan
In Tell Them Who I Am Elliot Liebow writes, “Unemployment, underemployment, and substandard wages are system failures only when viewed from the bottom. Looking from the top down, they are seen as natural processes essential to the healthy functioning of a self-correcting market system. From that perspective, it is as if the market system requires human sacrifice for its good health.” Liebow argues that markets can and should function without such failures. He argues that we have deliberately crafted a system that allows and accepts these market failures at the expense of greater marginal profits and returns on investments. The costs of the failures become spread over society, while the marginal gains are concentrated in the few market leaders.
Liebow encourages us to see homelessness as a system failure. He encourages us to see the support of the homeless as a responsibility of everyone within society and as a responsibility of the system as a whole. His book argues that we cannot rely on the few shelters, the minimal government assistance, and family members of those in need if we want to reduce homelessness. We all have to recognize the costs of homelessness, the way that social and market forces can drive people to homelessness, and the actors who are not helping to solve the problem. In particular, Liebow argues that businesses are not doing enough to solve homelessness:
“As if by magic, the onus of welfare and dependency is lifted from the system of work and the employers and placed on the workers and the unemployed right in front of our very eyes, and no one is any the wiser.”
I don’t think markets need to operate in a way that sacrifices the poorest people. There are statistics about the numbers of employees at companies like Walmart who receive food stamps or Medicaid benefits. Companies are able to pay minimum wage to their employees, and Liebow argues the companies themselves are subsidized for their low wages by our system that provides free healthcare and food to those individuals who cannot earn enough through their job. This shifts the burden of supporting the workforce from the companies that require the workforce in order to be profitable to the workers themselves. This accepts that we will have human sacrifices in order for profits to stay high and for the price of cheap goods to remain low. Liebow thought this was a problem and believed that it was possible for effective markets to exist without such human sacrifices.
I would also argue that there are many jobs that are not being done because we focus so highly on private markets. Companies want to be as efficient as possible, meaning they focus on where they can generate the highest profit. As a result, we don’t build enough affordable housing, our parks and greenspaces are littered with trash that no one is incentivized to clean, and lots of recycling goes to landfills instead of being sorted and reused. These are not all wonderful jobs and it would be hard to get homeless people to do these types of jobs, but the point is that our system which sacrifices the poor also sacrifices those jobs that don’t make the marginal cost benefit analysis worthwhile for corporations. There is work that can be done if we can find a way to allow public institutions to do it. Shifting from a sense of sacrificing the poor may encourage them to actually participate in society by doing these jobs, especially if we can make them suck a little less. Such a system would be a big departure from our current approach to markets, but it is probably necessary if we want greater social cohesion and less poverty and homelessness.
Is Homelessness an Individual Phenomenon?

Is Homelessness an Individual Phenomenon?

Posted on by jabittan
The other weekend I went for a run along the American River in Sacramento. California’s high cost of living and high housing prices are not as bad in Sacramento as they are in San Francisco, but nevertheless, housing in Sacramento is expensive, and many people have been displaced and become homeless. There are many homeless encampments along the American River pathway, with unsightly debris littering the river banks. I will admit, it is easy to be critical of homeless people when you are out trying to exercise and don’t want to run past garbage and homeless individuals that are a little scary. I was tempted, while I was out trying to exercise and do something good for my health and well-being, to criticize those who were homeless and making my run less enjoyable.
But I don’t think homelessness is entirely the fault and failing of individuals. What I remembered while running is that homelessness doesn’t reflect just individual failure, but societal failures as well. At some point we failed these people. We failed to help them have safe and healthy homes to grow up within. We failed to provide them with support, counseling, and treatment of addiction or mental health disorders before they became homeless. We failed to help them find some sort of purpose or meaning within their lives to give them a reason to make the difficult choices necessary to succeed in America.
In his book Tell Them Who I Am Elliot Liebow makes the following proposition: “Homelessness is no longer a matter – if it ever was – of a few unfortunate winos or crazy people falling through the cracks of our vaunted safety net. Indeed, homelessness is not an individual matter at all. Homelessness today is a social class phenomenon, the direct result of a steady, across-the-board lowering of the standard of living of the American working class and lower class.”
We become so focused on ourselves as individuals and prize individualism so highly in the United States that we have failed to see how larger structural forces and systems shape our lives and the lives of others. If someone is poor and cannot afford housing, then we simply think they need to move to a part of the country with lower housing costs. Or we think they need to find a different job, develop new skills, and make something better of their lives. We don’t see how high housing costs, minimum wage jobs with no guaranteed health benefits, and societal disrespect have made people feel helpless and isolated. We don’t recognize that employers are taking advantage of low-wage employees, instead we criticize the low-wage employee for being in such a situation to begin with.
I think that Liebow is right, as much as I am tempted to be critical and judgmental at times. Homelessness is not something that just happens to a couple of bad apples, lazy individuals, or derelict drug addicts. If that were the case, the banks of the American River in Sacramento would not be so predictably crowded with homeless encampments. Homeless has become a larger phenomenon that we cannot address simply by telling the homeless to get clean and get to work. It is a societal failure, and if we want to criticize the homeless for failing in their personal responsibility, we have to acknowledge our own personal responsibility in creating a society and system that doesn’t fail those at the bottom.
In-Group Cohesion & Out-Group Hostility

In-Group Cohesion & Out-Group Hostility

Posted on by jabittan
Everyone knows that a common enemy can bring together two groups that are not natural allies. World War II, when the United States and Soviets coordinated in against the Nazis is probably the best and most famous example. Humans are wired for in-group cohesion and out-group nastiness, and the common dislike of an external enemy and US/Soviet example shows how powerful these in-group and out-group responses can be. The phenomenon plays out in massive geopolitical theaters, but also in our every day lives. We quickly identify our in-groups and real or perceived threats by out-groups can drive us into closer bonds and even extend our in-groups.
Elliot Liebow shows how this happened among homeless women in his book Tell Them Who I Am. He writes, “real and perceived abuse by the non-homeless world strongly reinforced group cohesion. Much of the talk in shelters centered on fighting off the negative stereotypes of homeless women and the mindless insensitivity of the citizens at large.” The homeless women Liebow met and studied did not always get along. They didn’t always trust each other, didn’t hold the same beliefs, and came from different backgrounds and ways of life. But their shared homelessness often drew them together despite these differences, because a powerful out-group threatened them.
Liebow wrote about the stares, jeers, and insensitive comments that homeless women had to deal with on a daily basis. The women he met were constantly scared and made to feel weak and insignificant. On the streets the women were alone and hopeless, but when they came together in shelters, they found a community brought about by out-group antagonism reinforcing in-group solidarity that was hard to build among a transient population. The experience and group dynamics of homeless individuals reflects a very interesting and often troublesome reality of human nature. We evolved from small tribal groups, and the instinctual in-group versus out-group analysis that we do whenever we are in social settings is still with us, despite often causing more trouble than we want. Whether we are homeless, part of a metal band, or have a PhD, we cannot escape our in-group and out-group biases. These biases can determine the way we act toward others, and can bring us closer together when threatened. People with homes expressed this out-group nastiness toward the homeless which pushed the homeless together against a common out-group enemy. Their union and community was tenuous and wasn’t natural for many of the women, but the negativity they all experienced created a shared in-group sense for the homeless women and allowed them to bond and share niceties toward each other.
The Chicken and Egg Problem of Mental Health Issues and Homelessness

The Chicken and Egg Problem of Mental Health Issues and Homelessness

Posted on by jabittan
I recently wrote about the challenges of mental health and homelessness, and how sometimes homelessness itself causes mental health disorders in individuals. In general, we assume that people become homeless because they have mental health disorders, not that homelessness causes people to have mental health disorders. Elliot Liebow looks at the issue with a much more careful eye in his book Tell Them Who I Am. Liebow writes,
“Mental health problems and homelessness stood in a chicken-and-egg relationship to one another. Homelessness was seen as a cause of mental health problems just as often as mental health problems were seen as a cause of homelessness. Indeed, it was not uncommon for the women to use their homelessness to explain their sometimes ungenerous behavior.”
Being homeless is stressful. Homeless individuals cannot maintain many basic possessions. They face uncertainty with meals, where they will sleep, how they will go to the bathroom, and whether they will be in danger from weather, animals, or other people. They don’t have a lot of people, besides other homeless individuals, to speak to and get support from. Liebow writes about the ways this stress can boil over for the homeless, and how sometimes the women he profiled for his book would lash out or act irrationally and blame it on the stress of homelessness. With no safe places, shelters that impose rules and ask prying questions, and with little to keep one’s mind engaged and hopeful for a better future, it is not hard to imagine how the stress of homelessness could become overwhelming and spark mental health problems.
At the end of the day, however, this chicken-and-egg relationship should be encouraging. Not all the people who end up homeless have mental health problems – at least not when they initially experience homelessness. This means that early interventions and support can help keep people from developing worse mental health problems that prevent them from rejoining society. It also means that providing stable housing and shelter can help reduce some of the mental health problems that the homeless face, easing their potential reintegration into society. We can also look at the relationship between mental health and homelessness to see that providing more mental healthcare to people currently working and maintaining jobs may support them and keep them from becoming homeless. Preventative mental health care can prevent stress and anxiety worsening to drive someone into homeless where their mental health could further deteriorate. The key idea is that we shouldn’t dismiss the homeless as helpless crazy people. We should see investments in mental healthcare at all levels of society as a beneficial preventative measure to reduce and address homelessness.
Working Versus Dependent

Working Versus Dependent

Posted on by jabittan
One of my favorite ideas from the world of political science is the Social Construction Framework. In the framework, social constructions, that is ideas and concepts that people hold about groups of people, end up determining what types of policies can be adopted. The ways we think about people shapes the ways we treat people. We think of veterans as having made a great sacrifice for the nation, and as a result, we adopt policies that benefit veterans. We see people who commit crimes as having wronged society and consequently we develop policies that punish criminals.
Elliot Liebow reflected ideas from Social Construction Framework in his book Tell Them Who I Am when writing about the ways that homeless women saw and understood themselves. He wrote, “the women recognized only two classes: a working class and a dependent class, with each group claiming to be the deserving poor.” In this example there are two groups that share commonalities, but are differentiated by their work status. The social constructions around each group, the ways we (and they) think about the groups, was in flux, with each group trying to adopt a more favorable view than the other group. Adopting a more favorable construction would hopefully lead to more favorable policies in the long run.
First, the working poor wanted to be seen as the deserving poor because they were making an effort to participate in society, to contribute to the system, and to show that they were hard working and not lazy. They deserved aid because they recognized an unspoken expectation in the United States, we won’t help you unless you make an effort to work. Deservingness, according to this group, was determined based on how hard someone tried to make it on their own.
The second group was those who were not working, but still saw themselves as deserving. The group which was not working included women who had disabilities and could not work, women who faced discrimination and couldn’t work even if they wanted to, and women who had fallen on hard times and didn’t know where to go to get back on track. They were truly deserving because they had no other alternatives, no resources beyond what welfare and shelters could provide, and no hope of getting out of their current situation. They saw themselves as more deserving because they had no way to make money. Those who were working, on the other hand, should be able to get by without continuing to take handouts. In the view of the second group they were truly destitute and in need of aid whereas those who were working didn’t need the aid and assistance as much.
What Liebow’s quote demonstrates is the constantly changing nature of social constructions within the Social Construction Framework. How a group is seen, the framing used to describe the group, and the outcomes of those perceptions and perspectives is always in flux. Groups compete for favorable positions, all in an attempt to improve political and social outcomes. Subjective opinions and feelings often matter more than cold hard facts within a world dominated by the Social Construction Framework. The distinctions can be razor thin between one deserving group and another deviant group, meaning that even slight shifts in perspective can be the difference between how someone from one group is treated.
Only the Strong Survive - A flawed way to view the world? - Joe Abittan - Elliot Liebow - Tell Them Who I Am

Only the Strong Survive

Posted on by jabittan
In his book Tell Them Who I Am Elliot Liebow included a short conversation about war he had with a homeless woman. The short conversation ended with the following quote from his conversation partner, “Some people believe that only the strong will survive. Can you imagine going through life believing something like that?” This line is almost a throwaway line in the book, and honestly within context the line seems relatively unnecessary and distracts from the larger point Liebow made with the larger conversation. However, I think the question is an excellent one to think about.
Our world has just wrapped up the 2020 Olympic Games, delayed one year by the COVID-19 pandemic. I watched a decent amount of track and field and caught a few commercials that reflect the general idea that most people have about the Olympics and the Athletes competing in the games. That typical notion is not far off from the idea that only the strongest survive, a message that is a little grating at a time where the pandemic is making another surge, right when we all hoped it would begin to fade away. Nevertheless, numerous commercials encouraged us to strive toward greatness, to be our best, to be strong, to persevere, and to overcome – by purchasing a new Toyota, using an American Express card, or doing/buying whatever the commercial was advertising. With this year’s Olympics, the idea was perhaps a little muted but still present – only the strong survive.
To live with this mindset is effectively to see the world as zero-sum. It is to see the world as split between the strong and the weak, the fit and the unfit, the survivors and everyone else. It is also to be constantly weary of not being enough and fearful of no longer being strong and able to survive. This mindset works within athletics and the Olympics, where people are pushing for gold medals and world records, but it doesn’t fit with life in modern, complex, and cooperative societies. As the woman that Liebow quotes seems to suggest, this mindset can be counterproductive and unhealthy in the real world.
A zero sum mindset means that you have to get all that you can, because if anyone else takes more than you, you are directly harmed. The strength of others is constantly a threat to you – potentially a mortal threat – since you can only guarantee your survival by being the strongest. This mindset also seems to dismiss the poor, the weak, and the disabled. It excuses a lack of concern for them, because our concern must be on making ourselves as fit as can be, and those who are weak are hopeless and helpless. Only one can win gold. The medal can’t be split among all, and trying to help those who you compete against means that you sacrifice your own strength and won’t end up winning in the end. An athlete who stops to check on a fallen competitor doesn’t get the gold, doesn’t get the world record, and doesn’t get the glory.
If instead we chose to believe in human rights, community, and the idea that a rising tide lifts all boats, then we have to abandon the idea that only the strong survive. We have to come together as a society and help each other all survive and pursue happiness in our own ways that allow us to work together. We have to create systems and structures that are positive sum, so that we increase the size of the pie, rather than compete for smaller and smaller slices as the strong take the most for themselves. To live in modern society we have to find ways to engage the disabled, to empower those who have been left behind, and to cooperate and coordinate together to make life better for all of us. In the end it is a less stressful and less threatening way to live, even if it means we will miss our individual glory of standing atop the podium, the strongest survivor of them all.
Reactive Racism

Reactive Racism

Posted on by jabittan
An unfortunate reality in the United States is that there is a great deal of racial segregation across our states, cities, and communities. There are not a lot of spaces that manage to mix the different races, different socioeconomic status individuals, and different cultures that exist within our country. Many white people have almost exclusively white friends and social groups. Many wealthy people only engage with and interact with other similarly wealthy people. We don’t have a lot of voluntary institutions where different races come together willingly or where people of different socioeconomic status mix. I admit that this is the reality of my own life, as much as I wish it were not the case.
One consequence of this segregation is a misunderstanding of the power dynamics and direction of racism in our country. When we do not interact with people who are not like us in any deep or meaningful way, we can fail to understand the power dynamics of racism. We can fail to understand the structural and systemic factors of modern racism. In the end, this means that we misunderstand power dynamics, animosity, and the hatred that can flow between people of different races or social classes. I see this in my own life when people I know argue that black racism against whites is just as bad as any white racism against blacks. Black people who hold racist views against white people are sometimes used to excuse racist white people and in some cases they are used to turn the table and suggest that white people now face more discrimination than black people and other minorities.
What this argument seems to miss, however, is the role of power dynamics and the nature of reactionary racism. In 1993 when spending time trying to understand and write about homeless women for his book Tell Them Who I Am Elliot Liebow noted this phenomenon. In the book he writes, “It is tempting to see white racism and black racism as mirror images of one another, made of the same kind of stuff. But white hatred of blacks appeared to be a purer, self-sustaining emotion that fed on itself. Black hatred of whites appeared to be more reactive, more dependent, feeding not on itself but on white hatred.”
Liebow’s argument is ultimately I think about power. White racism against black people seemed to stem from systemic and structural factors that enabled, and possibly even promoted, the disenfranchisement of black people for the gain of white people. The racism and hatred for white people that blacks held, on the other hand, seemed to be more reactionary. That is not to say that both forms of racism are terrible and can drive people toward atrocities, but it is important to note that Liebow could detect a leading force and a reactionary force. It is important to recognize the idea of reactive racism and the inherent power structures and dynamics it represents so that we don’t fall into the false equivalence argument that racism toward white people is just as bad in this country as white racism toward others.