More on the Jon Stewart/Andrew Sullivan Contretemps

Columnist Andrew Sullivan was invited recently to appear on Jon Stewart's show to discuss race, and, according to Sullivan, the show was something of a train wreck. He felt that he was ambushed, but more than that Stewart delivered a monologue which, in Sullivan's opinion, grossly distorted the facts about race in this country.

Sullivan replied to Stewart's diatribe in his Substack column and I discussed some of his response in an earlier post on VP.

Here's more on his reaction to Stewart in which he lays out some facts that need to be articulated far more often than they are.

The entire dynamic of the [Stewart] show mirrored, it seems to me, the dynamic of the imposition of critical race theory across our society. You can see the technique everywhere. You start with the obscenity of slavery; you talk constantly of history; you lay out Reconstruction, lynching, Jim Crow, segregation and the other brutalities of the past.

So far, so good. That’s vital work — and we should pay tribute and close attention to it.

But the point of CRT is not to educate people about how appallingly African-Americans were once treated in this country, to construct an account of the progress since then, to note the Americans of all races who helped make a difference, and then to propose specific policies that might help move us further forward, into a more perfect union.

No, the whole point is to insist that this history is still the reality, that the structure of American society is no different in kind than in 1619, and that its democracy was designed from the beginning to brutalize non-whites forever. This is what we’re debating. No one is trying to minimize the pain of black suffering over the centuries, or debate whether systemic racism existed in America. Of course it did.

What we’re debating is how much those previous systems — repealed in their entirety nearly 60 years ago — explains resilient inequality today.

This is a good point. Often when people cite examples of racial injustice they reach back thirty or forty years to fetch examples. The question is, though, what's the situation in America today?

So when I asked Stewart to delineate “structural racism,” he reflexively listed a bunch of “systems” that no longer exist: post-war redlining, the GI bill, and so on....[In] America in 2022, the only formal legal systems that openly advocate race discrimination are discriminating in favor of African-Americans, not against them.

Affirmative action was only supposed to be a temporary diversion from liberal principles. It’s now a permanent system of race discrimination to favor blacks over every other demographic, disproportionately harming Asian-Americans. The federal government now enforces it across every department.

And even with past systems, the debate about their impact is still a live one. Take racial redlining. This profoundly hurt African-Americans moving out of the South. But class mattered a lot too.

Does Stewart know that 85 percent of households in redlined areas were occupied by whites? Or that the infamous maps with red areas probably had nothing to do with the problem? Or that, even if you go by those maps, the picture today is much more complicated than Stewart would ever acknowledge:

[About 11 million Americans] live in once-redlined areas, according to the latest population data from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey (2017). This population is majority-minority but not majority-Black, and, contrary to conventional perceptions, Black residents also do not form a plurality in these areas overall.

The Black population share is approximately 28%, ranking third among the racial groups who live in formerly redlined areas, behind white and Latino or Hispanic residents.

Or take the strength of white supremacy in the early 20th century, later overcome by the Civil Rights Movement. You’d expect to see terrible data for black family life in the dark days of white supremacist America under Jim Crow, with only a resurgence of wealth and stability after civil rights took hold. In reality, we see the opposite: real progress for African-Americans before the 1960s:

[B]etween 1940 and 1960, the percentage of black families with income below the poverty level was almost cut in half, from 87 percent to 47 percent. In key skilled trades, the income of blacks relative to whites more than doubled between 1936 and 1959, while black income rose absolutely and relative to white income across the board from 1939 to 1960.

Or take the impact of family structure. A very solid finding in social science is that the key ingredient for success in America is being raised by two parents in the home, and getting married.

It logically follows that when 84 percent of Asian kids grow up in a two-parent household, and only 33 percent of black kids do, you don’t need some abstract notion of “white supremacy” to explain why Asian-Americans, even the poorest, have sailed past African-Americans in educational success.

Is the poor family structure itself caused by the impact of white supremacy? The data show that the black family was actually more intact before the Civil Rights Movement than after it. And marriage in general was more valued:

From 1890 through 1940, black women tended to marry earlier than white women did…. In 1950, black women aged 40–44 were actually more likely to have ever married than were white women of the same age. Racial differences in marriage remained modest as recently as 1970, when 94.8 percent of white women and 92.2 percent of black women had ever been married.

And again, the importance of family structure isn’t limited to black Americans, of course:

Being raised in a married-couple household led the poverty rate for black children to go down 73 percent compared to mother-only households and 67 percent compared to father-only households. And as evidence of the power of family structure to transcend race, 31 percent of white children raised in mother-only households live in poverty, versus just 12 percent of black children living with their married parents. That is a stunning realization.

Being married brings you into a higher wealth bracket, with pooled earnings — which also accounts for some of the wealth gap. Age also matters for stats like median earnings. As Glenn Loury puts it, “Citing only the median in debates about the racial wealth gap … suggests that the wealth gap is more pervasive than it appears.”

The median white American, for example, is 44 and married, whereas the median black American is 34 and single. That’s worthwhile context.

He might've also mentioned the enormous advantage married couples have due to the fact that they often have two sets of parents to help them with finances, babysitting, emotional support, etc. A single mother often has only her mother, who's often also single, to help her.

Sullivan doesn't deny that racism exists, but he does argue that it's far less common and less pernicious than it was a generation or two ago:

In 1958, for example, four percent of Americans approved of marriage between blacks and whites; today, it’s 94 percent. If you think that’s evidence of the permanence of “white supremacy,” I don’t know what to tell you.

In 2019, the black unemployment rate and black poverty rate reached all-time lows.

[I don't want] to ignore the historical legacy of public and private discrimination. I’m just saying any explanation for racial disparities today is much more complex than simply intoning “white supremacy,” and implicitly dismissing any notion of other factors, or any black agency at all.

Yes, but complexity is the bane of the ideologue. Better to keep to simplistic slogans like "white supremacy" and "structural racism" than to have to have to account for inconvenient facts.