For the record, I am white and liberal.
John J. Dilulio Jr., having served as an adviser to
George W. Bush, is probably not a liberal, but he has had an influence on them
by his popularization of the term "superpredator". He was famous for
stirring up the panic that this new breed of youth was remorseless, and a blood
bath would wash over the land.
This did not turn out to be true, in a similar
manner to how fears about crack babies were overblown, and how youth weren't
really playing "the knock-out game", and how not only was
"wilding" questionable in terms of how it was understood, but that
the Central Park Five were not the rapists.
To be fair, we are learning new things about
psychology and the brain all the time, so it may have seemed like a reasonable
conclusion for Dilulio, except for how many people heard "superpredator"
and "gang members" and pictured "Black".
Now, as an adviser to LBJ, Pat Moynihan probably was
liberal. His report The Negro Family: The Case For National Action was
sympathetic to African Americans and saw many factors in the legacy of slavery
and of continued discrimination that led to the poverty and problems.
Unfortunately, it still pathologized Black people.
The Moynihan Report came from 1965, but over twenty
years later when I was a high school student it was still influencing how
people thought and how teachers taught. They didn't refer to the report, but
looking back I can see that's where it came from.
This is a gross simplification, but where we were at
was that Black people had problems. If you were conservative you blamed them,
and if you were liberal you blamed society for what it had done to them, but
you were still thinking of them as separate and as a mass. Viewing them as
victims may have made liberals more sympathetic, but it didn't mean you
wouldn't get nervous when you saw dark skin approaching.
When you start viewing some of this, guilt is a
natural reaction, but it may not be that useful. The structure that is in place
does a good job of separating races, and whom you get to know, and whom you
see, and this is perpetuated by entertainment and publishing and how news is reported,
all of which is disgusting.
I suppose this is why I have focused my reading more
on learning about what different people were doing at different times. There is
oppression, but there is resistance too.
And they are not a monolith. Some Black people may
be very passive, and some are criminals, though if you look at some of the
factors there are problems, but mainly they are individuals. We don't look at
aggressive panhandlers and think that all white teens are that way. We don't
look at a rise in the rate of unwed white mothers and blame slavery. (Actually,
we slut shame instead.)
What I am clumsily saying is that sympathetic
objectification is not strongly superior to hostile objectification.
It's unfortunate with the social sciences that they
seem to have a harder time responding to progress. Often in physics or biology it
can be pretty easy to test, see the error, and keep looking until a new
hypothesis works out. It doesn't mean that new one won't be replaced later, but
people see change all the time and accept it.
But here, very nice, well-meaning, people who are
trying to be progressive get stuck because someone said something that sounded
reasonable once, but was also wrong. To actually make progress we are going to
have to move beyond that.
I try to be educated about that, but it still wasn't
until about a year ago that I start realizing how many involved Black fathers I
knew.
(And the world just lost one of the really good ones
last week. We'll miss you Uncle Carl.)
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