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Critical Race Theory policy in hiring at UT

PHLaggie

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BrickHorn
BrickHorn

As an avowed liberal, I would like to thank far right idiots for bringing critical race theory to my attention. If it weren’t for you fucking morons and your obsession with talking about it every sing

SimonBolivar
SimonBolivar

It's always a YouTube video.

Brisketexan
Brisketexan

I confess that I am utterly unsurprised by the response of OP -- it was exactly as big a pile of garbage as I thought it would be. The damned shame of it is, there actually COULD be some really i

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jimmyjazz

jimmyjazz 47,199

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1 minute ago, washparkhorn said:

No. I was amplifying your post - which I thought was well stated. My apologies.

Sorry, my bad.  Stepdaughter pissed me off in a royal manner about an hour ago and I'm still cooling down.  No pics, assholes.

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jimmyjazz

jimmyjazz 47,199

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2 minutes ago, workswithseed said:

he's also saying there's charity in capitalist societies, but you didn't say anything about that.

While I do agree that this generally happens, I'm not sure it would happen in a purely capitalistic society.  I guess it would just because of the spread in human nature.

What I was trying to say was that even in a hyper-competitive marketplace, markets still aren't efficient enough to keep some workers from being exploited.  Greed wins out, and far too often.

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Pancho

Pancho 46,309

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2 hours ago, Biff Tannen said:

So someone near to me said that CRT was Marxist.  I heard this through a third party, so I wasn't there.  And this person is generally smart.  I was just pretty dumbfounded as to what he even meant.  Can someone try and explain what that means?

Did you ask them what Marxist meant because I’m guessing she/he doesn’t know. 

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Poolflood

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3 hours ago, jimmyjazz said:

To me, there's a gaping disconnect between the assertion that modern white America bears no responsibility for the sins of their fathers and the abject fear of anyone shining a bright light on America's history when it comes to race relations.  I mean, if one is not responsible, why would one care what truths are revealed?

Can you explain to me MY culpability as a modern white American? Or the sins of MY father?

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TwiceHorn

TwiceHorn 32,079

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2 hours ago, washparkhorn said:

No. I was amplifying your post - which I thought was well stated. My apologies.

All I have to combat greed is an appeal to virtue, which fewer care about these days. 

I think there's a fine line between self-interest and greed.  We're supposed to have laws to maintain at least some separation.

I am not completely sure that the jury is in, but it seems like self-interest (capitalism) is a "better' or more reliable human trait upon which to base a society, government, and economy than altruism.  When self-interest intrudes on the altruistic society, shit falls apart.  The converse is not true.

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Biff Tannen

Biff Tannen 46,166

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1 hour ago, Poolflood said:

Can you explain to me MY culpability as a modern white American? Or the sins of MY father?

 

1 hour ago, jimmyjazz said:

I'm pretty sure my point went flying right over your head.

 

58 minutes ago, Poolflood said:

Back at you.  Just responded to your very specific post.

Dude. He’s literally saying you don’t have culpability. Your job is to fix the results of the sin, not take the punishment (or guilt) for it. 

Edited by Biff Tannen
This really is the crux of the issue I think. We have to find a way to explain it in a non-accusatory way. The human psyche requires it, if we want to actually progress.
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jimmyjazz

jimmyjazz 47,199

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7 minutes ago, Biff Tannen said:

Dude. He’s literally saying you don’t have culpability. Your job is to fix the results of the sin, not take the punishment (or guilt) for it. 

While I agree with what you said here, I was really just pointing out the irony in much of white America's revulsion to having kids taught about the sins of the past when they unequivocally state that those sins are not their own.

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Biff Tannen

Biff Tannen 46,166

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8 minutes ago, jimmyjazz said:

While I agree with what you said here, I was really just pointing out the irony in much of white America's revulsion to having kids taught about the sins of the past when they unequivocally state that those sins are not their own.

Well I guess your point went over my head too. I had this exact discussion with the wife tonight.  It’s really a bizarre, yet kind of understandable, reaction. I think it’s the inability to separate a cultural or racial identity from historical reality. Maybe an ego vs id thing?  I don’t remember much freshman psych. 

Edited by Biff Tannen
Could also be im just drunk
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Satchel

Satchel 6,982

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From Dr. Snyder’s essay:

Last November, five days after the latest Russian memory law emerged from a presidential committee, the American president, Donald Trump, created the President’s Advisory 1776 Commission. Its “1776 Report,” published just as Trump’s term came to an end in January, defined its task as the “restoration of American education.” The report responded to the 1619 Project, an attempt to bring the history of slavery closer to the center of national narratives, which this magazine published in 2019. The commission’s report reproduced the structure of Russian memory policy, acknowledging a historical evil and then relativizing it in a shocking manner. Slavery was discussed, but only as one among numerous “challenges to America’s principles,” a list that also included “progressivism” and “identity politics.” Slavery’s practice in America was defined as a “denial of core American principles” and “the attempted substitution of a theory of group rights in their place” — which, the authors contend, “are the direct ancestors of some of the destructive theories that today divide our people and tear at the fabric of our country.”

The allusion to “group rights” seems to be a reference to Critical Race Theory: a set of decades-old arguments about how racism works in law and society that has recently become a fixation of Republican politicians. Associated with the U.C.L.A. and Columbia Law School professor Kimberlé Crenshaw and other African American scholars, Critical Race Theory asks why discrimination did not end with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and recommends critical scrutiny of laws focusing on their consequences rather than upon the avowed intentions of their authors. The 1776 Report fixates upon the related scourge of “identity politics” — a “creed” by which “supposed oppressors” must “atone and even be punished in perpetuity for their sins and those of their ancestors.” These ideas received more attention in the 1776 Report than slavery did.

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Poolflood

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18 hours ago, Biff Tannen said:

 

 

Dude. He’s literally saying you don’t have culpability. Your job is to fix the results of the sin, not take the punishment (or guilt) for it. 

What's my sin or the sin of my father or his father?  (Besides at this point misogyny)

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washparkhorn

washparkhorn 9,973

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58 minutes ago, Sawbonz said:

Will there be humans there?

Depends on how one defines human, I suppose if it ever becomes a reality.

Human enhancement will continue. The philosophers understand how to approach the issue of human enhancement from lipstick to species-altering enhancement.

But to answer your question, of course there will be humans. No reason to go otherwise. That's nothingness. The abyss. The void. No one can hear you scream in space. 

Anyway, here are the philosophers on the ethics of human enhancement. From Stanford's Encyclopedia of Philosophy: 

Spoiler

 

Nothing in the current debates over the ethics of human enhancement convincingly supports the conclusion that the impulse that drives interest in biomedical enhancement is inauthentically human or morally evil. To the extent that all technology is construed as an effort to extend and improve our inherited human capacities, the impulse to enhance ourselves is a hallmark of our species, as legitimate to celebrate as to disparage.

On the other hand, just as specific technologies are never “value neutral” in their design or use, specific applications of biomedical human enhancement can be dangerous, unfair, or vicious.

Thus, it is reasonable to endorse the generic claim that biomedical enhancement is morally acceptable as a human practice, and still argue that specific biomedical enhancements would be unethical to pursue.

As with other potent technologies, at some level the potential harms of unethical enhancements will also justify social efforts to formally control their development and use through regulation, law and public policy. Even though this topic moves quickly beyond the biomedical domain to fundamental tensions in political and social philosophy, it does preoccupy enough of the practical ethics literature on biomedical enhancement to warrant a brief concluding discussion here.

  1. Some argue that firm lines should be drawn in public policy and professional practice, against particular degrees of enhancement, like “species-altering interventions” (Annas, Andrews and Isasi, 2002) or “radical enhancements” (Agar 2013). The assumption here is that the moral problems raised by enhancement intensify as the enhanced move away from the human norm, and that a threshold can be identified beyond which prohibition would be merited.
    1. Since drawing the line at all enhancement uses of medical technologies would founder against too many contentious borderline and benign cases, this threshold is usually set at the boundary of our species identity, between the human and the post-human.
    2. As we have seen, this leaves many problematic enhancements in particular settings—like “gene doping” in sports—unaddressed, and it is still not clear what moral salience sheer taxonomy can have, apart from other ethical considerations—especially when one recalls the pernicious policies other human taxonomies have supported in the past.
    3. In practice, such an approach would face all the classic line-drawing problems, and the classic challenges of policing and enforcing prohibitions in a pluralistic and globalized society.
    4. Most importantly, however, if it is only those alterations that literally produce new biological species that are of concern the vast bulk of potentially problematic enhancement modifications would not fall within the jurisdiction of this approach.
  2. At the other extreme are those who support a libertarian position, eschewing any blanket public regulation of enhancement in favor of free markets involving those who would develop enhancement interventions and individuals who would use them (Engelhardt 1990; Flanigan 2017).
    1. But this extreme position suffers the familiar drawbacks of unregulated market economies: a toleration of severely harmful transactions (e.g., purchasing tickets to a match of gladiatorial combat), the exacerbation of economic inequalities, and a permissive stance to transactions with long-term adverse consequences, which lead to “tragedies of the commons” and environmental devastation.
    2. As a result, even the more permissive authors qualify their “utopian eugenics” proposals with the sorts of regulatory protections that surround other consumer products in free-market societies, in terms of safety, fraud, fair pricing and environmental protection (Bostrom 2003), and argue that the political justifications for those policies should support equivalent social controls for enhancement interventions (Kitcher 1997; Harris 2007).
    3. Even with minimal legal regulations in place to ensure that markets for biomedical enhancement technologies will be “free”, the libertarian emphasis on the legal permissibility of these transactions is a blunt instrument for dealing with the subtle ethical complexities involved in deciding whether to use a particular enhancement technology.
  3. Between the extreme positions of prohibition or an open market is a moderate position, which grounds enhancement policy in three of the observations we have made in our conceptual and ethical analyses above:
    1. First, policy will need to focus on governing the uses of technology rather than preventing its development in the first place.
      1. This is because of the conceptual flexibility of the boundary between enhancement and treatment.
      2. Almost all potential enhancement interventions will be developed first as interventions to treat or prevent human health problems, pursuing goals that will easily offset their potential unethical applications.
      3. Beyond that, even to assess the potential harms of enhancement applications of approved medical interventions will require research, even if it also helps pave the way for their use.
      4. This means that interventions capable of being used for enhancements will be inevitably invented and perfected as by-products of biomedical scientific progress, and their social control will have to focus on governing their dangerous, unjust or vicious uses (Mehlman 1999).
    2. Second, there are at least two possible responses to harmful interventions, and policy-makers should keep both in mind. If one won’t work, the other approach may.
      1. On the one hand, one can try to police and punish unauthorized uses of technology, or alternatively one can focus on protecting the interests of those disadvantaged by those uses.
        1. Thus, in sports, authorities screen for and punish “doping” athletes, because they cannot fix the essential genetic injustice of the spirit of sport.
        2. In the workplace and in higher education, on the other hand, there may be more concern to reduce the competitive stresses that would tempt people to rely on stimulants rather than their native talents.
        3. In families and schools, moreover, allowances are often made for those less capable in some domains, like sports or music, in order to compensate for their disadvantages there by enabling them to flourish in others. Affirmative Action campaigns, the Americans with Disabilities Act, and other civil rights policies also attempt to “level the playing field” in ways that compensate for disadvantaging biological differences rather than attempting to regulate the differences themselves. If we are not interested in policing the enhancement uses of biomedical technology, we may want to explore whether strategies like these might work to undercut the incentives to enhance in unethical ways.
      2. One trap that some authors have fallen into in pursuing this compensatory course is to try to use the enhancement shovel to dig out of the enhancement hole. Worried that an unregulated surge in biomedical enhancement might open the door to injustice and social harm, some are now arguing that the prerequisite for widespread access to enhancement should be the widespread enhancement of our moral faculties. Improved moral discernment and reasoning, keener senses of empathy and fairness, and deeper sense of solidarity, it is argued, will help mitigate the potential social harms by insuring that the users of enhancement are equipped to do so responsibly (Tennison, 2012; Persson and Savulescu 2012).
        1. The irony of this argument, of course, is that accomplishing these prerequisite moral upgrades would require a social gate-keeping system as intrusive and draconian as any attempts to police the use of particular enhancements themselves (Sparrow 2014b; Harris 2016; Azevedo 2016).
        2. It would also open to debate the criteria by which such moral upgrades would be made (Joyce 2013; Craigie 2014; Wiseman 2016; Hauskeller and Coyne 2018; Johnson, Bishop and Toner 2019; Paulo and Bublitz 2019).
        3. Would we still allow the enhanced to follow normal views of when the obligatory becomes supererogatory, or expect more of them? Presumably, we need not aspire to require superhuman virtues, such as angels might possess. But should they at least be saints? Against whose account of sainthood?
        4. Once again, the panorama of alternative philosophical traditions opens up for exploration down this road, offering no quick resolution for policy.
      3. However, it is worth remembering at this point that particular biomedical enhancements will never yield comprehensive improvements in moral character, if only because moral character is not reducible to its biological substrates in people’s brains and genes. Instead, enhancement will at best be able to change specific biological functions in ways that improve the chances that a person will act in a particular manner, like telling the truth, at the expense of reducing the chances of some other reaction, like lying, which, in particular circumstances, may actually be the more virtuous thing to do. This piecemeal, double-edged feature of biomedical enhancement means that every morally enhancing intervention runs the risk of being a morally disabling intervention at the same time.
    3. This point suggests a third observation from our review: despite the claims of its defenders, biomedical enhancement is not a practice that is not always especially well-suited to a melioristic ethic aimed at improving human welfare. Often a step forward for some purposes is also a step back in other contexts.
      1. Many enhanced people are correspondingly disabled, and so by extension are their teams, families, communities, etc.
      2. Consider, for example, an enhancement that makes our reflexes faster. Such an enhancement might increase the risk of making mistakes in ways that would be considered an acceptable trade-off for military pilots on solo combat missions, but not for commercial pilots ferrying hundreds of passengers.
      3. If our policies were to focus on reminding us that most enhancements come with trade-offs, we might be able to orient our public policy away from either regulatory or compensatory approaches keyed to “enhancement” in the abstract, and towards the specific social and institutional contexts in which particular enhancement interventions might be considered too risky or unfair.
      4. Should, for example, the Air Force consider the post-service consequences of a hyper-reflex enhancement for pilots in deciding whether to adopt such an intervention? Should enhanced veterans be able to claim accommodation from employers for their service-induced hyper-responsiveness?
      5. Focusing on trade-offs does not imply that no change is the best policy; there is nothing sacred about the biology we inherit. Some enhancements may well be worth attendant deficits in particular situations for particular individuals. But just as our inherited biology provides no definitive criteria for “human nature” that can be used to curtail enhancement, enhancement cannot take our future biology down any path that offers unequivocal improvement in the human condition.
      6. But would a pluralistic and piecemeal approach to governing the enhancement uses of medical technologies serve the broader needs of distributive justice with respect to enhancement interventions that are deemed acceptable in particular settings? As the enhanced use their improved capacities to gain power, wealth and status, justice might require that access to those enhancements be afforded more broadly, at least for those willing to bear the corresponding deficits (Sparrow 2016). Some authors have argued that a fair system of allocating enhancement opportunities will require a centralized, global agency akin to the World Trade Organization or the International Monetary Fund, capable of adjudicating all the interests involved (Buchanan 2011). But the assumption behind such proposals remains that “enhancements” will always give people fungible advantages over others, like wealth does. It remains to be seen how true this is.
      7. Understanding that enhancements are specific, often double-edged changes—beneficial in some settings for some purposes but not in others—suggests that a better analogy here may be the governance of health care itself. Good health care on the one hand and power, wealth and status on the other are positively correlated, through the expanded opportunity range that meeting specific health needs can provide. That correlation helps support the case for equitable access to health care. But not all health care needs are equally “profitable” in leveraging other social goods, and it is not the goal of a needs-based health care system to address that disparity. Just as a fair system of health care should be able to provide need-based access to specific therapeutic interventions, a fair biomedical enhancement allocation system should be geared to needs of people facing particular life challenges. In fact, in the end, as this tour of the enhancement literature suggests, with sufficient renegotiation of the boundaries of health care, it could be the same system. Again, the task of realizing such a system will continue to be daunting. But it is doubtful that this will require a Brave New World of centralized global moral enhancement schemes: instead, managing our emerging biomedical enhancement abilities begins with the tedious real world tasks of learning to live with human difference and meet human needs.

 

 

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Mrs Whiggins

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This is very tangential with regard to the thread title, but if threads can derail due to DW Horton homes, quality bbq, Sela Ward, and whether doing the nasty with Rep Boebert is worth considering, then indulge this post if you would.

We just returned from a visit out to lovely California to see one of our children. Had a wonderful time. Offspring is thriving, the weather was outstanding, food was fantastic, and it was great to be able to visit some museums--something we had not realized how much we'd missed until the pandemic hit. The highlight was a tour of oldest's lab and the campus is stunning: lots of citrus trees and also olives and it lit a spark of curiousity regarding the history of the area and agriculture.

After following my muse through various sources as well as listening to an NPR interview on the recent kerfluffle regarding black agriculture assistance by the Biden administration, I stumbled across this twitter thread and I don't believe I've seen it posted here, so I thought I'd put the initial tweet here, because the history is (to me) quite fascinating and involves something that perhaps is not often discussed in schools and with the recent trend, perhaps will become buried even further. Click on the tweet and have a read, it's worth the time IMO. It's definitely a tangent, but the story she relates regarding California ag versus the South and some of the possible root causes makes me want to learn if this is really a thing, and more about the long term effect on the US as a whole.

If any of you ag folks out there have thoughts I'd love to hear them. @Royalfan5 or one of the crop folks?

 

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Sawbonz

Sawbonz 28,221

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She doesn’t seem to know much about pecans. My grandfather began grafting pecan cuttings onto saplings 20 years ago. You’re going to get less than 50% take even with excellent technique and aftercare. 10 years is the minimum for pecan trees to start to produce, and they aren’t going to bear a lot for 15-20. You are going to have to irrigate to maximize survival, especially in Texas over the last few decades of extreme drought. The grafting is extremely labor intensive, and the land is unusable for anything else for the years waiting for them to mature, so if the land can be used for anything else profitable with a shorter return it will be. Jim Crow has nothing to do with that

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Incredulity

Incredulity 11,876

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21 minutes ago, Mrs Whiggins said:

This is very tangential with regard to the thread title, but if threads can derail due to DW Horton homes, quality bbq, Sela Ward, and whether doing the nasty with Rep Boebert is worth considering, then indulge this post if you would.

We just returned from a visit out to lovely California to see one of our children. Had a wonderful time. Offspring is thriving, the weather was outstanding, food was fantastic, and it was great to be able to visit some museums--something we had not realized how much we'd missed until the pandemic hit. The highlight was a tour of oldest's lab and the campus is stunning: lots of citrus trees and also olives and it lit a spark of curiousity regarding the history of the area and agriculture.

After following my muse through various sources as well as listening to an NPR interview on the recent kerfluffle regarding black agriculture assistance by the Biden administration, I stumbled across this twitter thread and I don't believe I've seen it posted here, so I thought I'd put the initial tweet here, because the history is (to me) quite fascinating and involves something that perhaps is not often discussed in schools and with the recent trend, perhaps will become buried even further. Click on the tweet and have a read, it's worth the time IMO. It's definitely a tangent, but the story she relates regarding California ag versus the South and some of the possible root causes makes me want to learn if this is really a thing, and more about the long term effect on the US as a whole.

If any of you ag folks out there have thoughts I'd love to hear them. @Royalfan5 or one of the crop folks?

 

As I read the Twitter thread she asserts that CA produces so much of Ag production(specifically almonds) because there is a developed industry infrastructure, specifically skilled farm labor, ready to serve CA Ag.

I would argue that infrastructure has thrived/built up because the San Joaquin Valley is very fertile farm land, the  climate of California is far more forgiving to Ag except for the fact its arid and prone to drought.  Which was reduced with large reservoir/irrigation projects early in the 20th century.

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Mrs Whiggins

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27 minutes ago, Sawbonz said:

She doesn’t seem to know much about pecans. My grandfather began grafting pecan cuttings onto saplings 20 years ago. You’re going to get less than 50% take even with excellent technique and aftercare. 10 years is the minimum for pecan trees to start to produce, and they aren’t going to bear a lot for 15-20. You are going to have to irrigate to maximize survival, especially in Texas over the last few decades of extreme drought. The grafting is extremely labor intensive, and the land is unusable for anything else for the years waiting for them to mature, so if the land can be used for anything else profitable with a shorter return it will be. Jim Crow has nothing to do with that

She sort of addressed the irrigation aspect in another thread; I don't know that she was considering Texas--her info seemed to be further east. I don't know agriculture, so for all I know she may be wrong, but I also recognize that some agriculture 'leaders' are protective of their turf. Here is the middle of a different thread where she is contradicting a crop economist, Lyman Stone. I'll stop there though, because that is less about the history of Southern Ag and institutional/CRT type stuff and more straight ag.

 

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washparkhorn

washparkhorn 9,973

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16 minutes ago, Royalfan5 said:

She’s not wrong about network effects. There’s a reason we raise livestock where we do, packing plants are where they are, certain food crops are grown where they are. 

@Royalfan5 - completely off-topic. Assuming your area utilizes pivots, what are folks in your area doing with  pivot corners? Any increase in city-slickers wanting those corners for homes?

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Royalfan5

Royalfan5 2,384

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6 minutes ago, washparkhorn said:

@Royalfan5 - completely off-topic. Assuming your area utilizes pivots, what are folks in your area doing with  pivot corners? Any increase in city-slickers wanting those corners for homes?

Anything existing acreages are being snapped up pretty quick. Haven’t seen much on new development yet, and around here’s there’s enough old home sites, chunks of grass etc that leaves corners around for right now. It’ll be interesting to see how some of new comers do that have shown up lately without prior connections and going backwards in the level of amenities offered 

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Royalfan5

Royalfan5 2,384

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Just now, Incredulity said:

Irrigated farmland kicks the shit out of non-irrigated farmland.

Much of the souths farmland isn’t irrigated because 

A.) it didn’t have to be

or

B.) Racism 

 

Is that where we are trying to get?

No, it’s that you can’t go custom hire shit done easily because the labor force left in the great migration. Doing everything yourself is expensive and time consuming if you don’t have the network base to do stuff. Sitting here in Nebraska, I can fill a pen at a feedlot with three text messages, never see that cattle and not have to worry if there there, that they’ll get fed, and that you’ll have a market. It’d probably take me 5 text messages if I picked up the lease on farm ground anywhere in the state to get it farmed with me doing any of the labor. If you don’t have that, it’s going to be harder to produce in that area. 

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Mrs Whiggins

Mrs Whiggins 13,050

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13 minutes ago, Incredulity said:

Irrigated farmland kicks the shit out of non-irrigated farmland.

Much of the souths farmland isn’t irrigated because 

A.) it didn’t have to be

or

B.) Racism 

 

Is that where we are trying to get?

What @Royalfan5 is saying.

The long term effects of the historical past have a relationship with the present, but the takeaway perhaps ought to be, how can we (as a country) derive solutions going forward if the climate is not as accommodating as it once was...I found the history interesting, but the ag side also captures my interest. If I understood the tweeter correctly, Georgia irrigates their crop and it pays off for them because at certain times of the year, reliable rainfall affects production/yield. But if one can lessen that reliance during other times of the year, it is likely more cost effective, right?

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TwiceHorn

TwiceHorn 32,079

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I'm not 100% sure "Jim Crow" is exactly the right terminology for that, either.  Plenty of white sharecroppers and tenant farmers lived in poverty in the South.  Of course, any system that inflicted poverty on people affects black people worse.

I suppose it's hard to extricate Jim Crow from "landed gentry" or the plantation economy, but in this case it seems like it might be appropriate.

And, in some cases, on smaller farms, sharecropping was actually beneficial during the depression.  My mother's father owned a small farm that grew all kinds of food crops/produce and raised pigs and chickens: a subsistence farm.  They had a black family that sharecropped and they all ate during the Depression.  When my grandparents moved into town after WWII, they (almost) gave away their house  to the Merritts, whose children went to college.  We (kids and grandkids) visited Charlie and Etta just like other family that lived in the country.

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Mrs Whiggins

Mrs Whiggins 13,050

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On smaller farms I might agree, although prior to the Jim Crow laws being enacted there were a lot more black family farm owners and operators. The loss of land for that group happened at over double the rate for white farmers. What I was reading in addition to the story about the nut crop production was another thread on the South and pellagra and a forty year outbreak in the United States. Pellagra is a disease caused by lack of niacin.

Here is the thread. It came up due to a conversation regarding communion wafers and gluten. Rather than post the entire thread, here is the initial tweet, click and read.

It has corn, it has the industrial age, it has a lot of things to ponder.....

Oh, and to save looking it up--nixtamalized means the corn has been treated (often in limewater), washed, and then hulled. This process removes most of the aflatoxins from mycotoxin contaminated corn. The Mesoamericans developed the process long ago (exact date uncertain). The thread refers to that process, and the calamity of what ensued.

 

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Mrs Whiggins

Mrs Whiggins 13,050

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I'm not sure what to think about Mr. Carson's viewpoint here. I'm not black so my perspective is not going to be from having experienced a situation remotely similar to his. The history I studied in school (not in Texas), talked about white slave traders and plantation owners breaking up families and the laws created post Reconstruction and to the present ended up not only with black families splitting due to employment opportunities (in the North) but also the criminal codes that incarcerated males at a very high rate over and over again.

So when he talks about family I cannot dispute that family units, regardless of composition, tend to create stronger bonds of accountability, love, security, and well-being, but to discount the sanctioned destruction of black lives that preceded what he calls 'government interference' as not as egregious makes me question his sincerity about improving the lives of persons of color.

 

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