Thread by @sbspalding

@CharlesNegy Hi! I'm going to assume good faith, because this conversation is too tedious any other way.

1. Often when people as questions like these, they tend to reverse the causal arrow. They look at a group and say, "bad outcomes are obviously the result of bad habits."

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@CharlesNegy 2. Alternately, they do the opposite, suggesting that good outcomes are always solely the result of good habits.

3. This is a highly seductive way of viewing the world, because it allows us to believe that everyone "gets what they deserve."

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@CharlesNegy 4. It also frees us from having to consider the alternative, that initial conditions drive both behaviors and outcomes to a much greater degree than we would like to admit.

5. Said differently, our agency is meaningfully constrained by the environment we were born into.

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@CharlesNegy 6. Now for an assertion: Chattel slavery, with Jim Crow following closely on its heel, created a series of conditions that are fundamentally different than those faced by immigrant populations.

7. This was by design.

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@CharlesNegy 8. Whereas most immigrant populations are seen as basically human but "other," chattel slavery created a strong incentive to dehumanize, both because it allowed the system to not seem morally repugnant AND because it was necessary to perpetuate it.

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@CharlesNegy 9. The result was that even after slavery ended, AA's were not treated like full people. This had obvious economic consequences, but also took a psychological toll.

10. Jim Crow only made things worse.

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@CharlesNegy 11. Beyond being a system of segregation, Jim Crow did two things that were spectacularly damaging to those who lived through it.

12. The first was stripping away economic opportunity through force of law. Preventing AAs from acquiring education, jobs, real estate etc...

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@CharlesNegy 13. The second is an extension of the first, making it difficult for AAs to pass on generational wealth. This wealth takes the form of money certainly, but also more ephemeral forms of "currency" like social capital and an educational legacy.

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@CharlesNegy 14. Since Jim Crow was the law of the land until 1964, and was enforced through a variety of extra-legal means for perhaps decades after (via red-lining et al), AAs born under this system weren't just starting from zero. They were starting in negative space.

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@CharlesNegy 15. Even if you ignore crippling, multi-generational trauma and extra-legal abuse, you're still left with economic effects that no other group in America was subjected to.

16. In fact, as a second generation immigrant, I was never personally effected by any of this.

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@CharlesNegy 17. I bring this up, because it's important to understanding my point. I have a Master's degree in STEM. I make more money and have more wealth than the vast majority of people in this country. I do not consider myself "oppressed."

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@CharlesNegy 18. The reasons are myriad, but ONE of them is that my parents benefited from generations of educational and financial attainment. I can trace my family tree back a few hundred years. What oppression we faced was idiosyncratic and manageable. Mine is an immigrants story.

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@CharlesNegy 19. It is much more like the Asian Americans you mention that those whose families survived America's peculiar institution. We had the privilege of started from "zero," of buying a home, of going to schools without threat of extra-legal violence. We had family and means.

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@CharlesNegy 20. When you are born into a situation like that, it's much easier to form healthy habits. It's much easier to believe that the world is fair. It's much easier to pull yourself up by your bootstraps -- because you HAVE bootstraps.

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@CharlesNegy 21. Comparing the outcomes of immigrants to those who have faced generational oppression is intellectually lazy, because it annihilates context in favor of an essentialist narrative that implicitly assumes that all "groups" are monoliths and their outcomes are ordained.

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@CharlesNegy 22. Instead, I would challenge you to take a broader view, to recognize that initial conditions matter. That bad habits can sometimes arise from bad initial conditions rather than visa versa.

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@CharlesNegy 23. This isn't to say that people aren't responsible for their choices, but that our choices are limited in some very real ways by not only our personal circumstances but our history.

24. Systemic racism is not a thing that is done, it's a machine were forced inside of.

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@CharlesNegy So to respond to your initial query, I don't think you can speak about "systemic racism" without first acknowledging the symptoms born of it (educational attainment et al). As such, the question is poorly formed, and should be refined if you're looking for a cogent response.

@CharlesNegy @threadreaderapp unroll