I recently had a discussion with Sargon of Akkad and was surprised by a few of his views…

Sargon of Akkad thinks the discussion on race heated up around 2011.

He thinks that the fact that first-generation immigrants who come to the US under very high standards and do well indicates that racism isn’t a big deal.

He thinks that the ills of the black family are best remedied by encouraging black men to marry black women.

Those are three views that I encountered in talking to him this morning in a livestream, and I have to admit…I’m a bit taken aback.

Apparently, I have to argue that the genesis of current outrage regarding racial inequality is not 2011.

The idea that I would have to refute the claim that the discussion on race has only recently heated up around 2011 is mind-boggling to me. I wonder where, exactly, people have been. It is true that there has been an outrage against racist policing in the wake of documented police brutality and lies, but that is a continuation of an outrage that has been going on for centuries, which should be obvious to anyone who has ever studied history.

The notion that concern over racism began around 2011 is so deeply ingrained in the mindset of Sargon that merely bringing up racial conflict before 2011 seems to prompt summary dismissal. For example, Sargon could say that race wasn’t a prominent topic of discussion in the 1980s and 1990s except (he alleges) in academia, and his audience nods sagely. When I respond by bringing up the racist drug war, the racist welfare reform push that stigmatized black families, and the racist push for policies enacted against crime by Bill Clinton (which were a prominent topic of conversation in Hillary Clinton’s campaign — not sure how he missed it) — all prominent definers of the 1980s and 1990s — all of a sudden that’s off topic because it’s in the past. The past he was just so busy mischaracterizing.

His other backup plan is to say, “No, but POPULAR culture wasn’t discussing this…” which is mind-blowing. Even if the above incidents are dismissed…the OJ Simpson trial, in 1995, was arguably the most publicized trial in the entirety of American history. And then there was the turmoil of the Rodney King riots, as well. If you don’t think highly publicized incidents like this put race at the forefront of American consciousness, you’re disingenuous or jaw-droppingly ignorant.

The 1990s and 1980s were on fire with racial controversy. To say that this wasn’t part of popular culture is like saying that the Kardashians (who got their fame, if you trace it back, ultimately from the OJ Simpson trial) are not part of popular culture. I mean, I don’t know how he gets there.

I do see, though, the convenience of the insistent lie that this attention to race sprung up, ex nihilo, around 2011. It’s certainly helpful in enforcing the anti-SJW narrative that they are responding to the antagonists who initiated the debate on race, but it’s also simply not true. It’s mind-bogglingly, clearly obvious that this is not true, which is why Sargon and his ilk seem to have to insist so hard that everything that happened before 2011 is irrelevant unless they’re referring to it to insist a conversation that existed was nonexistent. Looking before this supposed 2011 genesis of the race debate would ruin their narrative that this is a new problem that social justice advocates started, that anti-SJWs are on defense, and that the people fighting racism don’t have an unbroken long history (up to the present moment) of real grievances. It would force them to admit that, fundamentally, their side started the war against equality, and it is those fighting for Civil Rights who have been defending against aggression from day one.

It’s fascinating that such a clearly wrong erasure and revision of history seems so essential for preserving and protecting their narrative.

And it’s disturbing that such a lie would take a hold of a large segment of the American voting population. I mean, racism has been going on in an unbroken line for 400 years; to say that the controversy just started in 2011 when it’s been going on 80 times longer is to craft an astonishing falsehood. That people like Sargon believe it seems to indicate that they are hellbent on justifying their fight even if the have to lie about us to do so.

Stop hurting the “model minority” with the model minority myth.

OK, then there’s the model minority myth — the myth that because Asian-Americans are doing well, racism isn’t a serious problem US. I was taken aback that he brought this up, as this is widely known to be…well, a myth.

Anyway, we went back and forth on this part of the discussion because, frustratingly, Sargon kept trying obfuscate the point. He kept trying to say that because they are doing well, racism isn’t a significant factor. As a result, he stated, we need to focus on combating class and not race.

He’s wrong. Let’s go back in history a bit. As a CNN article reads:

Most of the Asian immigrants who came after 1965, when the United States ended its restrictive national origin quotas, were high-skilled immigrants such as doctors, nurses, and engineers from countries like India, China, South Korea, and the Philippines. By contrast, most of the refugees from Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos lacked college degrees, and many did not even have a high school diploma.

So, there’s complexity here. Another fact is that 79% of Asian Americans were foreign-born as of 2014 . So, a lot of their advantage is due to whatever status they had before coming into this country.

Unconvinced? Think about it. If this is true, what would you see? A major gap between the success of Asian Americans from India, China, South Korea, and the Philippines, who would be rich, and Asian Americans from Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, who would be poor.

And this is what you see. Although Asian Americans make more dough than non-Hispanic whites, the gap between poor Asian Americans and rich Asian Americans is substantially larger than the gap between poor non-Hispanic whites and rich non-Hispanic whites. The bottom 20% of Asian Americans are poorer than the bottom 20% of non-Hispanic whites. And who makes up this bottom 20%? As The Washington Post quotes

“The communities that we know aren’t doing so well — people from countries like Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia — they make up close to 40 [percent] to 45 percent of the Asian American population,” said Weller, a professor of public policy at the University of Massachusetts at Boston and a senior fellow at CAP. “By only looking at averages, you’re papering over the substantial struggles of a huge chunk of lower-income, less wealthy Asian Americans.” “The problem is that ‘Asian American’ doesn’t hold together as a category,” said Philip Cohen, a sociology professor at the University of Maryland. “The group is too diverse. It doesn’t really make sense to compare recent Chinese, Korean or Pakistani immigrants who are working in tech and engineering jobs to people who came as refugees in the 1980s and their working-class descendants.”

The disturbing truth is that Sargon’s use of the model minority myth actually hurts the poorer Asian Americans who are not recent immigrants to the US who came under high immigration standards, and who are yet expected to live up to model minority status. As an NBCNews article reports: Even as detailed data on education and income across the diverse Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) spectrum has begun debunking this myth, experts say the stereotype still persists. For many young AAPIs, it means always rising to meet an academic bar that seems to perpetually move upward — or being afraid to ask for help in school because the model minority label suggests you don’t need it. That, experts say, can create additional pressures and lead to mental health issues. “It’s like you’re supposed to be performing well so you don’t need help. So then when I needed help, I felt like I couldn’t go and ask.” “Usually the model minority [label] does cause a lot of anxiety in a lot of the second-generation children,” Shanni Liang, a counselor for a mental health hotline in New York City, told NBC News. “We do get a lot of callers that have their first mental health breakdown in college.” You’ll see many stories like this if you search for and listen to them. The myth that Asian American success means racism is an insignificant factor is not only wrong; the myth is racist itself in that it hurts poorer Asian Americans who are not recent immigrants from selective pools at a fundamental level. This is part of why it is so disturbing that Sargon does not realize it is a myth and is a major advocate of it. Second, you should realize that the myth was originally used to say that desegregation wasn’t necessary — Asian Americans were doing OK, so it wasn’t needed. The fact is, however, that although there is a gravely racist background in the history of Asian Americans, they often were not segregated as much as black individuals were, as they could go to white-only schools in some states or were at times ushered to sit at the front of buses. After WWII, elevating them was (and continues to be) a way to denigrate African Americans. So not only is Sargon and his ilk wrong; they are repeating lies and disturbing stereotypes from the 1960s that historically and currently hold back African American and Asian American progress, and thus hold back society as a whole. Preaching marriage won’t erase the effects of discrimination. Then, apparently, Sargon thinks marriage will solve the black family’s ills, because black families have a high single parenthood rate. To state the obvious, you can’t force people to get married. If you have two people struggling to make ends meet, it doesn’t seem convincing that forcing them to marry will cure their ills. A marriage that either a man or woman is forced into will likely be detrimental to children, especially if it ends in divorce. The fact that you have a child with a man does not obligate you to marry the man, or vice versa. So, on a principle level, I’m against this solution. It’s not a matter of morality; it’s a matter of conditions in which people are able to get married and able to thrive once they are married. We can’t force people to get married, but we can impact laws that ensure the well-being of children. I also said this during the livestream: If you’re saying the problem is that a lot of these families are fatherless, I think that in many cases [that solution] works out to, in practice, being a non-starter. [The mentality is that] what needs to happen is that we don’t need to change the policies with which we’re interacting with these communities; what needs to happen is that we just need to preach morality to them so that they get married…. [Crosstalk] If you have two parents, you have, oftentimes, two people who are able to look after children more, you have two incomes coming in, and so on. Yes. That’s not a moral judgment. I mean, that’s not a moral judgment. These are factors that go into raising children. But I think you can also apply those factors and take those factors apart and say, “Here’s a single mother; what does she need? She needs resources. She needs opportunities. She needs time to care for her children. Maybe when her child is first born, she needs maternity leave.” You can look at the advantages that these couples have and use them to see, “How can we change society for the better?” What I’m basically saying there, again, is that we can’t force people to get married. Saying that we should is basically the equivalent of doing nothing in these communities — or at least, that’s how it works in practice. But we can look at the advantages couples have in this country when it comes to raising children, and see if we can give some of those advantages to single women so that our society is filled with kids who are as healthy as possible. I suspect that’s possible — according to some studies, children from single-parent homes can do just as well as children from two-parent homes in European countries. I’m suspicious about the sincerity of people who insist on not encouraging help for single mothers, honestly — are you really concerned about children? Or are you concerned about preaching morality? As a Salon article once summarized: Most recently, Bhashkar Mazumder finds that, among those between the late 1950s and early 1980s, 50 percent of black children born into the bottom 20 percent of the income scale remained in the same position, while only 26 percent of white children born into the bottom 20 percent of the income scale remained in the same position. His research finds that the role of two-parent families for mobility is less important than conservatives assert. While living in a two-parent households increases upward mobility for blacks, it has no effect on upward mobility for white children, nor does it affect downward mobility for either race. If marriage has a significant effect, it is not marriage per se, but rather income and parenting effects that are at work; married people by default have more incomes and more time to spend with children. The solution, then, is paid leave, universal pre-K and government-provided daycare, not wealthy conservatives clutching their pearls and chastising young people for not getting hitched. It also seems important to point out the statistical fact that the majority of married couples tend to be doing fairly well is largely due to the fact that financial stability is a major part of what makes a marriage possible and stable to begin with. As an Atlantic article states: The question is rather one of causality—marriage may not lift people out of poverty, but financial well-being sure does seem to make marriages stronger. As Kristi Williams of the Ohio State University told Annie Lowrey, “It isn’t that having a lasting and successful marriage is a cure for living in poverty. Living in poverty is a barrier to having a lasting and successful marriage.” So that’s another factor. The degree of a marriage’s success is linked to financial stability, and where there is less financial stability — as is often the case in black communities — there will likely be fewer marriages. Which further means that those who are single are more likely to be unmarried than those who are not. There are also several factors that make marriage harder among black families. One is racism against black women across races, because although black women continue to be more desirable to black men than to other races, racism against black women makes them less desired by men, overall. Another is high incarceration rates — famously, black men are more likely to be incarcerated than men of other races (especially when the influence of the drug war is considered). Still another is job discrimination, which obviously impacts the financial stability often linked to marriage success. And added to this is the fact that most black fathers do live with their children, and they do spend a substantial amount of time with them. Also, the income gap between black and white women exists whether black women are married or not (and black women work more than white women, married or not). The solution to these communities is not insisting on marriage, as if that would cure the effects of discrimination. Marriage itself is a personal decision, and using moralizing to scapegoat the effects of racism on the backs of struggling black communities in order to further take or deny resources that would help them (as seems to be either the intention or result) delays us from enacting common-sense reforms that would enable children to grow up in healthier environments. Furthermore, even if these couples did get married when they were not open to doing so, the conflict that may ensue would actually worsen outcomes for children. In short, this moralizing reinforces the effects of racism on black men and black women in this country, and seems to be a desperate attempt to blame black individuals for the institutionalized inequality they experience, an inequality that remains when married black couples are compared to married white ones. If you’re going to solve the problem of black inequality in this country, and improve outcomes for single mothers of all races (as the number is going up among all races) you’ll need to use more relevant and realistic common-sense reforms that make life healthier for them and their children. One last note: These issues strike me as extremely important, and it’s deeply disturbing that someone like Sargon is gaining prominence preaching solutions that so clearly do not solve inequality in order to ignore or detract from common-sense reforms we could be making, and the very real experience of racism black families face. The importance these issues held for me may have come out on the livestream — I did come across as hesitant at times because I was thoughtfully trying to get my arguments right. I try extremely hard to base what I state in this arena on the actual facts and on workable solutions, as opposed to just talking out of my ass. If I’m being honest, I wish people like Sargon and his crew would do this same — and insofar as they do not, it seems important to move past their rhetoric and focus on workable solutions that actually take into account the reality of the situations we are trying to remedy. Other Thoughts One part of this discussion that was particularly interesting occurred when Sargon tried to argue that embracing a “white” style of living was healthy — indeed arguing that this style of living was not “white” but the way that you would gain an edge in society. There are a lot of problems with this that were a bit difficult to state all at once…but I’d like to list them. First, that ignores the fact that individuals in struggling black communities, due to generational discrimination, do not have the option of pretending that they have the advantages of individuals in white communities. Second, this assumes that a culture primarily formed by the experiences of white individuals is superior to one primarily formed by the experiences of black individuals, which is not inherently true. White individuals and those who behave like they do may have an advantage in some parts of society, but that is due to societal norms that can be changed to accommodate or incorporate predominantly black cultures more smoothly. And indeed, I would argue, many of these societal norms are adjusting to create a place for this colorful diversity. Third, I think that Sargon drastically underestimates the ability black individuals have to be seen as on-par with white people, as even the black people who have the most respectable jobs often report discrimination on a regular basis.

In summary, I don’t think many black people have the option of acting “white” in their communities (it often may not be to their benefit, even if they were), I do not think there is anything necessarily wrong with the overall culture of black communities and have noticed that societal norms increasingly seem to recognize this (cf. community policing that seems to protect these communities and respect them instead of demonizing them), I think Sargon drastically underestimates the ability black people could gain the status of “whiteness” even if they acted white, and as a result I think that respecting black communities will likely lead to better outcomes in them than demonizing them.

Another thing that Sargon mentioned several times is the idea that discussing some of the inequality in society as race-based is an excuse. This is a weak argument; if the reason for inequality in opportunity for a country is race-based, then that’s not just an excuse for the individual; it is in all our best interests to remedy that situation so that less of society is held back by racism. This will increase earnings, progress as a country, GDP, and so on. It’s not just about black individuals. It’s about the well-being of this country as a whole, and the kinds of environments we as a society can create that will enable us to flourish (especially in places we aren’t — because that’s capital we are missing out on if we aren’t trying to solve the situation).

Finally, Sargon also asked me when we would stop. I didn’t know what he was referring to — if he was talking about stopping the cultures inherent in black communities, or about stopping the fight for black equality. Regarding the former, I have no intention of stopping, though we may improvise on that culture. Regarding the fight for black equality — I would stop fighting once the statistics showed black vs white discrimination wasn’t prominent anymore in a wide arena of sectors in society. But the implication that now I should stop, when discrimination is still rampant — that’s mindblowing to me.