Encountering Thomas Sowell

Thanks. But, see, now it's you reading tea leaves. The original language read:

We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and ‘villages’ that collectively care for one another , especially our children, to the degree that mothers, parents, and children are comfortable. (em mine)

It's explicit about extended families.

I think we should be able to quickly agree that there are two things going on here:

First, the part you're responding to: Black culture contends with a great deal of blame and social disapproval regarding single mothers and absence of fatherhood (something Thomas Sowell talks a lot about).

Second, like many cultures around the world, including several in Europe, Black culture relies on multigenerational extended family networks for child care. Those family networks were, as I'm certain from previous discussions you agree, explicitly targeted by housing segregationists to keep Black families out of suburban enclaves and to keep Black students out of the best-performing schools.

There's apparently this whole sort of internal cultural debate about Black advancement --- I'm a white dude and talking out of my ass here, but, like, I read some stuff --- between what you might call the Booker T. Washington school, which says Black advancement has to come from Black people improving their own circumstances and correcting the problems that are holding them back, and the W.E.B. DuBois school, which says that the first order of business is to secure formal, recognized equality with white people. It strikes me that you can read Sowell vs. BLM in that light.

They might both be right, with regards to families! Certainly, Oak Park needs to stop rigging systems to keep extended Black families from taking root here. And it's hard to deny that children are better off raised by more than one loving stable caregiver, though we might go back and forth about how important it is that the other stable caregiver be a father, vs. for instance a same-sex partner or a committed grandparent --- I had friends growing up raised by grandparents and those grandparents were probably a lot more conscientious than a lot of our parents.

At any rate, my main argument here is that this "nuclear family" stuff is a weird bone to pick with BLM. They're an easy target! They believe that we can beat back racism without reforming all of capitalism! Pick that fight, not the one that actually does implicate 75 years of racist housing policies that created the impoverished neighborhoods that have trapped and killed so many Black people.

That's the point. There will be people who look down on your foster family for not being their idea of "traditional" and therefore inferior.

Increasingly, lots of different kinds of families are being recognized as good, and they're pushing back against people who insist that only one kind of family is acceptable.

I think that you have a point about how the media portrayal of Trump differed from the reality, but Trump is an example of what I'm saying. He had some good instincts, and a vague sense that we lost our way forty or so years ago, and he may value family, markets, and some sort of liberty, but he can't mount a coherent defense of those things, because he doesn't really understand them. He has some positions, albeit flexible ones and an odd mix at that, but no underlying principles — no philosophy of liberty. How can you expect to move a country in the right direction, and make a lasting change to how we think politically, without principles?

Thanks. I've also found a definition of 'racial inequities' and an example from Kendi from the same chapter:

> Racial inequity is when two or more racial groups are not standing on approximately equal footing. Here’s an example of racial inequity: 71 percent of White families lived in owner-occupied homes in 2014, compared to 45 percent of Latinx families and 41 percent of Black families. Racial equity is when two or more racial groups are standing on a relatively equal footing. An example of racial equity would be if there were relatively equitable percentages of all three racial groups living in owner-occupied homes in the forties, seventies, or, better, nineties.

This idea of the presence of (certain) inequities as evidence of racism doesn't seem controversial to me: if we took large samples of White, Black, and Latinx households in USA, accounting for regional differences and other coincident factors in the samples, wouldn't we expect the deviation in home ownership percentages to be much, much lower?

Could you (or someone else) reference a definition of racism from MLK?

That's an amazing inference.

IIRC, The Occupy Movement heavily influenced BLM.

David Graeber talks about the origins of Occupy in The Democracy Project. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Democracy_Project

Sure Anarchists like Graeber are adjacent to Socialists, Marxists, and other groups. But Anarchists are for participatory democracy, against government. The left-wing version of libertarians. So Anarchists oppose Socialists, Communists, and Liberals (today's Democrats & Republicans) equally.

I couldn't say if Occupy or BLM are Marxist, Socialist, or whatever. Or since everyone uses their own definitions, what that could possibly mean. Things get nutty when people try to use 100 year old terms to talk about contemporary stuff.

It's on my to do list to find similar write-ups about BLM. Please share if you found any.