From: drw@euclid.mit.edu (Dale R. Worley)
Subject: Re: Discrimination and anti-discrimination laws
Organization: MIT Dept. of Tetrapilotomy, Cambridge, MA, USA
Date: Fri, 22 Jan 1993 01:39:08 GMT

Apologies for including the whole of the message I'm responding to,
but there was a considerable delay before I could get around to this.
I foolishly assumed that, because these are issues of considerable
political importance, that I could go look up the information I needed
in the library.  No such luck.

cfthb@ux1.cts.eiu.edu (Howard Black) writes:
> In article <DRW.92Dec11163325@euclid.mit.edu> drw@euclid.mit.edu (Dale R. Worley) writes:
> 
> >But the discrimination against gays isn't as intense as
> >it is against blacks.  Yes, there are gay-bashings, etc., but it's
> 
> Define "intense".  There are many more people killed every month
> because they are gay than because they are black.  

Is this really true?  I attempted to get some statistics, but the
library I looked in (MIT's library system) had *nothing* under the
topic of "Hate Crimes".

My definition of "intense" is really "Is it a statistically
significant cause of mortality?"  We readily accept the present death
rate from auto accidents as "acceptable".  Bashing incidents, if they
cause significantly less damage, are a noxious nuisance, but not a
real barrier to accomplishing anything useful in life.  (As far as I
can remember, until AIDS came along, gayness was not considered an
important risk factor by insurance companies, which suggests that
there was no significantly higher injury or death due to being gay.)

Or as I once said about nuclear power, "I commute to work on Route 128
[a local death-defying highway].  This puts a distinct limit on the
amount of risk that I can complain that someone is subjecting me to."

> >easier to keep being gay undercover.  There's even the weird statistic
> >that the average gay person (or is it household?) makes a lot more
> >money than the average person.  (Though that's likely to be affected
> 
>     So what?  Does this mean that they more deserve to be bashed?  Or that
> bashing them is somehow less serious??
> 
> >by who defines themselves to be gay.)  The extension of
> >anti-discrimination laws should be done rather sparingly, because of
> >the costs that such laws impose.  And if and when the prejudice
> 
>     How 'bout you weight these costs against the cost to the gay community
> of *not* passing them?  You wouldn't be a white, het male, would you?

That brings up an interesting question -- really, what *are* the
costs?  I haven't seen them discussed here (or anywhere else) at all.
Back in 1964, the costs of discrimination to blacks were enormous --
whole professions were effectively closed to blacks, and black incomes
were enormously less than white incomes.  But as I referred to above,
what little evidence has come into my hands doesn't suggest that gays
make significantly less money than straights.  What are the
statistics?

It is true that I am a white, het male.  But don't blame me -- it's a
genetic problem.  :-)  For that matter, what did your genes do to
*you*?  And does that make your opinions intrinsically more valuable
than mine?  (See "ad hominem" in your dictonary.)

> >against a particular group declines to a relatively low level, that
> >group should be stricken from the anti-discrimination laws.
> 
>     By this logic, you should immediately support inclusion of gays into
> anti-discrimination laws, since prejudice against them is so amazingly
> high.  Do you?

But is it really "amazingly high"?  Certainly gays are *disliked* by a
lot of people, but does it really translate into a measurably higher
poverty rate, higher death rate (due to assaults), etc.?  Having
peoples' feelings hurt I refuse to admit as a sufficient basis for
social engineering legislation.  (Although you might want to structure
society differently.)

> >There's been a lot
> >of mixing in the American population, although it officially doesn't
> >exist -- The average American "White" is of something like 10% African
> >ancestry, and the average American "Black" is of something like 25%
> >European ancestry.  American Whites are considerably darker (on the
> 
>     Please cite a source for this unbelievable nugget of "fact".

Well, I thought that that would easy to do.  After all, there's been
about a billion books, etc. published on "the race problem", probably
going back to 1650.  But after several hours of searching in MIT's
libraries, I wasn't able to find *any* information on the subject.
It's like it didn't exist.  I even found a 700-page book titled
"Blacks in the United States" that didn't even list "intermarriage" in
the index!  Given the American obsession with race, and the obsession
about sexual contact between the races, I thought it would be a major
research topic.  Grrr.

So I have to fall back on the only reference I know:  Remember back a
few years ago, there was a big flap over the Louisiana
race-classification law, which said that if someone had over 1/8
(12.5%) black blood, they were legally classified as "black".  (That's
a bit circular, but you know what I mean.)  Buried in the extensive
newspaper coverage was the interesting nugget that I quoted above.
The reason that it was noted was because it implies that the average
American white is nearly "black" by the Louisiana standard.

> >average) than the northern European population that they are
> >supposedly derived from.  American Blacks are considerably lighter
> >than the west African population.
> >
> >Of course, you are right to ask why assimilation would start now, when
> >it hasn't happened for the preceeding 300 years.  The reason is, I
> >think, that the wall of prejudice has started to crack in a lot of
> >little ways, and that is going to cause a lot of larger cracks in the
> >next generation or so.  The situation of American Blacks is a lot
> >better than it was 40 years ago.  Well, situation of the middle class
> >ones, that is.  (The poor blacks are doing worse, but that's another
> >question.)  40 years ago, the number of middle-class blacks (middle
> >class in terms of income) was vanishingly small.  Now, they are about
> >1/3 of all blacks.  (And rising reasonably rapidly.)  And the number
> >of inter-racial marriages is going up significantly.  In cities like
> >New York, there are a lot of people of "mixed" racial background, when
> >classified by the standard American racial system.  (Such people tend
> >to get themselves classified under whichever race is most expedient at
> >the moment, which leaves affirmative action programs in a quandry!)
> 
>     Perhaps you could condense the preceding stream-of-illogic into two ro
> three sentences.  Even using your own questionable statistics, your point
> is not supported.
> 
> >Comparing the American Blacks to other minorities, they seem to fit
> >the standard model reasonably well, if you pretend that they arrived
> >in the US about 1960.  Three generations after that (around 2020 or
> >2035), we will start to resemble Jamaica, where they don't seem to
> >have "races" at all.
> 
>     Not a chance.

I think you're excessively pessimistic here.  The number of mixed
marriages is going up; a significant number of blacks are now entering
various highly-paid professions, and they have reasonable expectations
of being hired in those professions, often in "white" firms.  Also, a
significant number of middle-class blacks are starting to live in
areas that are mostly white, and their children will acquire all the
standard signs of American culture, and be reasonably acceptable to
white, middle-class culture, even as marriage partners.

Certainly, the number of mixed-race couples I've seen on the streets
of Boston and Cambridge has increased significantly in the last ten
years.  (Note: This area has an acute race-consciousness that has
poisoned my mind to the point that I *notice* mixed-race couples.
Grrrr.  Lily-white rural Iowa was much less damaging in that regard.)
The working-class neighborhood I live in (Waltham) seems to be
racially mixed, and the little children play in mixed-race groups;
even hoodish teenagers on the street are often in mixed-race groups.

In the US Army (from which my brother recently resigned), mixed-race
marriages are so common as to be entirely unremarkable.

And the rise of blacks to high office is becoming almost unremarkable
(Colin Powell, Douglas Wilder, Jesse Jackson, Bryant Gumbel, and
probably a zillion others that I don't happen to know are black,
because I get my news from the newspapers, not the TV.)

Certainly, there is more work that needs to be done, especially in
Boston ("the most racist city in the North"), but the present
situation and its simple extrapolation are going to pretty quickly
lead to a state where racially classifying Americans is going to
become nearly impossible.

Dale
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