Fake Charity Nerd Girl

I was browsing a bookstore the other day and came across a Miss Manners book, from the 90s, about the culture wars. So of course I had to get it and mine it for insights to help us during our current time of strife.

There are a some things that were hot-button issues in the 90s that just feel totally resolved today. 

• smoking. this seemed really big, like there was a time when everyone was either upset about people smoking or upset about people not wanting them to smoke. I guess the anti-smoking side just won that one
  
• first names. lots of drama about when it was appropriate to call people by their first names, is it sexist/racist to call a woman/black person by their first name (because would you do that to a white man??) feel like the first names have won this.
• swearing. again, I think this has just been resolved in favor of swearing.

And then there are some issues that are obviously still hot-button issues today:

The way race is talked about is interesting. It was clearly an issue on people’s minds back then too. But the way people were thinking and talking about it was really different: it feels like somehow people were actually talking about it in a way they don’t today? Like today there are two sides that don’t talk to each other, and one of them isn’t even talking about race, it’s talking about how you can’t talk about race. But back then there were people on both sides writing to Miss Manners not about how they were angry or exhausted but just trying to figure stuff out: black people asking how to respond to racist remarks, or white people asking how to respond to the black men who are always catcalling them (Miss Manners gently points out that race is irrelevant to this question before going on to answer it).

Workplace sexual harassment was big too. Miss Manners’ take is roughly

• some guys are just dicks, and that’s bad
• other problems result from misunderstanding and miscommunication around changing workplace norms, and see, this is why we never should have gone down the road of workplace informality and casual Fridays in the first place

And yeah I guess people are finally starting to come around and agree with her on that one huh.

She also takes the opportunity to lay out a clear definition of etiquette and explanation of her role:

• “manners” = the principles underlying systems of etiquette. these are universal (eg “show respect in a house of worship,” “guests should respect a host’s home”)
  
• “etiquette” = culture-specific systems of rules to express these principles (eg “take your hat off in a church”/”put a hat on in a synagogue”, “take your shoes off in a Japanese house”/”leave your shoes on in an American house”)
  
• etiquette does and should change over time to keep up with other technological and social changes, but gradually (due to its culturally foundational nature)
• Miss Manners’ role is to chronicle and explain etiquette, as well as arbitrating when changes are necessary
• etiquette can be divided into three categories: regulative, symbolic, and ritual
• regulative = how to resolve conflicts or adjudicate differing preferences: similar role to the law, but for situations below the level of legal involvement (who pays the check at dinner, what do you do when someone cuts you in the grocery store checkout line)
• symbolic = rules that seem arbitrary: their purpose is to allow signaling respect/conformity or defiance by following or breaking them (what do you wear to a formal dinner or a business meeting; do you greet people with handshakes, cheek kisses, bowing, etc)
• ritual = purpose is to “provide an aesthetically pleasing and emotionally reassuring sense of social belonging” (protocol for weddings, funerals, etc)

Examples of etiquette rules changing:

• non-smoking becoming the default for gatherings unless all guests are comfortable with it
• precedence for eg giving up a seat on the bus going from gender-based to purely based on age and disability

She pushes back against people who criticize her as being anti-freedom by arguing that etiquette is actually conducive to freedom. She thinks the declining respect for etiquette is in part responsible for regulatory creep and the increasing impulse to make everything bad illegal; she instead argues for keeping more minor infractions in the realm of etiquette, and enforcing etiquette by:

• practicing it oneself
• teaching it to one’s children
• making admission to voluntary associations dependent on following a system of etiquette (everything from marriage and friendship to parties one hosts to clubs or professional organizations)
• for the worst infractions, public disapproval and shaming

On political correctness:

• PC = condemning things for being racist, sexist, or otherwise bigoted
• this can be done appropriately or inappropriately: Good PC or Bad PC
• her principles of good PC:
• responses must be proportionate and consider intent, so people are not severely condemned for minor mistakes
• a rule must first be argued for and widely accepted before you can start the public condemnation phase
• rudeness does not justify rudeness
• prefacing a statement with “I know this isn’t politically correct, but” does not justify rudeness
• appropriate responses to bigotry can range from “surely I must have misunderstood” to “I beg your pardon!” to “how dare you!” to “you will be hearing from my lawyer,” depending on the severity of the situation.

Ok I also just want to quote Miss Manners in response to someone who criticized her for idealizing the past:

“Have you been paying such close attention to Miss Manners’ hairdo that you missed what she was saying? Wild horses could not drag her back to live in the past. For one thing, she has too clear a memory of what perfectly agreeable tame horses, who kindly provided public transportation in a previous era, left in the streets. There are too many things she could not live without, such as air conditioning and feminism.”

// cw: offensive, sorry

I feel like part of me that is interested in HBD is the same part of me that loves personality types and “which character are you” quizzes: my brain just has a strong impulse to put people into categories

there’s a stereotype of racist people that they will like, assume any East Asian person speaks Chinese or something. I appreciate that HBD people are the exact opposite of that, and will like make fun of you for saying something about “Indians” without specifying province and caste because come on, the genetic differences there are massive

I feel like there are a bunch of people from whom, given their views on immigration, I’d expect to see more hand-wringing about how the slave trade was the worst mistake in American history

one of the more annoying anti-SJ voices on my facebook newsfeed:

In fact, that trial showed that the University of Texas system is not racist in their affirmative action. They use residential segregation as a basis rather than race. It’s an example of a great affirmative action system to reduce residential segregation

like, just the fact that people who are opposed to affirmative action because it’s racial discrimination are fine with discriminating on other things whose sole purpose is to serve as a noisy proxy for race

I mean no one is pretending this is not the case. The Economist:

For nearly two decades, UT has filled some 75% of its seats with Texas public-high-school students who finished in the top 10% of their graduating classes. This rule, adopted by the Texas legislature in 1997, was intended to increase black and Hispanic enrolment in the UT system.

the idea that anything that has disparate impact on different groups is discriminatory is dumb but at least it’s less dumb than this

Man I read this Vox article today and there’s just so much going on I feel like I have to say something about it.

• It claims “white women benefit most from affirmative action.” Its evidence for this is:
  
• Kimberle Crenshaw said “the primary beneficiaries of affirmative action have been Euro-American women”
• “A 1995 report by the California Senate Government Organization Committee found that white women held a majority of managerial jobs (57,250) compared with African Americans (10,500), Latinos (19,000), and Asian Americans (24,600) after the first two decades of affirmative action in the private sector.” 
• The wording of this sentence is somewhere between misleading and wrong: in fact what the report said is that there were 57,250 more women employed in managerial jobs in 1993 than in 1975, and similarly for the other groups. So this is actually slightly better evidence than I originally thought. 
• But still, there is no attempt to look at percentages? Like, 40% of California residents are white women, while 7% are black. Maybe this has something to do with the fact that white women gained five times as many jobs as African-Americans?
• Also of course there is a lot that happened between 1975 and 1993 and we can’t really say with any confidence that affirmative action caused anything here.
• The percentage of women physicians has gone from 8% to 25% since 1970. The article does not mention what has happened to the percentage of black physicians over time. It also does not give any evidence that this is due to affirmative action rather than medical schools and jobs just not actively discriminating against women. I mean, maybe it is, but the article gives no evidence for that.
• It then proposes this “paradox”: that white women benefit the most from affirmative action, but still oppose it. It then gives the examples of several white women who have been plaintiffs in affirmative action cases over admission to college and law school.
• Like. Maybe this is because white women don’t generally receive affirmative action in college and law school admissions?
• I understand that white women do benefit from affirmative action in contexts like tech hiring! But undergrad admissions is really not one of those contexts.
• It dismisses the mismatch hypothesis in a sentence with “Study after study shows there’s simply no evidence for the claim.”
• Linking to two sociology studies.
• The studies don’t look particularly bad (though admittedly my prior for sociology papers being good is lower than that for economics), and I’d like to read them when I don’t have finals. But I could just as easily link you two studies that do find evidence of mismatch. This is the problem with saying things are debunked based on two studies.
• It admits that the percentage of black students enrolled at UC Berkeley has gone down from 8% to 4% since admissions went race-blind. But it says this is not because of “underqualified students of color” but rather because 58% of black students reject Berkeley’s offer of admission.
• Okay, the 58% number is for black students from 2006-2010, and I only found Berkeley’s yield rate for 2012. But in 2012 it was 37%!
• That means if the yield rate for 2006-2010 was similar, black students were more likely to accept Berkeley’s offer of admission than students of other races.