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so this ludicrous sidebar concerning opinions about opinions on opinions and how differences in opinions about opinions about opinions are ruining america aside....
we still have the same refusals to engage from some folk on the right, and this despite the fact that the moves have been pointed out repeatedly in this thread: the premises for a data-based study do not conform to either the anecdotal experience or hunches of conservatives then the study must be wrong; arbitrary assertions of political biais---and i mean arbitrary in this case---transposed into assumptions transposed into a device to dismiss data that does not sit well with conservative predispositions, onto which is tacked yet another claim concerning what it is that's destroying america; attempts to dismiss the entire discipline of sociology; and lots of crying victim from conservatives when their gambits don't work.
what's lost in all this of course is the actual study.
so this study concludes that wealth---which they define quite exactly and which excludes house ownership, which no doubt would have made the results worse---is distributed in a radically unequal manner in the united states. that inequality--which is by far the worst in the industrialized world, and which is roughly compatible with that of guatemala--- sadly--and to our collective shame--runs along racial lines. so taken collectively, within a context that disadvantages ALOT of people, african-americans fare *far* worse than whites. period. full stop.
1. what are the motives that animate folk from the right to pretend this data--which is not out of nowhere, which does not break with previous data about the distribution of wealth in the united states once you look at reality as it is and not as conservatives would prefer to pretend that it is---what is the motivation behind pretending this data must be wrong?
what are you defending when you make that move?
2. what do you think are the *policy* explanations for this inequality in the distribution of wealth? what are the structural explanations for it?
aside:
conservative ideology don't allow folk who take it on to like the idea of structure--or history for that matter--this because structures are expressions of history, the histories of institutions, the histories of populations with respect to institutions---conservative ideology doesn't make it easy to think about the opacity of the world, the opacity of the present, the extent to which human beings are not transparent to themselves, the extent to which the present is conditioned by the past. the folk who buy into that ideology prefer to perform the effects of these relations entirely unconsciously because they prefer to pretend they are somehow extra-social beings, outside processes of conditioning or socialization and outside of history--all this because they can't see any of these factors and can't know them without a degree of abstraction. and because of the way the educational system operates and because of the unequal distribution of wealth and opportunities---which affects ALOT of people, but disproportionately african-americans--the capacity to work in or with abstractions and/or to correlate statistical information, isolate regularities or patterns of action or interactions and to interpret them tends to be a specialized affair.
and because alot of conservatives do not like what this sort of information says, do not like what it leads to, do not like the kind of reflexivity that knowing your actions are conditioned by history forces onto you, they prefer to act as though this kind of information is a weapon fashioned to persecute them, to disrupt their opinions man, to push them out of the smug reliance on some immediate common sense which is useful when you're figuring out what orange juice to drink or what's happening in your immediate surroundings on the relatively superficial level of the "present" but doesnt help at all to think about what conditions that "present" and still less to think about what conditions the "common sense" that lives in the superficial variants of the present...superficial because this present is seen as self-contained.
it isn't.
enough of that. i feel a little better for having said it like there's at least something of a response to the "i dont like it so it can't be true" responses.
the ludicrous opinion about opinions about opinions digression aside.
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cimmaron: i'll get back to the argument you're building.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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