Wojtek
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THE NARRATIVE
I am going to arrange this post as a narrative followed by a discussion of several models.
After at forty years of experience, almost all of which has been `on the ground' lived where culture, parents, neighborhoods, and individual choices are in full view, I can assure you these taken together do not explain the vast differences of outcomes between black and white and the systemic inequalities that prevail.
That's the whole point for the construction of racism, not as a individual psychological problem (which it certainly is also), but more importantly as socio-economic and cultural system of relationships that have come to form a landscape (see model below).
The vast majority of white people and a very significant portion of black people have not had enough close relationships with African-Americans--not friendships, but work and work related relationships as in the service provider to customers, clients, people you work with to help improve the quality of their lives. To de-personalize it, I would say that very few people see this world of relationships in the residue of the welfare state from the ground level.
In my case, it has been all disability related. It turned out that fixing wheelchairs has given me a tremendous view on society---who would have thunk it?
It would make great empirical social science to merely guide academics through my world for a few months so they could watch the vastly complex net of psychology, sociology and anthropology work out their tenets in living flesh---well provided my tourists were mostly Marxists or had some form of latter day social democratic views of the political economy.
See this white guy roll in his power chair and out of his brand new modified van. He's got a PhD in comp sci at UCB and works for HP applying set theory to computational algorithms. We love him because he has a great health insurance policy.
Okay, now watch this black guy roll in his beat up push chair with duct tape holding his tires on. He's on MediCal-Medicare and they only pay for one pair a tires every six months. He uses the bus system and practically lives on the streets. He has one small room at his grandmother's apartment (section eight housing out in West Oakland). I hate him because Medi-Medi sucks, he has no cash to pay, and I have to cheat the boss to get him out of here. If I am caught enough times, I'll get fired.
Okay, okay, now watch these two families bring in their disabled kids. Notice the upper middle class white family has their own modified van and has hired a private therapist. The mother, the therapist and the aid are all falling over each other to get the best they can for junior. They are from a good county CCS and we love them.
Now watch this next little entourage with this little black kid. Same disability, what they call heavily involved cerebral palsy. Notice anything right away? The mother isn't with them. It's a CCS public school therapist and a home aid worker. That's because the mother is working and can't take off work. Everybody is from the Oakland school system and Alameda county CCS. I don't particularly them. They both cop an attitude as if it was my fault this kid's equipment is falling apart. So they guilt trip me into doing a bunch of work that I can't write up because it won't get paid for. The therapist and aid know the only equipment they can get is whatever is covered under CCS in Alameda County and the CCS budget is practically gone by this time of year. (This is a classic example of bad faith, near kin to bigotry on my part enforced by the capitalist system that puts me as a worker in conflict with my own social conscience and my labor. I am in effect a welfare cop or gate keeper of public funds, through the `free choice' of allocating my labor.)
Doug cited the Emergency Room profiles on pain killers (B reminds us, she posted it first---and I've been thinking about this parallel in DME ever since).
The same inequality of distribution takes place in medical equipment, all based on race/class---and not disability. Black kids with cerebral palsy are treated differently, go to different rehab centers are served by different social workers, seen by different medical personnel and almost never covered under the same healthcare plans as most white and asian kids. A very similar systemic discrimination occurs with Mexican-Americans---with some significant number of cases of worse treatment and support because of immigrant issues added. And all of these effects are a consequence of segregated housing, supposedly a personal `choice' but in concrete reality, simply a consequence of where working class miniorities live---their demographics driven by affordable housing patterns---a slowly disappearing `market'.
These consequences have absolutely nothing to do with individual decisions, since people live where they can afford to live and nobody chooses to bare a child with CP. For one thing, most cases are the result of birth trauma, and many are not diagnosed until a few months of age. And guess what class and race has the largest per cap incidence of CP? Poor and minority. Well, because they get less pre-natal care and use the public county hospitals where maternity wards are jammed and these things, just seem to happen more frequently in those kinds of places.
In other words disability amplifies built in systemic inequalities of race and class and makes them much more `visible'.
You note parental influence. The vast majority, say 85-90% of minority parents I meet do their best, as do the child's able bodied siblings and other relatives. And the best environment is a caring family with plenty of activities at home with lots of play and attention. The problems most often have nothing to do with families. Instead they are encountered in rundown housing and neighborhoods, in over crowded CCS units, poor public school programs, poor and crowed public hospitals and medical clinics, public transportation systems and other public institutions.
So returning to my role in all this. I build, modify, fit and deliver children's equipment where I can see first hand where and how the children's healthcare system operates (CCS, stands for California Children's Services, a state agency administered through counties). The real crunch comes over power chairs. Public school transport, public bus systems are accessible, but just barely. They are extraordinarily difficult to use with reliability and often damage equipment. Power chairs require more room indoors which are crowed for space to begin with as are smaller older classrooms used for special education in poor districts. And of course many poorer working class households are older, rundown and inaccessible rental units. In these cases, the best alternative is to leave the powerchair at school---which in automatically limits independent mobility---probably the most important part of growing up with a disability
In Hillsborough (99% white, upper-middle to rich) practically every kid in their CCS unit has a powerchair whether they can use it or not. Obviously well off parents can afford to buy a modified van for their transportation needs and hire after school aids.
Move to the poor neighborhoods of SF and East Bay, and there are many fewer power chairs for poor kids---with a few exceptions here and there---mostly in Berkeley and North Oakland were legal and social support advocacy has a long twenty year history and used to have a whole federal program devoted to it locally administered through the city. That program of course is long gone, but at least some of the positive effects can still be seen in the community awareness and expectations for Berkeley City schools and public services.
The school districts, the counties, and therefore the MediCal services provided are simply less in every way, no matter how pro-active the parents, how knowledgeable and committed the social workers, the therapists, the teachers and teacher's aids---or guys like me at the bottom of service delivery system. All the latter `decide' what the child will get in equipment, learning experiences, and socialization, but according to the county's budget.
Theoretically MediCal and CCS guidelines are uniform, but in concrete fact, each county has a budget and must distribute their monies within that budget and of course poor districts and poor counties have more disabled kids and fewer dollars to pass around. Ergo, poorer quality equipment, less of it, less appropriate to the need, etc. And it should go without saying poorer housing, poorer schools, more over worked therapists, teachers, and aids and other public service workers of all sorts.
Since the sales people at my work know all these concrete realities, they proportion their time and expertise accordingly, meaning they will spend more hours in richer districts and less time and energy in poorer districts, neighborhoods, etc. In this example, the sales people are not personally racist. They are merely reproducing racism through its capitalist labor manifestation, just as I do.
It gets worse. Consider what the business attitude is toward MediCal which requires huge amounts of paper work justification for every item. Now consider a wealthy family who comes into the store in a modified van with their child and a private therapist. The lucky sales person to land this cash client, will happily spend all the time it takes with the family, knowing at the end of the order, they will write a check, period. Except for the order, there is no paperwork and no need to justify anything. The equipment will be speced, called in the same day or the next, arrive in a couple of weeks, and be built immediately, delivered and fitted. The total time between contact and finished fitting takes at most three or four weeks, most of which is due to manufacturer's lead time. The store personnel time is counted in hours (which is what the boss looks at---charmingly called `productivity'). Which customer would you perfer, if you were in the business?
Now contrast that to the lead time for a child on CCS. First a social worker and public school therapist must evaluate the child, contact a doctor for a prescription, then arrange a time, place and date to meet with a sales person. The sales person usually goes to the school or a local therapy clinic run by the CCS system and the school district (both are county-level agencies)*. The sales person writes out the spec and submits it with all the appropriate documentation. CCS takes about two to three months to approve or deny equipment on a line item basis (and pays at 80% of what CCS allows per line item). Once the approval is received, then the order is placed with the manufacturer. When the equipment arrives it is built and delivered for fitting. Total time is upward of about four months or more. The lead time is so great in some cases, the therapists and sales people have to guess how the child will grow.
All of the above are concrete, visible, and systemic racism, magnified by class and disability or phrase it in the reverse order; class and disability amplify racism. None of the above measurable outcome differentials depend on individual choice, parental influence or a culture of poverty. Instead the outcomes are directly correlated to class and race and the socio-economic institutions of the capitalist society that administer these inequalities, as a matter of course.
*The importance of this county level is that counties pay through property tax for their local school district budget. The state apportions the CCS county budgets, thus the poorer the county, the less money they get per disabled child---placed in a poorer school districts in poorer counties. Technically under CCS the state re-imbursements match county expenditures by 50%. Well, provided such matching state money is available, which by spring of each year, it typically isn't available.
Working in tantum, these two public institutions insure more public money goes to richer counties than poor counties and completes the vicious circle.
So to fill in the last piece of this example of institutional racism, consider that there are more poor minority families and children as a percentage of their total population than there are poor white families with children as a percentage of their total population. Now add that there are more disabled children in minority population, per their population totals.
Public service funding amplifies the effects of race through class oppression. Meanwhile capitalism privileges the better off. All together both public and private institutions create an enormous disparity between rich and poor, white and black that is in turn amplified by disability.
Getting back to my position in this nightmare scheme. I started out with a clean conscience, working freely for rich and poor, black and white, where at first I believed disability was a great equalizer. Slowly as the public institutions moved to privatization, I was moved out of university and community service programs into the private sector medical equipment industry.
I am now completely complicit in this oppression as a fundamental job duty. Of course the poorest and most needy have the worst coverage while the upper middle class have the best coverage, so it's my job to hate the poor and love the rich. Obviously more poor are `coincidently' minorities, while all the rich or well off are white. It all has a beautiful existential symmetry for me.
I'll just end re-quoting Kelly quoting Iris Marion Young:
`` `The conscious actions of many individuals daily contribute to maintaining and reproducing oppression, but those people are usually simply doing their jobs or living their lives and do not understand themselves as agents of oppression.' Which means that people, often even when they think they are doing the `right' thing, can be reproducing oppressive practices.''
Of course I fully understand my position, and that is what has radicalized me far beyond what I used to think in my liberal social democrat days of yore.
Now add that the pure genius of neoliberalism and privatization of the welfare state, vastly amplifies the pre-existing inequalities that were formerly a matter of state institutional practice. Remember that the origin of the US welfare state was created to ameliorate the inequalities of distribution, resulting from a free market economy.
Now, under the join of state and capital to `reform' the welfare state, these inequalities of distribution have been naturalized into the routine operations of state substidized service industries of the `free market' in healthcare, housing, and education---all under the aegis of freedom of choice and the theoretical efficiencies of the free market system.
THE MODEL
So then, Charles gave the Marxist theory version. Julio gave the mathematical model version, and I hope I have given a sketch of the empirically derived narrative version. BTW, the latter is often dismissed as antidotal evidence. One or two examples might suffer that unconvincing quality. What I have tried to describe comes from literally decades of experience with hundreds of people in different contexts. After enough repetitions you reach a point where stereotypes or profiles emerge. These empirical collective impressions begin to resemble their abstracted statistical profiles.
Wojtek in a much later post directed toward Julio:
``...there is an element of "structure" even in individual decisions cf. path depedency theory claiming that earlier choices reduce or increase transaction costs for certian choices that follow. For example, if I make a bad choice earlier in life and become a sociologist my later choices are constrained...''
You should be able to see in the above, the profoundly deterministic nature of public policies that accomplish social engineering through a system of apparently small rewards and punishments that very effectively channel individual outcomes---through the system of apparently free choice alternatives.
WS continues: ``Nothing is just structure or just individual choice. Therefore, one needs to look into the interplay of these factors in individual settings instead of making blanket statemens and broad generalizations...''
One way to imagine this interplay is to construct a vector field or manifold that looks like a landscape contour map with a series of mountains and valleys with a roughly linear global direction or orientation. Consider the numerous small streams of water flowing along the lowest available contours until they reach a series of increasingly larger streams and finally become large rivers. While upstream it is always possible to rejoin a previously formed stream nearby, that possibility becomes increasingly difficult and more and more unlikely as one procedes along the global oriented direction of a particular region. This feature is called the gradient field.
The above abstract model gives a kind of mathematical picture to Dwayne's observation that black kids pay for their mistakes with a much steeper gradient, i.e. slide into the `bad' valleys and rushing torrents leading to the evil river of the prision-industrial complex.
In the abstract, the problem with path-dependency or decision trees is they are two dimensional and appear as a linear array of choices or decisions. In a three dimensional manifold like above contour map, you can see the `structural' features of how the differentials or gradients between branches are formed by steep and shallow contours.
So, then in this model you can say such gradient features are `natural' or given. Or, you can start analyzing these gradients and looking for how these differences arise. I maintain almost all of them are formed from the history of US social policy and amplified or reduced by various economic policies negociated between the state and capital that form the political economy, i.e the landscape.
I gather, though I have not studied it, that classical economic theory attributes the features of this contour map to human nature following rational choice. The consequence is path-dependency or a two dimensional multi-linear map that effectively obscures the determining gradients that always privilage, steer, accelerate or retard flows toward one branch or the other at each juncture.
What the former rational choice theory hides are the gradients of social policy and other structural features that guide the flows. Under the rubic of human nature these structural features are made to appear natural and universal, Capitalism 101. This is were Marxism 101 comes in handy. It is almost entirely focused on these structural features. I buy most of it, but it lacks the explicit detail of our historically formed current landscape and acts for me only as a rough indicator of how to look at the current contour map.
CG