The Janine Chronicles, Cont'd

What is our ideal woke type actually thinking and doing?

How I imagine Janine, with the help of ChatGPT.

I have a few more reader responses to my exchange with

Naomi Kanakia

(read parts one, two, and three) that I’ll share in a few days, but this one from

Shreeharsh Kelkar

was so substantive and Janine-centric I wanted to send it out on its own.

Kelkar is a lecturer at the niversity of California Berkeley and an alum of MIT’s doctoral program in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology, and Society. His work academic work focuses on the history and sociology of computing, labor, and expertise, and he Substacks about some of these topics at Technology and Society.

-Dan

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Dear Daniel,

I loved your email dialogue with Naomi; I wish there were more conversations like this carried out in transparent good faith between people who clearly disagree on a lot.

But my sense is that this discussion has basically ended in an impasse and both you and Naomi are still where you were when you began this discussion. I think that says something about why this conversation is so difficult in terms of reaching common ground.

The biggest problem, of course, is the definition of wokeness which is the elephant in the room here. Naomi says at the end that she “personally see[s] a lot of value in woke ideas” but I think the biggest question is what precisely these ideas are. To her credit, Naomi has managed to sketch out her ideas when she profiled Janine and I think the profile captures quite well Janine's idealism but also why her actions are ultimately wrong-headed.

Before I get to Janine though, I want to talk about what wokeness means. Sam Adler-Bell wrote a great piece (which I wish was cited more) in New York laying out his definition of wokeness. As he defines it: “Wokeness refers to the invocation of unintuitive and morally burdensome political norms and ideas in a manner which suggests they are self-evident” (my emphasis).

I think there are two key points here: one is that these are political norms and ideas that are unintuitive unless one has learned them in a somewhat esoteric place like a university seminar or a non-profit manifesto; but the second piece here is that the ideas are taken by proponents as if they are self-evident and delivered rhetorically in a way that does not try to persuade anyone who does not already believe in that idea. In fact, people who do not believe in that idea are already excluded because they are “perpetuating” something bad by the very fact of not believing in that idea. This leads to the third part of wokeness--which Adler-Bell does not get into--which is that because woke people do not believe in persuading, they end up doing a lot of language and discourse policing and prioritizing language over concrete policies.

Now, on to the hypothetical Janine. Janine, Naomi tells us, is a white woman working at a university who holds a “moderate” amount of power. I assume that Janine is some sort of professor, or, an administrator like an Assistant Dean.

Naomi says that Janine holds woke beliefs about America's original sin etc. but all of that seems to me to matter far less than how Janine operationalizes this belief: Janine seems to believe that the peculiarly American institution of disparate impact analysis is the best way to evaluate the output of any institution. So Janine looks at her department and sees that there are fewer black students in it. And Janine is convinced that the lack of black students is a matter of structural discrimination and not a matter of the "pipeline."

Part of the problem here is that Naomi's hypothetical situation is very vague. What is the department Janine works for? Is it physics or ethnic studies? Is Janine concerned about the composition of undergraduate majors or graduate students? Or is she concerned about the composition of the faculty?

But I think there is a reason that Naomi does not give any of these details. Because, in a sort of typical woke analysis, they do not matter. Because, as a matter of principle, any discrepancy in the numbers of white and black people, in any institution, is taken, in the woke analysis, as a matter of "structure," which, these days, is code for discrimination.

I do not deny that disparities can be important in certain contexts. Naomi mentions the racial wealth gap; this is a structural result of the fact that most Americans' wealth lies in housing and in America's segregated history, black people were either discouraged to buy homes or bought homes whose prices were significantly lower. Wealth grows over time, and so even when explicitly racist policies are gone, their descendants still hold significantly less wealth.

But these disparities matter at certain levels and in certain contexts. The white-black racial wealth gap exists at the national level and there must be policies at that level. It probably exists differently in different states and in cities and in neighborhoods; it would be madness to implement policies to solve the white-black racial wealth gap in the US at every level.

And yet, this is what Naomi's Janine chooses to do (for a different problem). Janine thinks there are fewer black students in her department than there should be. Is this right level at which to study the problem?

It is true that college graduation rates among black people are lower than white people. (Though again, it's complicated. As of 2022, 37.9% of white people and 27.6% of black people are college graduates; in 2000, the college graduates figure was 26.1% for white people and 16.5% for black people. So, a discrepancy, but also, progress. It is worth mentioning here that the college graduation rate for Asian people was 52.4% in 2010 and 59.3% in 2022. Is this a discrepancy that must be addressed? I don't think Naomi nor Janine would think so. It bears mentioning that there is no racial gap in high school graduation rates among black and white people since the 1990s.)

But if there is a white-black college graduation gap that must be addressed (I agree there is), does it need to be addressed at the level of every major and discipline? Should the demographic composition of the mechanical engineers we graduate nationally from college every year mirror the demographic composition of the population? Should we do this for English majors nationally? Should this be true at the level of every department? Should every department of mechanical engineering make sure that the demographics of its graduating class every year mirror the national population?

I think the answer is no; that way lies madness. But Janine clearly does not think so. Janine thinks that the college graduation gap matters not just at the national level. not just at the level of particular majors/disciplines considered nationally, but also at her individual department in her college. If I may psychologize a little bit, I think partly this is because this is a hard problem to solve and it can only be solved by policies at the national level; but Janine has no influence at the national level and her only influence is at her local department.

So, even if trying to solve this problem at this level makes no sense whatsoever, and probably will never work in achieving the intended outcome, Janine is going to do her best to do it with all the limited powers in her toolkit. And she is probably going to fail to solve it for factors that are unrelated to her policies. She will be restrained by who applies to her school. Harvard does not have that problem because everyone wants to get into Harvard but not everyone wants to get into Janine's department (this is the “pipeline”).

What's interesting is Naomi's evocative portrait of how Janine reacts to failures. Janine already believes that “America’s ostensibly color-blind legal regime actually encodes a deep racism.” Partly, this comes from the disparate-impact analysis framework she applies to everything including her own department's admissions policies. And when her efforts to change her own institution's student demographic fail (as they inevitably must unless you are Harvard) and her administration tells her that this is how things are and references the pipeline, Janine sees this not as evidence that she is tackling the problem at the wrong level (her department at Everywhere university) or even tackling the wrong problem (the problem is overall college graduation rates at the national level not at any individual college or department) but of a deep and all-consuming yet subliminal racism that exists everywhere.

And so Janine, again, in Naomi's telling, starts to do what she can at her own level. She exerts her “modicum of power [..] to block the promotions of people who she considers to be racist.” When someone in her department tells her that “This is just the way things are” she realizes that they are racists.

And now we have arrived at the crux of the problem. Whom does Janine consider to be racist? It could be people like me who think that trying to solve every disparate impact discrepancy is madness. That the composition of every occupation does not need to mirror the national demographic; that when demographic disparities in certain outcomes are important and structural, they have to be fixed nationally, and not in every institution and every department. Or it could be others who frame this very differently and argue that there is a trade-off between fixing the demographic balance and hiring and promoting based on merit. Are they racists? Well, by this definition, you are a racist if you speak up in any way, to argue that demographic disparities are not actually the right problem to solve.

This is where Adler-Bell's definition of wokeness is so useful and where the conflicts over language that I spoke about came into play. What is happening here is that there is something both deeply intuitive about and unintuitive about what Janine is doing. Most Americans, coming from a color-blind perspective, would agree that everyone should have the opportunity to go to college. You could argue that Janine is aiming for the same thing. But her methods to achieve it are deeply different. Moreover, Janine has defined as racists anyone else who would say that the goal of government policy must be equal opportunity or someone else who argues that this method of relentlessly looking for disparities everywhere, even in the smallest of institutions, is counterproductive. In other words, “racism,” once defined as prejudice, has now been esoterically defined as “espousing equality of opportunity” and anyone with that view is “perpetuating disparities and racism.”

So Janine has now invented a strange, unintuitive definition of racism starting from a particular set of circumstances (trying to solve the disparity problem in her department). It is a definition that she is going to have a very hard time convincing regular people about and what is more, she has now even stopped trying to argue with them. She considers them racists and sometimes tries to block their promotions.

I think, Daniel, that this also explains why you began your second note to Naomi with the assertion that “my tribe of people have gotten much stupider and less interesting over the past decade, and that this is almost entirely the fault of the left.”

If you think that the reason that we've not been able to root out disparities everywhere is because there are people who argue that some disparities are okay who thereby perpetuate this by the very articulation of this view, then you spend all your time language-policing people who take that view. You make sure that this is your litmus test for jobs and promotions and art, too. And other people, who are sympathetic to the goal of removing disparities, are sensitive to this and they are okay with changing the register in which they speak of these things. So artists try to make art this way and critics evaluate art in this way; they are all being good citizens of the moment.

So what's the way ahead? I think I agree with you, Daniel, that this mode of thinking (look for disparities everywhere at every level and try to solve it at the institutional level, often ineffectually) is not going away in institutions that lean left like academia and journalism. So you are right to be concerned about it.

I am most concerned, for instance, when Naomi thinks that the only people arguing against this sort of indiscriminate disparate impact analysis are “race realists” who think that the races are cognitively different and all disparities reflect innate talents. I'm sure there are some. I doubt that very much. The point is that disparities can be fixed with policies at certain levels and even there, those policies will come at a cost.

Naomi seems to think that no progress has been made whatsoever since the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts were passed but there has been considerable progress. In 1960, only 20% of black citizens had finished high school; by 1993, it was 70%, and it stands at 90.1% in 2022; the figure for white people in 2022 is 91.4%. What has not happened is complete equality (that disparity in college graduation rates) but here, the question is not simply to take every disparity (especially at the level of a local institution) as evidence of systemic racism; it's to figure out which disparities are most important (wealth gap, college graduation; but not, say, traffic cameras that catch people speeding) and then understand at what level we need policies to try to fix them (baby bonds, more funding to community colleges) and at what level these policies are guaranteed to fail (we certainly don't need every major at every institution to reflect the nation's demography).

Many of the policies that actually fix these discrepancies might be incremental, race-blind ones. But I worry that people like Janine may not be open to those policies. According to Naomi, Janine thinks that the “university [Janine's employer] has depended, for years, on people not calling out their racial equality rhetoric for being empty,” that Janine thinks that “the university is unwilling to accept the principles that it lives by.” Or, most concern, “any policy to remedy a societal wealth gap is going to end up increasing the racial wealth gap, because most of the benefits of this program will be captured by poor white people" (not true, by the way, but a great example of zero-sum thinking). For Janine, it seems like "calling out" the university is more important than actually figuring out a social policy that works and electing people who might implement that policy. (And all that “calling out” leads to some profoundly uninteresting art and discourse which is Daniel's problem.)

In any case, I seem to have written a lot and worked myself into a corner. But I do think this discussion has been a good one and while I disagree with her, I do think Naomi has used her imaginative powers to tell us how the "woke mind" functions.

Best wishes,

Shreeharsh