Athena, Holding Your Hair, Whispering In Your Ear

For me a few are enough, one is enough, none is enough. This is not for the many, but for you. We are audience enough for each other.

🟊🟊🟊

This book is an impassioned plea for social and racial justice, but makes the pitch in an unusual way. While the book deploys "the usual" types of arguments set out in popular policy books (lots of statistics coupled with case studies and personal anecdotes), the author did something unusual by focusing on what racism costs white people. The central metaphor of the book are the public swimming pools that southern (and some not so southern) municipalities closed rather than integrate. The wealthy happily went to their private pools, but poor whites were left in the same pool-less position as African Americans. And the author tries to diagram the same pattern in a half dozen different areas: in healthcare, in labor organizing, in industrial waste disposal, etc.

The pitch was good enough, and some of the early examples interesting enough, that, after the first few chapters, I started to think this might actually be a really good book to recommend to skeptical relatives to dramatize why advancing social justice is in everyone's interests. Unfortunately, I think the book's argument increasingly assumes a sympathetic audience and makes some very odd leaps of logic, so I'm not sure it would make for a good "persuader" (and I say this even though I actually agree with almost all of the book's prescriptions).

Probably the biggest single issue is a pervasive base rate neglect that runs through the work. The author will frequently quote percentage increases or decreases without explaining the actual absolute amounts or will conflate percentage increases with absolute numbers in confusing ways.

For example, her discussion of private primary and secondary school attendance is almost impossible to follow: she claims that a factor driving disinvestment in public schools is that the majority of public school students are people of color while the overwhelming majority of private school students are white. But she avoids mentioning how many private school students there are to begin with so it's hard to get a sense of how important private schools are to the overall picture (nor is this addressed in the notes).

So I dutifully looked it up, and found that only about one in ten students overall in the U.S. attend private school, and about 12% of white students do.¹ Moreover, while she's correct that the majority of public school attendees are non-white it's a pretty narrow majority (47% of public school students are non-hispanic whites). In fact, if white students attended private school at the base rate (10 percent), whites would still be just shy of 50% of public school attendance. So it's not really clear that the reason whites are now a narrow minority of public school students is actually a consequence of private school attendance. More meaningfully, it's hard to understand how such a small delta could be driving disinvestment in public schools in the way the author suggests. Even more confusing is that private school attendance is actually declining overall slightly in recent decades, so it's even harder to see how any of this amounts to white parents systematically abandoning public schools.

And the base rate neglect issue recurs. While the statistics the author mentions are usually more or less correct, they're often written in a way that creates a misleading impression. Another example in the same vein: the author describes declining public investment in universities after World War II, and makes the beginning of a case for racism as a cause, but completely fails to address the massive changes in total college attendance since then.

For example, she notes that in the middle of the last century, several states provided free college to anyone who was admitted but have increasingly charged higher and higher fees due to declining public investment. But at no point does the author address the fact that just prior to World War II fewer than 5% of people had a college degree, while the number has increased to nearly 40%. It was (comparatively) easy to fully fund colleges when they served one in twenty people; the budgetary picture is very different when they have to serve one in three. The fact that there might be any contributory explanations other than racism are not meaningfully explored, which is unfortunate.

I could trot out a few more, but you get the idea. The frustrating thing about all this is that she's usually building to a correct conclusion. Most of her points hold up if you actually drill down on them, but they're often framed in superficial ways that don't address the best counterarguments.

That said, if you don't mind doing research in parallel, it's a very interesting book with an unusual perspective. I learned quite a few things about labor history from the book, if nothing else. Recommended with those caveats.