@REHawk
Nah, just old fashioned asymmetric benefits of selfish benefit from prejudice. None of the rationalizers here of not having hired African Americans and women are secretive about the asymmetries of their thinking. They are proud of it. To them, this is normal. To want attainable, reasonable fairness is normal, too. They want that. They just don’t want to act now–to bear any of the cost now, because they don’t see a benefit to themselves now. It was the same with automakers and seat belts. They wished people didn’t die. But they saw no next quarter incentive to changing. It was easier to do the wrong thing.
There is also an element of strategy to racism, sexism, and all top down ideological encouragement of asymmetric treatment of human beings, but strategy is mostly not conspiracy either.
Take richness/power. With food, roof, leisure, purposeful enjoyable work and security, they mean nothing if everyone is rich/powerful. Richness/power take on meaning and operational effectiveness only if they are in asymmetric distribution. Thus, ideologies fostering asymmetry are pursued top down, by most groups at most levels of the hierarchy, and at most nodes of the network to heighten control of future beneficial action and its sustainability.
Prejudice is a highly reliable strategy of creating and sustaining this asymmetry.
Conserving prejudice is a highly reliable tactic of preserving the strategy of prejudice.
Conspiracy isn’t necessary most of the time, and only necessary at the margin, because conservation of prejudice is self incentivizing.
Unless laws, or wars, raise the cost of conserving prejudice to those imposing it as normal and tolerable in the short run and destined to be righted in the long run when they bear no cost, it goes on mostly without conspiracy–mostly through normalization. I try never to forget that considerable numbers of slaves were afraid of freedom; that Harriet Tubbman said one of her biggest problems was getting slaves to think freedom was even possible; this normalization through open, top down institutionalizing of asymmetry is the mechanism/dynamic that must be altered, not conspiracy.
Conspiracy assumes one cannot know who did what and that one must live with it. This is why intelligence organizations often spread and subsidize conspiracy theories in the wakes of their covert activities. Every person that believes in conspiracies and views the world through that lens is a self limiting problem. If you look for conspiracies you will find them and by definition their ultimate culprits cannot be known. Elegant. But just plain bad to do to a culture or group.
We just need to hire some more black head coaches and some women head coaches to free ALL of us of this strategy of asymmetry just a little more. There is no perfection. Not even thinking about perfection. But there is much greater symmetry both feasible and desirable.
Gotta do it.
Then the black folk gotta lend a hand and get us a Chinese head coach. Imagine how many shoes a great Chinese head coach could sell and how many more Yao Mings must be in China to develop in 2 billion people!
KU basketball. It helped change America. It can help change the world! But we can’t lay down on the job and we can’t rest on our laurels. We have fix what we have missed so far and keep moving forward. The more of these asymmetries we fix the bigger and better our recruiting and winning will become!
There is self interest–the enlightened kind–in doing the right thing.
Rock Chalk!
