joshhansen.net

Category: race

  • Bumbershoot internship/mentorship program appears racially discriminatory

    Bumbershoot internship/mentorship program appears racially discriminatory

    36th legislative district representative Julia Reed’s recent newsletter contains this section:

    OPPORTUNITIES AT BUMBERSHOOT

    The Bumbershoot Festival is a highlight for the 36th district. It provides opportunities for local artists to showcase their work to wide audience and gives us the opportunity to see our favorite artists in our backyard.

    But the festival is also an opportunity to invest in the next generation of creative professionals. That’s why I secured $150k to provide a fully-paid, tuition-free training program with internships and mentorship for students looking to enter the creative economy. This ‘festival as a classroom’ program prioritizes BIPOC students in the Puget Sound region and removes barriers to creative industry futures.” [Emphasis is mine throughout; quotes have been reformatted for consistency.]

    Of course, prioritizing BIPOC is the same as penalizing non-BIPOC, so this wording is very concerning.

    The Bumbershoot website’s description of the “festival as a classroom” uses less blatant language:

    This is a tuition-free program designed to remove barriers of entry for underserved communities while supporting the next generation of industry professionals. We are simultaneously laying the groundwork for a more equitable and inclusive arts and music scene.

    Representative Reed’s website uses neutral, non-race-based language in an earlier announcement:

    OPENING DOORS AT BUMBERSHOOT

    Celebrating Seattle’s rich musical and artistic history makes for an amazing way to provide opportunities for our students. That’s why I was excited to see the annual Bumbershoot festival return to our district, with a renewed focus on local flavor and opportunities for local creatives to show their work and to expand their audience. It also provides space for our students to get real world experience in the creative economy thanks to the $150,000 included in this year’s budget.  

    The Bumbershoot Workforce internship program provides young people interested in creative careers with paid training in festival production and technical arts. I’m glad to be able to support Bumbershoot and the next generation of creative professionals in Washington State.

    The inconsistent manner in which the program is described makes it difficult to tell just how open the opened “doors” are, and just how many “barriers” were removed, and for whom. But it would seem that Rep. Reed at least perceived that the funds allotted to Bumbershoot for the internship/mentorship program would be given preferentially to non-white applicants, and felt that it was something to brag about in her newsletter.

    Building racially discriminatory structures into our government and the programs it funds is toxic to the functioning of a liberal democracy, and should be avoided and opposed in every form. Frankly, we’ve been there, and done that, going in every possible direction, and it has only thrown fuel on the fires of racial resentments.

    This program appears well-meaning, but seems intended to distribute its $150,000 based on race rather than relevant attributes like familial income, parents’ education, and so on. Why not target based on what we actually care about as a society, which is helping those in need? Race is a blunt instrument for achieving that goal, and very likely illegal given the recent Supreme Court decision on affirmative action in college admissions.

  • Mandatory Housing Affordability does not make housing affordable

    Mandatory Housing Affordability does not make housing affordable

    Seattle has MHA zones, and yet rent is what it is. Case in point.

    But if you’d like more evidence than that brute observation, a recent study goes further, finding that housing permits declined in MHA zones in Seattle, while they increased in non-MHA zones. This is effectively a non-result, or a negative result, spitting into the supply-vs-demand wind:

    While the metro area population has grown by 30 percent over the past two decades, Seattle is building fewer new units per year than when it had 1 million fewer inhabitants. As a result, since 2000, median house prices have nearly tripled; one in seven residents is severely rent burdened.

    The core cause of unaffordable housing is there not being enough housing.

    Mandatory Housing Affordability centers on a requirement that a certain percentage of units in new residential buildings be provided at below-market rates to lower-income residents. This requirement is coupled with a relaxation on restrictions to the density of developments.

    The goal is noble, but by imposing a costly requirement on developers, MHA drives developments into non-MHA zones, and possibly prevents some developments ever getting off the ground.

    The MHA zones were presumably zoned with an affordable housing requirement out of a desire to provide affordable housing in that geographical area. Now, perversely, the MHA requirement reduces the new housing actually built in the MHA zone, likely contributing to housing costs in that area.

    Whatever makes sensible housing developments illegal to construct makes housing in general less affordable, by making there be less of it.

    If there were more housing to choose from, people wouldn’t have to pay as much – as recently happened in Austin, TX after a glut of new housing construction.

    Every restriction on housing construction is also, de facto, a restriction on the so-called “wrong type of people” moving into “our” neighborhood – which explains much of their popularity. Zoning laws were the original vehicle of redlining, and still reinforce de facto segregation by preventing different sorts of housing from coexisting in the same area.

    That same concern over “preserving the character of the neighborhood”, I expect, is behind the startling fact that 98% of developments in Seattle MHA zones chose to pay into an affordable housing fund rather than actually providing affordable units.

    In a sense, affordable housing mandates like MHA are trying to artificially reintroduce interesting heterogeneous neighborhoods, made illegal by zoning’s introduction 100 years ago, replaced by the sameness of the zones.

    Without restrictions like minimum lot sizes, a wider range of plots sizes and thus housing types and levels of affordability could possibly coexist in the same neighborhood.

    Minneapolis has pioneered such reforms, with good results, and Washington is following that lead (and Oregon’s and California’s) with HB 1110 allowing duplexes, triplexes, and quadplexes in most neighborhoods, and HB 1337 allowing more accessory dwelling units.

    HBs 1110 and 1337 tackle the root of the affordability problem by making less housing construction illegal – i.e. allowing a greater quantity of sensible housing to be built. Many more reforms of that sort can, and should be made soon.

    Increasing housing supply is the only path toward actually making housing affordable. A proper respect for material reality, rather than misguided mandates, will pave the way.

  • Separation of race and state: a response to Coleman Hughes and Jamelle Bouie

    The most delicious thing in the world is a good discussion of a critical issue.

    That’s what we got in Open to Debate’s conversation between Coleman Hughes and Jamelle Bouie on the topic of color-blindness with regard to race.

    It was a great debate. I think Jamelle was most effective in pointing out that civil rights movement leaders’ views on color-blindness were not unitary. Coleman’s quotes were the most convincing to me, but I would still like to see a thorough historical assessment of the question, preferably in book form.

    Disparities between racial groups function largely as embarrassing reminders of past injustices. But beyond that they are a distraction: for every race-based disparity, there is a more general issue—poverty, health, neighborhood quality, etc.—for which people deserve help regardless of their phenotype or the racial group with which they may identify (if any).

    Or is one to believe that a person’s suffering is somehow more deserving of help because their racial identity lines up a particular way?

    Such disparities also exist for religious groups, and yet it would be offensive to American sensibilities (not to mention the First Amendment) for government programs to target members of certain religions.

    So it should be with race which, like religion, is primarily a social construct.

    We need separation of race and state.

    But more than that, we need to untrain ourselves from thinking in racial terms, from seeing each other through the narrow lens of the Census form’s categories.

    Unconscious bias is usually brought up at this point in the discussion: because we hold prejudices subconsciously, so goes the argument, we must build race-based social and political structures to counteract our deep-seated antipathies.

    But again, the same could be said of religion. But the answer to anti-Catholic or bias was not to create government programs favoring Catholics; in fact, it was the opposite: the answer was to dismantle any program that discriminated on the basis of religious identity.

    The United States pioneered a liberal order in which religion was privatized and the state gotten out of the religion business altogether. This has been a wonderful success, freeing us from the sort of religious animosity that killed millions in Europe in the 16th through 18th centuries.

    We have partly achieved a race-agnostic political order as well, but this transformation is incomplete. Race is not yet fully privatized, and many intelligent people, like Jamelle in the above debate, are working to maintain racial considerations by the state in a belief that it is the most effective, or perhaps the only, way to correct historical wrongs.

    But we don’t live in history, and history, no matter how offensive, is never justification for injustice right now.

    In such questions, the racial identity of the sufferer is incidental; alleviation of suffering is primary. It is dehumanizing and illiberal to categorize people by race even under the noble banner of help, because it nevertheless reduces them to a socially-constructed and obsolete category, with which they may not even identify; not only that but by implication it reduces, dehumanizes, and on the basis of the same category refrains from helping everyone else.

    In personal life, the same should apply: if we refrain from an activity, or a relationship, out of racial considerations, we are contributing to and strengthening race as an institution. And so we should (and I believe most Americans do) strive to act without regard to race, to acquaint ourselves with a wide variety of life experiences regardless of the list of categories.

    On that, both of the debaters agreed, differing only as regards state policy. That is the bone of contention, the thing we should all chew on until we make up our collective minds.

    If we all strive for color-blindness in our personal lives, how could we collectively justify “race consciousness” in public policy? Why is color-blindness moral and commendable personally, but wrongheaded, even racist, publicly?