![\"\"](\"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/11\/JPEG-800x573.jpg\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
A chart I ran across on Twitter that I use in my stats classes.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n I don\u2019t know if they\u2019re still around doing their thing, but a while ago the \u201cBlack Menaces\u201d group got some attention by interviewing hapless BYU students about different social topics in a way to try to make them look stupid and close-minded. The not-so-subtle subtext was that only those silly privileged white kids would hold conservative opinions on social issues, whereas minorities with their wisdom gained from a lifetime of discrimination would naturally gravitate to another perspective.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Like The Book of Mormon<\/em> musical implying that Africans don\u2019t worship God because of theodicy issues, these folk hypotheses don\u2019t really hold up to even cursory examination as, for example, Ugandans actually tend to be quite religious, and plenty of African Americans hold the conservative social views the Black Menaces are mocking white BYU students for.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n These are specific examples of the kinds of demographic morality plays you see that often take trends with a kernel of empirical truth and blow them into narratives based on demographics. For example, the gender gap in abortion is real <\/span>but very small<\/span><\/a>\u201361% of men versus 64% of women support abortion in all or most cases. Yet, these single-digit differences are then often spun into some grand demographic morality play: in one corner you have old, white men who think that women having sex is icky, and in the other you have liberated, independent young women. This group-based otherization results in the reframing of political contests into demographic clique-based civil wars. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n These narratives are essential parts of grander, meaning-giving stories, so much so that people sometimes respond negatively when they are challenged. I remember as a budding wannabe political scientist attending a paper presentation at the Midwest Political Science Association in Chicago by Gary Segura, the Stanford political scientist who was one of the Hillary Clinton campaign\u2019s primary consultants on the Latino vote and, I suspect, one of the chief ideologues for the overly simplistic \u201cdemography is destiny\u201d narrative (the idea that immigration and increasing numbers of minorities will lead to semi-permanent democratic majorities) that allowed the Clinton campaign to become complacent. He presented results that showed that Black people aren\u2019t any more likely to vote against gay marriage than white people<\/span> once you control for religion<\/span><\/i>. Dr. Segura was openly gleeful at these findings, which was curious to me. If the main metric of interest is the overall rate of approval of gay marriage across the population, then the race differentials <\/span>per se<\/span><\/i> shouldn\u2019t matter, but I realized that he was only excited about them precisely because they support the Black Menaces’ narrative of white=naive and discriminatory, while non-white equals sagacious, wise, and empathetically liberal, which again is part of a larger, essential ur-narrative in modern-day progressivism that blows up the importance of empirically real but often not substantively large group differentials. Of course that’s not to say that there aren’t unique experiences that shape the white, Black, Native American, Japanese American or what have-you experience and outlook, just that interpretations of how exactly such perspectives are operationalized into political action often fit a little too neatly into partisan grand narratives.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n So on to the election. As a personal aside, my oldest children and I were able to attend the official Harris watch party at Howard U. The nature of election results coming in, and their attendant psychological effects, is gradual and creeping. There was no one moment when everybody realized that they lost, rather the heaviness gradually fell upon the crowd by incremental degrees throughout the night as it very gradually became clear which way the swing states were leaning. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Anyway, the aforementioned demographic warfare narrative took even more of a beating from the election, as it is increasingly looking like <\/span>a majority of Hispanic men actually voted for Trump<\/span><\/a>. Anecdotally, this isn\u2019t terribly surprising to me. I\u2019m one of the few white, white-collar professionals on my street, which is mostly populated by successful Hispanic and Black skilled blue collar workers and small business owners (I kind of get the vibe that I occupy the role as the neighborhood white dorky guy who can\u2019t fix anything and always has to ask them what part to get from Home Depot). The COVID shutdowns that many even on the left are now saying went over the top made things quite difficult for them, and even though the shutdowns happened under Trump many of them did blame the establishment keyboard warriors for wrecking their livelihood for a year. Right before the shutdowns my son got in a fight with a boy at school and we met the mother to make the peace, during the course of which we found out that she worked at a Wendy\u2019s and took an Uber to work every day because they couldn\u2019t afford a car (being poor is quite expensive, those who understand understand). I don\u2019t know how she survived the shut-downs.\u00a0<\/span>Anyway, I don\u2019t mean to re-adjudicate the grand COVID debate here, but suffice it to say there is presumably some daylight between popular, conventional wisdom depictions of minorities and women and what is important to them, in degree if not in kind.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n From a Latter-day Saint perspective we see this in our wards in a microcosm; for example, the Mexican immigrant that posts Trump memes (actual experience from my Texas ward), when the most liberal person in your ward is the old white man (another experience), or the first generation Liberian Americans for whom the priesthood ban is not nearly as salient as it is for a multi-generational African American (another anecdotal sense I\u2019ve gotten, which may be inaccurate). Finally, in what is perhaps a paltry but potentially meaningful recompense for our liberal brothers and sisters, in an environment where partisanship is dialed up to an 11 famously conservative Utah was one of only two states where Trump underperformed relative to past elections<\/a>. <\/span>Because people, identities, and worldviews are complicated, and they bely the simplistic demographic narratives that we shoehorn them into. <\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A chart I ran across on Twitter that I use in my stats classes.\u00a0 I don\u2019t know if they\u2019re still around doing their thing, but a while ago the \u201cBlack Menaces\u201d group got some attention by interviewing hapless BYU students about different social topics in a way to try to make them look stupid and close-minded. The not-so-subtle subtext was that only those silly privileged white kids would hold conservative opinions on social issues, whereas minorities with their wisdom gained from a lifetime of discrimination would naturally gravitate to another perspective.\u00a0 Like The Book of Mormon musical implying that Africans don\u2019t worship God because of theodicy issues, these folk hypotheses don\u2019t really hold up to even cursory examination as, for example, Ugandans actually tend to be quite religious, and plenty of African Americans hold the conservative social views the Black Menaces are mocking white BYU students for.\u00a0 These are specific examples of the kinds of demographic morality plays you see that often take trends with a kernel of empirical truth and blow them into narratives based on demographics. For example, the gender gap in abortion is real but very small\u201361% of men versus 64% of women support abortion in all […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10403,"featured_media":48263,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-48256","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-social-sciences-and-economics"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/11\/JPEG.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48256","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10403"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=48256"}],"version-history":[{"count":22,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48256\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":50288,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48256\/revisions\/50288"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/48263"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=48256"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=48256"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=48256"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}