yes

I think a big part of it is he comes across having a really limited world view. He doesn't recognize the bubble of wealth and status he grew up. He probably knew and still knows no black people, but has no problem telling them why they're responsible for their own hardship.

It's not really a justification for making fun of him. However, it's just typical for people like Ben, who parse the world in a really privileged, arrogant way, to be mocked. These ways of mocking him are all double-edged. They all target the fact he had a super privileged upbringing. Yeah, on the one hand, he's a fuddy duddy for spending all of his time studying. On the other he had the support network and family backing to attend law school early. I legitimately doubt he ever spent time speaking to a poorer black person until he was an adult.

People really want to say that he's not in the position to lecture to black people about their own lives and that his experience and understanding is limited. I guess being rude about it is funnier. His entire novel's representation of black people is definitely.. interesting.

What was so privileged about his upbringing again? Does he come from a particularly wealthy family?

The middle school he went to:

It's pretty obvious his family is well-off, idk exactly how wealthy.

Sorry, it was in bad taste for me to laugh at him just because the circumstances of his upbringing lent to an awkward social life. I guess I just got too much of a kick out of his claim that he didn't enjoy parties, if for no other reason than the fact that he comes across (as an adult) as such a no non-sense, "always on" kind of guy that it's not too surprising that he didn't find parties fun.

That said there's nothing wrong with being a virgin, and for the majority of my own life I also hated parties and was also pretty socially awkward.

And as a matter of fact, thinking about it more, there's really something to admire about the the kind determination and focus of he had as a young man, so I should feel bad about laughing at him for some superficial reason.

They certainly didn't used to be, at the very least.



https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/01/is-ben-shapiro-a-conservative-liberals-can-count-on.html

Maybe it's the kippah.

I don't know, most of what you wrote seems like an ex post facto justification for making fun of him. I absolutely get it, and see where the impulse to mock him comes from. There's definitely plenty there to mock: there's something simultaneously grating and sad about him, especially when he asserts himself. In general, though, I find the idea that it's okay to be mercilessly cruel to someone because it's "punching up", and to attribute anything that's disagreeable about their positions to any advantages that they may have received in life (it should go without saying that one of advantages that Shapiro received was being exceptionally intelligent and, likely, being industrious). It goes without saying that that's my opinion.

This basically just sounds like you're faulting him for having 'Jewish privilege': that is to say, you fault him for his success because, rather than being socialized by black people, he grew up in a hard working middle class family and studied his ass off to get into Harvard law school at a young age.

And yeah, he might have a limited worldview, especially if he mostly was socialized by those connected by family and religion, but I think it's a mistake to confuse this 'cultural capital' with actual capital. It's not like he was raised by wealthy bankers or something, his mom took home the paychecks and was a secretary!

I said specifically it wasn't a justification, I was just explaining the rationale.

Finally, what the heck does Ben Shapiro's success have to do with "not knowing black people"? When did that enter into the conversation? This just sounds like a cliched attack from the identity politics playbook.

Nobody would mind his existence if he didn't go around lecturing people on their own lives. That's really the issue, and I believe it's apparent in his book how little he understands black people.

Finally, I think Ben Shapiro's arrogance might well simply be the result of

1. Working his ass off and graduating high school to go to college at a young age, and
2. being made fun of for being so serious and so much younger.

It sounds like you're just assuming that any arrogant and cloistered person is automatically that way because of 'privilege' (whatever that means in this context).

it's a part of his whole oeuvre of lame conservative talking points

He has a law degree and was raised religious. Lol, what do you expect, they're all like that. He just comes across as slightly more annoying than the rest, but listen to the Mark Levin show some time. Holy **** that guy is annoying, and he's got pretty much the same background: a religious person with a legal background.

Ben Shapiro claimed to be successful because he knew no black people?

that's the point, lol, they're making fun of that background and for being annoying.



no, the "self-responsibility" shtick when used to dismiss racial prejudice.

OK, I read your earlier longer post a bit more carefully. I think I understand what you're saying and it seems like it's probably true to me.

That said, I haven't read his book myself.

Reid, what specific examples of things that Shapiro has said on this subject do you have in mind? I'm kind of curious. Might be better to make this a little more concrete.

Oh, OK. Yes, I totally believe it. The whole "why can't you pull yourself up by your bootstraps like I did with the support of my extremely good upbringing, lol".

And yeah, there's more to 'privilege' than having a huge amount of money in the bank.

i will say it's disturbing that conservatives view ben shapiro as some kind of peak intellectual.

I'm thinking of things he has said like this:



It's one thing I think to ascribe *some* inequality to other concerns. Here he's literally saying racism had no part in wealth inequality. I think that's beyond absurd, given the vast amount of historical evidence of discrimination. Such as, for instance, the New Deal housing policy which helped subsidize housing for basically only white people. People alive today still lived through that era, that's still a factor in who has wealth today. To just pretend that doesn't exist is pretty ridiculous.

Well, clearly "culture" (whatever that means) has something to do with it, but clearly the whole "being held back by racism" thing he is arguing against is a straw man. Certainly, you'll find people who really do think that POC are being held back by whites whose ingrained prejudice is actively holding them back, but that's not really the whole story when it comes to inertia of different communities in terms of wealth and success.

I mean, if there ain't much money / education / other forms of privilage in black communities compared to others (for example, the Jewish one of Shapiro's own upbringing, or any other white community), it doesn't matter how much overt "racism" there is anyway.

by the way, i suppose i did overestimate his family's wealth, because i knew he had attended harvard law and his sister is a trained opera singer. i took this affects to mean his family was more well-off than i suppose they actually were, so i learned something new about him.

I mean, isn't this so obvious so as to be insulting? If my parents went to Harvard rather than dropping out of high school to sell drugs, it's not going to matter whether or not their "culture" is better or worse. Well, clearly the two are going to correlate, but I'm not going to get shot because my professor father likes to gamble once in a while.

tl;dr conservatives dismiss network effects and inter-generational "inertia" of success because they want to turn the problem into one of "agency". Then it's easy to dismiss somebody's hardship as a problem of "culture", because of the belief that people are responsible for the shortcomings of their own culture (supposedly because they can just overcome them by changing their thinking, which I don't think is even true for most people).

(But when I hear the world culture, I reach for my identity politics)

I think it says something about conservative media generally. For many conservative media people, especially if they take a more radical or populist bent, believing what they're saying can't be rooted in critical thought, but in trust, often, in the face of, or despite, critical thought. I think that's why, for example, when conservative politicians go on Mark Levin, or Rush Limbaugh, or Alex Jones, they first have to heap praise on the host of the radio show: it's a way of establishing their credentials. (I think it's also because, in some cases, the radio hosts are actually more powerful than they are, so it's a matter of kissing the ring.)

btw, "culture" is such a red herring. Check out inertia of social mobility for something far more pernicious. For example, this professor's book (interesting critical review by a fellow academic here) suggests social mobility persists for something like 10 or more generations, even accounting for environmental factors.

I think it's just trying to sum up in a word the role that African-American individuals plays in perpetuating their circumstance vs. the view that their circumstances are solely the product of white oppression. (I think he could've just as easily used agency as a buzzword here.) I don't know, I think if we had a more reasonable public conservation about this topic, it wouldn't be the case even entertaining the role that the African American community might need to make internal changes was deemed offensive. I mean, partially, that's why there was such an explosion around those really controversial things that Kanye said a few months ago. He put it very imprecise language that made his remarks even more controversial, but that was actually the gist of what he was getting at.

In large part, I think that's a problem with identity politics. What role do white people have criticizing blacks for their own decisions? Whites seem like they're entitled to talk about racism when they can also say they're responsible for it. It'd be a little different if the discussion we had was more balanced, and whites were in a position where they were criticizing blacks for what they do in their own communities. But that would probably have to happen, if the identity politics hierarchy broke down, and the extent to which a group was innocent wasn't in inverse proportion to how powerful it is.

Would it be better or worse if Ben Shapiro believed what he believed because of a sheltered life, or despite the fact that he should know better?

Race seems so inherently bad and backwards as a category that even if you try to upend racial categories by turning the hierarchies upside down, it's going to produce all sorts of nastiness. I highly doubt that getting white people to think more about race (through the concept of privilege) has really helped anyone that much.

I guess my problem with this would be what I'd see to be the folly of addressing an entire "race" (whatever that means) as some kind of deliberating body capable of making internal changes (as if such a thing were possible).

In other words, I think you'd now be endowing an entire group of people with too much agency (rather than the regular canard of doing so toward individuals: e.g., telling black people to just behave more responsibly and keep their kids in school longer or not abandoning their children, etc.).

That said, I don't think that Ben Shapiro phrased his challenge to the panel any more clumsily than would be typical, given the way these problems are usually framed. I think we could probably do better as a society to use better models for understanding these things, but I'm not sure I'd fault Ben Shapiro for phrasing it the way he did.

He certainly comes across as arguing his point too strongly, but if there's something to fault, it's probably the generic conservative ideas about these things he's repeating that ought to be critiqued, rather than his particular expression of it.

I dunno. He's said some pretty offensive and inflammatory things [edit: fixed that link] about Arabs, which betray a pretty biased worldview in general in favor of his own chosen 'tribes' (be it his conservative ideology or his religious and ethnic affinity).

In other words, I am saying that because of the 'sheltered' life he was raised in (Orthodox Judaism), his beliefs seem to be sufficiently virulent that I'm sure he wouldn't care or understand if he should know better.

And yes, I am taking away some of Shapiro's agency. I see him as a product of his upbringing, for better or for worse. I'm sure he's a smart guy, but by no stretch of the imagination a great "intellectual".

I think most people accept, to some degree, that impoverished people are more likely to be less educated. As a result, they're more likely to make poor financial decisions. Or other similar things. I guess you can call that "culture", I think conservatives like to call it "culture" because they want to make comments about saggy pants and rap.



I'm for people trying their best to understand history as accurately as possible. The more people just try to face up to the reality of it, the better we can understand the present. Also helps us understand how to move forward.

He's also trying to be provocative, of course, in addition to expressing his view one-sidedly.