Jeffrey Yasskin’s blog

Yesterday, I found out that my parents are something-ist. I told them that some of you were thinking of taking in a refugee (wow, refugee is such a strange word to use in the U.S.), and their first reaction was (paraphrasing), tell them to be careful. A lot of the refugees aren’t good people. Well sure, any group of fifty thousand people is going to have a few untrustworthy ones. But why should they be any less honest, on average, than, say, the random person I shared a dorm room with for my first year at college? These people aren’t like random people in College Station. Well, that’s true. The people who couldn’t leave New Orleans were blacker and poorer than those in the town I grew up in. I don’t know which label fits, but I’m pretty sure one does.

I’m not immune to either racism or classism. I’m ashamed any time an instance gets pointed out to me, but the attitudes are still in there. So why am I disappointed in my parents for expressing them? What really matters is the scientific and statistical answer to the question: Are poor/black people more likely to steal from or otherwise hurt the people they live with than middle-class/white people? But there’s a whole lot of grey area between a scientific answer of yes and a scientific answer of no, and I think we’re currently in the middle of it. Our racism and classism is determined by how much we believe one way or another before getting a scientific answer. I see answering yes before all the data is in as a moral failing, and, apparently, am willing to call people out on it here.