Context is Everything!

There's a kind of running joke in my field that the sociologist's correct answer to everything is summed up as "well, it depends on the context." Hell, the American Sociological Association even publishes a journal titled Contexts. But like many cliches, it persists because it's basically true; no action happens in a vacuum, and the social reality surrounding any event can dramatically shape how even the same activity is coed and received (simple example: think of the reaction to a Black person using that most pernicious of racial slurs compared to a white person using the exact same word).

Few things are more infuriating to a sociologist than when people completely ignore any concern of context to announce what should be done by some other person, or what they would do were they in that person's shoes. To take one especially egregious example, lets look to that graveyard of irony, Forbes, and an editorial they published a few years back entitled "If I Were A Poor Black Kid." It's such a picture perfect example of the specious reasoning employed in the great SMBC comic depicted here.

To save you a reading of the article, it's pretty much exactly what you'd expect: well-to-do white guy explains to poor people of color how despite the institutionalized racism and classism they face every day, it's really quite a simple fix. But the conceptual problems of this guy's tone deaf writings are the two-fold assumptions that if he were a poor Black kid he would somehow have the knowledge and experience of a middle-aged, middle-class white guy AND that people would treat him with the deference and respect our society reserves for middle-aged, middle-class white guys.

To pick just one idiotic example, he exhorts these youngsters (who I'm sure are just eagerly reading Forbes every issue) that they should invest in their education, but take advantage of free education resources, such as Google Scholar. But this assumes someone is teaching poor Black kids what google scholar and these other free education resources are in the first place. This is not something that is intrinsic knowledge, this is something that has to be taught. Hell, I have grad students who aren't aware of the existence of Google Scholar. And yet he's somehow assuming that the crumbling schools serving our nation's poor Black youth are spending a great deal of time teaching them about academic research search engines.

He goes on to lecture these hypothetical kids about financial literacy, which is even more tone-deaf than lecturing them about various research software. Because again, financial literacy is not innate knowledge; at some point, it has to be taught to you. Most schools do not teach meaningful financial literacy, which means it's obviously up to other sources. But what if you don't have any of these other sources in your life? Instead, he's acting exactly as the old man in the comic is -- assuming he just magically knew this stuff as a kid and the reason the hypothetical kids he's lecturing don't know this is because they either weren't paying attention or refused to heed his lessons. Not that, you know, they've simply never been taught this stuff.

Of course, none of this is to mention that all the financial literacy in the world wouldn't do these kids much good without his standing as a middle-aged, middle-class white guy to employ them. Because to assume it's that simple is to ignore the wealth of evidence showing employers are less likely to hire Black people, lenders routinely push Black applicants into worse loan rates, realtors refuse to show Black clients houses in many neighborhoods, police are far more likely to arrest Black people for the same crimes as white people...basically, the entirety of our knowledge about how racism operates in contemporary America.

In essence, this is just a greatly distilled version of white privilege, which is ultimately the ability to ignore context and assume the rules that govern your life apply to all. Which, as the comic so deftly announces, is probably the bitterest pill of them all.