Spillover Systemic Racism

I already discussed how hypocrisy is often more damaging to the credibility of a politician than supporting immoral policies is. But I thought it would be a good idea to mention a specific strand that seems related.

Specifically, Democrats have a tendency recently to call policies racist that have racist outcomes, even when the policies themselves seem reasonable. More often, the policies themselves aren’t racist, but other systems that feed into the policies are.

Take voter ID laws. In theory, it actually makes some sense to require that you show ID to vote. It takes ID to do several things that seem less important, like renting a hotel room or filling certain prescriptions. As someone who recently renewed my driver’s license, that requires many levels of identification. Identity verification seems more important for voting than for something like filling a prescription, because the latter is more paternalistic and the former affects everyone.

Similarly, facial recognition software isn’t inherently racist. You can make privacy arguments about the merits of facial recognition technology, but the idea of trying to recognize criminals using this technology is in no way racist. In fact, clearance rates for many types of crime are quite low, and trying to solve that problem is important.

Where the racism comes in is the systems that feed these policies, rather than the concepts themselves.

Why is voter ID racist? Because many voter ID laws are tailored to pick and choose acceptable types of ID that more often discriminate against people of color. But instead of putting energy into making IDs more accessible to people of color, the focus is on preventing the requirement for IDs to vote.

Why is facial recognition software racist? Because the datasets of faces it draws from online are much less robust for people of color than white people (and similarly for men than women). But instead of trying to increase the amount of faces of color that can be found online, the focus is on banning facial recognition.

On its face, this isn’t yet the type of hypocrisy I discussed in that past post. But it will come back to bite Democrats if those underlying issues are fixed. Additionally, Republicans have started to capitalize on these issues, for example by comparing Democratic support for vaccine mandates (and implicitly proof of vaccination) to their opposition to voter ID laws.

Too often, people compartmentalize the policy discussion too much to focus on the issue at hand, and that can cause inconsistency which is easy to attack.