The Monopoly Analogy for Systemic Racism
Ben Shapiro recently went on the Joe Rogan Show where they talked about systemic racism. The interesting thing about the Joe Rogan Show (JRS) is that, when he often has right-wing thinkers and commentators on his show, they temper their more rabid opinions and theories in order to try and inch their way into the favours of the massive probably centrist and centre-right audience of the JRS. What this means is that Shapiro actually conceded some points on the JRS that he otherwise wouldn't have done and has seemingly never done before.
Here, David Pakman looks at a few of the exchange moments:
I want to talk a little of the analogy that Pakman used in his video (it's somewhat similar to the running race analogy made famous by this video).
Systemic racism can be pretty well analogised by the use of the board game Monopoly. The claim is that everyone plays to the same rules in Monopoly. It is not unfair. The rules are not unfair - they benefit or screw over everyone equally, right?
But the analogy goes that, to understand systemic racism, imagine the game played by four players (I am not choosing female players because, to a meaningful degree, it could be applied to women, as well): Harry, Jack, Todd and Jamal. Harry, Jack and Todd play for, say, fifteen rounds, without letting Jamal start the game. They accrue a substantial number of properties and wealth. Okay, so they miss buying the brown properties, but they have accumulated between them a huge amount of wealth, some extra wealth being handed out by Community Chest and Chance.
Jamal is allowed to come and play in, say, the sixteenth round. Now, the rules are fair, right? Everyone is treated equally, right?
Except that Jamal only has the poorest property left to buy and, everywhere he lands costs him a disproportionate amount of money compared to the others. He has not "inherited", at the beginning of his game, an amount of money that allows him to "fairly" compete with his peers.
Without a leg up, some help from others or the system of the game, how will Jamal ever get the real opportunity to either win the game, or at the very least, compete equitably?
But, actually, it's worse than that. You see, although the rules might be fair, they are not fairly used. It turns out that, whenever Jamal has to go to jail, he stays in for the full three-turn term, but whenever the other players go to jail, they tend to let each other off a turn at least one turn [1]. Whilst in jail longer, Jamal is even less able to find a level playing field of competition with the other players.
Furthermore, where in the first fifteen rounds, the inheritance Chance cards came up every turn or so for the other players, it turns out the cards got lost just before the sixteenth round so that Jamal's chances of inheriting money in the game are next to zero. See:
- "Receiving an inheritance helps white families more than black families"
- "White College Graduates Are Doing Great With Their Parents' Money. Higher education alone can't bridge the wealth gap that separates black Americans from their white peers."
- "Three generations of data show how wealthy (white) families stay wealthy"
So on and so forth. In fact, it turns out that, during the first seven turns, the decks of Community Chest and Chance cards have become arranged in such a way that Jamal is disadvantaged for the foreseeable future number of turns.
To make it even more realistic, imagine every five turns, a player gives their hand over to a younger relative, with each relative "inheriting" their older relative's wealth.
So on and so forth. You could adapt this analogy to be even more accurate.
NOTES: [1] The paper concludes:
Using rich new linked data that allow us to address the sample selection problems and other limitations that have pervaded prior research, this paper provides robust evidence that black male federal arrestees ultimately face longer prison terms than whites arrested for the same offenses with the same prior records. This disparity arises from disparities in the intensive but not in the extensive margin of incarceration. Observed case and defendant characteristics are capable of completely explaining the large raw disparities in incarceration, but not in the length of incarceration. The conditional black-white sentence disparity is approximately 9 percent at each decile in our main sample.42 If the disparity is 9 percent across the entire conditional distribution of these cases, then the conditional mean effect of race is also approximately 9 percent.43
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