tremr | Tada is correct in his insistence on the need to approach politics from a partially personological (rather than a purely systemic) approach. In order to understand the roots of Oluo's deeply deficient and distorted perspective, it is very important to understand that studies indicate major differences in narcissistic personality traits among individuals from different racial groups.
In general, African Americans tend to exhibit the highest rates of narcissistic personality traits, with East Asians (perhaps with the exception of Tada) possessing the lowest levels of groups measured. While some have suggested that the alleged "black self-esteem advantage" that is well-known among social scientists, may explain these heightened levels of narcissism, as a kind of compensatory attempt at preserving self-esteem in the face of marginalization, other marginalized groups, such as Hispanics, do not exhibit this heightened self-esteem, throwing this hypothesis into question.
Such a self-esteem advantage is likewise absent among East Asians, and East Asians have lower levels of self-esteem than whites. Of course, since East Asians, on average, have higher levels of income than Caucasians in the U.S., we may rightly question whether it is proper to consider them "marginalized" in any meaningful sense of the word. Virgil Zeigler-Hill and Marion T. Wallace stated their "Overview and Predictions" in their three studies as follows:
"Our goal for the present studies was to examine whether racial differences emerged for narcissism in a manner that was similar to the Black self-esteem advantage. This was accomplished by conducting three studies that compared the narcissism levels of Black and White individuals. The present research extends the findings of Foster et al. (2003) by using various measures of narcissism rather than relying solely on the NPI. Also, the present studies accounted for factors related to narcissism such as self-esteem level and socially desirable response tendencies in order to clarify the nature of any racial differences in narcissism that emerged. Given previous research concerning racial/ethnic differences in narcissism as well as the fragile nature of the high levels of self-esteem reported by Black individuals, we expected Black individuals to report higher levels of narcissism than White individuals. Finally, Study 3 included indicators of psychological adjustment so that we could examine whether race moderated the association between narcissism and psychological adjustment."
In their second study, they found that "Black individuals possess higher levels of narcissism than White individuals. The magnitude of the differences varied across the facets of narcissism such that the largest differences were found for those facets that captured grandiosity and self-absorption...". Consistently across these studies, they found that black individuals exhibit higher levels of narcissism than white individuals. This is exactly what one would expect in a cultural context in which activists in the Black Lives Matter movement insist that blacks cannot be racist. Their claim is that the definition of "racism" was changed a few decades ago, so that it can only be used to speak of those whose systemic power allows them to express their prejudices institutionally. Of course, the only reason they insist on this definition is because of the tremendously negative emotional payload the word "racism" has.
The obvious underlying psychological motive in insisting that the definition of "racism" can only refer to discrimination by those with the institutional power to enforce their prejudices is that blacks cannot be held accountable for their actions in spite of the fact that, on an individual basis, they tend to engage in much higher rates of race-based crime, and they likewise feel comfortable accusing whites of being racist merely for being white, despite the fact that whites are far less likely than blacks or Hispanics to engage in interracial crime on an individual level. While systemic racism exists, we must emphasize that in this post, we are merely following Tada's approach in looking at racism from a purely personological perspective.
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