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Is the rhetoric of “White Privilege” just the modern way of acknowledging historical and systemic truths of racism, or does it point to a novel way for acknowledging injustice, or does it on the contrary obscure these insights by involving confused claims about group responsibility and guilt?
We are rejoined by guest Lawrence Ware to discuss several sources, some less formal than others. Cultural sources included:
1. Peggy McIntosh: “Unpacking the Invisible Backpack” (1989)
2. Tim Wise: “White Like Me” documentary (2016)
3. George Yancy: “Dear White America” (2015 editorial in the NY Times The Stone)
4. John McWhorter: “The Privilege of Checking White Privilege” (2015 editorial in the Daily Beast)
Academic articles included:
1. Charles W. Mills: “White Ignorance” (2007)
2. Lewis R. Gordon: “Critical Reflections on Three Popular Tropes in the Study of Whiteness” (2004) (From What White Looks Like
3. Lawrence Blum: “White privilege: A mild critique” (2008)
You may wish to first listen to our initial foray into philosophy and race, where we talked about DuBois, MLK, and others.
Continued on part 2, or get your full, ad-free Citizen Edition right now with your PEL membership. Please support PEL!
McIntosh picture by Olle Halvars.
As an Asian American growing up in the Midwest, I remember many cases in which white people were not the majority, but African Americans. Indeed in these situations I often felt uncomfortable due to foreign cultural norms and the lack of familiar in-groups. Does that mean there is Black privilege? I am having a hard time understanding White Privilege, is there any reading that may be more rigorous?
I don’t know of anything more rigorous than what’s here (I looked around quote a bit in research databases — not that this says there isn’t something out there somewhere). I’m writing a long piece systematically explaining the moral assumptions behind the concept and providing my objections to it (I also provide some limited objections in the second part of this episode). If your looking for more criticisms, see the Blum, Gordon, and McWhorter articles above. See also this book: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/book-party/wp/2017/03/23/the-last-thing-on-privilege-youll-ever-need-to-read/
I look forward to reading your objections, Wes. I often find myself most closely lining up with your perspective, and I suspect that will be the case here. There is a real dearth (at least as far as I have seen) of criticism of some of these PC concepts WITHIN the left. I would have cited Sam Harris as one example, but he now explicitly spurns the left and identifies as being in the “new center”. The only others I can think of are Bill Maher and Jonathan Chait.
Usually when I hear that someone is proclaiming that the “Left” (however that term is defined) has “failed to do A”, it’s usually from a lack of working knowledge of what is actually happening, conversationally and theoretically, in the “Left” itself. “PC”, Identity Politics, and a host of other recent bugaboos that seem to plague thinkers at the Atlantic and other Liberal publications, have been objects of criticism in Anarchist, Marxist, and other “Left-wing” circles for years now. A cursory search of “Critiquing Identity Politics”, for example, brought up the following pages:
1) ‘Against Identity Politics’ <—-https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/lupus-dragonowl-against-identity-politics
2) 'What’s Wrong With Identity Politics (and Intersectionality Theory)? A Response to Mark Fisher’s “Exiting the Vampire Castle” (And Its Critics)' <—–http://www.thenorthstar.info/?p=11411
3) 'A Marxist Critiques Identity Politics' <—–http://portside.org/2017-04-26/marxist-critiques-identity-politics
4) 'Identity Politics and Essentialism' <——http://www.coloursofresistance.org/326/identity-politics-and-essentialism/
I could go on and on but I won't. I'm not trying to be glib here or necessarily chastising but the "Left" has been struggling with these concepts for years, sometimes contentiously. All I really want to say is that we can do better than referencing Sam Harris, Jonathan Chait, or Bill Maher, none of whom really represent significant examples of competent analysis of "PC" politics or Identity Politics, at least not in my opinion.
Well, that’s just, like, your opinion, man.
I really liked your idea about recognition. Looking forward to reading your longer piece.
In short: no, that does not mean there is Black privilege. That’s not how privilege works.
Here’s my long answer. Sometimes, our feelings of discomfort as a result of differing cultural norms and lack of familiar in-groups don’t come because we’re lacking any kind of privilege – they come just because we recognize that we are different, and especially visibly so. As a white woman growing up in the midwest (and this is the view point I will speak from now), I might feel uncomfortable in a space where African Americans are the majority, but that doesn’t mean I’ve suddenly lost any of the privileges that come from being white in the US. Privilege isn’t a simple matter of numerical majority vs minority – rather, privilege is a result of unjust social constructs. When we’re in places with a numerical white majority, it isn’t just because there are a lot of white people coincidentally living in that particular space. When we ask why there are a lot of white people in that space, we often find it’s because of the social structures that make it easier for white people to thrive in that context over everyone and anyone else.
Take, for example, large research universities in the midwest. They often are majority white (like, seriously majority white), even if the communities around them are not. Why is that? Is it just because no one else applies or wants to study there? Absolutely not. The reasons for it are much more complicated, and I can’t begin to list them all here. People have written books on the subject, and you can do your own research. Look into the persistence of school segregation through the gerrymandering of school districts and the school to prison pipeline. Look into the ways academic writing creates a gatekeeper that advantages certain groups of people (and one group the most – able bodied, upper class white men). Look into who benefits most from Affirmative Action policies (spoiler alert: it’s not black people, contrary to what Abigail Fisher’s lawsuit would like you to think!).
As for more reading you can do on the subject, there’s a lot out there! Some by philosophers, some by feminist researchers across academic disciplines. It can be hard to start the research on you own, but it’s not impossible. Here’s a few things you can look at from the academic world.
You can read any of Sally Haslanger’s work on race, gender, and social structures: http://sallyhaslanger.weebly.com/research.html
Any book by Angela Yvonne Davis. Or you can just read about her life and learn quite a bit by example.
bell hooks’ (not a typo, she doesn’t capitalize her name) book, Killing Rage: Ending Racism.
Kimberle Crenshaw’s “Mapping the Margins.”
This may be less easy to find, but the Color of Violence the Incite! Anthology edited by INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence has a lot of great work in it.
“Post Colonialism and the Idea of a Writing Center” by Anis Bawarshi and Stephanie Pelkowski.
You can also find a fair number of YouTube videos on the topic. While YouTube isn’t typically a great place to learn about something other than what happens when you combine coca cola and mentos, even broken clocks are right twice a day.
Tim Wise is mentioned above and he really is a great resource. He has said a lot of great things on the subject, and you should definitely listen to this one! He’s a white man who uses his privileged voice to do something about the unjust system that gives him that privilege, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4mVaLvpsXs
Here’s a clip I like of Toni Morrison: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F4vIGvKpT1c&t=
I hope some of this helps answer your question! There is so much out there on this subject, from both academic and non-academic sources. My one request is that, should you decide to read and listen to the messages of those mentioned above, please internalize it and take it to those around you. This is so important for the lives of those struggling now and for the hope of our futures. This does not just stay in the ivory tower, this is part of our daily lives and we should be doing something about it!
“Look into who benefits most from Affirmative Action policies (spoiler alert: it’s not black people, contrary to what Abigail Fisher’s lawsuit would like you to think!).”
This is worse than the name-dropping that is discouraged on the podcast. You didn’t even drop us a name! You did later list a bibliography of references on the topic in general, but I’d like to see a source (or at least an encapsulated argument) for specifically what you are referring to here.
Very well said, Katelyn. Great resources.
I think the concern of the person you’re addressing ultimately is one of what groups get considered when talking privilege. Your response tends to presuppose that the analysis should only be conducted in a national level and on broad common racial patterns. If I have the other person’s objections right they aren’t so much objecting to that as to asking why a more narrow analysis of who have privilege in a smaller community with different groups doesn’t count as privilege.
That is one might well concede the problems of social structure nationally but note that in a given smaller community the structures are simply different from the national one. The obvious rejoinder is of course that national structures could still be in play. That however would require a more careful analysis.
This ends up just being a common post-structural critique of structuralism. In a real sense privilege discourse really ends up adopting a lot of structuralist logic one saw in social analysis up through the 70’s even as it appropriates elements of Foucalt and other figures. The traditional responses to such structuralist analysis is to critique first off the levels of structural analysis by noting actual power relations are local not national when they beset particular individuals. The second common response is to simply look at what power relations are marginalized in the discourse that is itself put in a privileged status.
Privelege tends to mean social power, We could maybe distinguish permission. A member of an oppressed group may have permission to behave in ways that a member of the more dominant culture doesn’t (say particular forms of dress); but this doesn’t affect the privelege of the dominant culture.
Hey, I’m only halfway through part one of this discussion, but in thinking about the upshot of talking about white privilege (particularly considering Wes’s thoughts), it reminded me of a lecture I was just listening to by Judith Butler on violence and non-violence; and in particular I think that what the discourse of white privilege does (albeit imperfectly) is expose the dynamics of biopolitics. It provides a “way in,” perhaps, as a methodology for uncovering not a material or psychological dynamic, but a power dynamic by which some lives are perceived as “lives” and others are perceived as something less. This refers not to sovereign power which “takes away” life or “allows [life] to live” but to a different form of power which “does not save” life or “allows [life] to die”. For me at least, the discourse of white privilege (such as the kind normally discussed by white folks to white folks, i.e., of the Mcintoshian variety) is a method (perhaps not the best method) of relating the (un)examined life to dynamics of epistemic power and violence. Those dynamics are both immaterial and significant; invisible and consequential. In that sense, privilege is a clunky term for the power to know/not know life as life. I don’t think the concept is reducible to that, but it seems to me like an important component.
Thanks for tackling this topic, especially with Law! I always appreciate it when you have him on. 🙂
The video I mentioned is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3sSFCqzvTEI&index=4&t=2237s&list=WL
I was very glad to hear your guest acknowledge that people “weaponize” white guilt. I got into an extensive discussion of this with Athena Sophia on an earlier comment thread.
The thing that is both so personally galling and, I believe, politically counterproductive, is that such weaponization only works against whites who are at least moderately progressive. The most venomous bigoted alt-right assholes are immune to this weapon, and in fact feed off of it. And they gain converts from the middle by asking whites, especially white men, if they want to go over to the left with their tail tucked between their legs in a permanent state of apologetic submissiveness, or if they want to come over to the dark side of the alt right and hold their head up high and be proud of who they are.
Mark said the minimum bar for white people is to not espouse “social Darwinist” beliefs. And I would agree that it’s bad form, at the very least, to aggressively spout stuff like that just to be an asshole and make people feel bad. But to take the opposite approach, and assume that we should always have equal outcomes, or else there is something hinky afoot–what Steven Pinker calls the “blank slate” paradigm in the social sciences–carries a lot of real-world policy implications that can do real harm.
Before delving into the trickier terrain of race, let me provide an essentially inarguable example relating to sex. By which I don’t mean “sexytime” type stuff, but what I might have called “gender” at one time, before that term was made almost unusable by its contemporary political implications. That is, biological differences between men and women.
The firefighting profession is overwhelmingly dominated by men. My belief is that it should absolutely be open to women as well, IF they can meet the same physical standards. These tend to exclude even most men, other than those who are unusually tall and strong. So they therefore exclude virtually all women. If we apply a disparate outcomes test and say that we must make it so that the same percentage of women can pass as men, we are going to end up with women firefighters who are significantly weaker than what is allowed today. This can, and almost certainly will, lead directly to people dying horribly in fires. If you’re the average middle-aged man in America, you weigh over 200 pounds. If you have been overcome by smoke, you need a really big strong dude to carry you out. If a woman, even one who is stronger than the vast majority of women, tries to carry you, both of you are in deep trouble.
When it comes to race and this “blank slate” ideology, the most serious problem I see is in education, the “Waiting for Superman” phenomenon. This directly impacts my wife’s profession: she is an elementary school special education teacher.* The basic idea “school reformers” have is that axiomatically, inner city schools with majority black populations should be able to produce standardized test scores that are equivalent to those at mostly white schools. Any school that fails to meet this standard (which is to say almost all majority-black schools other than those with selective admission) is, ipso facto, a “failing school”. This means not that the students are failing, but that the teachers and administration have failed the students. No proof is required: as I say, this is considered axiomatic.
But what if it’s not true? What if the educators at the black inner city schools are working just as hard and smart as those at the suburban or rural white schools? What if they are perhaps working even harder/smarter, due to being under the gun, with a constant pressure to improve? What if their students are simply not capable, as a group (we need to be very careful about applying these observations to individuals, who can vary widely) of matching the other group? What if this is not even necessarily about their race in some broad sense, but because these are the black families “left behind” when redlining was outlawed and the more successful black families left for the suburbs? There is ample evidence proving that intelligence is heritable; what if these inner city populations self-select into a gene pool of the least intelligent African Americans in a metro area, and few if any genes are added to the pool from without?
Take that premise as a given, for the sake of argument. What would we see if it were true? The inner city black schools would be put on notice that their test scores must improve, or there will be serious consequences. In some cases, we might see educators crack under the pressure and cheat, as happened in Atlanta. Or we might see schools reorganized or even closed. We might see various groups claim that they could swoop in and do a better job, be given charters, and then report underwhelming results (again, other than those charter schools that have competitive admission: I’m talking about public schools which serve everyone in a neighborhood). And endlessly we would see teachers demonized, for being unable to change something that is out of their control.
I’d argue that this IS exactly what we are seeing. If these groups of people do have (as a group) inborn limitations on their academic potential, I don’t believe, as some “alt-right” asshole might, that we should gloat about this, wave it in the faces of poor black people. We certainly shouldn’t hold animus toward someone because of a limitation they are born with, any more than a black person should hate white people because they “can’t jump” (or, in the vast majority of cases, sprint as fast as elite black athletes can). We should, instead, give them all the resources we can to help them do the best they can.
But that means going back to what Dubya lamented as “the soft bigotry of low expectations”. Instead of making these teachers and students feel so pressured to match an unrealistic set of expectations vis-a-vis standardized tests, meet them where they are and make them feel positive about where that is. If we don’t insist that schools are “failing” because their test scores are lower, we don’t even need to tell students or their parents that their scores are lower than the national average. (I wouldn’t want to completely hide this information from a parent who was strongly interested in knowing it; but it doesn’t have to be presented to every parent at a parent-teacher conference; give them an option like “if you want to see more detailed information about your child’s progress, I can go to the office and get their file to show you if you like”.)
*There are even people who argue seriously, and are *taken* seriously, that it is prima facie racist that black kids, especially black boys, are much more likely to be placed in special education than white kids are. This is a form of focused help these kids are getting, a way of spending *more money* on them than is spent on the white kids who are in “reg ed”, but the optics are bad so it is being called out. What are these “reformers” asking to happen? Take the black kids out of “SpEd” and let them sink or swim in the “reg ed” deep end of the pool? (Or then fire the reg ed teachers if they do sink, I suppose.) Or add a bunch more white kids to SpEd classes to balance it out, even if this is ruinously expensive and means putting white kids in a SpEd classroom whose performance really just does not justify it? It’s madness.
So, are you saying your wife’s apparent poor performance shouldn’t be attributed, at least solely, to her personal skill? In fact, we shouldn’t assume it is a personal failing of hers or her colleagues because there is a larger historical and cultural context at play?
Interesting. I wonder if that logic could apply to any other situations.
Haha, ISWYDT. Clever, but:
(1) My wife is actually considered an MVP at her school. No one is calling her a failure. She teaches at a high poverty school (measured by the percentage of kids who qualify for free and reduced price lunch) but it is in a rural area and mostly white. I would be very concerned if she ever taught at a predominantly black school, because I do think the teachers and administrators at such schools are being treated incredibly unfairly.
(2) There is strong evidence for a genetic basis of academic aptitude, in studies of fraternal vs. identical twins, twins separated at birth, etc.
(3) I found this educational intervention study, described on the Freakonomics podcast, very, very suggestive:
http://freakonomics.com/podcast/does-early-education-come-way-too-late-a-new-freakonomics-radio-podcast/
——–
LIST: So, a first thing to note is we have huge differences across kids. Now, what I mean by that is that our program really, really helps Hispanic and white students and it doesn’t help blacks at all.
DUBNER: How disappointing was it to see that Hispanics and whites moved a lot and blacks didn’t?
LIST: Yeah, I think it’s a mixed bag. I think that when we started down this research agenda, part of our mission was, first of all, to learn about the racial achievement gap and learn about how we can lower that gap. Most of the time we lump Hispanic and African-American kids together, and we say, “What is the solution for minorities in public education?” And I think this particular result teaches us that the education production function across these two groups is very different and the solution will not be the same across African-American and Hispanic families.
DUBNER: Do you have any ideas for African-American families?
LIST: We have a few things boiling, but nothing that has popped up that moves African-American families.
LEVITT: And to be honest, we have no real theory for why that is. The two sets of parents were equally engaged in the program and we can control for all sorts of background characteristics and nothing really explains it. So to me that’s really a puzzle, and a puzzle that I don’t have an answer for.
——–
It’s so taboo to even suggest the answer that I consider to sort of jump out via Ockham’s razor, that they don’t even hint at it. They just throw up their hands in complete puzzlement.
(4) There are also major effects of lead exposure on IQ, and not just in water as in Flint. This is a serious problem for inner city slum dwellers, and should be a strong priority for progressives to combat. But once the damage is done, it is not reversable: not by medicine, and certainly not by schools and teachers.
(5) Even those effects that are arise from socialization cannot be fixed by teachers, so even under your paradigm the fingers are being pointed in the wrong direction.
The arguments you are making fall into a long history of taking contingent features of human society and misusing the mantle of science to try to argue that the world could be no other way. That’s usually wrong. Not wrong as a political correctness matter, but wrong as a scientific matter of trying to actually come up with the best explanation for the world.
You say that your ideas are taboo, but that’s contingency too. In fact, the claim reverses the history. The argument that group differences arise from innate features has been the default argument for centuries.
I can’t say for sure that there is nothing at all to your particular argument, but given that essentially all of the arguments of this flavor have turned out wrong, it’s a good bet.
Hi Alan,
As I understand it, the theory you’re putting forward seems to be that both black kids and white kids have the same opportunities to succeed and that, to the extent we see unequal academic performance between these groups, the reasonable explanation is that the black population have an innately lower academic potential. Or to return to the firefighter analogy with which you introduced this concept, in the same way that males are on average stronger than females (a well-evidenced and understood feature of biology), your claim is that white children are (on average) naturally ‘stronger’ academically than black children. I think you describe this as an ‘inborn limitation on the academic potential’ of the black population.
This seems to me a *very* dangerous claim to make. And ‘J’ is right to point out that it is not a radical new point of view. It is an argument that has been made for many years, usually based on ‘evidence’ that has now been debunked – e.g. phrenology. I honestly do believe that you’re not trying to encourage racism by making this argument, but you must understand that these lines of reasoning have been used for decades (or perhaps centuries) to justify some terribly racist public policies.
Unlike your comparator, being the strength differential between men and women, I’m not aware of any well-understood or accepted biological reason that we should expect lower academic performance from people of a particular race. And, though you talk about the heritability of IQ, the statistical principle of ‘regression to the mean’ would suggest that, in the absence of environmental factors, you would expect the intelligence of a population to move towards average over time.
Now there’s a great deal of evidence to suggest that environmental factors, including parental socio-economic status, will have a significant impact on a child’s academic performance. And, as is well detailed in the readings/viewings for this podcast, America has a long history of social/housing/economic policies which have resulted in white Americans owning the large majority of that country’s wealth. These iniquities have continued right through to very recent history (and arguably still continue in some areas). So I think it’s waaaay too early to throw up our hands and say, “Well, these black children must just be simpler than white folk”.
Sure, it may be true that an unfair or unproductive amount of pressure is being put on your partner to singlehandedly counteract a long history of inequality, but that’s kind of beside the point. It’s really a management issue. If the teachers are well-skilled and are doing their best, then the State Departments should let them do their job and focus on the myriad other factors which impact on school performance (facilities, home life, peer pressure, perceived expectations etc.)
Anyway, hope I haven’t misinterpreted your POV and interested to hear what you think of the above.
YT
Hi Aslan (or are you YT, as you seemed to sign your comment? A little confusing),
Glad to discuss it. To start, I do think your characterization of my position is a little off, although I sense in you too much good faith to think you intentionally created a straw man.
“As I understand it, the theory you’re putting forward seems to be that both black kids and white kids have the same opportunities to succeed…”
I see it as a lot more complicated than that. First of all, there has definitely been a huge, ugly legacy of slavery and Jim Crow, and for that reason I support reparations for slavery but not affirmative action (yes, an unusual position to be sure). I don’t know if it will ever happen, but we as a country should dig deep and commit trillions to a reparations program that targets those black families who have the greatest deficit in wealth compared to whites (for it is wealth rather than income that shows the greatest disparity, and that makes sense since white families have been able to build wealth for generations that black families were robbed of).
Secondly, I believe that in many places (particularly the South), racial discrimination is an ongoing major factor that holds black kids back. This needs to be challenged and changed.
But my views on this have evolved over time in part because of things like the study I cited upthread, about the intervention that dramatically helped white and Hispanic kids but not African Americans. More broadly, there are also parts of the country where the funding disparities you are more likely to see in the South and some other places are not there–where, in fact, public schools serving mostly black populations have robust budgets and people who sincerely want to raise these kids up. And yet by and large, the test scores are not budging. (One issue that may be outside the scope of this discussion but is worth raising at least briefly is the notion of “multiple intelligences” as promoted by the Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner. I have the sense that African Americans excel in some of the types of intelligence that don’t apply so much to academic performance, which is true of the majority of those Gardner identified–the full list being musical-rhythmic, visual-spatial, verbal-linguistic, logical-mathematical, bodily-kinesthetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, and naturalistic).
New Jersey makes for an interesting test case. 20 years ago, its state Supreme Court mandated a huge increase in spending in poor districts (which, in New Jersey, serve mostly black students). WNYC reported last April on the results in Camden, a district with only 15% white enrollment:
http://www.wnyc.org/story/what-happened-when-one-new-jerseys-poorest-school-districts-increased-spending/
——–
In 1997, the New Jersey Supreme Court ruled that the state’s school funding formula was leaving behind poor students. It ordered millions of dollars in additional funding to 31 of the then-poorest districts — until the state could come up with a new, better formula.
Today, many of those poorest districts are still outspending some of the state’s most affluent schools. But Eric Hanushek, who studies education funding at Stanford University, says much of that money hasn’t paid off.
“They’re currently spending 2.5 times the national average, and there’s no real evidence that they’re closing the achievement gap or that they’re doing significantly better,” Hanushek said.
——–
Now, for conservatives, this kind of thing serves as an excuse to oppose increased funding for poor districts. This is not my jam. I’m sympathetic to the argument made by Camden Schools Superintendant Paymon Rouhanifard:
——–
Rouhanifard says focusing only on test scores overlooks the good the increased funding has done.
“If you read the stories about Camden from the early 90s, late 80s, it was a really, really horrendous situation where schools couldn’t offer basic meals for their kids,” he said. “They didn’t even have cafeterias. They didn’t have basic textbooks.”[…]
Camden recently spent $5 million on new textbooks — because students needed them and the district could afford them.
“That doesn’t translate into student achievement, but we’re in a very, very different place,” he insists.
——–
I would absolutely not be in favor of reducing their funding, or breaking up the schools, or firing the teachers or administrators. Sounds like their students are better off (and one look at the photo accompanying the story tells me this is not a place that doesn’t care about its kids). Great. Stop roiling up a big fuss solely on the basis of test scores. If a school district is suffering from the kind of problems Camden was 25 years ago, then address that. But if they have adequate funding and there is no obvious incompetence by the administration and faculty, but the scores stay low relative to mostly white schools? Just leave it be.
“[Y]our claim is that white children are (on average) naturally ‘stronger’ academically than black children. I think you describe this as an ‘inborn limitation on the academic potential’ of the black population.”
Yes, although I noted that some of this may well be due to exposure to lead, a very serious problem. It would also likely help to get black mothers’ breastfeeding rates up to levels seen in white mothers (and it would help everyone for all groups’ breastfeeding rates to rise). But even genetically: African Americans today are not just some random sampling of all the descendants of sub-Saharan Africans. Their ancestors, first of all, were enslaved–often first by other Africans before being sold to Muslim and European slave traders. There were, I’m sure, a few geniuses among those captured. But it’s not hard to imagine that this population was lower in IQ than the average African. Then there was the passage over, which claimed many more lives. Would this have selected for academic intelligence? Hard to see how. After that, surviving hundreds of years of slavery, during which enslaved African Americans who could read were killed.
During the post-Civil War Reconstruction period, there was a brief opportunity for freed former slaves to become politicians and community leaders. Tragically, this brief window only served to put targets on certain individuals’ backs once the North withdrew troops, at which point the KKK killed so many who had become too “uppity” in their eyes. This surely did not help the gene pool.
So now we have an African American gene pool that has repeatedly been culled of the “best and brightest”, at least in academic terms. Nothing like this happened to whites or other ethnic groups. (Furthermore, I suspect–but can’t find data to confirm–that people who immigrate *voluntarily* to the U.S. are smarter than the average yokel who stays behind on the farm. So if true, this gives everyone in the U.S. but African Americans and Native Americans a leg up.)
“I honestly do believe that you’re not trying to encourage racism by making this argument, but you must understand that these lines of reasoning have been used for decades (or perhaps centuries) to justify some terribly racist public policies.”
I think I could certainly be defined as a racist in some senses of the word. But my racism is of the paternalistic variety. As mentioned previously, I support reparations and robust funding for social services for poor African Americans. I even spearheaded a march to protest a case of police brutality against a black man who had done nothing wrong except annoy the police by repeatedly calling 911 to ask them for help (he was stranded in the town I lived in). I find it disgusting when people use these kinds of differences to express hate toward African Americans. But those things are not inherently tied up together. At one time, people with genetic conditions like Downs Syndrome were treated abominably. Today, they are treated pretty charitably by society, I’d say–and I’m glad of it. But we don’t expect them to live up to the same academic standards as everyone else, or pretend the problem is with the schools if they do not.
“And, though you talk about the heritability of IQ, the statistical principle of ‘regression to the mean’ would suggest that, in the absence of environmental factors, you would expect the intelligence of a population to move towards average over time.”
No, that’s not how regression to the mean works. It means that if you take two very high IQ parents, or two very low IQ parents, their offspring are likely to be closer to the mean than they are (although still probably on the parents’ *side* of the mean). That’s within one family. Large groups that don’t interbreed with other groups are different. That’s why you have certain places like Croatia or the Netherlands where the average height is so high. You might have a couple of especially tall Croatian basketball players who get married and have a baby, and that baby is likely to be shorter than the parent of their sex when he or she grows up. But the basketball players’ offspring will still likely be above average for Croatia, and almost certainly above average on a worldwide basis. And those height genes are going to keep bouncing around Croatia and making that ethnicity taller than others, unless they start substantially mixing with other groups who aren’t as tall.
“Now there’s a great deal of evidence to suggest that environmental factors, including parental socio-economic status, will have a significant impact on a child’s academic performance.”
Yes: about half the influence. In the ongoing nature-nurture debate, it is the “nurture” side who have tended to be the extremists, locating almost all the influence with environment. The so-called “nature” side is fully willing to admit that it’s a roughly 50-50 split. (And I’m intimately familiar with that “nurture” crowd: my father was a professor of anthropology and my mother a professor of sociology; my wife–who BTW disagrees with, or just doesn’t want to confront, a lot of what I’m saying here–got her bachelor’s and first master’s in sociology as well.)
“And, as is well detailed in the readings/viewings for this podcast, America has a long history of social/housing/economic policies which have resulted in white Americans owning the large majority of that country’s wealth.
These iniquities have continued right through to very recent history (and arguably still continue in some areas).”
We agree on this, as I noted earlier. However, the left-leaning Brookings Institute acknowledged in a 1998 report:
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-black-white-test-score-gap-why-it-persists-and-what-can-be-done/
——–
Traditional explanations for the black-white test score gap have not stood up well to the test of time. During the 1960s, most liberals blamed the gap on some combination of black poverty, racial segregation, and inadequate funding of black schools. Since then, the number of affluent black families has grown dramatically, but their children’s test scores still lag far behind those of white children from equally affluent families.
——–
How do you explain that?
“Sure, it may be true that an unfair or unproductive amount of pressure is being put on your partner to singlehandedly counteract a long history of inequality”
Not on my partner, but on many others in her field. She teaches at a high-poverty school, but it is in a rural area and predominantly white.
“If the teachers are well-skilled and are doing their best, then the State Departments should let them do their job and focus on the myriad other factors which impact on school performance (facilities, home life, peer pressure, perceived expectations etc.)”
No disagreement there, except that I believe at some point they should stop wringing their hands and expecting their interventions to cause these populations to match the national average in every way. Just try to help them have “the good life”. They deserve it as a kind of inheritance, after all that we have put their people through.
“Anyway, hope I haven’t misinterpreted your POV and interested to hear what you think of the above.”
I thought you did in some respects; but as I said, I think it was an honest misunderstanding, and I’m likewise interested to hear what you think of my response. Cheers.
Thanks Alan – I think I understand what you’re saying more clearly now, though I can’t say that I agree with it all.
I guess my basic concern is that you’ve jumped to a conclusion without anything like sufficient evidence. And it’s a particularly dangerous conclusion to have reached – one that we know historically has always been tempting, but which has been proven wrong time and time again, and has done enormous damage in the meantime. I’ll try to keep this brief, since we might just have to agree to disagree, but here are a few points which, from my perspective, are important to think about:
First, as I already mentioned, there is no biological reason that we would expect different races to have lower intelligence. And it’s not sufficient to point to isolated cases of investment in education that didn’t deliver results, and say that therefore the problem must be an ‘inherent’ limitation in the ability of black kids. A plus B just doesn’t equal C. If the problem truly was that black children were being held back by ‘natural’ limitations on their ability, then we would expect to see that NO programs are effective at closing the gap, and this is simply not the case.
FWIW, while doing some thorough (*cough* Google *cough*) research on your arguments, I came across a great review of a book that deals directly with these issues. Check it out, particularly the section headed ‘The Heredity-Environment Controversy’: http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/j/jencks-gap.html
I think that, if you try to remain open-minded and avoid the temptation to just stick to your guns, some of the evidence outlined in that article might make you seriously reconsider your position.
Second, I’m sorry, but your story about the ‘best-and-brightest’ having been weeded out of the African-American gene pool really sounds to me like pseudoscience. Neither the premises or the conclusions are supported by evidence. You could tell narratives like this about many different populations. For example, Australia was for many years a colony of convicts from England. Should we expect the many descendants of this population to have lower IQs and higher rates of criminality? And, just like the KKK, the Nazis targetted and imprisoned/killed those who were considered ‘uppity’ in the countries they occupied during WW2. Should we expect that the French population has a lower IQ as a result?
Finally, thanks for your explanation of ‘regression to the mean’. It accords precisely with what I thought it meant. And, I remain of the view that it is a relevant principle here. Let us for a moment accept your assertion that those captured as slaves in Africa had a lower intelligence than the general population (for simplicity, let’s say 10 IQ points lower than average). Then, just like your example of the especially tall Croatian parents, we might expect the children of those people to have below average IQ, albeit closer to the mean than their parents. If you say that the nature-nurture divide is 50-50, then we might expect them on average to be 5 IQ points below average. And then the children of that generation will be closer to the mean again. As you’ll see, no matter what your starting point, it doesn’t take many generations for the population to revert to a basically average distribution.
So, even if we accept your claim that those captured as slaves were the ‘worst’ of the African gene pool (and I actually don’t think that is a fair assumption to make), this doesn’t mean that African-Americans of the current generation will have less than average ability. And really, to say “They can’t help it, they’re descended from slaves” is just plain
You may think of it as paternalism, and you may have the best of intentions, but I truly believe that the POV you are espousing is harmful and I would strongly encourage you to reconsider.
I hope the above doesn’t come off as a personal attack at all. I know that you’ve engaged in this in good faith and I want to do the same, but just trying to clearly put forward my perspective. Again, v interested to hear whether any of what I have said resonates with you, or whether you think that I’m just blind to what (for you) is an obvious conclusion.
I’ve read the NYT book review you cited. They clearly go into it with a strong disposition toward seeing it the way you do (and let’s face it, in the modern West, taking any other angle is a good way to ruin your reputation and career–fortunately for me, I have no career to ruin!). I note the impeccable logic of the 1969 Jensen formulation they cite:
——–
–Most of the variation in white IQ scores is genetic.
–No one has advanced a plausible environmental explanation for the black-white gap.
–Therefore it is more reasonable to assume that part of the black-white gap is genetic than to assume it is entirely environmental.
——–
“First, as I already mentioned, there is no biological reason that we would expect different races to have lower intelligence.”
Races are nothing more than extended families, as Pinker noted in _The Blank Slate_. Given this fact, and the fact that IQ is strongly heritable, it would be astonishing–almost unimaginable–if every race had the genetics for an exactly equal level of IQ. The coincidence involved there is beyond comprehension. So we can essentially be certain that some races will, on average, have a predisposition to higher IQs than others. From there, it’s just about measuring which ones are which. (A project, I note, that I would be happy for us as a society to eschew, just out of politeness and general decency, as long as we don’t make public policy predicated on the axiom that there are not such disparities.)
“If the problem truly was that black children were being held back by ‘natural’ limitations on their ability, then we would expect to see that NO programs are effective at closing the gap, and this is simply not the case.”
I think you meant to say “narrowing” the gap rather than “closing”. If you know of programs that have closed it entirely, please cite them. Narrowing the gap is entirely consistent with the 50/50 split between nature and nurture that I talked about in my previous comment. If and when it is closed entirely, my thesis will be debunked. I’m not holding my breath.
“Finally, thanks for your explanation of ‘regression to the mean’. It accords precisely with what I thought it meant. And, I remain of the view that it is a relevant principle here. Let us for a moment accept your assertion that those captured as slaves in Africa had a lower intelligence than the general population (for simplicity, let’s say 10 IQ points lower than average). Then, just like your example of the especially tall Croatian parents, we might expect the children of those people to have below average IQ, albeit closer to the mean than their parents. If you say that the nature-nurture divide is 50-50, then we might expect them on average to be 5 IQ points below average. And then the children of that generation will be closer to the mean again. As you’ll see, no matter what your starting point, it doesn’t take many generations for the population to revert to a basically average distribution.”
No. You still don’t have a handle on regression toward the mean, particularly as it applies to a gene pool. (If you were right, there would be no countries with notably tall or short populations, or even any IQ difference between humans and chimpanzees.) I suggest carefully reading the entire Wikipedia entry on it, but I will highlight this part:
——–
Although extreme individual measurements regress toward the mean, the second sample of measurements will be no closer to the mean than the first. Consider the students again. Suppose their tendency is to regress 10% of the way toward the mean of 80, so a student who scored 100 the first day is expected to score 98 the second day, and a student who scored 70 the first day is expected to score 71 the second day. Those expectations are closer to the mean than the first day scores. But the second day scores will vary around their expectations; some will be higher and some will be lower. This will make the second set of measurements farther from the mean, on average, than their expectations. The effect is the exact reverse of regression toward the mean, and exactly offsets it. So for every individual, we expect the second score to be closer to the mean than the first score, but for all individuals, we expect the average distance from the mean to be the same on both sets of measurements.
——–
Another key point in that article is that it is not a causal process (and BTW incorrectly ascribing causation is a common problem in social science). It occurs only because two parents with extreme genetics (extremely tall or short, or of very high or low intelligence) were more likely to have been a “fluke” to begin with. This does not at all apply to large interbreeding populations that make up a gene pool. Just the opposite.
“I’m sorry, but your story about the ‘best-and-brightest’ having been weeded out of the African-American gene pool really sounds to me like pseudoscience. Neither the premises or the conclusions are supported by evidence. You could tell narratives like this about many different populations. For example, Australia was for many years a colony of convicts from England. Should we expect the many descendants of this population to have lower IQs and higher rates of criminality?”
The Reconstruction-era terror campaign by the KKK to eliminate black political leaders (who we can assume were above average in IQ) is well documented: https://cnx.org/contents/oL9PqrP4@3/The-Collapse-of-Reconstruction
And while criminals can be clever, there is in fact evidence of a genetic predisposition toward criminality in Australians: http://www.news.com.au/national/crime/australian-convict-history-could-mean-warrior-gene-leaves-a-legacy-of-crime-in-our-blood/news-story/be1d4d6ab0b67a4e941088039107b4e1
But since there’s that 50/50 share of nature and nurture, that doesn’t make individuals with that predisposition doomed to be criminals. They need to be vigilant, however.
Look, Alan, it seems that we’re just not gonna be able find any common ground here. I find it interesting that you want to call out ‘bias’ on a well researched and reasoned article that doesn’t support your POV, yet you’re quite happy to cherry pick studies or tabloid news articles that suit you. I’m gonna have to bail from this convo now, but before I do, a few points:
1. You might want to think again about the ‘impeccable’ logic of Jensen. First, you yourself say that nature-nurture is 50-50, so the first premise of his ‘impeccable’ logic falls away. The second link in the chain is simply not true. There are many plausible explanations that have been advanced, including those in the article I sent you (even if you think it has a ‘slant’, that doesn’t mean the suggestions are implausible). And the third link simply doesn’t follow. It’s equivalent to saying, “Well, nobody can prove what is going on, so my explanation must be true”,
2. You still seem to have misunderstood the section you extracted from wikipedia on regression to the mean. The point here is that, across the whole population, the breadth of distribution will remain the same. So, for example, across the whole human population we won’t see that after numerous generations that everybody has the same intelligence. There will still be unusually intelligent and unusually unintelligent people. The reasoning I set out in my last comment remains valid.
I’m not sure whether you’re just emotionally invested in this position, but you seem to be erroneously assuming that you can simply assert a thesis and then the onus is on others to ‘debunk’ it. This is not a scientific approach. Instead, as I keep saying, you are falling into the all too tempting racist prejudices that we know humans have historically been fallible to.
I get the last word? OK then.
It’s clear you don’t have a sufficient grasp of the principles of statistics and probability, not only to have initially understand regression toward the mean, but even to have the capacity to understand any detailed series of explanations and examples I might offer. Certainly not when you are so resistant to being educated on the topic. “There are none so blind as those who will not see.”. But if anyone approaching it with more of an open mind wants further explication, let me know, because many illustrative examples come to mind.
As for burden of proof: the average IQ of African Americans has remained significantly below that of whites (and even further below that of Asian Americans). This is an undisputed fact. The disparity remains after controlling for socioeconomic factors. Another fact. IQ has been proven to be highly heritable. Fact. It is statistically impossible for all races to be equal in genetic potential for average IQ. Those are more than enough to shift the burden of proof to those like you who insist there’s no way the African American gene pool contains fewer of the genes that convey high academic intelligence. Why do affluent black kids score so much lower than affluent white kids? You offer no answer and huff that even asking the question is tantamount to practicing phrenology. (Remember, I have repeatedly advised that we as a society politely avoid inquiring into this area, but that also means quietly discontinuing regulations requiring all schools to get their test scores up to the national median or be punished.)
In the next decade or two, they will likely isolate all the genetic factors for IQ. At that point, I see two possible outcomes, both better than the status quo in my view:
(1) People start doing as I have advised: quietly discontinuing the “reform” movement centered around test scores and doing more like we see in Camden: alleviating poverty and addressing social problems.
or
(2) Genetic engineering becomes ubiquitous, and every baby’s genome gets tweaked to the max intelligence setting. People still have outward racial characteristics, but nearly all the IQ gaps are wiped away, and those which remain finally can be laid entirely at the feet of “nurture” (though if you notice, the nurture crowd as in your NYT cite opens up a whole ‘nother can of worms: “Nothing wrong with black people’s genes–they just don’t know how to raise their kids properly, as we white folk do”).
You also repeatedly failed to even acknowledge lead exposure as a major factor in all this.
I feel that it’s important to note, even if no one takes me up on my offer to provide other explanations and examples, that speciation would be impossible if regression toward the mean worked the way you described it. It would be impossible for there to be both chimpanzees and humans (and gorillas and orangutans for that matter). Actually, you could take it even further back, and it would make it impossible (or at least very difficult) for there to be multiple species of any kind. Everything would always be reverting back to “average animal” mode.
Ok, I can’t help myself. Humans split from chimpanzees due to genetic mutation. These mutations occur randomly over very long periods of time. Sometimes, when the mutation results in a survival advantage, you will see evolution in species, or even splits between species. That has nothing to do with the claims you have made here…
Alan, you’re not as smart as you think you are. You might want to keep that in mind before declaring the intellectual inferiority of millions of other humans on the basis of race.
Aslan,
Classic. You say you’re done but you can’t resist weighing in again, because you can’t handle someone else having the last word.
I’ve given up trying to explain these matters of statistics to you. If someone else asks for clarification, I can do that; I have expended more than enough effort on it with you.
But since you directly challenged my intelligence, I will just note that I aced the SATs, and I belong to the Triple Nine Society, which is open only to people scoring above the 99.9% tile on I Q tests. (95% of Mensa members do not qualify.). http://www.triplenine.org/HowtoJoin/TestScores.aspx
This is something I only ever “brag” about in response to someone casting aspersions on my intelligence, as you have. Most of my closest friends do not even know I am a member.
BTW, I just happened upon this article, which is a sign of the kind of losing battle you’re likely to face by attempting to dispute race-IQ research findings on the merits:
http://www.news-medical.net/news/2005/04/26/Race-differences-in-average-IQ-are-largely-genetic.aspx
A much better idea, as I keep saying, is to discourage this type of research as being essentially uncivil, and to stop collecting data on IQ/aptitude and race–and certainly to stop insisting that schools and teachers must erase the disparity.
First off, I think Mark’s thoughts about the philosophical side of just what we are doing here are important. That said…
Alan, while you can find evidence for your views (many people have made the argument before), there is also quite a lot of work in population genetics and on IQ that does not support the picture you are painting. The fair reading of all of the evidence together is that the evidence is equivocal and complicated.
You’ve posted links and quoted from various popular media news summaries. There are a variety of problems with both the summaries (e.g. sub-Saharan African populations have an average IQ considered retarded?) and your sometime selective quoting of them. Reading the scholarly work itself (and the scholarly replies), a lot of your questions about what possible alternative explanations exist are answered. Certainly there is no fair interpretation that genetics is the only reasonable interpretation left or even that 50% variation explained by heritability is a good estimate. On the other hand, we presumably agree that it’s also unreasonable to dismiss IQ tests altogether and assume zero heritability (either on statistical principle or the evidence at hand).
This argument has gone around and around before. The discussion surrounding Hernstein and Murray’s The Bell Curve and more recently, Nicholas Wade’s A Troublesome Inheritance, puts more flesh on the issue than we can or should do here. Wade’s case is especially relevant here because the logic of his arguments are similar to yours.
Solid post, J. I appreciate your equanimity.
I actually have the Wade book, although I have not finished it.
But there is a caveat I am starting to feel I should reiterate in every comment, due to situations like Mark’s where people may pop in and only see some and not all of the conversation. Apologies in advance to those for whom this is redundant; you can stop here.
DISCLAIMER: I am strongly in favor of more government spending on educational initiatives and social programs that benefit poor black kids. Even as an atheist, I agree with what Jesus said about the “least among these” (to tie it more in with modern philosophy, does this not also resonate with Rawls and his “original position”, or am I remembering that podcast wrong?). And I would love to see the race/IQ discussion go away completely, and for schools not to even collect this data. But as long as policymakers are collecting it, reporting it, and punishing teachers and administrators for not making kids of different races equal in aptitude, I’m going to feel forced to take up the argument, distasteful though it certainly is.
Ha; what a massively tendentious argument! I’ll call it what it is: Sophistry and dressed-up racism. Aslan suffers you too much.
Alan, I would recommend checking out this episode of This American Life to give a little more perspective on the issues in inner-city schools:
https://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/562/the-problem-we-all-live-with
I’ve heard it. I’ve been a regular TAL listener for many years (well over a decade for sure).
I feel like most of you were too scared to really interrogate the concept like you could have. Why not play it on easy mode?
In the US, Evangelical Christians are 25% of the population. Most of the statistics you were talking about apply to them (much less likely to be represented in media, poorer than some other religious groups, etc). How do you feel about the privilege critique as applied to this group? Are you willing to draw the same conclusions you would for race?
Hard mode is left as an exercise for the reader.
Is there a history of discrimination against evangelicals? Are they overrepresented relative to their percentage of the population in prison and poor communities? Do they have to worry about being stopped by cops and specially tracked by security guards, etc. etc. etc.?
According to Pew, Evangelicals are less likely to be rich (> $100K/year) than Catholics, Hindus, Mainline Protestants, Muslims, and others. They are in fact overrepresented among the poor if we look at the < $30K group, where they are more likely to fall than Mainline Protestants, Mormons, Muslims, Orthodox, Jews, and even the unaffiliated. I don't have stats for the other things you mention.
But I think way too much work is being done by "etc, etc, etc." How do you avoid the temptation to cherry-pick stats to fit the conclusion you already want to reach? Evangelicals are underprivileged according to the social status/media representation stats talked about in podcast. They are underprivileged according to the poorness stats you mention here. I don't have measurements for the other things you mention. Does that make them at least 50% underprivileged, or we keep looking for more stats where they beat the odds relative to percent of population until we find enough to make them privileged again?
Finally, and I was trying to avoid going back to race, but if we go strictly by the criteria you listed in this comment, Asians are substantially more privileged than whites. Do we bite that bullet, or not?
No one choses their race. On the other hand, people do chose whether to be evangelicals or not, at least adults do.
What’s more, it is evident at first sight what race people belong to, while if I go into a supermarket, the security guard has no way of knowing whether I am evangelical or not. On the other hand, the security guard will see immediately that I am a person of color and will tend to be more suspicious of me than of a white person.
Now it may be that there is a factor besides discrimination against their religious affiliation which leads evangelicals to be poorer than, say, Hindus. It may be that evangelicals are less educated than Hindus are or that, God forbid, a religion which believes that the Bible is literally true tends to attract people of lesser intelligence.
We’re apparently falling into a habit of making similar comments within minutes of each other. 🙂 I just thought it was humorous and worth pointing out.
I see that, but for the record, if someone looks at the times of the comments, they are almost simultaneous, so it would be impossible for one of us to have copied the other.
All I can say is that your opinions are very perceptive and bright.
Well, thank you! That’s very kind of you to say.
Evangelical is a category that is chosen. A person cannot be identified as Evangelical by sight. As such, it cannot be subject to the kinds of discrimination being discussed. That doesn’t lessen the issues that those people deal with, but since it is a chosen group, it might be more fruitful to ask why Evangelism happens to be chosen by people you have called underprivilieged.
Based on that principle, it’s fine to discriminate against someone for being Muslim, since being “[Muslim] is a category that is chosen.”
I’d suggest getting a different principle.
As an atheist, as a supporter of rights for women and gays and lesbians, and as a fan of Bill Maher and Sam Harris, I agree. Particularly as concerns conservative Muslims, who are a majority of their religion. (And yes: I feel the same way about ultra-orthodox Jews, who have had a disproportionate and worrisome amount of influence over the Israeli government in recent years.). This is however complicated by the fact that a woman born in the heart of a conservative Muslim country like Saudi Arabia has about as much chance, on her own, of escaping that oppressive orthodoxy as Winston Smith does of escaping the clutches of IngSoc.
Once Muslims have immigrated to free societies, however, they bear more individual responsibility for the benighted ideology they espouse.
I don’t believe I indicated discrimination would be “fine” at any point; only that Evangelicals could not really be subject to the same kind of discrimination as that being discussed, particularly since there is nothing to outwardly signify being Evangelical that is not presented by the person claiming that identity. Discrimination against Muslims usually manifests itself as discrimination against people of Middle Eastern descent, to the extent that there is little distinction recognized between Muslims, Sikhs, and Jains, despite these being quite different traditions.
If Evangelicals are being discriminated against because they identify as Evangelical, then that would be problematic, especially if that discrimination is systemic in nature, but that seems rather unlikely and is not established simply by correlation. But that discrimination would still not be the same as discrimination against African Americans or Arabs (nor are those really the same, but they are more similar than the evangelical claim that was made.)
I think that being Muslim in the U.S. or in Europe is a bit like being Jewish (I’m Jewish). Even if you’re an atheist (as I am), you have a Jewish name or a Middle-Eastern name, you have a Jewish nose or you look Middle-Eastern (i.e. Muslim). Someday someone is going to ask you where you or your parents immigrated from and when you mention a predominantly Muslim country, you may see a less than welcoming look on their face.
So even if one wants to escape being Jewish or being identified as a Muslim, people will remind you that they see you as one from time to time and that they see Jews or Muslims negatively.
I think we are needing to distinguish different kinds of privilege. There is more than socioeconomic status. (I loathe the word ‘intersectionality’ but it does label something real I think).
Wow this site has been hijacked by political talk. I understand there was just an election, but this is getting boring for those of us not really into politics. Not even much political philosophy going on here, just political talk that one can find a million different places. Can’t wait for Ep. 162!
George, are you referring to the discussion here or the episode itself?
So, not all this made it into the episode, but there’s some historically significant philosophy in here. Charles Mills is revered as a next-in-line after Rawls-Nozick-Sandel for his critique of Rawls. A succinct account of that seems contained here: https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/11/16/lost-in-rawlsland/.
Also from Mills there’s this whole notion that Quine’s influence on epistemology means that it’s no longer an a priori matter but needs to actually pay attention to empirical findings, including discussion of the social aspects of knowledge: how testimony and expert opinion actually get dealt with: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/epistemology-social/
And then it’s also of course very instructive to see how philosophical ideas get converted into spreadable rhetoric: what nuances get lost, how argument does or does not work not just in a forum of intellectuals but among the wider populace.
…And we get more of Wes’s idiosyncratic psychoanalytic analyses of social dynamics, and the attendant question re. whether that’s a useful method of making sense of political phenomena including claims of moral justification.
And finally, the clincher is the issue of moral responsibility that we got into here: Do those with more power actually have more responsibility? Is there any sense to be made of the notion of “group responsibility,” particularly because so many of the world’s problems have to do with the accretion of fucked up institutions established by those with (to their own lights anyway) good intentions, which require and receive tacit support from most of the rest of us most of the time?
I understand how reading some of the back and forth in the comments here can be aggravating (e.g. I think this whole thing about “what about black privilege? what about evangelicals” entirely fails to engage the discussion we had in the podcast), but if you don’t see any legitimate political philosophy in this topic, you’re being pretty short-sighted.
But don’t worry, we’re getting back to more traditional epistemology/metaphysics/etc. soon enough, though I think we’ll be continuing to periodically take on current issues through philosophy as well.
Hey Mark, you got me! I’d like to apologize for that post. Been turned off with the incessant political talk, not just on this website, but everywhere. Nice call on your part, this was the first episode of PEL that I skipped, and I was referring to the discussion, but your response has compelled me to listen to the episode. I appreciate it, thanks a lot for the humbling response, maybe I should give political talk more of a chance (on this site at least, I’ll probably still avoid it elsewhere). But definitely looking forward to the upcoming non-political episodes. Not going to skip another PEL episode again!
I hear you there. Since the election, I’ve actually avoided political discussions everywhere BUT here.
Just giving you a hard time. 🙂 Peace!
The following is completely coincidental to this episode, but I wonder if interviewee’s anecdote dovetails with ‘the gaze’ (of the Other) that Wes speaks to when playing devil’s advocate to his own well-considered argument. From today’s Fresh Air (http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=521371034):
“TERRY GROSS: So I was reading some of your essays because you’ve written – you know, you write for The Atlantic. You’ve written for Slate and other places. And you have this personal essay that you wrote, probably a couple of years ago, about a Miley Cyrus performance.
MCMILLAN COTTOM: (Laughter) Yes.
GROSS: OK. And in that, you write about being the only African-American couple at happy hour…
MCMILLAN COTTOM: Yes.
GROSS: …One day at this, you know, bar-restaurant. And you write, (reading) I saw a few white couples imbibing and beginning some version of bodily grooving to the DJ. I told my partner that one of them would be offering me free liquor and trying to feel my breasts within the hour (laughter). And of course…
MCMILLAN COTTOM: Yep.
GROSS: …You write that your partner thinks you’re crazy. But sure enough, that’s exactly what happens.
What is going on?
MCMILLAN COTTOM: (Laughter) That’s a great question – what is going on? No. So the story was about this thing that happens to me a lot, which is – when you’re black in a majority-white space that is a social space, so not work – right? – but that is a social space, we have so much, sort of, self-segregation by race still in this country – most people are friends with people who are the same racial group as they are, especially white Americans – that the social space has become like a microcosm for, like, all of our racial angst – right? – in the country.
And I say to my partner that night because he was from a different part of the country. And this was – we were in the South. We were in North Carolina. I said, now look, they’re drinking. And they’re about to become very familiar. And the only way they’re going to know how to deal with me as an African-American woman who they perceive as being so different from themselves – but here we are sharing this social space and their defenses are lowered because they’re drinking – the only way they’re going to know how to do that is to sexualize me in this really weird way.
So I get lots of really bizarre, unsolicited overtures from white people in those social spaces, especially where alcohol is involved, that almost always revolves around them wanting to touch me physically. It happened so much that it’s a joke among my friends. You know, at what time tonight – we usually call an hour – by what time tonight will Tressie be felt up by a stranger…
GROSS: (Laughter).
MCMILLAN COTTOM: …In the women’s restroom? (Laughter) We have this constant pool going on.
And in the essay, the point I’m making is that it’s really easy for us to assume that that’s just about being a woman – that that’s about sort of our sexual culture. And it’s very easy for us to say that’s about my individual experience. The challenge for me was to try to unpack – what about that was about me, and what does that say about how we interact socially across racial divides? Why are we so uncomfortable until we are comfortable enough to be too comfortable with one another?
Why did strangers feel like they had permission to invade my personal space that way – to actually sort of take away my bodily autonomy, often against my will? They’re often touching me before any words are said, both men and women, I should point out. So this wasn’t just men. In fact, it’s often the women who are initiating it. Why did that happen? I wrote that essay, and I got – I think to this day, I get more mail and email from responses from people about that essay than anything I have ever written.
GROSS: What kind of responses do you get? Are people – is it from people who find themselves in the same position you’ve been in?
MCMILLAN COTTOM: Oh, yeah, from black women overwhelmingly saying, oh, yeah, been there. Right? Like, yeah. I have to decide even when I’m going out for drinks after work with work colleagues – right? – about how long we’re going to stay and what that’s going to look like. Plenty of black women saw their experiences reflected in that piece, lots of defensiveness which that part we might expect from lots of non-black readers who had a million explanations for why that might be the case that was not the explanation that I had given.
But also some really reflective pieces from people saying, you know, I’ve kind of caught myself in this moment doing this to a stranger the other night, and I had to ask myself why I thought I had the right to do that. And I think when these essays – I’m not a huge fan of doing a lot of personal essays – but I think when they do work, they work when they do that, right?
When a person goes I was sitting somewhere. I have never met you – right? – and I was initially emotionally resistant to everything you had said. But I found myself in the real world the other day having an experience where I thought of that thing you wrote, and it made me reflect on myself differently. When that happens, it’s worth the 20,000, you know, emails I get from people who are really angry but – trust me – but lots of people were really angry.
GROSS: Well, you know, I hesitate to bring this up because it’s also loaded. You write about body types in this essay.
MCMILLAN COTTOM: Yes.
GROSS: So how do you think, like, your body type figured into these, like, strange overtures that you were getting from people…
MCMILLAN COTTOM: Terry, you’re going to make everybody Google me.
GROSS: …Like buying you drinks and touching you…
MCMILLAN COTTOM: Right?
(LAUGHTER)
GROSS: I’ll spell your name.
MCMILLAN COTTOM: Yeah. There are going to be thousands of people now Googling what does she look like? OK so, you know, at risk of violating, like, being modest, I am, I think, robustly built is a way to say that. I’m not exactly sure. But, yes, there is something to that if her – if she didn’t want to be sexualized, she wouldn’t look that way – right? – which is certainly, again, part of – that’s just as much about gender as it is about anything else – a gender dynamic.
We tend to ascribe personality characteristics of people based on their physical appearances and when it comes to women because we’re uncomfortable with women being sexual beings. We have an excess of negative assumptions about women based on how they are built or how they look.
But, yes, I think it would’ve been very different if I were smaller or thinner or certainly if I read as being closer to white phenotypically, like if I was lighter skinned, etc. I think all of that would be different. But I think there’s something particular about – I call it being Oprah-fied.
GROSS: (Laughter).
MCMILLAN COTTOM: You know, there’s something about wanting to be familiar and comfortable with a black woman’s body in a way when that body looks more like Oprah than it looks like, say, Halle Berry because we only have a couple of ways to understand that.
I can either relate to Oprah as being like a mother figure, you know, doing the sort of motherly thing, but when we try to put her in the realm of being like a mature, adult sexual being, we get really uncomfortable. And so I think we go to the extreme and over-sexualize, and I suspect that maybe that’s what’s happening to me – getting a little Oprah-fied.”
That is so bizarre, and gross. I’m glad to know at least that it is a thing Southern whites do, not just whites all over the country (we’ve already had ample reason over the years to side-eye Southern white folk). Good grief.
Hey everybody, just a friendly FYI:
Some of us are having a Not-School discussion group sometime in the next few weeks which will include a number of philosophical topics tangentially related to what was discussed in this episode. We will be discussing the book “The Free Will Delusion” by James B. Miles. In addition to covering the various historical and contemporary views on free will itself, the book also spends a lot of time talking about biological and environmental factors affecting power, freedom, and responsibility. The real point of the book, however, is to attempt to articulate some of the moral implications of the various philosophical stances toward free will, and it is here where a number of contact points to the concept of white privilege come up.
Anyway, it’d be great to have a few more voices in the conversation. Feel free to join us!
Brian
I don’t even have to listen to this one to know that you guys have lost your sense of direction.
I don’t want or need to hear about our current political junk.
I need truth seeking. I want to probe the truth of our existence not talk about our politics.
Don’t sell out to your audience just because you want to make money.
You may have convinced yourself that it isn’t about money but in truth you want this to be your source of income.
You need to find a way to make this work without that being the case.
I think you guys have something good going here and I don’t want that to get distorted because you feel the need to make it your primary source of income.
Your passion shouldn’t be your primary source of income. It should be your secondary source of time expenditure.
Keep true to the pursuit guys. If that ever was your pursuit in the first place that it is.
Are you implying that examining the existential reality of what Fanon calls ‘the fact of blackness’ is unworthy of philosophical inquiry?
I hope not.
Incidentally, Law, do you judge the Rachel Dolezal case (http://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/rachel-dolezal-why-she-can-t-just-be-white-ally-n738911) as having any bearing or angle on this discussion of white privilege and Fanon’s ‘fact of blackness?’ Or is she just so much distraction and navel-gazing on superficial racial claims?
It seems to me that Rachel Dolezal isn’t too terribly relevant. Even those who think that division lines on race have a large social component don’t think that implies any individual can redefine race on their own. Rather they’re noting larger category changes on a wide societal basis like how the Irish or Italians became considered ‘white’ and how some hispanics consider themselves white.
Here it is. ” I liked them back before they joined a major label and sold out.” ::eyeroll::
To me philosophy is about the bigger picture of our existence and seeking wisdom about the good life.
Not about current political issues concerning race or money.
How are “current political issues concerning race or money” not a key part of “wisdom about the good life”?
I feel like your critique, as I understand it, plays right into the criticisms some have about philosophy: that it’s esoteric navel-gazing, with no relevance to people’s actual lives.
I agree that ideas of race and money are very closely related but yes philosophy IS very much about the things in life that seem intangible.
The life of the mind is hard to pin point and bring into concrete action (which is why we need video games about it).
My main point is that CURRENT POLITICized controversies shouldn’t be headlined in this jewel of a podcast.
Racism is simple. Life is not.
Clearly, while the moral claim “racism is bad” is simple, the impact of historical fact on ethics is not. It sounds like such influence should be ruled out by the is-ought distinction, but of course that distinction just says that fact is not sufficient for determining value, not that it’s not necessary. Again, see Mills’s critique of Rawls. The question shouldn’t be simply “what political rules would you choose not knowing your social place in the world?” but “Given that there has been as a matter of fact a history of racism that has affected people’s current places in the world, what political rules would you choose not knowing your social (including racial) place in the world?” It’s the difference between ideal-world political theorizing and non-ideal-world theorizing; this is a pretty central issue in ethical/political philosophy.
Hey, Alex, so ironically, the only time money has recently made a difference in the podcast is for this next, non-political episode (163 on Natural Kinds). This was a topic Dylan and Wes wanted to do to talk with one of their St. John’s people, and I found the book (initially) super boring. So knowing that Dylan would be on site doing the interview (as with Eva Brann), I seriously considered making this the first episode I would skip out on. But because of the amount we now pay ourselves to do these episodes, I felt like I couldn’t afford to miss it, so I powered through and eventually “got it” and had a great discussion.
I think you likely know by now that we are always delving into different directions on the podcast, spending a few episodes on religion here, going off into aesthetics for a couple of months there, etc. Our goal is to cover the range of the intellectual stuff that philosophers consider worth their time, and there are plenty of legit philosophers covering race and gender issues at this point in time. …and things like oppression, protest, objectification, all of which have been batted around recently as possible topics. But we’ve also got Spinoza and Habermas coming up too…
We’ve received many listener requests for topics like this over the years, and I think if you can follow us on this journey it’ll be worth your while. We certainly have no desire to merely replicate the many bullshitty political discussions going on elsewhere, but if we choose now to do topics like Orwell in reaction to the zeitgeist, that’s not a matter of twisting what we do to please the audience, but choosing among the things we’re interested in to do this now (meaning that Orwell has been on our list for like two years).
Wes has some strong opinions in this area that we’ve long wanted to help him explore (or at least force him to just get it out of his system instead of continuing to bring it up in an offhand and unhelpful way), and that came to a head in that natural course of our Rorty discussion (a legit philosopher, long-requested, whose epistemology we covered first) when he again pissed off a lot of listeners by being dismissive about one of the big intellectual trends of our time. So this episode was my idea, intended to force us to actually get into that, and the results were surprisingly rich.
I recall us getting a comment some years ago as a negative iTunes store review that we were afraid of “the real world,” and I long held that kind of view in contempt, as having no sense of what philosophy is. But I’m glad that we’re taking some time at least here to wade into more directly practical areas. I feel like I’m learning a new skill re. how to try to talk in a non-bullshitty way in this arena, and the same goes for talk about literature, about essayists (see our back and forth on the Thoreau and Emerson episodes, for which I was rightly criticized)… none of this means that we’re surrendering our critical faculties or pandering. And though some of these readings are more fun than wading through Kant, we certainly haven’t gotten lazier; we’ve been keeping a pretty frantic schedule with all this stuff and throwing ourselves more than ever into whatever literature we’ve challenged ourselves with this week.
Okay, point taken. I do apologize for reacting so strongly to the title of the episode.
I can see that broadening your scope of topics is good and that MAYBE philosophy should
be able to comment on such things as race.
This is you guys podcast so that means it’s about what you want it to be about.
I feel strongly that at the heart of philosophy is existential truth seeking, and not politics or aesthetics.
As far as racism goes I agree that politically it can get complex. But to me, asking if black people
should get some sort of payback for having a history of slavery is like asking if parents should make amends to their kids for all the errors they made raising them.
At a certain point you just let go of the past and start working towards a better future.
So what does philosophy have to say about people of color getting discriminated?
I’d say not much if any.
Ethics shouldn’t change or somehow be different for people who have different colored skin.
Seeing as my only education of philosophy has been through you guys on this podcast I recognized that I’m speaking out of ignorance concerning basically all of this (not to discredit your great work!).
So everyone please feel free to look at me with contempt.
“…asking if black people should get some sort of payback for having a history of slavery is like asking if parents should make amends to their kids for all the errors they made raising them. At a certain point you just let go of the past and start working towards a better future.”
Using that metaphor aren’t white people the “parents” and everyone else “their kids” in a situation where the parents are willfully disregarding the harm they are subjecting their children to (totally patronizing, not my metaphor).
I Also wonder why slavery is the debt in question? The episode was full of references to more recent and contemporary subjugation.
I don’t know about you but I had to do a shit ton of work to get to a point where I could let go of my parents failures and look toward a better future. I feel like understanding privilege is that same work on a societal level.
So Alex, let me pose to you this thought experiment:
Let’s say your parents worked hard all their lives, and built up savings they intended to pass down to you, to help you and your descendants have a better life. But then the government said “sorry, due to your parents’ genes, we are authorizing these other people with genes we like better to take all the money they produced from all those years of work”. Your parents subsequently died brokenhearted that they could leave you nothing of monetary value.
A few years later, the government acknowledged that what it had done was terribly wrong, and made it illegal to do anything like that in the future. But, they said, what is done is done, and you and your family just has to sit there and see the other families who took your parents’ money living it up, high on the hog, and you don’t get a penny of that inheritance back. Is that really okay by you?
This discussion has nothing to do with philosophy, but to respond…
Jeremy,
actually I meant that the parents represent the government.
Any racial discrimination related to government today should be quickly taken care of by the authorities.
It’s that simple to me.
I don’t think it takes philosophy to understand that.
Any other discrimination happening in social contexts should be taken care of
by the people in that situation with discrimination towards the discriminator.
Alan,
obviously in that situation I would feel angry and exploited.
And yes I’d also want my money back. I’d feel justified in asking for it too.
But if that happened to my grandfather before I was born then no, I would not ask for the money.
To me I don’t think our government should make reparations to african americans who have a history of slavery in their families. That’s just how I feel politically.
Now for this particular political view I DO have a philosophy to found it on.
I think government and society have similar roles to play in controlling/influencing peoples behavior.
For example, should bullies be illegal in high school or just socially ostracized? I think ostracized. Why?
Because some things shouldn’t be laws. Some things should just be understood by people as bad and not acceptable. Involving government for every little thing makes life hard and complex.
Another example would be that I also think large companies like telephone or oil companies should not be allowed to pass ALL of their money down to their successors in order to keep the money in the family or business.
I feel that after a time the profit making side of NEEDED services and resources should cease.
And that those companies should then go nonprofit.
In the societal sphere things should be a little different when it comes to reparations for minorities who have previously been harassed. We can have that discussion too if you like.
So let’s not forget socially but let’s move on politically.
So if the families who stole the wealth stall for a few decades, they get to keep it? That doesn’t sit right with me.
If the family went to court and the case was still open then I think it’s up to the courts to decide if the children should be allowed to keep the case going. But if the case had been closed I think it would be a different story.
Alex, you seem to have a very specific non-specific idea of what philosophy is supposed to be about. I would characterize philosophical thinking more as a particular type of approach to things than as an approach to particularly specific objects of thought. It is not the topic of the thinking that makes something philosophical, but the manner of the approach and the depth of the questioning. As such, anything can be the subject of philosophical inquiry, though some inquiries may be more interesting or fruitful than others.
If our aim is to better understand our existence, then any part of that existence can be questioned, and those parts of existence that are most difficult are perhaps the most imperative to question. The ways in which we relate to each other, politically or not, are as open to philosophical inquiry as questions of what existence is and what the good life is, and all of these questions are at some point implicated in each other. One cannot question existence without examining the way in which we exist, politically and individually, and one cannot come to any conclusions about the good life or virtue without some understanding of how we actually are in life.
Hmm…yeah…I see your point. That’s a good argument.
I’ve even said before that to me philosophy is human thought carried out to its logical extent.
That would naturally include basically everything like you just pointed out.
I mean honestly I’d have to say defining the scope or essence is like one of THE problems not just with philosophy but really any practice.
Everything is one, light is really just electromagnetism, but at some point a distinction needs to be made between things just like how we see that distinction in the colors of the spectrum.
Politics is the idea of government expressed socially.
Society is the collective expression of behavioral norms.
Math is the expression of logic in numbers.
Science is the expression of rigorous experimentation of natural phenomenon.
Phycology is the expression of the exploration of our cognitive/character patterns.
So yeah what SHOULD we define philosophy as the expression of?
I’d say it’s the expression of the exploration into the world of abstract ideas as they pertain to the explanation of the human condition and our place in reality. Big picture stuff mostly.
When we talk about science are we talking about people? Are we talking about the instruments scientist use, or are we really just talking about the “products” of scientific activity and the knowledge that activity brings about?
Some scientists will tell you it’s a mindset but I’d say that it still has to be explainable in a way that puts expectations on the actual activity.
What scares me is when scientists now days start saying things like, “philosophy is dead”.
I don’t think it’s dead yet and I bet you that really defining WHAT philosophy is at its core would go a long way in stoping those silly claims.
I’d start with defining philosophy by looking at the products of philosophy.
One such product in my opinion is obviously religion.
So that right there should go a long way in helping us define it.
Hmm…yeah…I see your point. That’s a good argument.
I’ve even said before that to me philosophy is human thought carried out to its logical extent.
That would naturally include basically everything like you just pointed out.
I mean honestly I’d have to say defining the scope or essence is like one of THE problems not just with philosophy but really any practice.
Everything is one, light is really just electromagnetism, but at some point a distinction needs to be made between things just like how we see that distinction in the colors of the spectrum.
Politics is the idea of government expressed socially.
Society is the collective expression of behavioral norms.
Math is the expression of logic in numbers.
Science is the expression of rigorous experimentation of natural phenomenon.
Phycology is the expression of the exploration of our cognitive/character patterns.
So yeah what SHOULD we define philosophy as the expression of?
I’d say it’s the expression of the exploration into the world of abstract ideas as they pertain to the explanation of the human condition and our place in reality. Big picture stuff mostly.
When we talk about science are we talking about people? Are we talking about the instruments scientist use, or are we really just talking about the “products” of scientific activity and the knowledge that activity brings about?
Some scientists will tell you it’s a mindset but I’d say that it still has to be explainable in a way that puts expectations on the actual activity.
What scares me is when scientists now days start saying things like, “philosophy is dead”.
I don’t think it’s dead yet and I bet you that really defining WHAT philosophy is at its core would go a long way in stoping those silly claims.
I’d start with defining philosophy by looking at the products of philosophy.
One such product in my opinion is obviously religion.
So that right there should go a long way in helping us define it.
I don’t want to sidetrack much more from the subject matter of the actual podcast, so I’ll just say briefly that I’m doubtful of the necessity to define philosophy, and I’m not particularly worried about what some scientists might be saying about philosophy’s death.
In an effort to take it back to the discussion at hand, I’ll accept your definition as the “expression of the exploration into the world of abstract ideas as they pertain to the explanation of the human condition and our place in reality.” Doesn’t the concept of race itself come from this world of abstract ideas, one that arose in a particular time and place, namely, the colonial and imperial periods of Europe? Has it not been used (and is it not still used) as an explanation of the human condition and our place in reality? If that explanation appears to be incredibly faulty and dehumanizing, but has implicated itself in myriad ways, both explicitly and implicitly, throughout the social fabric, then is it not worthy of rigorous examination, both in how it has manifested in the past and in how it manifests in the present day?
I would be interested to hear what Law (or anyone else who has something intelligent (not baiting) to say) thinks of Daryl Davis and his approach to racism (confronting and attempting to befriend Klan members, and trying to get them to hand over their robes).
In the doc I just watched about him there were a couple very heated exchanges with BLM activists, which I guess I view in some ways as emblematic of tensions between new school/old school race activism, like whether it’s better to lead with a message of sameness/mutual dependency or the empowerment of African Americans as a group.
Hello!
Great episode. If anyone can help with these questions, I’d be grateful:
1.) Is there any way to search for episodes which have Law as a guest? They mentioned that this is the 4th.
2..) How can I find out what the reading material is before the episode airs? (embarrassed that I don’t know this by now, but I’m late to the party)
As for the episode – I’m still pretty confused. I did find this article helpful in differentiating between white privilege and black/minority disadvantage. http://www.in-mind.org/blog/post/inequality-minority-disadvantage-or-white-privilege-and-why-it-matters
But when I think about trying to have a conversation with my southern white friends and family (from AR) I always bump into this issue. I think it even sank one of the presidential candidates. It’s when people talk about poverty and act like poverty only or even mostly affects minority groups. I’m certain that it definitely plays a role but doesn’t it seem important to differentiate clearly and state clearly what sjw’s are fighting against? If it’s poverty, then that’s only going to make whites even more privileged assuming they would benefit from such changes as well as black people. If we are concerning ourselves with social recognition, then that’s different right? And it needs to be set apart and not conflated with things like poverty. I guess my point is that when discussing race, doesn’t there need to be a really clear argument that social justice warriors are fighting for that is different than social issues that affect all races even if the percentage of minorities affected is higher. I taught in an all black school with only one other white teacher. What stood out to me that I didn’t see in any of the other schools that had a similar economic demographic was the girls’ sense of self worth. I didn’t become as close with the boys so I am not certain how they were different. But there was an almost tangible difference in the way the girls seemed to feel about themselves vs the young white girls that I met teaching in other schools. I won’t go into all of what made me feel that way, but I’m just trying to say that poverty was a problem but there was a deeper one. If we keep talking about the things that affect both whites and minorities then we won’t get to the issues that only affect minorities. I think this is what you all were trying to do when focusing on social recognition, but at times in the conversation it was unclear. Poverty was brought into the mix. I am probably not being very clear but hopefully you understand some of it.
Is this kind of differentiation something that is discussed?
Anyway – I really loved that you guys discussed this at all and exposed me to the more scholarly literature related to this issue that I had not read. It’s what you guys do so well, take a common issue and find the more philosophical (and sometimes pyschoanalytical) perspectives. THANKS!
Also – for anyone who might like more podcasts that discuss these issues, I’ve long since been a huge fan of on being.
http://onbeing.org/programs/eula-biss-lets-talk-about-whiteness/
http://onbeing.org/programs/john-a-powell-opening-the-question-of-race-to-the-question-of-belonging/
I made my original comment before Wes shared his story.
That’s what I’m trying to say. I grew up dirt poor by a single mother and so while I have a super privileged life now, it’s gonna be hard for me to think that black people or any minority cornered the market on poverty. My Hispanic husband grew up with his dad as a doctor and while all his neighbors thought his family, due to their wealth, was dealing drugs – I think to myself – that wasn’t nearly as pervasive in his sense of self and personal narrative as my situation was. As you can see – suffering comparison is never really productive.
That was my point – there IS something different about minority disadvantage but talking about poverty will almost never get you there.
Also – when I listen to you guys in this episode and I listen to you all on the episode where you discuss Peter Singer’s pond boy thing – you sound like 2 different groups.
You guys specifically discuss whether or not you are morally responsible or whether or not your just a crappy person for not helping the pond boy out.
How is this different? Isn’t moral obligation of any kind a BAD idea? Can’t we just accept that these people are wrong in these articles? It’s good to be helpful when you see a wrong. That’s a good virtue. It’s good to be self examining and critical of society and an awareness of another’s plight – but obligated to be all of this? No. It seems like moral shaming in order to effect change and action. Which seems like a really bad idea.
Hey Jennifer, you can see the reading materials for upcoming episodes here: http://partiallyexaminedlife.com/upcoming/
I’m not too sure how you could find all of the Law Ware episodes, other than just scrolling through the list and searching for his name…
Law is on episodes 52:Philosophy and Race, 112: Ricouer on Interpreting Religion, and 113: Jesus’s Parables.
thank you, Aslan and Paul! Another PEL member sent me a private message with the list also. You guys are the best!
So Alan is casting his argument as an example of fearless philosophy questioning conventional wisdom: the quest for truth prevailing over social stigma. Since I profoundly disagree, I’ve been asking myself why.
First, is philosophical argumentation about matters of fact? The alleged average IQs of various groups of people, claims about whether IQ is a good test and how it’s influenced or not by heredity vs. environment. This all looks to me to be in the domain of science. Not that philosophy is never about facts… I mean, Mills’s argument is based on historical facts, and there are plenty of other examples. (And I don’t mean tricky facts like the existence or not of God.)
More importantly is the relation here between facts and values, or more generally facts and what we do with them, which is why I think good philosophy, at least done in this kind of casual environment, need seldom or ever get bogged down in disagreements about facts in the way political discourse routinely does. (Like, we’ve never hit an impasse on the podcast such that until we decide some disputed fact, talking more is pointless.)
Mills’s (and Baldwin’s, and bell hooks’s, and other arguments underlying white privilege and similar discourses) argument points to the pretty goddamn undeniable history of discrimination (as we know from Holocaust deniers, anything can be denied, and in cases like that the disputant has ruled himself out of civilized discourse, though part of what I’m trying to figure out here is exactly why) and says “hey, given all that, and its lingering effects (that you who are not of that minority may not be aware of, so the writer is spelling it out for you), maybe we all want to establish a moral code that rules out any of that crap in the future.”
Following this, you might ask yourself before putting a lot of time into an argument, “Is this something that someone with a racist agenda might espouse?” And if the answer is yes, you stop, out of good taste, not because you fear social retaliation, but because you don’t want to be an asshole.
But we still, of course, want to be able to judge the merits of the Mills (etc.) argument; it would be circular to say “according to Mills’s argument, it’s rude not to accept Mills’s argument, so I better accept it.” That’s the kind of logic religion has relied on for centuries!
So it’s OK to actually back up and try to impartially evaluate any argument. The not being an asshole is in what you’re trying to achieve by making an argument. People might brag that they’re just “telling it like it is,” but that’s seldom the case. The search for truth (in political matters especially) is always for a purpsose, like to make sensible legislation or establish “correct” moral rules, which relate to standards of legitimacy for proposed legislation.
I find the overall Mills/Baldwin/etc. about not being an ass convincing (and haven’t seen any good arguments here specifically against it), so one of the implications is that we try to improve (educational/social/etc.) outcomes for all groups, we recognize that we actually do have to pay attention not just to individuals (yes, of course to individuals), but to systematic group disparities, and that we have to have policies that try to address those… not of course by handicapping the more capable but through more resources/thought/time to those falling by the wayside. And this should not just be a matter of trying to fit every peg of whatever shape in the same round whole, but actually rethinking what constitutes “success” in life. If we live in a strict meritocracy where all the glory goes to those capable and willing to generate bankable value for the rest of society, and only shame goes to those who can’t measure up, then fuck that shit. Capitalism should not de facto define human virtue.
The whole motivation behind trying to argue that some groups are naturally, whatever you do environmentally, going to fall short seems to be at base social Darwinist, which in our society is an essential part of our capitalist brainwashing. Being informed by the experiences of oppressed groups means you stop marshaling your energy to make arguments like this, because you no longer see why a human being would want to do so.
Well, that’s the best I can do right now. I’m not sure how well that works.
“Being informed by the experiences of oppressed groups means you stop marshaling your energy to make arguments like this, because you no longer see why a human being would want to do so.”
Of course I can see why human beings want to make all kinds of arguments, often for very “ugly” reasons.
In his lectures on Ideological Critique (available in Youtube), Philosophy Professor Robert Paul Wolff (who is a Kant scholar) speaks of how many years ago he was trying to derive his political principles (which are very progressive) from Kant’s moral philosophy and a student suggested to him that it all depends which side you choose to be on, that there’s no fixed or “rational” way from which to derive one’s political commitments.
There are political issues in each society and one takes sides. I think that that’s true here too.
Which one of Alan’s comments are you referring to?
Mark:
“So Alan is casting his argument as an example of fearless philosophy questioning conventional wisdom: the quest for truth prevailing over social stigma. Since I profoundly disagree…”
Once again, I’m going to (at least to start with) assume good faith on your part–that you aren’t intentionally strawmanning me. So let me clarify where I’m coming from.
I actually agree with Sam Harris on this (as with most things). He has mentioned several times that research on race and IQ would be an example of something he thinks should not be explored by science. He hints that he thinks there’s likely something to it (though cleverly on his part, it’s always in video/audio form, never in writing), but that no good can come of digging into it. The value of truthseeking for its own sake does not outweigh, essentially the “asshole-being” of researching (and more importantly, publicizing) research along these lines. Your typical “race realist” brushes this kind of objection aside because they do seem to find some kind of glee in rubbing the “Bell Curve” stuff in black people’s faces. I find that disgusting, and wish to completely dissasociate myself from such people, much as several of you here are trying to tar me with that same brush.
As I’ve repeatedly tried to make clear (I can cite myself from upthread if you need me to), I agree that in principle it would be great if we all had a tacit understanding that it is not good form to publicize these racial differences in standardized testing. However, it needs to be in the context of an implicit social bargain: we won’t even *keep track* of how different races are doing on these tests, and we certainly won’t flog teachers and administrators who “fail” to get their black students to match the test scores the average white kid gets. Don’t you see the imbalance, the unfairness, if one part of this implicit bargain is kept, but not the other?
Furthermore, I want to also defend myself by pointing out that I wouldn’t have gotten into this issue at all in response to this podcast episode if you (Mark) had not thrown down the gauntlet of saying (paraphrasing from memory) “the very, very least any white person can do is: don’t be a social Darwinist”. So I figured any contention you explicitly make on the podcast was fair game for debate, even if it otherwise would have seemed a bit off topic. Is that not fair?
“I find the overall Mills/Baldwin/etc. about not being an ass convincing (and haven’t seen any good arguments here specifically against it), so one of the implications is that we try to improve (educational/social/etc.) outcomes for all groups, we recognize that we actually do have to pay attention not just to individuals (yes, of course to individuals), but to systematic group disparities, and that we have to have policies that try to address those… not of course by handicapping the more capable but through more resources/thought/time to those falling by the wayside.”
I feel like you either didn’t read everything I wrote upthread, or didn’t read it carefully, and sort of automatically slotted me into the category of “alt-right, Grover Norquist asshole”. As–again–I’ve said repeatedly, I am enthusiastically in favor of spending more money on schools (and social programs, etc.) to benefit poor black kids. Buy them coats, let their parents wash their clothes at school, send them home on the weekends with “Buddy Packs” of food to get them through to their free breakfast on Monday, as my wife does with her underprivileged kids. And let’s get Trump and Ryan and the rest of those heartless monsters out of there and jack up taxes on the rich to pay for more of this kind of thing. I’m a “bleeding heart”, I promise you! I just don’t want to see teachers and administrators, who are in the trenches doing something noble that’s almost like social work (or what a religious person might call “God’s work”), getting flogged endlessly when their students’ standardized test scores don’t measure up to those at white schools. Please, give this paragraph a close reading and ask yourself if perhaps you’ve lumped me in with a group of people I don’t deserve to be lumped in with. And then further ask yourself if I might even have a point!
“If we live in a strict meritocracy where all the glory goes to those capable and willing to generate bankable value for the rest of society, and only shame goes to those who can’t measure up, then fuck that shit. Capitalism should not de facto define human virtue.”
I agree wholeheartedly. And as an aside, I’ve been tempted to curse a couple times, but wasn’t sure if that was allowed. I’m glad to know it is–or must be, if the bossman’s doing it. Fuckin’ A! 😉
I think it would be cool if comments within a thread would go to the right of the screen making the vertical list of comments not so long. Just a thought.
Alan, you are absolutely right that I did not read the whole previous exchange and I apologize. I noticed one particular thing you said about average IQ and it inspired me to try to articulate something that apparently wasn’t much in reaction to the whole of what you were saying.
Whenever someone posts a new thing, the PEL email (which we all get) receives an email about it, which I sometimes read; and in a multi-threaded conversation like this, it’s not always even clear to me who is responding to whom. Since I have no appetite to go catch up on the rest of the thread, I’ll just stop here.
Best, -Mark
Fair enough! Thanks for the clarification.
Well, I read the whole exchange, and although many qualifications are made, it’s still Social Darwinism when you boil it down. It should be called on that; plain and simple. The weird Middle Passage selection theory, the unsupported assertions about lead poisoning, the breathless citing of questionable data points like IQ scores… it all amounts to, yes, a straw-man argument.
By the nature of the forum, perhaps, we want to demonstrate how receptive we are to extended and nuanced reasoning, but in this case it’s flattering undeserving argument. It’s the same pernicious and specious claptrap that’s inspired whole philosophical genres like White Privilege.
I’m ambivalent about some of the implications of White Privilege talk, myself – I agree that it can be weaponized – but two bad weapons (namely, 1. old-wine-in-new bottles racism, and 2. exploiting white guilt) don’t make a right.
Luke,
I’m going to try to make this one brief because it doesn’t require anything lengthy in response.
It’s true that I haven’t provided any cites about lead, because I thought it didn’t need any. But fine, here you go:
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-lead-poisoning-science-met-20150605-story.html
http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/AmericanFamily/story?id=125121&page=1
I’m actually surprised to see resistance to this. It’s a clear case of environmental injustice to black urban populations, it’s tragic but solvable for future generations (but clearly it needs more attention and political will), and it at least partly gets their genome off the hook.
I’m not going to even get into how questionable it might be scientifically to dismiss IQ and other aptitude tests entirely. I will just point out that if you read the whole exchange, you saw me repeatedly say I would be happy for schools to not even report these scores at all. Let’s not even COLLECT any data on IQ and racial groups. I would be fine with that. Ecstatic, in fact! My complaint is that these scores ARE measured and recorded, and publicized, and then schools are punished if they don’t magically make the black kids get the same scores as the white kids.
You’re dissembling. It’s still a weak argument; sorry. Start out with plausible premises and work your way through it again, please.
Luke,
I’m not going to waste my time arguing with someone who doesn’t advance an argument of their own, or even anything that looks like a specific rebuttal of anything I’ve said. Come back with actual points, if you can think of any, and then we can talk.
Alan –
Tell me first why you believe that black slaves brought over the United States should have been genetically inferior by intelligence to others? This is a REALLY presumptive claim and it taints the rest of your argument. If one didn’t know any better, it might be construed as building a patently-racist argument.
You push back on this characterization hard, though, so let’s stop everything right now and focus laser-like on this highly-loaded premise. (Several others here have already pointed this up already, I should say, but the brazenness of the assertion deserves confronting again… especially since umpteen varieties of the same have been used to justify black subjugatio0n for so long!)
Did you not make the claim, so many posts ago, that you were confident “the best and brightest” were not brought over to America to work as slaves? So far I can’t remember you disclaiming this baseless assertion.. If you have in the interim, bravo!, and he rest of post here is moot.
You must defend this before you can get into the minutiae of IQ scores, regressions to the mean, your (also speculative) assertion about the relative influence of genetics and environment, this red herring about lead poisoning (Why should blacks be any more effected than similarly-situated whites/Latinos/Asians/etc.?), and so and so on.
You’ve got this baroque mansion of argument standing on quick-sand. If you want to convince us, you are going to have to return to your start.
Best,
Luke
Luke,
Do you just automatically sign everything “Best”? I feel like you should be more selective, depending on the tone of any given missive. 😉
Let’s get my now-standard disclaimer out of the way up front:
*********************
DISCLAIMER: I am strongly in favor of more government spending on educational initiatives and social programs that benefit poor black kids. Even as an atheist, I agree with what Jesus said about the “least among these” (to tie it more in with modern philosophy, does this not also resonate with Rawls and his “original position”, or am I remembering that podcast wrong?). And I would love to see the race/IQ discussion go away completely, and for schools not to even collect this data. But as long as policymakers are collecting it, reporting it, and punishing teachers and administrators for not making kids of different races equal in aptitude, I’m going to feel forced to take up the argument, distasteful though it certainly is.
*********************
Moving on to the particular bees in your bonnet:
“Did you not make the claim, so many posts ago, that you were confident ‘the best and brightest’ were not brought over to America to work as slaves? So far I can’t remember you disclaiming this baseless assertion.”
I wouldn’t call it an assertion. More of a hypothesis to explain, in part, the proven fact that African Americans–even ones who grow up affluent and going to the best schools–score significantly below their matched peers on IQ/aptitude tests. I don’t know if my hypothesis is true. Perhaps it’s not. (I may just be influenced by this being a widespread belief among black Africans in East Africa, where I was born.) It does strike me as logical, though, being somewhat analogous to the demonstrated differences in intelligence between dogs and wolves. But as much as you might wish otherwise, the fact of these IQ disparities is so well established that if you believe no portion of the disparity is congenital (which is not necessarily the same thing as genetic), or a result of irreversible physiological (i.e., not simply psychological or sociological) brain damage (as with lead poisoning), the burden is on you to explain it some other way. The irony here is that your alternative explanations, if you offer any, are almost sure to be highly speculative, with no proof behind them at all. But that’s okay when it’s you doing it. Right?
And speaking of lead poisoning, not to mention irony and just your general credibility to be lecturing me, you once again complained of “this red herring about lead poisoning (Why should blacks be any more effected than similarly-situated whites/Latinos/Asians/etc.?)”.
Lawyers know not to ask a question for which you don’t already know the answer, and this maxim comes in handy in almost any kind of rhetorical sparring. It’s strange, first of all, that you’re not already well aware of this issue; second, that you wouldn’t do a little research before getting way out on that limb; and the irony I mentioned is that the activists most concerned about lead exposure in predominantly black neighborhoods would consider the argument I just quoted from you to be in the same vein as those pooh-poohing the idea that African Americans are treated differently (worse) by the criminal justice system. Really? That’s where you want to take your stand? Okay then:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4697843
——–
ED GORDON, host:
Pediatricians and health advocates have long known the health risks of lead. A recent study from the University of Michigan found that of children diagnosed with lead poisoning, only half of them receive any kind of follow-up care or testing. This is a particular problem in the African-American community, since blacks are five times more likely to be poisoned by lead. Commentator Kristal Brent Zook says the toxicity of lead is affecting black kids in ways seldom thought of.
KRISTAL BRENT ZOOK:
We’ve known about the dangers of lead forever. Roman emperor Nero was poisoned by lead, after all. We know that the substance is extremely toxic, especially to developing young brains. It only takes a tiny hint of lead, the size of a sugar speck really, to cause learning and behavioral problems, stunted growth, aggression and memory and hearing loss, particularly among kids and developing fetuses. A Colorado State University researcher called the relationship between lead and low academic test scores, quote, “so extreme it’s almost beyond belief,” end quote.
——–
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/07/13/black-children-at-risk-for-lead-poisoning-_n_7672920.html
——–
“It’s pathetic,” Matthew J. Chachère said of the fact that lead paint poisoning — a fully preventable, but extremely toxic hazard to young children — is still happening in 2015. “We still have kids being poisoned and we still have kids at risk,” he said.
Chachère, a staff attorney at Northern Manhattan Improvement Corporation, helped advocate for New York City’s Lead Poisoning Prevention Law of 2004, which requires landlords to find out if young children live in their buildings, inspect for lead paint and remove any lead paint hazards, if they exist.
Some children are at greater risk for lead poisoning than others. A HuffPost analysis of available lead poisoning data for U.S. cities found a correlation between cities with high percentages of African-American residents and elevated lead poisoning rates.
“This is a disease that primarily impacts African-Americans,” Chachère said.
——–
http://www.cleveland.com/healthfit/index.ssf/2015/10/race_racism_and_lead_poisoning.html
——–
Anyone who lives in a home built before 1978, when lead paint was banned, is at risk for lead poisoning. Low-income families who rent, though, often have no recourse when that paint is deteriorating. They can’t move, fear eviction if they complain, and don’t know who to turn to for help.
“You can’t just pick up and move when you have no resources and no one to fall back on,” Foreman says.
Minority children appear to be at higher risk of lead poisoning independent of income level, though, according to some research.
Black kids have blood lead levels 50 percent higher than other races, regardless of age and family income, Lanphear said. While it’s unclear why, it may be a result of genetic differences in the way lead is absorbed in the body.
——–
Mark, thank you for weighing in on the direction that things have taken. Thank you.
Love is the answer.
Im only halfway through but the Wills article is pretty cool. Recommend it
Individualism Vs Collectivism. Is there a better balance? How to discuss white privilege and circumvent a sort of prevalent ‘fragility’ i have even observed in myself. Great episode. For me the contemporaryness of it i think helped motivate me to read the more rigorous stuff and spend a lot of time in contemplation in general.
Hey Law, what do you make of this argument?
http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/everyone-needs-to-stop-talking-about-white-people-trump/19008#.WOE8UIWsbPM
Noah,
Very interesting. Thanks for sharing this. Part of his argument, I wholeheartedly embrace without reservation:
——–
The white-people obsession turns whiteness into a kind of original sin, a marker for wickedness. To be white is to be corrupted — from the moment of birth — and so one must spend one’s time atoning and apologising. This is why we have the cult of white privilege-checking, where well-educated, racially minded ‘progressive’ whites will ostentatiously watch what they say around blacks, take a back seat in debates about race and power, and preface their every utterance with the words ‘I know I’m white, so this might be invalid, but…’.
——–
This is right in line with what I debated at length with Athena Sophia in an earlier thread. Progressive whites, including heterosexual white men, should not have to “atone and apologize” for traits they were born with and cannot change. They should be answerable only for what they do and say.
But then there is another argument he makes that I partially agree with, but take in a very different direction from what the editorialist intended:
——–
For following Trump’s shock ascendancy to the White House – another WHITE institution – it’s become clear what all this ‘white people’ talk really represents. It’s not a radical, post-racist attempt to expose where power lies in society and discuss how it might be challenged. On the contrary, it’s a racially charged, dehumanising expression of class contempt by well-connected white people, and some non-whites, for the wrong kind of white people: bad whites; unthinking whites; the dim or undeserving poor[…]
As if the white man who owns a bank is indistinguishable from the Rust Belt white guy who works on a production line.[…]
They’re talking about those people. Them. Those whites. The other whites. The inhabitants of the Dark Heart of America, the gruff speakers and unhealthy eaters of the north of England. The insensitive, the ungrateful, the unlearned. Oh for the honesty of the old elitists, who said what they meant…
——–
I especially love that bit about the honesty of the old elitists. I am going to step forward and be just such an honest elitist. I am by turns horrified by, and contemptuous of, the people he refers to. I don’t believe they are contributing anything valuable to our society, and I certainly don’t think we would miss them if they were gone. Obviously I’m not in favor of lining them up against the wall to be shot or sending them to gulags. But neither am I in favor of even giving lip service to honoring their culture or inviting them to express their ugly, benighted views through the political system. If the older ones among them are probably irredeemable, we should try to educate the next generation to become enlightened, or at least not so unenlightened. Heck, I would settle for an effort to encourage such people to simply stay out of politics.
As a progressive, I hasten to note that this does not mean I don’t also want to oppose the business tycoons (e.g., the Kochs) who are supporting the right wing in order to enrich themselves and weaken regulations that hamper their capitalistic greed. We can do more than one thing at once. But we do have to recognize that these are almost completely different fights.
“They should be answerable only for what they do and say.” from Alan Thomas above.
People are answerable for what they do and say and also for being honest with themselves about who they are in the context of a given society and the factors that made them who they are in the context of a given society.
Thus, we, generally white middle class people, who have grown up with certain cultural tools as givens, should recognize that a certain part of our high intelligence and academic skills are due to our upbringing, not to any special “merit” on our part. . You yourself, Alan Thomas, were honest enough to explain that both of your parents were university professors or at least highly educated people (I don’t recall). Mine were not university professors, but both were highly literate people who read a lot and placed an emphasis on debating ideas in our upbringing.
Yes, they were university professors. But that was not up to me. I continue to believe we should not be “answerable” for any factor we cannot control. Which is why I consider it unfair for you to put words in my mouth about “merit”.
Now, since we are talking about politics in a philosophical context, I could point out that libertarian free will (depending on how you define it, yadda yadda) is an illusion–and therefore no one is truly answerable for anything. But that is not a very useful formulation, as it leaves us nowhere to go.
I would say it’s fair to look at the advantages someone gets and what they do with them. And also whether they accept or reject problematic elements of their upbringing. My father was raised in New York and suburban Connecticut by a rapacious real estate tycoon who sent him to fancy boarding schools and then to Stanford, with the intent of having my dad carry on the family business. But my dad then broke free and went on to get his Ph.D. at Stanford in anthropology, much to my grandfather’s chagrin. The resultant family strife is in part responsible for my dad’s subsequent suicide. So he certainly carried advantages with him; but due to his own conversion to progressivism, even Marxism, it all ended up being a very mixed bag.
Then there’s me. I did not get sent to private schools or any of that, but there was certainly an intellectual atmosphere in our household growing up (my dad’s suicide did not occur until I was in high school). But despite having the highest test scores in the city out of three high schools, I graduated in the bottom half of my high school class, and never did graduate college (although I still have plenty of student loan debt). Financially, I am now in my 40s and doing better than I ever have previously, but our family of four is still only at 150% of the federal poverty level.
Another wrinkle to throw in here is that while I was simply characterized in moral terms growing up as a lazy procrastinator, it is now clear that I am more than qualified by the terms of the latest DSM to be diagnosed as suffering from the predominately inattentive form of ADHD. So once again, it can be questioned whether I was born with more advantages or disadvantages.
All that philosophical murkiness aside, I do think it’s fair to morally judge adults based on their political affiliation, probably more fair than judgment in almost any other moral characteristic (leaving out cases where people are actually committing crimes for which there is broad consensus they should be crimes, whether they get away with them or not). If you are a Democrat, I am going to cut you a lot of slack. If you are a moderate Republican, less so; if you are a hardcore Tea Party right winger or alt-right Trump supporter, I’ve got no sympathy for you at all.
Alan,
I didn’t put words in your mouth about merit. You may have read it that way. However, my
comment refers to the whole debate here, not to anything that you said about yourself.
I agree that libertarian free will is an illusion, although compatibilists would say that in spite of that, we are answerable or responsible.
Sorry about your father’s suicide.
Like you, I had very good test scores and like you, I’ve never made any money at all.
However, this debate has not been about how much money different groups make, but about the academic performance of certain minority groups. By the way, I agree that your wife and other teachers should not be held responsible for complex social problems of school failure.
I realize that your academic performance may not have lived up to your test scores, but from your comments on this blog, I consider you to be a person who could do very very well in an academic setting if you had the right motivation and professors who knew how to channel your obvious high intelligence and cultural skills. So your case is not at all that of a child who fails in school because they have problems with basic skills such as reading. You may well have read above the level expected of you in school and thus, paid little attention to school.
“If I had the motivation” is a big “if”. We could just as easily say about someone else who has the motivation (or what people are calling “grit” these days), “if they only had the native intelligence to go with that grit…”. But of course this pulls us right back into the murk of free will and compatiblism, however much we (or at least I) might like to escape it. (It’s a philosophical issue I feel like I just cannot even begin to grapple with the ethical implications of, so I prefer to punt if at all possible.)
Thanks for the condolences and other kind words–I appreciate it. Nice to “meet” another cash-poor intellectual. In my TNS group, someone once posted something about how the strong correlation between IQ and income breaks down at the very highest levels. Not that it reverses, but that people are scattered all over the graph at that IQ level.
Nice to meet you too.
Most of the highly intelligent people whom I know are not “in it for the money”. Of course that might just say something about the very small group of people who put up with me, not about highly intelligent people in general.
In any case, most of the Western (and Eastern as far as I know) philosophical tradition claims that there are more important things in life than money.
Alan,
I read many of your responses. I always appreciate how thorough and thoughtful you are but I’m a little stumped by this one. While I am all for questioning the status quo and not worrying about political correctness I wonder – do you really believe that black people as a whole have lower IQ’s? I read many of your comments looking for how thinking that is making a straw man argument as you suggested but in your response to Aslan, you seemed to defend that idea. It reminds me of the new movie “Get Out” where the people have this kind of strange appreciation for the qualities of black people but don’t actually see them as people so they enslave them. I’m not saying you are suggesting enslavement! But of all the confounding evidence against the claim regarding IQ – I’m struggling to understand how it’s founded. Isn’t the idea that an entire group of people have some kind of inferior genetic quality a bad idea? If I were to read that about say – women- I’d be pretty upset. In fact, I won’t lie, the fact that Plato calls women deformed men kinda pisses me off. You mentioned people with Down’s syndrome – they actually DO have a genetic issue. It’s not an entire race of people with enormous genetic diversity so I was unclear about that comparison. I get that you are saying that IQ is kind of BS and also that there are multiple intelligences – completely agree. But then it seems like you really do see it as a deficiency rather than a bias testing issue.
I’m reading most of this on my phone and don’t always see all the responses so please pardon if my questions seem clueless. And it’s also really tough to scroll back to make specific references so if I have mischaracterized what you have said I apologize in advance.
Jennifer,
Let me start with the disclaimer I belatedly realized I should use in every post, due to the fact that some people don’t read every response (and I say that with no judgement–it’s just something I didn’t think of earlier, which led to people like Mark reading things out of context which probably looked a lot worse than I feel the entire conversation would have).
*********************
DISCLAIMER: I am strongly in favor of more government spending on educational initiatives and social programs that benefit poor black kids. Even as an atheist, I agree with what Jesus said about the “least among these” (to tie it more in with modern philosophy, does this not also resonate with Rawls and his “original position”, or am I remembering that podcast wrong?). And I would love to see the race/IQ discussion go away completely, and for schools not to even collect this data. But as long as policymakers are collecting it, reporting it, and punishing teachers and administrators for not making kids of different races equal in aptitude, I’m going to feel forced to take up the argument, distasteful though it certainly is.
*********************
Okay. That out of the way, I will try to answer some of your questions.
“While I am all for questioning the status quo and not worrying about political correctness I wonder – do you really believe that black people as a whole have lower IQ’s?”
I’m not sure how to evaluate “as a whole”, but on average, it is beyond dispute that African Americans have lower IQs than the average American overall. I mean, people who haven’t looked at it closely might dispute it, but it’s really a fact, if what we mean by “have lower IQs” is “when IQ tests are given to people of different races and their race is recorded by the test-givers, the average scores of black test-takers is lower than the scores recorded for other ethnic groups, even when controlled for socioeconomic status”. That is an objective fact. What is disputed is:
–Whether IQ is a valid measure of intelligence (and I do believe it only measures a certain type of intelligence, missing many others that African Americans are likely stronger in, perhaps stronger than whites);
–Relatedly, whether the tests are culturally biased (although the high scores by Asian Americans tend to weigh against this at least to a degree);
–The biggie: whether this is at least in part an inborn difference in intellectual aptitude (whether genetic or a result of exposure to lead), as opposed to being an entirely nonphysical result of “nurture” deficits such as inequities in the education system (or, perhaps, weaknesses in parenting–although as I noted upthread, this opens its own can of worms).
I suppose someone could also dispute the disparity in scores by accusing those giving the tests or recording the scores of fraud, or claiming that somehow the smartest African Americans are not getting tested, skewing the scores downward. But I’ve never seen anyone make those claims.
Now, again: I’m not thrilled about the concept of going around seeming to gloat over these IQ disparities. Many “race realists” are obviously doing just that, and I find that disgusting. But policymakers have decided, by and large, that the fault lies with schools and teachers. So they give ultimatums for the schools to get test scores at majority black schools up to at least the national average, and punish them in various ways (up to and including closing the school) if they don’t achieve this.
To date, there are very few examples of schools who have managed this feat. Unless they “cheat” by using selective admission to take in only the best students, that is (or, as in the Atlanta scandal, just flat out helping the kids answer the questions so as to raise their scores). But I’m talking about schools that are charged with educating all the kids who live in a certain neighborhood or other geographic area. It’s unfair to punish the schools for a situation that seems intractable.
But honestly, I don’t even like using that kind of language (“intractable”). I don’t see why we can’t just accept that different people are different, and stop wringing our hands and pointing fingers. As long as black kids are going to schools with adequate funding (and that is far, far more the case than it was a few decades ago), staffed by educators who care about them, let’s stop with this obsession with their test scores. It’s just going to end up making these kids, and a whole race of people, feel bad about themselves. Which, again, may seem ironic because that’s what people think I’m doing. But I really just want the whole thing to go away, for people to stop even collecting data on race and IQ/aptitude.
“Isn’t the idea that an entire group of people have some kind of inferior genetic quality a bad idea? If I were to read that about say – women- I’d be pretty upset.”
Well, but hang on. This is another case where we don’t need to be rude and rub this in unnecessarily, but you do recognize that when it comes to speed and strength, there are significant differences between women and men, right? Usain Bolt has run the 200 meters in 19.19 seconds. The women’s world record for that distance is still held by Florence Griffith-Joyner, who ran it in 21.34 seconds back in 1988. That time, which no woman over the past thirty years has been able to match, would be almost a second too slow to even qualify for the Olympics for men. Their standard is 20.50, which in 2016 was met by 71 men–including not just bigshots like Bolt but unknowns like Kyle Greaux from Trinidad and Tobago, Hua Wilfried Koffi of the Ivory Coast, and The Gambia’s Adama Jammeh (got to love that name).
This is why I made the point in one of my first comments that requiring the firefighting profession be equally open to women as to men would be dangerous. If you’re the average 200+ pound guy passed out from smoke, you want a guy who’s 6’3″ and 220 pounds of muscle to carry you out. There are not too many women who could compete in that respect.
But of course women are as intelligent as men, or more; and they have a pretty nifty trick up their sleeves of being able to create new human beings. So different people have different strengths and weaknesses, and it makes no sense to pretend we are all the same.
Alan,
Thank you for your thoughtful reply. So – I guess it just sounds like, when referring to IQ, that although there are some nice comments about various kinds of intelligence, it all sounds kind of mixed up and vague. It sounds like this – black people just don’t have the same intellectual capacity as whites. They are better in some things but not things like math or science or reading. The different kinds of intelligence makes it unclear to me in which ways blacks and whites might differ. It sort of sounds like we are avoiding saying blacks are better at things like sports but whites are smarter.
Listen, I realize that the majority of professional basketball players are black. I get that we have genetic differences. I get that men are stronger and all of that. And I am not even particularly offended at the notion that if we could somehow have some truth about intellectual capacity as measured in some magically fair way that one group might even have some genetic leg up. But the simple fact is that we don’t have that and we really don’t know. And I do feel like it misses the point of “closing the achievement gap”. The point isn’t that black people just will not ever measure up and so why keep asking a shoe to fit that will not. I thought the point was that the biggest and most obvious reason there IS an achievement gap is largely due to the decades of oppression that have wreaked (wrought?) havoc on an entire race. As Chris Rock so cleverly put it “Shit, you had a 400-year head start, motherfucker.”
It seems a little like that implicit bias issue. Which I most definitely have in spades. And I felt terrible about it for a really long time until Nelson Mandela shared his story in his memoir about being instantly concerned when boarding a plane with a black pilot. We all have it. It’s naive to think otherwise. To me, having a belief that black people have any kind of lower intelligence, since it’s so poorly backed up IMO, is a case where the belief is leading the data instead of the other way around. I don’t think it means a person is a racist individual when these things happen. I do think it means that sometimes our beliefs are so deeply held that we look for evidence to support them. In this case, I think about people like Lewis Lattimer and George Carruthers and so many more who may even not have been recognized because they were black.
In the end it sounds kind of patronizing or condescending to say, it’s ok, you just aren’t built that way. No need to fight it. It begs the question. I think I am using that term correctly – it is begging the question about whether or not there is a real problem with the advantages that whites have over blacks due to these kinds of structural or institutional forms of racism or whatever you want to call it. Why beg the question? Let’s do whatever we can to give everyone a fair shot and then tally scores if we feel so inclined. No?
I know these conversations are not really easy or fun so I hope I didn’t say anything to offend you. I really do appreciate having the conversation.
Me too. No worries!
I’d be happy for that gap to close. And I’m all for putting additional resources toward helping educate black children. I’m also for reparations for slavery.
What I’m not for is metaphorically pointing a gun at schools and teachers and saying “close this gap, or else”, when we just don’t have a lot of evidence that it *can* be closed. I’m not saying it absolutely, definitely can’t be. But in the absence of evidence that it can be, it’s not fair to educators to call a school “failing” when its students do as well or perhaps even better on standardized tests than the average demographically similar group of kids.
Jennifer,
I just realized there was one other point of yours I wanted to respond to:
“The different kinds of intelligence makes it unclear to me in which ways blacks and whites might differ. It sort of sounds like we are avoiding saying blacks are better at things like sports but whites are smarter.”
I get why you might take it that way, but I’m not just beating around the bush with that thesis. Here are the eight types of intelligence Gardiner identified: musical-rhythmic, visual-spatial, verbal-linguistic, logical-mathematical, bodily-kinesthetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, and naturalistic. IQ and other aptitude tests generally measure verbal-linguistic and logical-mathematical aptitude, and perhaps visual-spatial to some degree in some cases. Bodily-kinesthetic intelligence would map most closely to “good at sports” (but also dance). I’m absolutely willing to call that one for black people (again: on average, or collectively; most black people, even in the NBA, are not as good at basketball, for instance, as Kevin Love).
I would also grant them musical-rhythmic, without objection. Some of my favorite music of all time is “hard bop” jazz from the late ’50s and early ’60s, and the only major player from that era who’s white, kind of the Kevin Love of jazz, is Bill Evans. Despite this being during the late stages of the Jim Crow era, a number of absolute geniuses predominated (and I don’t think that’s too strong a term). Charles Mingus, Miles Davis, Hank Mobley, John Coltrane, McCoy Tyner, Oscar Peterson, Lester Young…the list goes on and on. To my mind, these guys are right up there with Bach and Beethoven–even more impressive in a way, because they didn’t sit down and spend hours/weeks/months carefully plotting out their music. They improvised it organically, on the spot, in front of a crowd! Incredible.
So to my mind, the musical-rhythmic intelligence is nothing to sneeze at. It’s just that, like bodily-kinesthetic aptitude, it makes a small number of people rich and famous, while not really doing much for the vast majority (in terms of socioeconomic status; it still enriches individual lives of course).
As for the other three intelligences (interpersonal, intrapersonal, and naturalistic), I have no particular instinct as to who “wins” in those categories. Thus if we did really value all types of intelligence equally (as we should), it looks like a draw. I rate very highly in verbal-linguistic and logical-mathematical aptitude, but although I love music and tennis, I can’t play a note and I’m only a middling tennis player after years of practice. Would I trade my verbal-linguistic and logical-mathematical abilities to be in the 99.9th percentile in ability to wield a tennis racquet and, say, a saxophone? It would be tempting!
Alan,
I’m just gonna go ahead and cut to the chase and assume you aren’t easily offended.
It smells a whole lot like racism. And I really hate when people scream racism at every single thing that happens. And I also don’t think that racism equals hate so I’m not saying you are a horrible and hateful person. But dude – you wouldn’t mind trading in your intelligence for the an awesome tennis backhand? Come on!! You don’t see this as really condescending and patronizing? I don’t know. I could be really off. I’m just reacting more than coming from a solid philosophical argument. I am not as well versed in such things as your average PEL listener. All I know is that I had a visceral response when you intimated that women were awesome because we could give birth. And should I decide not to give birth? I’m really trying to give this the benefit of the doubt but I can’t wrap my brain around it.
The entire conversation seems to miss the point that the conversation should be about changing things so that we don’t have institutional racism. The issue with black kids going to prison for doing crap that’s completely overlooked in white communities. All the things that cause young black kids to feel less than that are baked in society – kind of like the ones that constantly focus on women as objects. All these things are what I think a conversation about white privilege should focus on.
But instead we are entertaining the idea that teachers are brow beaten because they can’t close and achievement gap bc of some genetic differences which sounds a whole lot like code for genetic inferiority. Maybe it’s just a personal thing but when people pat me on the head and say – it’s ok, you don’t have to be smart bc your pretty! Or any variation of that I really don’t respond well. I guess what I’m trying to say is that this feels like a fancier more intellectual form of racism. And even if it’s not – if I’m just too dense to get the point, at the very least it detracts from the conversation about white privilege which is a real, actual problem.
And I was a teacher. In an ALL black school. One of two white teachers. And never was I brow beaten for test scores.
I’m not sure, unless you are willing to change your position entirely about IQ that we will come to a consensus.
I would just say rhetorically –
1.) Don’t you find it interesting and questionable that a conversation about white privilege would be steered in the direction of discussing the white person’s plight of dealing with problems of race – because that is what happened here.
2.) how difficult is it on a personal level to hold space for the idea that black people as a race are held back by some of the inequalities that haven’t been corrected and that they are just as smart and capable as white people and that it is an injustice that we have to own. Maybe it’s not our fault but perhaps if you are empathic toward the plight of others it is our responsibility (I’m not saying obligation – though I think perhaps it is; I’m of two minds about that).
3.) How is this argument at its most basic level different from saying something like – there are natural slaves?
Given that I’ve repeatedly said there should be reparations for slavery, I’m at a loss to understand where you would get any pro-slavery message. Two of my four children have autism and are far behind their peers academically. That doesn’t mean I think they should be enslaved, or even that they are “less than”! Jesus.
And that’s great that you did not feel any pressure when you taught school, but I would urge you to read these articles to see what is going on around the country:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/obama-administration-spent-billions-to-fix-failing-schools-and-it-didnt-work/2017/01/19/6d24ac1a-de6d-11e6-ad42-f3375f271c9c_story.html
http://m.motherjones.com/media/2012/08/mission-high-false-low-performing-school
Hello!
I didn’t read anything in the articles that I haven’t sent before so I’m unsure what I am supposed to take away from it exactly. Being in education I can tell you that money did not ever feel like the main issue. The issues were vast and complex and weren’t a matter of not having text books. Money does matter but it’s all how it’s used and for some issues money placed directly into the schools wouldn’t help. I think that’s a separate conversation and not really relevant to the point I’m trying to make.
I didn’t say you were for enslavement. I said how is this different from believing Aristotle’s idea there are natural slaves? The idea that some people just don’t have autonomous rationality. The conversation around IQ/intelligence just kept making me think of that. Kind of like saying women just don’t have the ability to make proper use of the vote. I can’t help but think that saying that a group of people lack a certain kind of intelligence comes really close to that.
And it doesn’t matter whether you or I think anyone is less than. I was saying that young black kids don’t have enough of a positive social experience of people who are like them and as a result often have a low self esteem. They feel less than. That’s a problem we can fix.
Basically I think it’s really problematic to have this idea that there are some groupings of people who aren’t as well off intellectually. But to each his own. Maybe I’ll learn something new and change my mind. Either way, the achievement gap isn’t because of that. Or at least, there is no way you can even begin to say something like that until you’ve done everything you can to eliminate oppression.
I linked those articles because you said:
“And I was a teacher. In an ALL black school. One of two white teachers. And never was I brow beaten for test scores.”
But now you say what’s in the articles is nothing new to you. However, they make it clear that there is heavy pressure on schools to raise test scores and that this puts a lot of stress on teachers and administrators up to the point of getting rid of principals or half the teachers in the school or closing the school altogether. And then even after a heavy carrot-and-stick approach along these lines, there was no change in the test scores.
So I’m not sure how you square your two statements.
There is a lot of money placed in programs to help close the achievement gap. Many times it doesn’t work. I’m not sure how this is pressure placed on teachers? I never felt like it was my fault. Actually, the only time I felt pressure was when I was a student teacher in an upper middle class white school and the school’s rating would change if they went below a certain score and the principle was all over it every day checking in on the practice test assessments. But it doesn’t make sense for me to apply my singular experience of teaching to everyone. I think testing is an inherently flawed tool for kids from every background. I always felt like – why is so much money going into schools? Many times we had much of what we needed to be successful but we needed kids who didn’t have dads in jails and moms who work 3 jobs and can’t read to them at night. We needed parents who had the bandwidth to learn about positive parenting solutions to behavioral issues. We needed educated parents to increase the vocabulary used at home. Those are the problems that, to me, stem from institutional racism. And pouring more money into schools and not addressing that in a big way seems like a denial of that.
I just went to an actual computer and read all of the comments. I see we are basically having the same conversation you’ve already had.
Feel free to carry on. Many others can do far better at arguing this issue than I can.
At this point I’m only responding to people who address me directly. Seems like the polite thing to do.
Alan,
It’s pretty hard to have this conversation without falling into a weird sort of superiority complex of calling out racism. I don’t know – I find it all kind of fascinating. I was happy to have interacted with you and while I don’t agree with some of the assertions I am glad you engaged. I think there are a lot of really interesting questions related to this which I have been grappling with since I started listening to PEL. For example, can there be equality? Maybe it was Burke who said something along the lines of the notion that we can’t have equality. Forget about the idea of whether or not it’s racist, I wonder what it means for me. On some level don’t we all wonder if we are equal? If we are as good as another. To me it’s a deeper question that I make it into.
Yes, that is a profound question indeed. I do not believe we are all equal. But I consider it grotesque for anyone to say “this person/group is ‘less than’, therefore I will be contemptuous of them”. (Now, if they voted for Trump, that’s another matter altogether.)
Jennifer,
I just want to say thank you! I REALLY, really appreciate so many of the points that you raised here. They are so spot on!
I’m hesitant to jump into this discussion, just because I think you and others are doing a great job pushing back on Alan’s claims.
That said, for better or worse, I suppose that I am just adding another stick to the fire.
The only piece that I’m specifically interested in adding to this discussion is to question what Alan’s notion of “race” is. It is unclear to me as to how he understands it.
I think it’s important — in this strange detour into Alan’s seemingly “scientific racism,” to note what the scientific consensus is regarding the nature of “race.” The scientific consensus is that while ideas about “race” are rooted in biology, “race” itself is nonetheless a social construct, a folk ideology.
***As an aside to Alan — I know that you’ve put a disclaimer on several of your posts. However, such disclaimers don’t mean that you haven’t staked out some super racist and pseudo-scientific, pseudo-historical positions. If it walks like a dog, looks like a dog, and barks like a dog…it’s probably a dog. Of course, I could be wrong. Hence, despite couching your argument within the rhetoric of the “objectivity” of “science,” I just haven’t heard you say anything that suggests to me that 1) you’re looking at the science in any kind of objective manner, and that 2) you’re not just arguing anything other than a racist perspective. So far, the core of you’re argument amounts to…”I’m not racist, but…,” which is precisely the kind of covert and/or unconsciously racist justification that we hear whenever someone is about to say some super racist nonsense.”**
Moreover, I feel like debate at this level is already a lost cause in some sense because it seems like this level of discussion is — at it’s core, really about someone’s psychological attachment to (paternalistic) notions of “racial superiority/inferiority” as opposed to a critical and objective evaluation of the mainstream scientific consensus on “race,” but I’m hopeful that maybe Alan can come around to and/or be open to a different perspective…I have my doubts though. In other words, despite all of Alan’s protestations otherwise, his position just feels like intellectualized racism…and at the end of the day, it’s still just the same plain, old lazy racism that seems to be at work in much of his argumentation.
As a counterweight to Alan’s largely “pop” citations in support of his position, I’d like to offer some perspectives from some academic journals that accurately reflect at least some of the mainstream scholarly, scientific, and academic understandings of “race,” as well as “race,” genes, and IQ in general. Again, I offer these as a counterweight to push back against some of his claims, and to offer a potentially generative opportunity for a more nuanced discussion. Hopefully, those purposes are served over and above whatever personal failings there might be on my own part.
…
From the February/March 2012 issue of “American Psychologist” — the official peer-reviewed academic journal of the American Psychological Association, I’ll quote from an article called, “Intelligence: New Findings and Theoretical Developments,” by Nisbett, Blair, Dickens, Flynn, Halpern, & Turkheimer.
Here the authors stated:
“About the Black–White difference in IQ, which at the time was about 15 points, the Neisser et al. (1996) article stated, ‘There is not much direct evidence on this point, but what there is fails to support a genetic hypothesis.’ That conclusion stands today: There has been no new direct evidence on the question.”
http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/nisbett2012int.pdf
—
From the January 2005 issue of “American Psychologist” — the official peer-reviewed academic journal of the American Psychological Association, I’ll quote from an article called, “Intelligence, Race, and Genetics,” by Sternberg, Grigorenko, and Kidd…all from Yale University.
Here the authors stated:
“In this article, the authors argue that the overwhelming portion of the literature on intelligence, race, and genetics is based on folk taxonomies rather than scientific analysis. They suggest that because theorists of intelligence disagree as to what it is, any consideration of its relationships to other constructs must be tentative at best. They further argue that race is a social construction with no scientific definition. Thus, studies of the relationship between race and other constructs may serve social ends but cannot serve scientific ends. No gene has yet been conclusively linked to intelligence, so attempts to provide a compelling genetic link of race to intelligence are not feasible at this time. The authors also show that heritability, a behavior-genetic concept, is inadequate in regard to providing such a link.”
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.372.2679&rep=rep1&type=pdf
—
From the October 2011 issue of “BioSocieties” — a cross-disciplinary journal about the crucial social, ethical, and policy implications of developments in the life sciences and biomedicine, I’ll quote from an article called, “Race and IQ in the Postgenomic Age: The Microcephaly Case,” by Sarah Richardson, John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard University.
Here she stated:
“Methodologically, defenders of race and IQ research have never unequivocally demonstrated the validity of IQ tests as culturally independent measures of innate intelligence, persuasively disambiguated genetic and environmental (for example, socioeconomic) factors in intelligence, or provided evidence of any gene or genetic mechanism biochemically implicated in differences in IQ among racial and ethnic groups.”
http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/srichard/files/richardson_race_and_iq.pdf
—
I would also like to quote from Vol. 12, Issue 1 from April 2015 of “Du Bois Review” — a peer-reviewed journal from the WEB DuBois Research Institute at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard. The journal is devoted to research and criticism on race in the social sciences. It’s a journal that provides a forum for discussion and increased understanding of race and society from a range of disciplines, including but not limited to economics, political science, sociology, anthropology, law, communications, public policy, psychology, and history.
From the journal, I’ll quote from an article called, “SCIENTIFIC RACISM REDUX? The Many Lives of a Troublesome Idea: A Troublesome Inheritance Indeed,” by Ann Morning, Associate Professor of Sociology at NYU.
Here the author stated:
“What, if anything, does Nicholas Wade’s ‘A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race, and Human History’ have to offer sociologists?
For most of us, the answer is ‘nothing.’ Because simply put, this is not scholarly work. ‘A Troublesome Inheritance’ is not an empirically-grounded monograph that offers substantial arguments, but rather a trade book targeting general readers who are probably not interested in the literature reviews and citations that academics expect. All kinds of claims are made without reference to any supporting evidence or analysis. As a result, the book cannot serve as a source of data or credible theory regarding race, culture, social structure, or the relationship of genes to human behavior.
But for sociologists of knowledge and of science, ‘A Troublesome Inheritance’ is a gold mine. These scholars will no doubt delight in discovering the echoes of eighteenth-century race science, nineteenth-century polygenetic and Romantic thought, twentieth-century eugenics and development theory, as well as enduring sexism and the occasional tirade against ‘Marxists.’ This book may also well become a classic for students of racial ideology, right up there with Herrnstein and Murray’s ‘The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life’ (1994). Both books are poignant cultural artifacts that testify to the ways in which biological science is invoked in the United States to shore up belief in races and to justify inequality between groups.”
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/du-bois-review-social-science-research-on-race/article/scientific-racism-redux-the-many-lives-of-a-troublesome-idea/47CFC2A09AC220CACD54AB4C336FE725
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Just to contextualize/situate Alan’s position a little more (and less for evidentiary purposes, as this is from student-run academic journal), I would also like to quote from Vol. 9, Issue 1 from January 2006 of “McGill Journal of Medicine” — an international, peer-reviewed publication run entirely by the medical and science students of McGill University. I’ll quote from an article called, “A Brave Old World: An Analysis of Scientific Racism and BiDil,” by Joel Garrod.
Here the author stated:
“While these earlier theories failed to provide any form of concrete proof surrounding many biological issues, Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution and natural selection provided logical evidence that addressed ‘the origin and maintenance of biological diversity.’ Darwin’s theory succeeded where others did not due to ‘directly observable biological phenomena, such as the resistance to pesticides and antibiotics, our ability to produce new food crops, and the postponement of the aging of laboratory animals.’ His theory has had such an impact on genetics and race that ‘[a]fter Darwin, any ranking of human beings by specific criteria would need scientific (that is, testable) justification.’
Furthering Darwin’s concept of natural selection, sociologist Herbert Spencer ‘coined the term ‘survival of the fittest’’ in response to growing social inequality in both England and the United States. Adapting Darwin’s evolutionary theories to the social landscape, Spencer would conclude that millionaires ‘were the product of natural selection, the bloom of the competitive society.’ Essentially, Spencer’s social darwinism mirrored polygenism without the religious connotations; successful groups of people, whether based on race or other factors were a product of biologically superior genetic inheritance. This thinking would lead others such as Sir Francis Galton to develop the areas of eugenics, pseudoscience, and psychometry. These new ‘sciences’ would retain the same irresponsible practices and methodologies as their former iterations.
Yet, while scientific racism appears to be a result of past irresponsible scientific practice, it has hardly fallen out of popular favour. In his 1997 book, ‘Why Race Matters,’ Michael Levin is quoted as saying: ‘If breeds of dog may differ in intelligence and temperament, there seems to be no reason evolution could not have differentiated human groups along similar lines.’ Responding to current sociological claims that race is socially constructed, Levin states: ‘As the accumulating evidence has made group differences harder to deny, one is apt to be told they do not matter.’ Continuing the tradition of scientific racism, Levin does not provide any substantial evidence to support his claims, instead choosing to discuss the genetic inheritance of particular species of animals, heritability of personality, and IQ testing between both blacks and whites. Vincent Sarich and Frank Miele similarly discuss race in their 2004 book, ‘Race: The reality of human differences,’ discussing social and scientific factors that ‘prove’ the existence of different races. Like Levin, Miele and Sarich provide faulty and illogical evidence to support their claims:
—[They say]—One must look to the breeds of dogs to find a comparable degree of within-species differences in morphology. We also point out other aspects in which human diversity in morphology, pharmacogenetics (body chemistry), and behaviour more closely parallels our best friends (the dogs) than our nearest relative (the apes), and what that reveals about the origin of our species.—
What Levin, Sarich and Miele fail to recognize is that ‘individual genetic traits are inherited independently,’ not as a group. Therefore culture, intelligence, athletic ability, et cetera cannot be racially linked due to the independent nature of these genetic traits.
A further illustration of this would be the commonly misused example of sickle disease and malaria ‘to support the biological foundation of race.’ While sickle disease is ’caused by a specific mutation in the haemoglobin gene [. . .] [it] appeared in, at least, four independent regions of the world, including Central and North Africa, Spain, Arabia, and India.’ Bernard Swynghedauw states:
—[He says]—In homozygous persons, the mutation is fatal and patients died from severe anaemia and its consequences. In contrast, in heterozygous persons, the mutation provides a selective advantage because patients are resistant to malaria [. . .], and the contemporary map of sickle disease can be superimposed on that of malaria. In fact, such an evolutionary advantage was crucial for the geographic distribution of the disease in three continents [. . .] between black and white Africans, Spanish, Arabs and Indians.—
Swynghedauw continues to make clear the issue that ‘race has nothing to do with such a distribution, and, in no sense, can sickle disease support the assumption that race or even ethnicity has a biological basis.’ While interbreeding populations will most likely share genetic traits – such as resistance to or susceptibility to particular diseases – these traits cannot be assumed by phenotypic differences or racial classifications as is done in the work of Levin, Sarich and Miele suggests.
Similarly, difficulties arise in not only finding societies composed solely of phenotypically homogeneous individuals, but also in finding individuals that identify themselves as made up of distinct races. Swynghedauw describes the ‘human race’ as ‘an extremely vague concept, with several, and contradictory definitions, mixing geographical (Asians), religious (Jews), and imaginary (Caucasians) origins, together with biologic phenotypes (Black).’ He also raises an interesting point:
—[He says]—Race is a parameter that cannot be measured accurately and cannot even be defined using objective criteria. Why skin colour? Why not height, which confers a strong evolutionary advantage? Or baldness – which is neutral? How do we classify mulattos? If one drop of black blood is enough to become black, why not the reverse?—
Barring the difficulties in trying to measure and classify race, ‘data from the last US census showed that even self-identification of race was problematic, since 7 million people identified themselves as members of more than one race, and about 800,000 respondents said they were both black and white.’ In our cosmopolitan world it is becoming more and more difficult to identify the ‘racial’ identity of an individual and according to John E. Clark, president of the Association of Black Health-System Pharmacists (ABHP), racial identification in terms of skin colour is not enough: ‘For me to call someone ‘black’ because they [have] black skin may be inappropriate because they may not see themselves as that.’ If there was ever such a thing as genetically-distinct ‘races,’ they have long-since disappeared due to a world that has become a global village, blending different ethnicities and ambiguous racial definitions with multiple socioeconomic and geographic factors which have the ability to affect the genetic inheritance of every group and individual.
Going beyond simple phenotypic differences, however, the results of the Human Genome Project provide further evidence against the racial concept: ‘The genotypes of ‘White’, ‘Black’, ‘Asians’ are remarkably identical, and there are no more than 0.1% variations in 35000 genes that have been identified so far in the human genome.’ A further study focusing on the ‘classical seven ‘races’’ in different geographical locations found that ‘the within-population diversity is much wider than the between-population or between-races diversity [. . .] From a genetic point of view, it is more difficult to distinguish one person from another, than a black from a ‘Caucasian’.’ As well, Swynghedauw relates the results of another study in which individuals were assigned to different ‘subclusters on the basis of their genotype, ignoring their actual population or racial affiliations.’ This study found similar results, such that ‘62% of Ethiopians belong to the same cluster as Norwegians, together with 21% of the Afro-Caribbeans, and the ethnic label ‘Asian’ inaccurately describes Chinese and Papuans who were placed almost entirely in separate clusters.’ The heterogeneous nature of our society, along with genetic evidence of commonality between the human ‘races’ distinguishes modern studies such as these from those by Levin, Sarich, Miele and others, which demonstrate a similarity to past scientific racism in their use as an oppressive tool. While it was historically ‘believed that biology held the key to solving social problems,’ it has instead often been used as justification for slavery, oppression, and manifest social inequality.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2687899/
—
Now, I would like to leave this information as it is, and again step back from the conversation. That said, if I am familiar with Alan to any degree, I am almost certain that my comments will inflame his passions in one way or another. I can imagine that he might make a knee-jerk attempt to ridicule, deny, and/or denounce the perspectives of the scholars who I have quoted, as well as my positions, my arguments, my characterization of his arguments in general, and/or my characterization of his arguments as essentially racist in nature. It is my hope that any of Alan’s misdirections may eventually circle back to the bare fact that the relationship between genes, “race,” and IQ is, at the very best, not established.
Again, I just want to thank you for your comments with regard to Alan’s perspectives/arguments. Also, if you managed to read through this lengthy digression, I am thoroughly appreciative.
Athena,
I wrote this once and then lost it – hope it’s not just a repeat.
I did read all the way to the end! Thank you for sharing such awesome examples. I’ve been mulling this idea over in my head all day. I kept thinking – regardless of how baseless the claims are – what if they weren’t? Could that be possible? Is there a world in which we could all know how we measure up? I kept thinking about Brave New World. In the book people are socially engineered to have different kinds/degrees of intelligence to perform specific tasks. They are also conditioned once outside the womb. It’s a truly disturbing portrait. I thought about how truly difficult it is in therapy to try and tease out if some issue you have is because of some genetic predisposition or if it’s because of a traumatic event and the default answer is always – it seems to be a combination of the two. And I thought about things like the mind/body problem – the hard problem – in philosophy and how that really seems like an unsolvable problem. How people can lose half their brain and still function normally or have insurmountable obstacles and overcome them with no real scientific explanation. All of these things make me think Huxley’s world is not really possible. We just don’t know enough about how it all works. We are not merely the sum of our genetic makeup – or our environment. The examples you shared helped me to see that more clearly. Particularly the part of what makes a person “black”.
Anyway – I’ve clearly taken my thoughts in a sort of different direction but it was all kind of getting to me – this idea that we could pigeonhole people into categories of intelligence and skill. No such magical science exists and I honestly can’t fathom a world in which it does. It would be like a world where we could prove or disprove the existence of God. Never gonna happen.
The best we can do for ourselves or for any person is to remove the obstacles or oppression which we have control over such that they have the opportunity to become their highest or best self – if they want to. I feel like that statement is hard to say without implying that their is some ultimate goal – I’m trying not to say that – but hopefully you know what I mean.
I should also say that Huxley’s Brave New World CAN exist – and it does. I meant only that there will always be people who feel their oppression and fight against it where as in the book it seemed as though there were none. I guess a couple of the characters do qualify as “not loving their oppression”. But mostly people are sheep who stay in their designated class in the book. I guess I have a more optimistic view of society.
Jennifer,
It looks like maybe I responded to the version of your comment that you lost? Because my reply seemed to land out in the middle of nowhere. So, since this one is pretty similar (you did a good job of reproducing it from memory), I’m going to paste it in here so you’ll see it:
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Jennifer,
I sense we don’t agree on the mind-body “problem” (I’m a physicalist), but I wanted to express my strong appreciation of, and agreement with, something else you said in this comment:
“The very least that we can do for ourselves or for any oppressed person it seems is to remove as much of the obstacles/oppression as possible – that we can control – and create an environment where people are free to become the highest/best versions of themselves.”
Yes indeed. The question Wes raised, that I’m still not sure about, is whether we have any *extra* responsibility to do something about obstacles for others that serve to benefit us. I can really see both sides of that one. Morally, it feels like we do; but Wes’s logic nags at me. He didn’t provide any examples or pose any thought experiments that I can remember, but one that occurs to me is: if you are a white American, and your $500 charitable contribution could do an equal amount of good either for African Americans (by giving it, say, to UNCF) or for South Asians (by contributing to a legal fund that helps people from low castes protect their modern legal rights to equal opportunities in housing, employment, and education)…have you made some kind of moral error by choosing the latter? I’m not sure.
“I don’t know Alan that well but I’m holding out hope that we can all have our ideas and beliefs picked apart a little bit without attaching it to our sense of self – since it’s a philosophy podcast!”
I’m not entirely sure how to interpret this, but if you’re wondering whether I can “disagree without being disagreeable”, or without taking it personally, it’s definitely something I strive for–and I think I do a pretty good job, by and large. (Sometimes I feel–not so much here but on other forums–that my interlocutors actually get more angry at me because they fail to get a rise out of me.)
Hoo boy. Lots to respond to. If I don’t address some point or other, it’s not because I’m cowering in fear of the world-destroying power of your argument. I’m only one person.
Two disclaimers tonight. First, the usual one:
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DISCLAIMER: I am strongly in favor of more government spending on educational initiatives and social programs that benefit poor black kids. Even as an atheist, I agree with what Jesus said about the “least among these” (to tie it more in with modern philosophy, does this not also resonate with Rawls and his “original position”, or am I remembering that podcast wrong?). And I would love to see the race/IQ discussion go away completely, and for schools not to even collect this data. But as long as policymakers are collecting it, reporting it, and punishing teachers and administrators for not making kids of different races equal in aptitude, I’m going to feel forced to take up the argument, distasteful though it certainly is.
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Now, a special disclaimer for tonight only:
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DISCLAIMER THE SECOND: I’m drunk.*
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And, because I’m feeling fancy, an epigraph:
“Every man, wherever he goes, is encompassed by a cloud of comforting convictions, which move with him like flies on a summer day.” – Bertrand Russell
Okay, with those out of the way, let’s tackle the biggest one first. Hi, Athena Sophia!
“The only piece that I’m specifically interested in adding to this discussion is to question what Alan’s notion of ‘race’ is. It is unclear to me as to how he understands it.”
This (the avowed narrowness of what you were aiming for) made me laugh the second time, as I had no idea the first time I read it how large a wall of text was still to come. (Yes, I have written some long comments too, but I think they contained more of my own thoughts mixed in with the quoted material.)
I did address this upthread, but again: I think Steven Pinker defines “race” quite well, as a large extended family. As with all extended families, it does not have any precise boundary. But the lack of precise boundaries does not mean a thing or concept does not exist. Surely philosophers if anyone can see this! How many grains of rice are required to make a heap? How many hairs exactly must a man lose before he transitions from “not bald” to “bald”? https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sorites-paradox/
“So far, the core of you’re argument amounts to…’I’m not racist, but…,'”
Not quite. In one of my first lengthy posts in this thread (almost a week ago now), I stated the following:
“I think I could certainly be defined as a racist in some senses of the word. But my racism is of the paternalistic variety. As mentioned previously, I support reparations and robust funding for social services for poor African Americans. I even spearheaded a march to protest a case of police brutality against a black man who had done nothing wrong except annoy the police by repeatedly calling 911 to ask them for help (he was stranded in the town I lived in). I find it disgusting when people use these kinds of differences [e.g., the “IQ gap”] to express hate toward African Americans.”
BTW, since I mentioned reparations there, I have the feeling that not a lot of people have noticed that a mere ten minutes after I wrote the above, owning up to a certain type of racism, I wrote the following challenge to someone who was arguing against reparations:
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[L]et me pose to you this thought experiment:
Let’s say your parents worked hard all their lives, and built up savings they intended to pass down to you, to help you and your descendants have a better life. But then the government said “sorry, due to your parents’ genes, we are authorizing these other people with genes we like better to take all the money they produced from all those years of work”. Your parents subsequently died brokenhearted that they could leave you nothing of monetary value.
A few years later, the government acknowledged that what it had done was terribly wrong, and made it illegal to do anything like that in the future. But, they said, what is done is done, and you and your family just has to sit there and see the other families who took your parents’ money living it up, high on the hog, and you don’t get a penny of that inheritance back. Is that really okay by you?”
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I’m not asking for a cookie, but it would be nice if some people would at least acknowledge that I “contain multitudes” when it comes to race.
“I’m hopeful that maybe Alan can come around to and/or be open to a different perspective…I have my doubts though.”
Upon further reflection, I may have to retract one assertion: the idea that the school issue will go away if we stop even tracking the black-white IQ/aptitude gap. There will still be great disparities between some schools and others, meaning the same educators will be punished unless there is a tacit understanding that we need to apply the “soft bigotry of lower expectations” without ever saying so explicitly (to be gentle and polite to those about whom our expectations are lower).
Now, Athena Sophia: you next proceeded in your comment to paste a blizzard of cites and quotations from sociologists (I’m assuming), who are struggling to maintain the dispassionate tone one might expect from a peer-reviewed journal article written by a scientist–even a social one. (And I have much love for the sociologists, literally–my mom is a retired sociology professor, and my wife’s first master’s degree was in sociology–but on some subjects they just make me SMH.) The overwhelming barrage is reminiscent of a “Gish Gallop” (http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Gish_Gallop), so I’m not going to attempt to address them one by one. I’ll just make two general points in response to them collectively:
(1) They so blatantly proceed from their premises. The question-begging is off the charts.
(2) They disclaim the very existence of race, when it is convenient to their argument. But there is a giant, gaping logical flaw here. If race doesn’t exist, then neither does “whiteness”, and “white privilege” is impossible! You can’t have it both ways, people.
http://www.realclearscience.com/articles/2014/05/06/race_is_real_what_does_that_mean_for_society_108642.html
“[I]nstead of explaining that race is real but racism is wrong, they are presenting the assertion that race is imaginary as a reason that racism is wrong, and branding as a racist anyone who suggests that evolution might happen to humans too.”
One more point: neither you nor almost anyone else has acknowledged the issue of lead. When it was briefly referenced, it was with derision, as though it was some fantasy I cooked up. Then I provided some solid evidence, and they clammed up about it, no doubt retreating into sheepish silence. This is a major part of the picture, that has nothing to do with genes (well, except perhaps for a predisposition to be more sensitive to lead) and is a textbook case of environmental racism. Why does everyone seem to want to sweep this under the rug?
*I actually don’t drink all that often, and I can’t remember the last time I got drunk two nights in a row. But last night, my beloved Tarheels (I grew up in Chapel Hill, you see, in the Michael Jordan era) won the national championship. And then tonight a committee I belong to that has been campaigning for a small but locally important progressive change, for a ballot measure that would raise taxes (in a rural red county of a red state, mind you!) to provide more funds for parks and recreation, achieved a great victory–by a more than 2-1 margin, after the same proposal narrowly failed a few years ago.
Alan,
I am loathe to respond to you. This will be my last time, and I will be fairly blunt (my apologies ahead of time). I think that we fundamentally disagree about the world and that you are unsettlingly resistant to questioning your own racist impulses, having found a modern version of “scientific racism” as a “legitimizing” facade for some exceptionally abhorrent ideas, weak argumentation, pseudo-science, pseudo-history, and generally unwarranted condescension.
By your own admission, you are a racist…and it shows (in a multitude of ways). Hence, your attempt to take up the mantle of “fearless questioner” is utterly sullied, perverted, and distorted by your own racism, making your questioning come off more as a befuddled attempt to justify and legitimize your own racism, as opposed to coming off as a serious and critical interrogation of controversial scientific claims.
Hence, the reason that almost every single respondent to you has not “taken the bait” with regard to lead poisoning, school funding, standardized testing, the travails of teachers, reparations, how you stood up for that one black person that one time, etc. is because most of us just can’t get past your fucking racism. To put it mildly — it’s a HUGE bummer, plain and simple. I would venture to guess that no one here is “afraid” to discuss any of those topics, they just pale in comparison to your racism. Moreover, your self-avowed advocacy of “paternalistic racism” doesn’t make it “less” racist, neither does it excuse it or give you a “pass” in any kind of meaningful way…it just doesn’t work that way.
I think that most folks here are interested in discussing the ideas directly related to the topics that were covered in the episode. Personally, I was interested in learning about the rational coherence and general reasonableness of “white privilege” as a discourse, as well as any attendant potential problems with it.
Unfortunately, much of this discussion has been sidetracked by attempts by you to justify your racism and by attempts by others (myself included) to push back against that. As Jennifer suggested earlier, it is extremely unfortunate and telling that this discussion has devolved into a situation where the central thread of conversation has coalesced around some modern version of the white man’s burden, such that the “unfair” burdens of whiteness have become the central focus.
You say:
“(1) They so blatantly proceed from their premises. The question-begging is off the charts.”
“(2) They disclaim the very existence of race, when it is convenient to their argument. But there is a giant, gaping logical flaw here. If race doesn’t exist, then neither does “whiteness”, and “white privilege” is impossible! You can’t have it both ways, people.”
Maybe you were just drunk, but from those responses, I can only assume that you didn’t read the articles in full. I didn’t expect you to, but I do expect that you refrain from bald protestations to their positions without any kind of rigorous engagement with their arguments. This seems to be a common rhetorical device on your part — take a superficial understanding of an argument, build a straw-man, and then knock it down.
Let’s parse things out a little. They are saying that claims that assert that “race” is a clearly and scientifically definable biological “reality” are EXTREMELY tenuous and indefinite at best. Biology is obviously different than culture and cultural practices. Hence, “race” as a cultural practice is a reality, which is why people say that “race” — though rooted generally in physically observable biological differences (i.e., skin color), is a “social construct.” Thus, “whiteness” and “white privilege” are real cultural practices, which means that yes, we can have it both ways.
Lastly, I find it odd that you linked to a review of Nicholas Wade’s book, “Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History” as evidence that “race” is somehow a coherent, scientifically established biological reality. The review itself acknowledges that Wade’s claims are not fully substantiated. Moreover, in what meaningful way is a book review of a book that makes specious claims with unsubstantiated evidence and that is written by a science writer (as opposed to a scientist in a peer reviewed journal) any kind of serious rebuttal to the positions of professional academics. I’m sorry, but I’m going to have to take seriously and trust the professionals on this one, especially when they themselves can’t even take his book seriously.
Good luck. I hope that you are able to tear down that wall of racism that you have built for yourself one day, and please don’t let your “scientific racism” be the excuse for why you don’t deal with it.
Athena Sophia:
“I find it odd that you linked to a review of Nicholas Wade’s book, ‘Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History’ as evidence that ‘race’ is somehow a coherent, scientifically established biological reality. The review itself acknowledges that Wade’s claims are not fully substantiated.”
I wondered if you or anyone else would take note of that. In a sense, it was almost an intellectual trap I laid for you. You should stop and think about what it says that I might provide a source which is not 100% dedicated toward selling out on one side of an argument. And that you would reflexively seize upon that as a weakness to attack. I respect that reviewer because they do see stronger and weaker points, pros and cons to the arguments. But the reviewer certainly does not endorse the position your prickly sociologists take as axiomatic.
In a similar vein, I note with amusement that when you thought I had protested that I was not in any way racist, that was your avenue of attack; when I pointed out that I did cop to a type of paternalistic racism, you were just as happy to attack that angle instead. I find that particularly notable in the wake of the recent podcast on Orwell. Your facility with doublethink would serve you well at the Ministry of Truth. 😉
As for your disappointment that this topic discussion did not pan out as a posting of whether your take on white privilege is really really valid or just plain valid, I can only note that almost any discussion of a topic like this is much more likely to attract a lot of people complaining in far more darkly racialist terms about black criminality or family dysfunction. I would be tempted to say that if you get me as your bete noire, you are doing well…except that it then occurs to me that maybe you actually do want rhetorical opponents who create their own straw men for you, and are easily dispatched without breaking a sweat. #sorrynotsorry
Have you listened to the debouvoir after show with Jennifer Hansen? Around minute 1hr 25 to 1hr 30 and the idea around Aristotle and essentialism and a whole lot that I can’t explain any better than is done here is discussed there. I highly recommend it.
I’ve rather avoided the discussion because there is simply too much text and outside reference involved that I fear even if I were to comment on it, I would be told I was missing a key part that was written elsewhere. But I also keep thinking about racial essentialism in relation to Alan’s argument.
Alan, there is one thing I want to ask you: you have many times posted a disclaimer about how you are forced to make this argument because of the prevalence of test scores being tied to school funding. Why do you think you need this particular argument for this, given its controversy, and given how little that particular issue has been involved in any of this argumentation? I would wager that many of the people who you’ve been arguing with would agree that tying test scores to school funding is not a policy that is likely to correct our education issues.
Paul,
The genesis of it was Mark’s saying on the podcast that the absolute minimum ethical standard for any white person was “don’t be a social Darwinist”. (This is obviously a big deal with him, as he said it again in Part II.) I wanted to push back on that, and the whole “Waiting for Superman” dynamic in the culture (which has been used by policymakers to create rules and direct funding in ways that have a huge impact) is for me a very concrete sign that this “don’t be social Darwinist, whatever you do” ethic is very harmful and counterproductive. It leads to people working backward from their conclusions and then making nonsensical pronouncements that ultimately cause a lot of harm.
Again, without pretending to have read this whole thread:
Is social Darwinism a scientific or hermeneutic claim? It was put forward as scientific, but is notoriously pseudo-science. You’re right in categorizing it as a moral claim, of the same sort as the moral equality of Man, which does not say that every person has equal capabilities of any sort but that we as moral and political agents are going to treat them as equal (which of course does not save us the trouble of figuring out what that means in any given situation).
Social Darwinism was clearly a rationalization by those in a fortunate position, to pat themselves on the back, and to counter it merely requires deciding that that attitude has produced enough awfulness that we’re not going to even consider it as a serious thesis any more. So putting forward actual data in its support (e.g. People with higher measured IQs tend to end up wealthier) is really beside the point.
Social Darwinism is the defining characteristic of American conservatism: the claim that there’s nothing seriously wrong with our economic system or culture because those who are morally upright and work hard tend to come out on top, and while individual tragedy is of course admitted, any systematic disparities such as those apparent between various social categories of people are not accounted to historical accident but to some innate inferiority of the oppressed classes.
So I agree with folks here that the issue is at bottom not a matter of evidence-gathering, though neither will I admit that it’s arbitrary or irrational. This is related to our ongoing beef with scientism.
Mark,
I suppose a key point here is defining “social Darwinism”. If it is, as you say, simply “the defining characteristic of American conservatism”, then I’m agin’ it–for I’m not generally a fan of American conservatism. (I do wonder what a deeply religious conservative would make of your claim; but I am the furthest thing from a religious conservative, so I’ll not pursue that point outside these parentheses.)
I suspect, however, that we may be talking past each other due to the distinction between “is” and “ought” (something I learned on your podcast, BTW!). You seem to interpret Darwinism as being about “ought”, where I see it simply as “is”. The fact that I need glasses to see clearly, or that my two youngest children have autism and require extra resources in their schooling (something even the most conservative justices on the SCOTUS, to my astonishment, recently unanimously agreed should be mandated of all schools), does not lead me to the conclusion that my kids and I ought to be killed, or sterilized. It doesn’t even mean that neurotypical people with naturally good vision are “better” than we are.
By the same token, I certainly don’t believe rich people are “better” than the poor, either. I’m a socialist at heart, albeit one who is pragmatic enough to be a moderate Democrat in practice.
In fact, I consider it an extremely impressive and highly laudable aspect of modern human culture that we expressly expend resources to compensate for, and even work at cross purposes to, the Darwinian flow. While we face periodic setbacks, as just happened last November, there’s no denying that–much to the chagrin of libertarians and Grover Norquist–we tax the rich, and redistribute their wealth to the poor, to a degree that would have been completely unthinkable in the Gilded Age, or even as recently as the Coolidge Administration.
So if social Darwinism is irrevocably bound up with “ought” rather than “is”, then I’m no more of a social Darwinist than you are. But in that case, we need some kind of word for the “is” version that I espouse.
Jennifer,
I sense we don’t agree on the mind-body “problem” (I’m a physicalist), but I wanted to express my strong appreciation of, and agreement with, something else you said in this comment:
“The very least that we can do for ourselves or for any oppressed person it seems is to remove as much of the obstacles/oppression as possible – that we can control – and create an environment where people are free to become the highest/best versions of themselves.”
Yes indeed. The question Wes raised, that I’m still not sure about, is whether we have any *extra* responsibility to do something about obstacles for others that serve to benefit us. I can really see both sides of that one. Morally, it feels like we do; but Wes’s logic nags at me. He didn’t provide any examples or pose any thought experiments that I can remember, but one that occurs to me is: if you are a white American, and your $500 charitable contribution could do an equal amount of good either for African Americans (by giving it, say, to UNCF) or for South Asians (by contributing to a legal fund that helps people from low castes protect their modern legal rights to equal opportunities in housing, employment, and education)…have you made some kind of moral error by choosing the latter? I’m not sure.
“I don’t know Alan that well but I’m holding out hope that we can all have our ideas and beliefs picked apart a little bit without attaching it to our sense of self – since it’s a philosophy podcast!”
I’m not entirely sure how to interpret this, but if you’re wondering whether I can “disagree without being disagreeable”, or without taking it personally, it’s definitely something I strive for–and I think I do a pretty good job, by and large. (Sometimes I feel–not so much here but on other forums–that my interlocutors actually get more angry at me because they fail to get a rise out of me.)
Responding here to continue the thread on social Darwinism, as WordPress only supports just a few replies w/in a thread.
I’ve not actually read any Herbert Spencer, i.e. the source of social Darwinism: I see that wikipedia characterizes part of his belief is that “humanitarian impulses had to be resisted as nothing should be allowed to interfere with nature’s laws,” which is much more over the top than the rhetoric of modern conservatism, though the anti-bleeding-heart sentiment remains there today.
Of course this claim is in general true: “Those most adapted to the job market will thrive in the job market,” and because we live in a society with a good degree of economic openness, “those most adapted” will include certain kinds of talent (as opposed to just being related to the boss). What gives the claim juice for conservatives are the normative components: That therefore those who are successful deserve their success, that “the cream rises to the top,” that economic value (i.e. what actually gets rewarded in a market economy) = actual value (whatever that means), that the talents that get rewarded in that way are virtues in your favorite (Aristotelian, Nietzschean, etc.) sense.
A purely descriptive version would have to be “people with objectively measurable characteristics X, Y, and Z (e.g. measured IQ) tend to become richer,” and such a claim seems only as interesting as the uses to which it is put, i.e. the motivations for arguing for it. Again, not having read the whole thread, I did look at the article you linked to dissing the Obama investments in poorly performing schools… the actual mechanics in how to fix a failing school or measure that it’s failing seem several degrees removed from any kind of descriptive social Darwinist claims, and the failure of such a program (assuming it actually was a failure; the article seems to be quoting a partisan and not any kind of expert… e.g. I likewise don’t know how to objectively judge whether Obama’s middle east policy was a failure, but I sure as hell don’t take conservatives’ word for it) is probably not best analyzed by saying “well, those minority populations are just inherently less intelligent than white ones, so we shouldn’t expect them to succeed no matter how much money you throw at them.”
Interestingly, the concept “white supremacy” has a similar ambiguity re. descriptive vs. normative. It would be a very fragile position to hold it descriptively, on purely objective, scientific, not-at-all-desperately-self-esteem-involved grounds. (Unless this just means holding that whites have globally held most of the power, but no one’s going to call someone who holds that position and fights against that state of affairs a “white supremacist.”)
Mark, did you also read the Mother Jones I linked at the same time? It’s a long read, so I at least want you to see this part, which I did not excerpt when I linked it previously:
http://www.motherjones.com/media/2012/08/mission-high-false-low-performing-school
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Judging from what I’d read about “troubled” schools, I’d expected noisy classrooms, hallway fights, and disgruntled staff. Instead I found a welcoming place that many students and staff called “family.” After a few weeks of talking to students, I failed to find a single one who didn’t like the school, and most of the parents I met were happy too. Mission’s student and parent satisfaction surveys rank among the highest in San Francisco.
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Yet this school faces various draconian penalties, up to and including complete dissolution, simply because its student population tends to score very low on aptitude tests.
BTW, just to be clear (since you made a comment about “dissing Obama” that was at least intended to be aimed at a spot adjacent to me, if not squarely at me): although I differ with our erstwhile president on a few things and do not give him blind devotion, I do consider him the best president the U.S. has ever had (preceding the worst, at least of modern times). I still carry my keys on an Obama-Biden lanyard, and I have a photo of Barack and his daughters framed on my mantelpiece, next to the certificate OFA sent me when Obamacare passed.
So that brings me to your contemptuous jibe “not-at-all-desperately-self-esteem-involved grounds”. If that were my underlying motivation, why do I always, year after year, vote against, campaign against, the candidates supported by the majority of straight white males? Why can’t you accept the very plainly stated motive I have offered: that I support teachers, including specifically my wife who is a rockstar of a special education teacher, and I believe they are getting thrown under the bus in all of this frenzy to “do something” about supposedly “failing” schools? That’s MY social Darwinism (or whatever we are going to call it, if Spencer has ruined that specific term).
My “social Darwinism” is also the same reason I groaned when, a decade or so ago, I heard Bill and Melinda Gates tell Charlie Rose they were intending to get every student in America to go to college. Not everyone is college material, and that’s OK. By the same token, our country is not Lake Wobegon. Not everyone can be above average, or even average. Some are below average, or much below average, and that’s OK too. I love my seven-year-old daughter to pieces, and she amazes me with some of her talents–like being able to locate all 50 states by name on a blank map–but she could not answer a “why” question to save her life. I don’t rage against her teachers, or teacher unions, or the tenure system, or demand that her school be closed or reorganized because they have failed to teach her how to do that. I accept that she has limitations, and as long as she is happy and treated well by her teachers, I am satisfied.
P.S. Mark, it just occurred to me that, given that you have not read most of the threads, my description of my daughter might be puzzling. She, like her younger brother, has autism (and not just a mild case of the type that used to be called Aspergers) . Her older sister and brother, BTW, are “reg ed” and ace standardized tests like I did at their age, although I strongly suspect my eldest son and I share the condition of ADHD-inattentive.
I love all four of my children equally, which is perhaps also an apt metaphor for the fact that I care about ALL children getting a quality education–but do not expect them all to attain the same outcomes as measured by standardized tests.
“not every student is college material”. Wasn’t there a time when people said, not every person is able to be educated? Blacks couldn’t learn to read and write? And I am talking about typically functioning kids, not kids with a known issue. And even that, many many people feel that we’ve severely underestimated what Autistic kids can do. Kids with down’s syndrome are now attending college.
Your historical comparisons just aren’t apt. I guarantee you that black kids who score low on aptitude tests are getting more one-on-one attention from teachers, and more education funds spent on them, than are white kids with average or above average scores. And that’s as it should be! But it’s certainly no cause to level the charge that they are being underserved by the educational system (at least outside the Deep South, where everything is shitty). This is not 1954, or even 1984.
Ok. Even if I am wrong to make a comparison. Does that make my point any less relevant? Who are we to decide what to expect and from whom? That’s not the way education works and it’s not the way parenting works – or should work. Placing our own agenda onto another person in that way is a mistake. I don’t have a particular set of expectations for my kids. I provide the conditions in which they can thrive. If they aren’t thriving, I study the conditions. I consider what thriving means to me and get curious about my own thoughts and beliefs about what “should” be occurring. I don’t decide that they are absolutely not thriving or that I am completely handling things correctly or incorrectly. I remain open. Saying that not all kids are college material isn’t a statement we can make IMO.
Interesting discussion between Sam Harris and Charles Murray, germane to the IQ issue:
https://www.samharris.org/podcast/item/forbidden-knowledge
I am listening to this podcast. It’s painful. PAINFUL. Sam Harris has THE worst habit of presenting “science” in highly skewed terms and forcing us to swallow it whole as “fact”. He did this in Free Will and it was equally as painful. If the science were as clear cut as he intimates right out of the gate it would be different. This is not compelling.
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1994/12/01/the-tainted-sources-of-the-bell-curve/
He literally says – we will have intelligence figured out by 2025.
How can this NOT make one turn and run. What’s SO puzzling to me is that Sam Harris Has a PhD in neuroscientist. I cannot understand how he doesn’t see though this. How does he have a platform? How is it that he seems so intelligent yet falls for this kind of thing. I’m baffled.
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1994/12/01/the-tainted-sources-of-the-bell-curve/
Jennifer, thanks for listening (even if you didn’t quite like it as much as I did!). I am going to read the sources you cite as soon as humanly possible (I’m currently gearing up for a big cross-country move), and I will get back to you.
Alan,
I just happened to go listen to episode 109 on Jaspers. Maybe it was divine intervention! Because it spoke to this idea about race/IQ etc.
Putting aside the notion that IQ is a measure of anything other than specifically what the test questions ask and isn’t really telling about a person’s intelligence because no test can be. – Tests or any scientific question we ask tells us a very limited piece of info meant to guide and it’s a problem to then extrapolate any more from them. It happens all the time, for example, when a study comes out and then articles come out afterwards referring to a study and they have such far reaching claims that it makes you wanna bang your head against the wall. So – that issue with IQ or any other measure of a human being aside – I want to mention fearless questioning.
The question came up about whether or not (in episode 109) asking these kinds of morally repugnant questions – is there a correlation between IQ and race – and they did frame it that way – is what Nietzsche called fearless thinking (or something) or if it’s not so fearless bc the person thinking it is using science or whatever else to support underlying beliefs.
I can’t know what you, Alan, or anyone else thinks. All I can say is that it is extremely difficult to take anything else besides the latter away from your discussions here because of the simple fact that there is not any kind of solid evidence that blacks are intellectually inferior due to some selective gene process that occurred during slavery. Pushing a point that lacks evidence really points me to that.
All that said, doesn’t it matter? Do I really need the whole world to not be what I consider to be racist? Do I need them to think of things the way I do? You’ve said on many occasions that you value all lives and that you are all for doing anything and everything you can to remove oppression. So – what do I care if you believe what you do? I’m not sure it matters.
Also – when I try to articulate the issue you keep raising – we are not all equal, it gives me pause. What does equality mean? What am I so worried about with this statement? It feels important to differentiate between several things – 1.) equality doesn’t mean that we can all play the cello equally well or we all have the same aptitude in Math or reading. So – then what gives? Is it the application of a generality to an entire group of people that is dangerous/wrong/illegitimate? I think that’s what it is. Because when you lump a whole group of people into a category then it seems a slippery slope and tends toward treating people not as ends in themselves. There is no value in it. How would knowing that black people score lower on and IQ test tell us anything other than we may have failed to accurately capture the intelligence of black people or to reach them with our current system of teaching? Or any number of things we might be doing wrong that we could fix (ie white privileged issues)? To use something in the way as you have indicated – the gap is what it is and we should entertain the idea that we just can’t close it is the little sneaky thing that bugs me. It’s the giving up and not caring that seems as though the value of that person is less. If every single white kid scored poorly relative to black kids I have a feeling we would do everything we could to understand how kids learn, how to capture their intelligence and we would love heaven and earth to get them where they need to be. So that’s my issue.
Again – I appreciate your feedback. And willingness to beat this dead horse. No need to respond, but just want to say this has been a growth experience for me as a person. I am so grateful for the discussion.
Alan,
Also, you’ve mentioned this several times and I still don’t know where you stand, or maybe my brain refuses to see it:
“There will still be great disparities between some schools and others, meaning the same educators will be punished unless there is a tacit understanding that we need to apply the “soft bigotry of lower expectations” without ever saying so explicitly (to be gentle and polite to those about whom our expectations are lower).”
I’m confused because you seem to know it’s bigotry, but you seem to endorse it?
Jennifer,
My use of that verbiage was somewhat sarcastic, because it is a quote from George W. Bush, who is not exactly one of my favorite people. (Although he certainly looks less ludicrous in retrospect, compared to the buffoon currently occupying the Oval Office.)
Basically, that was shorthand for the fact that George W. Bush pushed for the terrible No Child Left Behind legislation, which set up all these carrots and sticks that required all schools serving all populations to get all their students to the same “proficient” scores on standardized tests. His defense, whenever people questioned the feasibility of this requirement, was to whip out this “soft bigotry of low expectations” canard.
Theory and execution are two different things. Leaving no child behind is absolutely what a public school system should strive for. Low expectation is a form of bigotry. Anyone who thinks that ideology and theory about education is the problem vs trying to manage a system that is a gigantic monolith probably hasn’t worked in a school system. I think it would be a mess of a conversation to try and discuss or conflate the outcome of programs with the legitimacy of the theory that underpins/informs them. Way too many variables. Keeping this conversation at a philosophical discussion seems a bit more manageable.
Fair enough, but I can’t leave that “probably hasn’t worked in the schools” bit alone without saying something. Personally, I worked for years as a substitute teacher. But the people who have worked in the schools the most are the members of teachers’ unions. And while they were always demonized by the right and looked upon skeptically by the center, in recent years significant segments of the left have also thrown them under the bus. That’s exemplified by the Obama Administration rules I already mentioned, by the “Waiting for Superman” crowd, by Bill and Melinda Gates and their powerful foundation, by many prominent figures in the media,, and so on. Standing fousquare for teachers’ unions has become a pretty lonely place to stand.
so then you know. Changing a huge system is really hard and it takes time and it will always be riddled with unintended consequences and unforeseen variables. In no way does this equate to the theory/ideology/spirit which underpins the execution. There are a zillion ways to do something. Not all of them will work. It makes no sense to say or imply that because GWB’s actual plan may or may not have panned out that the idea that we shouldn’t leave any child behind and that we should be aware of the soft bigotry of low expectation is incorrect.
I believe the fundamental philosophy behind it was wrongheaded. I believe schools can always use more funding but (again, outside the Deep South) do not need to be fundamentally reformed. Unless we federalize the schools, which I would be in favor of but has no chance of happening.
Alan,
I really do think you are! No worries about that. I just wanted to make sure and keep my side of the argument focused on the actual issue I had. It’s really simple for me. There is no evidence that supports the claim that blacks have an genetic intellectual inferiority due to a culling of the best and the brightest during slavery.
A hypothesis need not have evidence for it. If it’s at all plausible and there’s no disproof of it or better evidence for an alternate theory, it is provisionally a valid contribution to the search for truth. But I’m not going to let you box me in to this corner. I don’t care if that hypothesis has no ultimate merit in fact to explain the black-white gap in test scores. Maybe it’s lead. Maybe it’s lack of “middle-class parenting skills”, as one of the papers cited by one of my opponents said. Maybe it’s a combination, or something else I’m not thinking of.
We know it’s not poverty itself, because the gap persists among affluent black families. It’s not lack of school funding, because that has been massively increased but the test scores have not budged. Yet you seem attached to some unproven hypothesis that it is, what, exactly? I don’t even know what your hypothesis is. Is the score gap the product of some kind of hidden racist practices on the part of teachers (who often are nonwhite themselves)? And they are still undermining these kids on those tests even when it puts their jobs in peril? Their racism is that stubborn and strong? Really? Is that why they chose to work in mostly black schools, so they could keep black kids down, and in return suffer abuse from school reformers and punishment from the Education Department? Do you hear how crazy that sounds when you say it out loud?
Where is YOUR evidence that these kids could have the same test scores as everyone else, if schools and teachers would just stop doing all this “failing”? How can you accuse them of failing when you have no recipe for success? You want to put me on the defensive, but that’s not gonna fly. For decades and decades reformers have been trying all kinds of things to close this gap and nothing has worked. But people like you just insist that it’s some sort of ill will or negligence on the part of teachers and administrators. Once the stick has been used on them long enough, they will finally straighten out and fly right and teach these kids correctly, at which point the scores will even out. Is that about the size and shape of it? Again: have you really stopped to think how ridiculous that sounds?
How about this for a way to take the explosive factor of race out of it. If you have kids, you know that your pediatrician wants to see your child grow along the track they “start” in (actually at about two years of age). So if at age 5 they are at the 20th percentile for height and weight for a five-year-old (meaning they are smaller than 80% of five-year-olds), the pediatrician wants them to be at about the 20th percentile when they are six, or eight, and so on.
So why not do the same for academic aptitude? Assess kids early, maybe in first grade, and then if they do not stay at around the percentile they started on or higher, you can fairly say you have a problem. Otherwise you’re not guilty of “low expectations”, but simply reasonable expectations tailored to each individual. Is that fair?
I responded and now it’s not showing up. And I’m actually sort of getting over discussing this. Not because it’s not fun, but I think it’s not really going anywhere. We don’t agree. I think it’s the foundation of racism to say the things that you say – again, I don’t think you are a terrible and hateful human being. I don’t see racism that way. I grew up in the south. I have long since had to learn how to deal with the confusion of having racist loved ones and reconciling my own internal racist. But the bottom line, no bull shit POV I have is that it’s racist and really unfortunate to say that black folks just aren’t as smart as white folk and we need to give that project up.
I would really urge people to read that Mother Jones article even though it’s long. Then decide on who is the party really crushing these kids’ self image? Is it me on the philosophy blog? Or is it the policymakers who say “you may love your school and your teachers and your principal, but you’re wrong. You kids keep getting these super low test scores, so we’re going to have to fire your principal or get rid of half the teachers, or if your scores don’t rise high enough even after all that, we will just close down the whole school.”
A lot of schools that have heavy minority enrollment also have many teachers who are minorities. So these policies tell the kids and family that they don’t know what’s good for them, and they are wrong to be happy with the school. They tell the mostly minority teachers that they are too stupid or lazy or neglectful to teach kids properly. And they keep a laser focus, over and over, on the low test scores.
My point to your analogy that got lost was this:
growth curves show that a certain race tends toward obesity. We don’t accept that they are naturally obese – we study and find OH! This group doesn’t have access to adequate nutrition and we can fix that.
Similarly we don’t see low IQ scores and think yep – they probably just aren’t as genetically endowed. We can give up on that project.
I can’t possibly go into all that’s wrong with testing a child in first grade and then assuming that they will track a curve. This has been shown to be inaccurate time and time again. Children are all over the map developmentally very early on and when tested later no correlation can be found between the first scores and the second ones taken later on. That just could not ever work given what we know to this point.
Alan and others,
I’ve read most of this fascinating debate, although not the links.
I wonder why Alan is pursuing this topic with such persistence. First of all, I accept his affirmation that he is not personally a racist. Second, I agree with him that school teachers should not be blamed for complex social issues of school failure by children. I have the highest opinion of school teachers: I spent several years teaching future English teachers. My woman companion for several years was a school teacher, my niece is a school teacher, etc.
Much has been written about the subject of IQ and race by experts for both points of view, and as far as I can see, none of us, including Alan, is an authority or expert on this complicated issue. What’s more, the fact that blacks tend to have lower IQ scores than whites is often used by racists, although once again, I am not affirming that Alan is a racist.
However, given that that affirmation is often used by racists and given the fact that none of us are experts on this subject, why pursue it? It may be very offensive to some black people, I would suppose. Black people, as we all know, are already the victims of many forms of discrimination, bias, police violence, and lack of recognition: so why add insult to injury?
This is not a neutral philosophical issue, but a very political one and at the risk of sounding grotesquely old-fashioned, I would point out that impressionable young minds may be reading this blog and they may take Alan’s arguments, stated in good faith by Alan, as a pretext for becoming out-right racists.
So once again, why add insult to injury against black people? I can see that many people here, including Alan, are very talented at debating and I am certain that they can find many neutral philosophical issues to debate with same skill and intelligence.
I love the sound of “woman companion”. 🙂
I swear to you, if everyone would stop hounding teachers and their unions about supposedly “failing schools”, I would gladly bury the whole IQ/race debate.
And if I am persuasive, those impressionable minds should hopefully also be persuaded of the need for slavery reparations, robust funding for social programs, etc.
In response to your issues with attacking teachers or teacher unions. To me this falls under ignoratio elenchi. Maybe red herring. The point being is that is not the argument. If you want to debate about whether or not teachers or teacher unions are to blame for the problem then that is a separate issue. The issue I have been discussing along with others is the notion that the gap cannot be closed because of some inherent inability in blacks. These are two completely separate issues.
I don’t know where I stand on unions. There is a great npr debate on that topic that illustrates far better the complexities than does the Mother Jones article you mention previously.
It does not follow that the reason you have this fundamental belief about blacks that I see as racist is somehow birthed from the issues with that debate and therefore valid.
The issue, IMO, is your view of blacks in relationship to white privilege and institutional racism. Just saying – I am not ignoring that you want to get that point across about teachers and teacher unions. Taken.
If you won’t accept that I’m making a good-faith effort to honestly and openly share my actual position, with no hidden agenda, I don’t know what I can do with that.
Alan,
I am going to copy and paste your last comment – even though I am not sure it was addressed to me because of the way the comments place themselves on the page. Here it is:
”
A hypothesis need not have evidence for it. If it’s at all plausible and there’s no disproof of it or better evidence for an alternate theory, it is provisionally a valid contribution to the search for truth. But I’m not going to let you box me in to this corner. I don’t care if that hypothesis has no ultimate merit in fact to explain the black-white gap in test scores. Maybe it’s lead. Maybe it’s lack of “middle-class parenting skills”, as one of the papers cited by one of my opponents said. Maybe it’s a combination, or something else I’m not thinking of.
We know it’s not poverty itself, because the gap persists among affluent black families. It’s not lack of school funding, because that has been massively increased but the test scores have not budged. Yet you seem attached to some unproven hypothesis that it is, what, exactly? I don’t even know what your hypothesis is. Is the score gap the product of some kind of hidden racist practices on the part of teachers (who often are nonwhite themselves)? And they are still undermining these kids on those tests even when it puts their jobs in peril? Their racism is that stubborn and strong? Really? Is that why they chose to work in mostly black schools, so they could keep black kids down, and in return suffer abuse from school reformers and punishment from the Education Department? Do you hear how crazy that sounds when you say it out loud?
Where is YOUR evidence that these kids could have the same test scores as everyone else, if schools and teachers would just stop doing all this “failing”? How can you accuse them of failing when you have no recipe for success? You want to put me on the defensive, but that’s not gonna fly. For decades and decades reformers have been trying all kinds of things to close this gap and nothing has worked. But people like you just insist that it’s some sort of ill will or negligence on the part of teachers and administrators. Once the stick has been used on them long enough, they will finally straighten out and fly right and teach these kids correctly, at which point the scores will even out. Is that about the size and shape of it? Again: have you really stopped to think how ridiculous that sounds?”
I think maybe this is moving into a direction that I don’t really want to on the internet. When I argue something I never feel very emotionally invested in it online and so maybe that comes across poorly here. It seems perhaps you feel attacked because I keep responding. Or because I am trying to have a really strong debate where we try to point out logical fallacies and make sure it’s really getting points across.
I certainly don’t want to put you on the defensive in other sense than a person defending his argument.
So I keep laying out my central issue with your claim and you seem to keep coming back to test scores. I want to make sure I am very clear – I don’t believe teachers are to blame for bad test scores. I WAS a teacher in an all black school with bad test scores. People always want something easy to blame and so that’s where it lands. For me, that issue is separate and apart from the central issue I have.
Making a claim that black might be intellectually inferior is hugely problematic for me. You are certainly accurate that none of this requires scientific evidence. Nothing about human behavior can be reduced to scientific evidence. I’m a big fan of psychoanalysis and you really can’t call it a science, yet for me it is profoundly meaningful and useful. It would be remiss not to consider that lead paint might be a factor and it’s not even offensive to me to pursue science that does try to understand genetics and the role in intelligence.
The big issue I have is that this is a podcast about white privilege. I am looking at things through that lens. To debate so fervently that it is likely that black people have an inferior gene pool and just will not ever measure up as a first and foremost consideration for the issue INSTEAD of the fact that black people have a long history of oppression and disadvantage and that it (unscientifically BTW!!!) seems the best first step toward eliminating the gap. Going into all of the many reasons that your idea about IQ is not a really good premise from a scientific perspective in the first place absolutely matters. There is good science and there is pseudo science. There is good philosophy and there is bad philosophy. There is good logic and poor logic. Much of what you say falls under one of these three categories IMO. So pushing forward with this particular idea is something that seems less about arguing from a sort of disinterested and logical point of view and seems to go into the personal agenda category.
Your comments about “hearing how crazy it sounds when you say it out loud” seem to be pointed at someone else because I didn’t say them. So I am not sure who you are speaking to there.
You also say “How can you accuse them of failing when you have no recipe for success?” Again, not sure if you are talking to me here. I don’t really want to discuss failing schools. I just want to address the issue with saying blacks have a lower IQ because they are genetically inferior in this way. I do think I can say schools are failing when I don’t have a solution, but I am actually not. Because that’s not my issue.
Anyway, this has been fun for me! I watch debates on youtube for fun. The oxford debates if you are interested. This is a strange forum to do this in because it’s tough to respond to multiple people and make sense.
Also, I’m starting to feel a little bit guilty about keeping this going and also a little bit like the resident crazy-internet-lady bc I’ve been on here 9000 times in the last three days. So peace out and I’ll give all your inboxes a break. :-/
Jennifer Tejada,
I’ve follow this whole debate and I don’t see you as the resident crazy internet lady at all.
Jennifer,
I would like to echo s. wallerstein, as well as thank you for your efforts, civility, focus, dispassionate (and passionate) argumentation, self-awareness, honesty, and thoughtful responses throughout this extremely difficult thread.
s. wallerstein, I would also like to thank you for your kind and honest sensibilities. It is an example well worth emulating.
She’s back!
Alan,
As one of the contemporary forms of internet/comment section communication (I believe it’s called “trolling”), I recognize that you revel to some degree in baiting and goading people and making sure that you regularly have “the last word” (and perhaps I too am unfortunately guilty of it to one degree or another as well). That’s fine. But from one adult to another and for the sake of the larger discussion, I know that I would appreciate it if we both did our best to keep it to a minimum. Thanks.
I wasn’t the one who made a point of telling everyone I was outta here (always a silly, drama-queen/king move) before coming back. Anyone who pulls that move should always expect a little gentle (very gentle, honestly) ribbing upon their return.
(Jennifer, I just caught your tail end statement as I came here to paste up what I wrote this afternoon. You’re no crazy lady. You rock!)
Alan,
You’ve had many here take on this conversation and I’m borrowing from that for this consideration. That is to say, I’m not offering something totally new as much as offering a repackaging in my consideration, which presses heavily from a philosophy of science argument. I read this thread yesterday, so my recollection will be foggy and my comprehensiveness will be woefully incomplete. These are just some features.
Your position and disclaimers have been well established and are taken into account. You may very well disagree with my characterization, but I do feel I’m making a roundup of a host of characterization beyond my own.
I shorthandedly see the argument goes like this:
(1A) Because of the iniquity facing the difficulty of educators and the system at large, let’s use some other science shuttered off by PC pressures to get a clearer view. That will straighten things up.
(i) Now, the issues with the education system is quite massive. Money alone doesn’t quite seem to do it (though one might question how long money needs to work before there is a righting of the ship and what constitutes the portioned measures related to money). Testing and data measures are messed up. And, really, education is baring too much weight against what’s clearly a bigger problem than it alone can’t carry.
— issues with the education system are probably agreed with if that were the discussion at hand with knowledgeable people. And, philosophically, education’s role in society and what it contends with could probably be framed.
(1B) Science can clear up.
(i) the other science you fall to is murky at best
— a rejoinder by Mark to point out factual resting can be passed to get at the philosophical wasn’t used to turn the corner
— because 1A is your base argument that not only doesn’t engage with the subject of white privilege but that is encompassing your concern so completely that you’re reframing it to suit your narrative which is, well, a prime example of white privilege moves.
— you state certain absolute facts but those are not traced through and backed by journals
— an excellent list of scientific studies presented in contrast to your facts are dismissed
(ii) the science you prefer is selective toward seemly experimentally provable hard science (like physics is) over soft science like sociology
— that’s interesting given your background, though don’t hear that as some sort of condemnation. Perhaps some personal reflection that I don’t want to entertain might be enlightening or why, under pressure of the system, that appeals. Or, why methodologically that makes sense and whether the combining of hard to soft science is being applied with scientific rigor.
(iii) the social science of the effects of soft bigotry and dealing with the difficulty of what amounts to soft bigotry is hard.
— you opt to bypass that by favoring on spurious science due to iniquity. With your respect to social science by familial and studious connections, you chose to favor the appearance of hard sciences to solve the issue. I submit, this is exactly, verbatim, what white privilege is trying to address. Systemic racism is hard! Of course it’s hard. Let’s own all those difficulties, let’s swallow the challenge, let’s pick justice in total. That educators are being scapegoated, yeah man that sucks. They are swallowed by the systemic issue, too. Let’s carry that. Let’s not fall back to the defenses that made this a problem in the first place. Racism is real. Systemic racism is real. What does education properly look like in the face of that and definitely let’s avoid using more of the same.
(1C) I am not a racist, look at all my disclaimers.
— Even the blatant racists in the Tim Wise documentary say that. White privilege unpacks that racism isn’t some skinhead overt thing.
— As gently as possible, many here have asked you to consider your social darwinism direction. You’re not being called a racist. You’re espousing a historically and contemporary racist-motivated argument for a purpose. And you seem unmoved for being called to consider this. This is why you feel the need to use the, ‘I’m not racist but, think about this’ approach.
— your paternalistic standpoint is unreflective infantilizing. That is also philosophically interesting but, well, another subject altogether.
To counter,
(2A) That’s not good science. Your science is that because of who ended up where, how and why genetically lowers the IQ, thus the educational possibilities for blacks. Further, you claim a 50/50 nature nurture defense of IQ. You assert the facts have spoken. Education that attempts to work around soft bigotry will fail the educators.
(i) Your 50/50 view is well, it’s messed up. The scientific studies presented before by someone were an excellent set of clarifications.
— Biology studies speaking generally, even those who heavily weight biological determination, always footnote the strong and unsortability of biological factors against mitigating factors before going on to describe very specific biological indicators. Footnote methods are acceptable but a lot of excellent research in the philosophy of biology has been written looking at how this overplays prevailing attitudes. See Evelyn Fox Keller, Mirage of a Space between Nature and Nurture, for example.
— what could possibly be the biological determinism of IQ neurobiologically? Is it the number of neural pathways and their connective branching, what becomes activated given stimuli of a learning challenge, some sort of mathematical activation and volume calculus that totals IQ? Well, you don’t know if you’re focused on heritability (biological vs environmental heritability). But, if so, doesn’t neuroscience also indicate the fluidity of these mechanisms to be inhibited or encouraged?
— and what of straightforward biological capacity? Male musculature physiology is generally more than female physiology, for example. We don’t live out to our biological capacity. The fastest male runner in the world will (likely) also be the fastest runner in the world. But the fastest female runner in the world will be faster than nearly all other male runners. Is her birth-biology deterministic of her faster than males status? Or, did she take the outermost possible case of boundary to run. Do we honestly say due to meritocracy alone every intellect must run the fastest or be determined a moral failing? Or do the environmental factors converge, not insurmountable but invisibly, consistently constraining that we all decide it’s a biological top out of maximum capacity because we studied the mentally incapacitated and figured this hard boundary out?
— additionally there are biologically compromised from environmental factors like lead poisoning. That’s a real fact, though your use of that fact should apply at the student and school level, directed toward targeted solutions to help kids and educators alike. Your roll up, I’m saying, sounds broad-brushing.
— The running example presents the problem of a 50/50 view. While under study to find the exact right metaphor of description, biology is more like a state of potentiality. Environment awakens that potential. Biological essentialism for much of human complexity beyond things like what color did your eyes end up being, is not settled science. Except, at the moment, it’s settled that it won’t be flatly essential deterministic. An arbitrary 50% determinism is not the philosophy of biology perspective. It’s maybe, 100% biological potentiation with 90% environmental activation. Research programs under various ontologies to understand evolution are currently underway and being debated.
(ii) Another lapse is the assumption that IQ to education is a straight line. Maybe that’s another point you’re trying to make inside the 50/50 picture. If you’re troubled by testing, I’m not sure why you’re untroubled by IQ testing. To be fair, you probably are troubled by the measurement capacity but still hold it is a reliable, biological take-to-the-bank fact that blacks are under. No doubt, your 50/50 reflection contains all sorts of defensive coverage for test anxiety or whatever else falls into the environment mitigation, but that is exactly why your science is not in, not established fact, is not a rigorous approach. Because at bottom, a thing not at all yet discoverable, you hold there must be a rigid, unadjustable, unresolvable as an entire group of people who happen to have black skin and hair notwithstanding that race isn’t a genetic reality, somehow they group in particular schools all being of some mental deficiency and the education system just needs to stop caring about addressing what is writ large. Well, if 50% is nurture, which I already state it isn’t, aren’t you neglecting that because you feel it’s over indexed? Instead wanting to over index, based on science, an opposite version? You’ve, basically, cherry-picked plus added some bad evaluation onto it.
(iii) Let’s look at the science factors quickly to see what’s missing in the 50/50 view. I’ve already established that IQ, if it is biological, it remains a biological potentiality. We can live up to the outermost boundaries of whatever that potential but mostly we don’t. And I’ve established that whatever we are using to look at IQ are just fixed and unreflective measures at a point in time. That’s questionable but is being used as a defense measure of a fixed mental capacity via an assumed biological constraint of blacks. That hard and data science foundation has bad grounds. But let’s tick off some of the social sciences contributions that have been discounted into the arbitrary 50 nurture.
— new study, girls think they’re equally as smart as boys until age 6 and then they change their minds. That’s a nurture data point that will affect their IQ measurement not their capacity and it’s without merit. Cases like this extend to African Americans by way of example of unmerited effects.
— wearing sexualized girl’s clothing correlates to behavior conforming to school performance stereotypes, lower grades in math, etc.
— harsh discipline both verbal and spanking/whoopings lead girls to enter puberty preternaturally early (doesn’t take an evolutionary genius to see why that’s valuable). This has long ranging educational affects. Black community parenting tends toward aggressive discipline.
— in school excessive and harsher discipline far more effects black students from the earliest grades. Zero tolerance, police in schools, suspension practices starting in 1st grade — all of this starts feeding black children into the school-to-prison pipeline.
— we just don’t have the studies for what the subtle affects of white privilege like authority images in culture, the authors of the books and the history, and on TV do educationally to finding one’s black place when you’re on the outside of the culture that is also your own home
— we do have many, many studies that show when verbal queues are given to study subjects before they answer test questions, the answers they give are swayed by the initial prompting. What constant prompting are black children being hit with? Studies show they have a higher anxiety to (this breaks my heart) not test black. Show up for ‘my people.’ Gawd. What have we done?
— the form of test question writing bias toward white normative knowledge
— the knowledge by students of soft bigotry in education because of teach-to-the-test in some schools affects attitudes that negatively predispose or reinforce worthlessness of making an effort
— the developmental social need to challenge authority in a safe environment because they see authority is against them in an unsafe external environment, something they’ll soon enough need to face outside the class
— expecting children to trust and conform to authorities and the system as the see their own parents and peoples excluded from those things. Mentioned was DWB. Well, what about riding while a black child?
That’s just off the top of my head. Is it any wonder in the face of such complex findings and a real, personal difficult educational situation rife with personal, civic and cultural politics that upping the ante on a neat ‘blacks just gotta be that way’ scientific defense would be anything but of the highest appeal? And hell, highest appeal to PoC too. You’ll find your defenders there. This stuff is hard. It’s complex. It’s messy. It has a lot riding on it. Anything to soothe that will be mighty compelling. It’s just not good science and it is racist as in racially biased to make easier the challenge.
Eh, I’ve written enough of my considerations. I’m wore out. I guess I’ll finish with something on the actual subject of white privilege to keep this comment honest. There’s an interesting church seminar group, I want to say out of LA, that starts almost like AA, I am a racist, that is working to heal and or bond fractures in their churches. It’s not about guilt, it’s about getting beyond that sort of shame reactionary position. They’re finding that they had an impediment to community, they believe in community as their faith, and this approach is creating community and removing personal stigma. I probably read this in The Atlantic for a piece they write each Sunday, but I didn’t find it. White folk don’t have this sort of community. They don’t have people helping them own their privilege and speak their interaction to the injustices including the weight it places on them and others. So, yeah. As gently as possible, many here have asked you to consider your social darwinism direction. In a way, we’re all racist as that church group found to be liberating to confront to form a more perfect community they all wanted to transcend from the current state for a better one. Racism, for a time, got buried into a post-racial fantasy, helped by picturing people that use the n-word as ‘not us good white folk.’ And it’s allowed the invisible racism to blossom. White privilege is a way to uncover that. It’s not an accusation that needs defense, it’s a request for a perspective to open views. It’s philosophical, it’s social critique, it’s psychological, it’s timely and prescient. I’ll say it. I’m white. I have white privilege. I am a racist, I use my benefits and do next to nothing address any of it. I love listening to black liberation theology from the likes of King, West, Lewis and Cone and what do I do with that? Nod and say ‘ain’t it a shame.’ It’s hope porn, so I’m a racist. I am not guilty of the causal system at large. I am not clear about what can be done about the systems or anything I purposely do adjusts that. My sloppy words, unreflective behaviors, inconsiderate focuses and who knows what else just ripple through the water we all swim in, ever calm and beautiful for me and rough seas for those I help make waves for. It takes concerted focus to calm the waters we all swim in. I’m a racist and I gotta, because I make it and I break it and own it, need to work on that.
This was wonderful!!! Thank you!
Jill,
First let me say that while I disagree with you ideologically on a number of points (yet agree with you on what you might find a surprising number of others), and I believe you have mischaracterized my perspective in some ways, I also want to make sure up front that I express the appropriate kudos for your overall perspicacity, clarity, and knack for constructing persuasive, well-reasoned arguments. (Although I must say you do substitute an awful lot of homophones for someone who otherwise demonstrates such verbal aptitude: did you voice-compose all this on a phone or something? Just curious, not trying to be insulting, I swear.)
Now, here are my responses to some (not all, not even close–that would probably end up running many thousands of words) of what you wrote:
“(i) Now, the issues with the education system is quite massive. Money alone doesn’t quite seem to do it (though one might question how long money needs to work before there is a righting of the ship and what constitutes the portioned measures related to money). Testing and data measures are messed up. And, really, education is baring too much weight against what’s clearly a bigger problem than it alone can’t carry.”
Fully agree with all this, and fair point about giving money more time to work (remember, I’m not in any way calling for a reduction in education funding–just the opposite, in fact).
“— because 1A is your base argument that not only doesn’t engage with the subject of white privilege but that is encompassing your concern so completely that you’re reframing it to suit your narrative which is, well, a prime example of white privilege moves.”
Touche.
“— you state certain absolute facts but those are not traced through and backed by journals”
I’m not sure “absolute facts” is fair. But on the issue of citing scholarly journals vs. reputable journalistic sources, anyone can feel free to dismiss my evidence entirely if that is a dealbreaker. But I’ve been criticized on this basis for years, and I’ve stuck to my guns. I could go into my reasoning on this if you want, but I fear it risks going off on a long tangent in an already long thread. Just know that I’m well aware that you and many others argue for this evidentiary standard, and I consciously reject it.
“(ii) the science you prefer is selective toward seemly experimentally provable hard science (like physics is) over soft science like sociology
— that’s interesting given your background, though don’t hear that as some sort of condemnation. Perhaps some personal reflection that I don’t want to entertain might be enlightening or why, under pressure of the system, that appeals.”
Yes, it’s interesting. But I have more fondness for sociology than it might appear from this discussion. In particular, I like some of the big names from the 19th and early/mid-20th century, like Marx and Goffman. And in general, my feeling is that the sociologists are the ones being greedy and extremist. I line up with Steven Pinker (if you have not read his Pulitzer-runner-up book _The Blank Slate_, I strongly urge you to check it out) in seeing a roughly 50/50 divide between nature and nurture (I know you want to dispute that, but it’s only intended to be rough, and this again could turn into an unmanageable tangent if we get into parsing the exact percentages). But for many sociologists and other social scientists who adopt what Pinker calls the Standard Social Science Model (or SSSM), it’s not enough for their fields to be credited with half the explanation for behavior (and, as I think you pointed out, often the only half we can do anything about, although that is changing as neuroscience advances). They insist it’s virtually all nurture, except for some small fringe where those with severe brain damage or developmental disorders reside.
Thus I can get really annoyed with this inflexibly greedy position, without claiming that social scientists don’t have anything to tell us about human behavior. They have an immense amount. But they won’t credit fields like evolutionary psychology with ANY validity whatsoever. I brought up my interest in ev-psych among my wife’s grad school cohort (at a highly ranked sociology department) and with one of her professors, and the incredulity and dismissiveness, utter contempt and bile…it took me off guard, even having grown up with social scientists as parents.
“That educators are being scapegoated, yeah man that sucks.”
I appreciate that we agree on this! This is my core passion on this whole deal, which I think s. wallerstein also is sympathetic too.
“(1C) I am not a racist,”
I haven’t said that. My American Heritage Dictionary (5th ed., probably the last great dictionary that will ever be issued in print) defines “racist” as a variant of “racism”. The latter is defined as follows:
1. The belief that race accounts for differences in human character or ability, and that a particular race is superior to others.
2. Discrimination or prejudice based on race.
So…I would call it debatable whether I qualify. We are into philosophy, so a precise parsing of definitions is not out of line. “Accounts for”? Hmmm. I would say something more like “roughly coincident with (on a population level that varies greatly over a continuum, and therefore should never be applied to individuals)”. That a particular race is superior to others? Definitely not. As for #2, I certainly don’t have hostility toward or dislike of people because they belong to a given race. And I strongly believe equal access to housing, employment, and public accommodation. I don’t however believe that means an equal percentage of every race must be granted access to the most prestigious jobs, or else discrimination is automatically present. And many (maybe including you?) would differ with that. So I will certainly say that by many people’s definitions of “racist”, I would qualify.
“look at all my disclaimers.”
Yes, because without them I feel sure that no one would even imagine that I support reparations for slavery, robust funding for social programs that benefit racial minorities, etc. In fact, they would probably assume the opposite. And does it really make no difference in your estimation of my character whether I do or do not support such things?
“— Even the blatant racists in the Tim Wise documentary say that.”
I haven’t seen the documentary, but would they really be down with all my disclaimers?
“White privilege unpacks that racism isn’t some skinhead overt thing.”
Sure: it’s on a continuum like most social or psychological phenomena.
“— and what of straightforward biological capacity? Male musculature physiology is generally more than female physiology, for example. We don’t live out to our biological capacity. The fastest male runner in the world will (likely) also be the fastest runner in the world.”
I’m sorry, but the “(likely)” is absurd. Did you not see what I posted about Jackie Joyner-Kersee? For another example, when I was in high school the Olympic trial for the women’s marathon was held on a course that went right by my house. It was in combination with a men’s marathon as well, as is often the case. My mom, always the ardent feminist, made a practice of putting out lawn chairs and cheering for every woman who went by. Before the first woman passed us (and this is around the 19-20 mile mark), I was like “hey, there’s our dentist!” A weekend warrior (okay, I’m sure he trained hard every day) was ahead of the leading female contender for the U.S. Olympic team.
“But the fastest female runner in the world will be faster than nearly all other male runners.”
Okay, but the median female runner in the world will be much slower than the median male runner. Same with the ones at the 20th percentile, 90th percentile, wherever you want to pick.
“Do we honestly say due to meritocracy alone every intellect must run the fastest or be determined a moral failing?”
Absolutely not! I thought I was clear as can be that I don’t think intellectual prowess maps to moral superiority, any more than being able to run fast or jump high does. If anything, I’d say African Americans, on the whole, have demonstrated clear moral superiority over whites, based on their political behavior.
“— additionally there are biologically compromised from environmental factors like lead poisoning. That’s a real fact, though your use of that fact should apply at the student and school level, directed toward targeted solutions to help kids and educators alike. Your roll up, I’m saying, sounds broad-brushing.”
At least you’re acknowledging it’s a “real fact”!
“— The running example presents the problem of a 50/50 view. While under study to find the exact right metaphor of description, biology is more like a state of potentiality. Environment awakens that potential.”
Sure, of course. No one on the so-called “nature” side is arguing that someone born with a potential facility for verbal language, if locked in a dark room and not spoken to for their first decades of life, will ever have any significant ability to use language.
“If you’re troubled by testing, I’m not sure why you’re untroubled by IQ testing. To be fair, you probably are troubled by the measurement capacity but still hold it is a reliable, biological take-to-the-bank fact that blacks are under. No doubt, your 50/50 reflection contains all sorts of defensive coverage for test anxiety or whatever else falls into the environment mitigation, but that is exactly why your science is not in, not established fact, is not a rigorous approach. Because at bottom, a thing not at all yet discoverable, you hold there must be a rigid, unadjustable, unresolvable as an entire group of people who happen to have black skin and hair notwithstanding that race isn’t a genetic reality, somehow they group in particular schools all being of some mental deficiency and the education system just needs to stop caring about addressing what is writ large.”
Oh maaaan. This is a mischaracterization of my position that is so vast, I don’t even know where to begin. So I will simply jump up and say “I object, Your Honor!”
“I’ve already established that IQ, if it is biological, it remains a biological potentiality. We can live up to the outermost boundaries of whatever that potential but mostly we don’t.”
Yes, as is true for the vast majority of people when it comes to running or anything else.
“— new study, girls think they’re equally as smart as boys until age 6 and then they change their minds. That’s a nurture data point that will affect their IQ measurement not their capacity and it’s without merit. Cases like this extend to African Americans by way of example of unmerited effects.
— wearing sexualized girl’s clothing correlates to behavior conforming to school performance stereotypes, lower grades in math, etc.”
But boys don’t outperform girls on aptitude or IQ tests, so I fail to see the relevance.
“— harsh discipline both verbal and spanking/whoopings lead girls to enter puberty preternaturally early (doesn’t take an evolutionary genius to see why that’s valuable). This has long ranging educational affects. Black community parenting tends toward aggressive discipline.”
I’m not going to argue this point, but I do wonder why your asserting it doesn’t lead to howls of protest that THIS is a racist thing to say. “Black people are by and large shitty parents, and therefore mess up their kids.” Uhhh…
“— we just don’t have the studies for what the subtle affects of white privilege like authority images in culture, the authors of the books and the history, and on TV do educationally to finding one’s black place when you’re on the outside of the culture that is also your own home”
That’s fair.
“What constant prompting are black children being hit with? Studies show they have a higher anxiety to (this breaks my heart) not test black. Show up for ‘my people.’ Gawd. What have we done?”
Doesn’t this dovetail with the exact point I’ve been making all along?
“— the form of test question writing bias toward white normative knowledge”
Sure. I acknowledged this implicitly when talking about jazz geniuses. But the counterpoint is that Asians do even better on these tests, despite their having been devised by Europeans.
“— the knowledge by students of soft bigotry in education because of teach-to-the-test in some schools affects attitudes that negatively predispose or reinforce worthlessness of making an effort”
Again, dovetails with my point.
“— expecting children to trust and conform to authorities and the system as the see their own parents and peoples excluded from those things. Mentioned was DWB. Well, what about riding while a black child?”
Also a good point.
“Is it any wonder in the face of such complex findings and a real, personal difficult educational situation rife with personal, civic and cultural politics that upping the ante on a neat ‘blacks just gotta be that way’ scientific defense would be anything but of the highest appeal? And hell, highest appeal to PoC too. You’ll find your defenders there.”
I was not specifically aware of that, but I’m glad to hear it.
“I love listening to black liberation theology from the likes of King, West, Lewis and Cone”
I have made a point of noting that I don’t bear any animus toward black people. But I want to also note that I make an exception for Cornel West. I straight up hate that guy. Ugh. He is the worst! I’m sure my blood pressure just went up 20 points from seeing his name. Ptui.
“My sloppy words, unreflective behaviors, inconsiderate focuses and who knows what else just ripple through the water we all swim in, ever calm and beautiful for me and rough seas for those I help make waves for.”
Very eloquent!
Quickly, yes my (likely) caveat was hastily tossed where no caveat in general would be necessary but, it would have better been stated “all else being equal.” I’m typing in a window that amounts to 1″x2″ roughly. And interface haywire moments and autocorrect latent adjustments definitely are not conducive writing a lengthy response. That said, my apologies that “(likely)” created an unnecessary and unintended rabbit hole.
Fair enough! I have tried to respond on mobile devices before, and found it too frustrating. Hence there is often a delay of several hours between when I first read comments and when I respond to them (when I can sit undisturbed in front of a keyboard).
Identity politics coda:
Elucidations episode #107: Linda Martín Alcoff discusses identity and history
https://lucian.uchicago.edu/blogs/elucidations/2018/08/03/episode-107-linda-martin-alcoff-discusses-identity-and-history/