Killing The SAT Means Hurting Minorities

The Weekly Dish: Killing The SAT Means Hurting Minorities

"The evidence is clear. But the woke refuse to accept it."

"The rationale for the SAT abolition movement is — surprise! — critical theory, which insists that any measurement that results in different outcomes among ethnic or racial groups is a priori racist. (Except for all cases when non-whites and non-Asians do better than whites or Asians, in which case, never mind.)"

"[This] argument is pure Ibram X. Kendi: the results are solely and exclusively what determines if a test is racist." Me: If there is any statistical disparity, it is due to somebody's "racism," whether or not that somebody admits it or even recognizes it as racist.

"There is no countering this argument because it is not an argument. It is a threat."

Black Rednecks and White Liberals #2

‘The Real History of Slavery’ is the third essay of Thomas Sowell’s Black Rednecks and White Liberals. The following is paraphrased or quoted from it. Quotes are in all italics.

Slavery was an evil of greater scope than most people imagine and its place in history is radically different from the way it is usually portrayed. Mention slavery and immediately the image that arises is that of Africans and their descendants enslaved by the whites in the Southern United States. A somewhat broader perspective includes slavery by Europeans or a slaves elsewhere in the Americas. Clearly, the ability to score ideological points against American society or Western civilization, or to induce guilt and thereby extract benefits from the white population today, are greatly enhanced by making enslavement appear to be a peculiarly American, or a peculiarly white, crime.

Almost any library can show the incredibly lopsided coverage of slavery in the United States or Western hemisphere as compared to the meager writings on the even larger number of African enslaved in Islamic countries, not to mention the vast number of Europeans also enslaved in centuries past in the Islamic world and within Europe itself. At least a millions Europeans were enslaved by North African pirates alone from 1500-1800, and some European slaves were still being sold on auction blocks in Egypt, years after the Emancipation Proclamation freed blacks in the United States.

During the Middle Ages, Slavs were so widely used as slaves in both Europe and the Islamic world that the word “slave” was derived from Slav in English, other European languages, and Arabic. Nor have Asians and Polynesians been exempt from either being enslaved or enslaving others. Slavery was also common China and India for centuries.

For most of its long history, slavery was not the enslavement of racially different people for the simple reason that it wasn’t possible to go to another continent to get slaves and transport them en masse across an ocean. People were enslaved because they were vulnerable, not because of how they looked.

How and why did slavery end in most of the world?

Far from being targeted by Europeans for racial reasons, Africa became a large source of slaves after Europeans ended enslaving other Europeans. The anti-slavery ideology behindthis began to develop in 18th century Britain, when the British Empire led the world in slave trading.

Contrary to the myth created by Alex Haley in Roots, Africans were by no means innocent to slave trading. West Africa became one of the great slave trading regions, before, during and after the white man arrived.

Slavery ending in the U.S. due to the Civil War was unique. The same didn’t happen elsewhere.

Moral, philosophical objections to slavery was a development in the Western world of the 18th century. There was near none before then.

Black Rednecks and White Liberals #1

Black Rednecks and White Liberals is the title of a book by Thomas Sowell. It is also the title of the first essay, from which the following is paraphrased or quoted.

“Black rednecks” are the subset of blacks who copy the habits and adopt the culture of white rednecks.

Long before “black pride” became a fashionable phrase, there was cracker pride – much the same kind. “It was not pride in any particular achievement or set of behavioral standards or moral principles adhered to. Instead it was a touchiness about anything that might be even remotely construed as a personal slight, much less an insult, combined with a willingness to erupt into violence over it. New Englanders were baffled by this kind of pride among crackers.”

The people who migrated from different parts of the British Isles took their habits with them to different parts of the U.S. Most who settled in New England were from the lowland southeastern half of Britain. Many who settled in the South migrated from other parts of the British Isles. Even where there was no conflict or hostility, Southerners often showed a reckless disregard for human life like they did from whence they came.

The violence for which white Southerners became most known and notorious was lynching. But most victims of lynching in the antebellum South were white. It was only after the Civil War that most lynching victims were black.

Observers of the white population of the antebellum South commented on the white redneck poverty and their lack of industriousness or entrepreneurship. For example, while the South abounded in cattle, the reported production of dairy products was small compared to that in the northern states. Literacy in the South was much lower than in the North.

Much of the cultural pattern of Southern rednecks became the cultural heritage of Southern blacks. The culture of Northern blacks were much closer to that of Northern whites.

White liberals in many roles – as intellectuals, politicians, celebrities, judges, teachers – have aided and abetted the perpetuation of a counterproductive and self-destructive lifestyle among black rednecks. It has been reinforced by the welfare state and other white liberal policies.

Blaming others for anything in which blacks lag is standard operating procedure among white liberals. For example, riots by blacks are blamed on whites. Why it is not a problem for blacks from the Caribbean or Asians goes unexplained.

The Logic of Bell Curve Leftism #3

My last post on this topic will not include quotes from Andrew Sullivan’s article. Of course, income and IQ are partly correlated, but not near as much as argued by Sullivan and DeBoers.

This article shows a graph of lifetime income based on AFQT (Armed Forces Qualifying Test) score. Note the degree of dispersion above and below the gray line. The article includes the following.

But a lot of other things also predict income. So, what’s the unique contribution of AFQT scores? More precisely, how much of the variability in income can they explain? Statisticians often answer this question by reporting a statistic called r-squared that varies from zero to one. In this analysis, zero means AFQT has no predictive power, while one would mean that someone’s income can be perfectly predicted by knowing their AFQT score. An r-squared of 0.5 would mean that half of the variation in income could be explained by knowing someone’s AFQT scores (or, less scientifically, half the time you can predict someone’s income by knowing how they did on the AFQT).

The data show that AFQT scores explain 21% of the variation in income between survey respondents. That translates to a correlation coefficient of 0.46.

Is that a large correlation? It depends upon your perspective. If your cup is half full, you can correctly point out that 0.46 rivals the largest observed correlations in social psychology, sociology, and other relevant fields. But if your cup is half empty, you’ll say that many things determine how much money people make, and smarts is only one of them.

In fact, the true contribution of AFQT to income is probably smaller. That’s because AFQT is serving as a proxy for other attributes correlated with earnings. People with high AFQT scores probably stayed in school longer, and most likely had more successful parents. These and other correlates of intelligence factor into the aforementioned 21 percent.

A reader might wonder how the 0.46 and 0.21 are related. Two statistical metrics are the correlation coefficient, r, and the coefficient of determination, r^2 (link).  The range of r is [-1, +1] while the range of r^2 is [0, 1]. 0.46^2 = 0 .2116.

Two other oft-used statistical metrics of dispersion, standard deviation σ and variance σ^2, are similarly related.

Related: 10 Jobs Where Employees Tend to Have the Highest IQs

The Logic of Bell Curve Leftism #2

Again I will put excerpts from Andrew Sullivan’s article in all italics followed by my comments.

Freddie [DeBoer, author of The Cult of Smart] notes that “if the average white student sits at 50 percent of all students at a given academic task, the average black student lies somewhere between 15 and 30 percent,” which is not a minor difference. DeBoer doesn’t explain it as a factor of class — he notes the IQ racial gap persists even when removing socio-economic status from the equation. Nor does he ascribe it to differences in family structure — because parenting is not that important. He cites rather exposure to lead, greater disciplinary punishment for black kids, the higher likelihood of being arrested, the stress of living in a crime-dominated environment, the deep and deadening psychological toll of pervasive racism, and so on: “white supremacy touches on so many aspects of American life that it’s irresponsible to believe we have adequately controlled for it in our investigations of the racial achievement gap.”

DeBoer’s collectivist, victimhood, and oppressor/oppressed mindset is patently clear. He makes culture and individual character, attitude, and effort irrelevant, too.

Sullivan: I suspect that many smart people have mistaken their own unearned gift for some kind of moral virtue, which is why they are so reluctant to note that others may not be so smart, and if they do so, think less of them. Remove the elites’ vanity, and self-love, and you can see their irrationality for what it is.

Heh. What about the elites at the vanguard of leftism, critical race theory, and people like Sullivan? Are none of them irrational or smart?

My big brain, I realized, was as much an impediment to living well as it was an advantage. It was a bane and a blessing. It simply never occurred to me that higher intelligence was in any way connected to moral worth or happiness.

In fact, I saw the opposite. I still do. I don’t believe that a communist revolution will bring forward the day when someone like my grandmother could be valued in society and rewarded as deeply as she should have been.

A high IQ doesn’t guarantee its being used well or wisdom, either. Sullivan seems like a good example. Value to whom for what? There must be plenty of other uneducated grandmothers as good or better than his. Does he value any of them as much as his own? He seems to want a communist revolution, but is too cynical to believe that people in general are good enough for it.  

The Logic of Bell Curve Leftism #1

Andrew Sullivan is a popular political commentator. He recently resigned from New York magazine – not to be confused with The New Yorker magazine or The New York Times magazine – and started his own publication The Weekly Dish. 

His 9/11/2020 edition included The Logic of Bell Curve Leftism, much of it based on a recent book The Cult of Smart by Fredrik deBoer. I haven’t read the book, but Sullivan’s article and reading a few reviews on Amazon is enough to get the book’s gist. When writing for The New Republic magazine in 1994 Sullivan wrote about the controversial book The Bell Curve, about race and IQ, which resulted in a lot of controversy for him. 

My comments that follow will be mostly based on Sullivan’s article. I will put excerpts from his article in all italics followed by my comments.

DeBoer proclaims. “It is the notion that academic value is the only value, and intelligence the only true measure of human worth. It is pernicious, it is cruel, and it must change.”

Sullivan doesn't disagree. However, academic value is not the only value, nor intelligence the only true measure of human worth. The high incomes of pro athletes, movie and tv stars, popular singers or musicians, many business executives, and some politicians have a strong basis in other values – rarer kinds of ability, creativity, and hard work. Politicians obviously value political power and use it.

Also, neither academic value nor intelligence imply a high income or wealth. How many Nobel Prize Winners are in the Forbes 400 richest people? Physicists, mathematicians, electrical engineers, college professors, and some other professions rank high in IQ, but that doesn’t entail a high income.

“Critical theory leftists insist that everything on earth is entirely socially constructed, that all inequality is a function of “oppressive systems”, and that human nature itself is what John Locke called a “white paper, void of all characters” — the famous blank slate. Freddie begs to differ: “Human behavioral traits, such as IQ, are profoundly shaped by genetic parentage, and this genetic influence plays a larger role in determining human outcomes than the family and home environment.”

This shows a big misunderstanding of John Locke’s “white paper, void of all characters” or “blank slate.” Locke was an Empiricist, which means he held that all knowledge is based on experience. He was arguing against innate ideas, which were claimed to exist by Rationalists. This puts the emphasis on “void of all characters” and “blank.” It does not mean everyone’s paper or slate is identical. There are nature-given capacity differences – e.g. intelligence, athleticism, and musical.

What Freddie is arguing is that, far from treating genetic inequality as a taboo, the left should actually lean into it to argue for a more radical re-ordering of society. They shouldn’t ignore genetics, or treat it as unmentionable, or go into paroxysms of fear and alarm over “eugenics” whenever the subject comes up. They should accept that inequality is natural, and construct a politics radical enough to counter it.

For DeBoer, that means ending meritocracy — for “what could be crueler than an actual meritocracy, a meritocracy fulfilled?” It means a revolutionary transformation in which there are no social or cultural rewards for higher intelligence, no higher after-tax income for the brainy, and in which education, with looser standards, is provided for everyone on demand — for the sake of nothing but itself.

This implies that becoming a doctor – with all the time, effort and often a lot of debt – should not be rewarded with a high income. If an equal income could be made in work that requires less effort, fewer hours, less stress, or gives more personal enjoyment, why become a doctor? In other words, lower pay to doctors would also reduce the supply of doctors and patients’ access to them. DeBoer wants to have the cake and eat it, too. He wants doctors' income confiscated -- "no higher after-tax income for the brainy" -- but still wants the services they provide. 

What DeBoer endorses to end meritocracy is far more political power, the power to coerce others one envies or doesn’t like.

How Not to Be an Antiracist

The above title is the title of a Wall Street Journal opinion piece. It is the best thing I have read -- not a lot -- about the new meaning of racism. Since it is behind a paywall, the following in italics are some excerpts.

When properly conceived, antiracist programs can provide a powerful response to hate and bias incidents. The problem with much of today’s antiracism is that it doesn’t really oppose invidious discrimination and may even foment it.

The new antiracism is not, as its etymology suggests, opposition to racial discrimination. Ibram X. Kendi demonstrates this in his 2019 bestseller, “How to Be an Antiracist.” He defines “racism” as a combination of policies and ideas that “produces and normalizes racial inequities.” This racism has nothing to do with individual discrimination. Rather, it is support for institutions that yield disparities. Lest there be confusion, Mr. Kendi emphasizes that “focusing on ‘racial discrimination’ takes our eyes off” the policy goals he and other self-proclaimed antiracists support.

In other words, the new antiracism requires that we take our eyes off what antidiscrimination work is all about—combating invidious discrimination—and focus instead on social outcomes that arise in the absence of racial preferences.

I have not read Ibram X. Kendi's book, but I have seen him in videos and often referenced in articles. He is at the forefront of the new meaning of "racism" and the new term "anti-racism." The book was a #1 New York Times bestseller. It has 6,561 reviews on Amazon with 88% of them 5-star and a tiny percent of 1-star or 2-star reviews. The top of page 81 defines a cultural antiracist as "One who is rejecting cultural standards and equalizing cultural differences among racial groups."

Imagine a person with primary responsibility of selecting players for a professional NBA basketball team or NFL football team. About 80% of all NBA and NFL players are black, far exceeding their percentage of the U.S. population, which is about 13%. Imagine the person pursues all or nearly all white players in order to equalize this huge racial disparity. In other words, skin color outranks any other considerations like playing ability and improving the team's skill-set. 

Somebody might object. That's not what Mr. Kendi means. That person would decrease income for the blacks replaced and the wider goal of equalizing income for the black population. I would reply that objection doesn't follow. Other teams could pick up the black players replaced. What this brief exchange shows is how logically weak Kendi's meaning of "cultural antiracist" is.

An individual being color-blind is not good enough in Kendi's opinion. What counts instead is that society level statistics show no racial disparity.

Is there institutional racism in America? Walter Williams says 'yes', but it is not the kind that Kendi dislikes.

The Myth of Systemic Police Racism

This Wall Street Journal article by Heather Mac Donald is more than a month old, but still worth reading. Since it is behind a paywall, the following are excerpts.

In 2019 police officers fatally shot 1,004 people, most of whom were armed or otherwise dangerous. African-Americans were about a quarter of those killed by cops last year (235), a ratio that has remained stable since 2015. That share of black victims is less than what the black crime rate would predict, since police shootings are a function of how often officers encounter armed and violent suspects. In 2018, the latest year for which such data have been published, African-Americans made up 53% of known homicide offenders in the U.S. and commit about 60% of robberies, though they are 13% of the population.

The police fatally shot nine unarmed blacks and 19 unarmed whites in 2019, according to a Washington Post database, down from 38 and 32, respectively, in 2015. The Post defines “unarmed” broadly to include such cases as a suspect in Newark, N.J., who had a loaded handgun in his car during a police chase. In 2018 there were 7,407 black homicide victims. Assuming a comparable number of victims last year, those nine unarmed black victims of police shootings represent 0.1% of all African-Americans killed in 2019.

A 2015 Justice Department analysis of the Philadelphia Police Department found that white police officers were less likely than black or Hispanic officers to shoot unarmed black suspects.

***********

I pose the following question. If those who want to say "racism" every chance they get want to prevent white police from killing blacks, why don't they advocate far more black police and far fewer white police in mostly black neighborhoods? (I suspect black police want to work in safer neighborhoods as much as white police do.)

Meaning of 'Black Lives Matter'

Per Wikipedia "Black Lives Matter (BLM) is an organized movement advocating for non-violent civil disobedience in protest against incidents of police brutality against Afro-American people." 

So a more accurate, more honest, non-racist name would be People Against Police Brutality. I'm for that. If all the phrase BLM meant is that black people also have rights -- to life, liberty, property, the pursuit of happiness, vote, seek political office -- that would be fine with me. I suspect that is the way many people view it and what gives the phrase its broad appeal. However, the organization and movement BLM is far more than that. They are Marxist, racist (anti-white), and pro-violence. Link. Killing people such as David Dorn, destroying property, and looting are neither civil nor non-violent. Two of BLM's founders, Patrisse Cullors and Alicia Garza, are self-admitted Marxists and racists. 

In the USA 93% of Afro-American homicide victims are killed by other Afro-Americans (link). However, I don't see BLM protesters protesting those victims, and I see nothing about it on the BLM website. So apparently their lives mattered little or none.

*****

In The New York Times Michael D. Shear -- who previously worked 18 years for the Washington Compost -- wrote: "In the interview, Mr. Pence called Mr. Floyd’s death “a tragedy,” but his insistence that “all lives matter” is likely to be seen as a provocation by activists and others who say that phrase dilutes the issue and fails to acknowledge the specific threats that African-Americans still face at the hands of police officers in the United States" (link). 

Shear claims that a guy named Taff pressed VP Pence to say "black lives matter" more than once, but Pence would say only "all lives matter." 

Pandering to BLM, both Shear and Taff failed to acknowledge the meaning of "all." "All" includes white, black, Asian, Hispanic, and every other possibility. Shear also ignores (1) the African-American homicide victims killed by other African-Americans, and (2) the specific threats that African-Americans still face at the hands of other African-Americans. When Shear believes it's fair to criticize Pence for what Pence doesn't say, he made it fair to criticize Shear for what he doesn't say.

I did a search for 'what does black lives matter mean?' The following are typical.

This page says, "At its most basic level, it calls for a shift in the statistics that Black people are twice as likely to be killed by a police officer while unarmed, compared to a white individual."

What about "while armed"? What about "killed by another Black person"? Dead silence.

This page says, "So, if you’re unsure about what ‘Black Lives Matter’ means, how to respond to someone when they say ‘All Lives Matter’ or just curious to know why saying ALM doesn’t benefit anyone, let us explain.  ...  The statement is not political or controversial. It’s an expression that calls out for justice, respect and empathy for every life that has been affected by discrimination, prejudice and misrepresentation for centuries. Point blank: It’s raising awareness for basic human rights."

Okay, but "every life" and "basic human rights" aren't limited to black lives; it includes whites, Asian, Hispanics and all other possibilities. 

The same page also shows a picture of woman with an ALM poster, on which "All" doesn't mean "all." Apparently, like Shear and Taff, she doesn't know the meaning of "all," which means each and every one.

The term Word Nazi come to mind. By that I mean somebody who is fond of declaring what another person means when said person uses a particular word or term, regardless of what that person actually means.

True Plight of Black Americans

Walter Williams' article The True Plight of Black Americans is well worth reading.

Democrats are very fond of accusing others of racism. But what have they done when in charge? They have dominated politics in large cities for decades. What is the result? "Democratic-controlled cities have the poorest-quality public education despite their large, and growing, school budgets."

Such cities are also high crime areas. Williams touches on crime and African Americans. There is more. 93% of African American homicide victims are killed by other African Americans. African Americans accounted for 52.5% of all homicide offenders from 1980 to 2008 (link), despite being only about 13% of the USA's population.