Steve
Salerno, Quillette, May 10, 2018
{snip}
Now,
reasonable people can differ about whether academia, as the ancestral
home of white guilt, has been overzealous at micromanaging
outcomes. Significant race-based preferences remain widespread,
and lawsuits continue to be filed by white and Asian students who
feel they bore the brunt of academia’s attempt to realize its
vision of a utopian society in which minorities are represented at
demographically correct levels. Eyebrows also raise at the way in
which black students may be acculturated upon their arrival:
ironically, some colleges “ghetto-ize” incoming minorities
by creating for them separate advising systems, housing, academic
tracks, and even graduation ceremonies. Still, it’s hard to dispute
the wholesomeness of the mindset from which such tokens of
affirmative action spring.
And
yet wholesome is
not the word that comes to mind when one assesses the newest wrinkle
in academia’s attempt to balance the scales: an all-out,
unapologetic assault on ‘whiteness’ itself. Today’s college
administrators increasingly frame diversity and inclusion as
lessons that must be learned by whites alone—and they’re lessons
that too often unfold as interventions that force whites to regard
themselves less as full partners in diversity than an obstacle to be
overcome so that other constituencies might thrive. {snip}
A
tale of two coasts: New York’s Hunter College promotes coursework
for poli-sci majors in
“the abolition of whiteness.” Stanford
examines “abolishing
whiteness as a cultural identity.” Elsewhere, to cite just a few
examples, classes at Grinnell
and UW-Madison confront “the
problem of whiteness.” New Mexico’s St.
John’s College takes on the
“depravity” of whiteness. Moreover, academic theorists
crusade to purge whiteness from STEM courses, because critical
thinking and research are regarded as tools of “white hegemony.”
Engineering students at Purdue must contend with the
school’s indictment of “racist
and colonialist projects in science,” while a UC-Irvine
professor condemns even
“technical prowess” as a white male construct. A Linfield college
Gender Studies professor even
condemns her peers for
putting “stellar” colleagues in leadership roles, because stellar
individuals, she notes, tend to be white and thus have benefited
unfairly from “a logic of meritocracy that is built on this racist
assumption that everyone has had the same access and
opportunities.” UCLA
pays students a stipend to
act as professional social justice activists who will diagnose,
expose, and combat “whiteness” and “the patriarchy” in all
campus manifestations.
Most
of these initiatives surfaced within the past few semesters, so a
Geiger reading on fallout is premature, but the message and
predictable effects are worrisome. Aside from simple issues of
fairness, academe’s crusade is almost guaranteed to backfire.
Today’s white college students have little to do with the active
bigotry of the past; treating them as if they arrive on campus with
some endemic moral deficit is almost certain to foment
a stronger sense of racial identity among students who deem the
attacks unwarranted. (77 percent of today’s freshmen describe
themselves as
somewhere between liberal and middle-of-the-road.) No matter how
erudite the packaging, labeling a race “depraved” is the textbook
definition of bigotry (if not, some might argue, an institutionally
sanctioned hate crime).
Consider,
too, the implications for black self-reliance. It seems
unhelpful to suggest to blacks that resolving the gap in minority
performance remains a problem that somehow falls to whites; this
undercutting of black agency subliminally echoes the very paternalism
that colleges decry. For that matter, what is the message to
non-whites of identifying such concepts
as excellence, prowess, and stellar
performance with
whiteness?
{snip}
Suggestion
for my academic colleagues: ensure that opportunity exists for all,
then allow diversity to occur organically on its own. It may take
longer and never quite come to imagined fruition, but it will be
genuine, and will not stigmatize an entire group of people in the
guise of eliminating racial stigmas. You can commit to this truer
diversity or you can allow your campus to devolve into a Balkanized
chaos-sphere that not only perpetuates ancient grievances but stands
in direct reproach to the mission of higher education.
You
cannot do both.
AND THE 2ND ARTICLE
Posted
on May 15, 2018
The Racism Treadmill
Coleman
Hughes, Quillette, May 14, 2018
The
prevailing view among progressives today is that America hasn’t
made much progress on racism. {snip}
But
the data take a clear side in that debate. In his controversial
bestseller Enlightenment
Now,
Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker notes a steep decline in racism.
At the turn of the 20th century, lynchings occurred at a rate of
three per week. Now, racially-motivated killings of blacks occur at a
rate of zero to one per year.1 What’s
more, racist attitudes that were once commonplace have now become
fringe. A Gallup poll found that only
4 percent of Americans approved of
marriages between blacks and whites in 1958. By 2013, that number had
climbed to 87 percent, prompting pollsters to call it “one of the
largest shifts of public opinion in Gallup history.”
Why
can’t progressives admit that we’ve made progress? Pinker’s
answer for
what he dubs “progressophobia” is two-fold. First, our intuitions
about whether trends have increased or decreased are shaped by what
we can easily recall—news items, shocking events, personal
experience, etc. Second, we are more sensitive to negative stimuli
than we are to positive ones. These two bugs of human
psychology—called the availability bias and the negativity bias,
respectively—make us prone to doomsaying, inclined to mistake freak
news events for trends, and blind to the slow march of progress.
But
while psychological biases may sufficiently explain progressophobia
on most other topics, our denialism about racial progress calls for a
deeper explanation—an explanation in terms of widely-held beliefs
about race and inequality.
One
such belief is the notion that disparities between blacks and
whites—in income, housing, employment, etc.—are caused by
systemic racism. {snip}
But
the premise built into the thinking of [Ta-Nehisi] Coates and [Ibram]
Kendi is false. I call it the disparity
fallacy.
The disparity fallacy holds that unequal outcomes between two groups
must be caused primarily by discrimination, whether overt or
systemic. What’s puzzling about believers in the disparity fallacy
is not that they apply the belief too broadly,
but that they apply it too narrowly.
Any instance of whites outperforming blacks is adduced as evidence of
discrimination. But when a disparity runs the other way—that is,
blacks outperforming whites—discrimination is never invoked as a
causal factor.
Here’s
a clear example of the disparity fallacy: a recent
study by
researchers at Stanford, Harvard, and the Census Bureau found that,
“[a]mong those who grow up in families with comparable incomes,
black men grow up to earn substantially less than the white men.”
A New
York Times article attributed
this disparity to “the punishing reach of racism for black boys.”
But the study also found that black women have higher college
attendance rates than white men, and higher incomes
than white women, conditional on parental income. The fact that black
women outperformed their white counterparts on these measures,
however, was not attributed to the punishing reach of racism against
whites.
Economic
disparities that favor blacks have been reported for decades, yet
they have rarely if ever been attributed to anti-white systemic bias.
A 1994 New
York Times article reported
that, among college graduates, black women earned slightly more money
than white women did. In addition, the economist Thomas Sowell has
pointed out that, as early as 1980, U.S. census data show black
college-educated couples out-earning their white counterparts.3
The
black/white unemployment gap provides an even older illustration of
the disparity fallacy. Many commentators have reflexively attributed
the modern unemployment gap to systemic racism. But in historical
eras with far more racism, the gap was reversed. According to Sowell,
“[b]lack unemployment rates were lower than that of whites in 1890
and, for the last time, in 1930.”4 Facts
like these, however, are never explained in terms of discrimination
in favor of
blacks. Indeed, why progressives only commit the disparity fallacy in
one direction is never explained. What the writer Shelby
Steele has said about progressives and
racist events is equally true of statistical disparities that
disadvantage blacks: When they learn of one, “they rent a jet plane
and fly to it!”
It’s
a sign of the poverty of our discourse on racial progress and
inequality that the rarest findings are thought to be normal, and the
most common findings are thought to require special explanation.
Indeed,
it is rare to find any two ethnic groups achieving identical
outcomes, even when they belong to the same race.
A cursory glance at the mean
incomes of census-tracked ethnic groups shows
Americans of Russian descent out-earning those of Swiss descent, who
out-earn those of British descent, who out-earn those of Polish
descent, who out-earn those of French descent in turn. If the
disparity fallacy were true, then we ought to posit an elaborate
system that is biased towards ethnic Russians, then the Swiss,
followed by the Brits, the Poles and the French. Yet one never hears
progressives make such claims. Moreover, one never hears progressives
say, “French-Americans make 79 cents for every Russian-American
dollar,” although the facts could easily be framed that way.
Similar disparities between blacks and whites are regularly
presented in such invidious terms.
Rather than defaulting to systemic bias to explain disparities, we
should understand that, even in the absence of discrimination, groups
still differ in innumerable ways that affect their respective
outcomes.
Black
culture
One
crucial way in which groups differ is culture. Culture matters
enormously. The importance of culture is, ironically, a value often
expressed by progressives. When presented with arguments that point
to genetic influences on human behavior, many on the Left respond by
emphasizing the importance of culture over genetics, that is, nurture
over nature (see Steven Pinker’s The
Blank Slate for
more.) Moreover, cultures differ from one another. This is true by
definition. It’s unclear what the “multi” in
“multi-culturalism” could possibly mean if cultures were all the
same. Put these two premises together, and you arrive at what should
be an equally banal conclusion: if culture matters enormously, and
cultures differ from one another, then differences between cultures
matter enormously.
But,
together with the disparity fallacy, the denial of cultural
explanations for disparity has become the received view among
progressives. Coates, for instance, has dubbed cultural explanations
of disparity “lazy.”5 Others
believe such arguments to be intrinsically racist when applied to
blacks. The sociologist and award-winning author Michael Eric Dyson
has argued that cultural explanations of black/white disparities are
seen by whites as “heroic battles against black deficiency.”6
But
intuitive examples of the importance of culture are all around us.
Disparities in athletic achievement, for instance, are inexplicable
without reference to culture. Although blacks make up 14 percent of
the U.S. population, they account
for only 8 percent of MLB baseball players.
This relatively small disparity has been enough to prompt articles
in US
News, NPR,
and Vox that
blame the decline in black baseball representation on everything from
mass incarceration to racial bias to a generic sense among white fans
that “baseball culture should stay white,” as the Vox piece
summarized it.
Meanwhile,
blacks account for a staggering three-fourths
of all NBA basketball players,
while whites account for a mere 18 percent. Curiously, progressives
have not seen the under-representation of whites in basketball as
requiring any explanation whatsoever. When whites are
under-represented somewhere, it is assumed to be a choice or a
cultural preference. But when blacks are under-represented somewhere,
progressives descend on the issue like detectives to the scene of an
unsolved murder, determined to consider every possible explanation
except for the “lazy” one: that in black culture, basketball is
more popular than baseball.
Strangely,
it is only among thought-leaders that these twin dogmas—the
disparity fallacy and the denial of cultural explanations—have
become gospel. Black people themselves are, on the whole, open to
other ways of thinking. For instance, 60
percent of blacks attribute disparities in
income, jobs, and housing mainly to factors other than
bias, according to a 2013 Gallup poll. A more recent Pew poll found
that 60
percent of blacks without college degrees say
their race hasn’t affected
their chances of success in life. The belief that cultural factors
don’t influence outcomes, too, seems to be the special province of
progressive intellectuals. For example, when asked by Pew in 2008, 71
percent of blacks said that rap was a bad influence on society.
Nevertheless, for years progressives have accused those who criticize
harmful elements within black culture of “victim-blaming,” never
stopping to wonder whether the supposed victims actually felt blamed
by such observations.
It’s
no accident that the majority of blacks don’t view racial bias as
the main issue they face today. Indeed, there is reason to believe
that culture,
rather than bias, is the primary cause of unequal outcomes for
blacks. {snip}
{snip}
The
disparity fallacy and the denial of cultural factors conspire to
create a dynamic that I call the Racism Treadmill: as long as
cultural differences continue to cause disparities between racial
groups, and as long as progressives imagine that systemic racism lies
behind every disparity, then no amount of progress in reducing
systemic racism, however large or concrete, will ever look like
progress to progressives.
Indeed,
it may be a mistake to think of progressives as engaging in
progress-oriented activism to begin with, because that would imply
that they are progressing towards some specified endpoint. But if the
progressive definition of ‘progress’ ends with a disparity-free
world that will never—indeed could never—exist,
then progressives are left with a Sisyphean politics; an agitated
march to nowhere in particular.
{snip}
Staying
on the Racism Treadmill means denying progress and stoking ethnic
tensions. It means, as Thomas Sowell once warned, moving towards a
society in which “a new born baby enters the world supplied with
prepackaged grievances against other babies born the same
day.”[15] Worse
still, it means shutting down the one conversation that stands the
greatest chance of improving outcomes for blacks: the conversation
about culture.
By
contrast, getting off the Treadmill means recognizing that group
outcomes will differ even in the absence of systemic bias; it means
treating people as individuals rather than as members of a
collective; it means restoring the naive conception of equal
treatment over the skin-color morality of the far Left; and it means
rejecting calls to burn this or that system to the ground in order to
combat forms of racial oppression that grow ever more abstract by the
day. At bottom, it means acknowledging the fact that racism has
declined precipitously, and perhaps even being grateful that it has.
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