Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
I guess today’s theme is bigotry. I had no idea that Frank Sinatra was an outspoken opponent of bigotry, particularly anti-Semitism. In fact, there’s a Wikipedia article called “Frank Sinatra and Jewish activism“. Here’s an excerpt:
Frank Sinatra was a strong supporter and activist for Jewish causes in the United States and Israel. According to Santopietro, Sinatra was a “lifelong sympathizer with Jewish causes”. Sinatra participated in Hollywood protests and productions supporting Jews during the Holocaust and the formation of the State of Israel. He actively fund-raised for Israel Bonds, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and the Simon Wiesenthal Center, and helped establish two intercultural centers in Israel which bear his name. Due to his support of Israel, his recordings and films were banned by the Arab League and by Lebanon.
Personal relationships with Jews
Sinatra became friendly with Jewish individuals in his youth. His Jewish neighbor, Mrs. Golden, often babysat him while his mother was out working. She spoke to him in Yiddish and served him coffee cake and apples. For many years Sinatra wore a mezuzah charm that Golden had given him. In 1944 Sinatra insisted on a Jewish friend, Manie Sacks, serving as godfather at his son‘s baptism over the vociferous protests of the priest.
According to Swan, Sinatra despised racial prejudice and was quick to put a stop to it. Sinatra said: “When I was a kid and someone called me a ‘dirty little Guinea’, there was only one thing to do – break his head…Let anyone yell wop or Jew or nigger around us, we taught him not to do it again”.[4] Once he heard a reporter call someone a “Jew bastard” at a party and punched out the speaker.[4] When Sinatra heard that some golf clubs restricted Jews from membership, he became the second non-Jew to join a club with a majority Jewish membership.
And he is in the 11-minute 1945 film below, called”The House I Live In“. Although it seems a bit schmalzy now, remember that the U.S. was rife with anti-Semitism then and largely ignored the Holocaust. The film won an Honorary Oscar and a special Golden Globe awared.
The YouTube notes:
This short film, which earned an honorary Academy Award for director Mervyn LeRoy in 1946, exhorts the message of religious tolerance and post-war hopefulness. Frank Sinatra, then the idol of teenage bobby-soxers, takes a break from a recording session and finds a group of children bullying one boy because he’s Jewish. Sinatra reminds them that Americans may worship in many different ways but they still remain Americans. The film ends with Sinatra performing the title song, penned by Abel Meeropol, best known for the song “Strange Fruit” which denounced the horror of lynchings. Named to the National Film Registry in 2007.
Well, he does use the word “Japs,” twice, which was standard during the war but is not regarded as a slur. So be it. But one thing’s for sure: Old Blue Eyes sure could sing!
Prompted by a set of questions I found on Facebook, I queried ChatGPT:
The next question is obvious: why the difference? I asked it and the bot simply regurgitated the last paragraph.
I tried again:
I gave it one more try:
Okay, you tell me the difference!
I asked instead for jokes about “Jews” and “Muslims” instead of “Jewish jokes” and “Muslim jokes”. I got the same result:
Finally, it’s not just Jews that can be subject to jokes:
Now you could accuse the bot of being bigoted, but it’s not programmed by humans—rather, it’s programmed by data from online texts. But Muslim jokes do exist (here are some), so it’s not due to their absence on the Internet. Tentative hypothesis: the bot somehow knows that ALL jokes about Muslims could “potentially cause offense”. How it knows this is beyond me.
Yet you get the same non-response if you ask for jokes about Mormons. But Mormons aren’t known for being easily offended or violent, so I’m baffled. Are there simply no Mormon jokes? Nope; I found some here—in a Mormon publication! The mystery deepens. All we know is that the bot doesn’t treat all religions the same way.
On November 25, you may recall, three young Palestinian-Americans, Kinnan Abdalhamid, Hisham Awartani, and Tahseen Ali Ahmad were shot n Burlington, Vermont. Two of the injured were American citizens (not “Palestinians”); the other a legal resident. The alleged shooter, Jason Eaton, was captured and appears to be mentally ill.
Two of the students have been treated and released from the hospital, but the third was shot in the spine and may never walk again. This was a reprehensible crime that may have stolen a huge part of the life from one victim.
But was it a hate crime?
On December 1 I wrote about how desperately the media seemed to want it to be a hate crime, for it fit the narrative of “Isamophobia” touted by progressives. Muslims, too, seemed to share the notion that it must have been a hate crime. After all, two of the boys were wearing kaffiyehs, the Palestinian headscarf, and they were speaking Arabic to each other.
Now, eleven days later, it appears that there is still no evidence for the alleged perpetrator having a particular hatred for Muslims, even though his social media posts have been thoroughly scrutinized. And yet the desire for this to be an “Islamophobic” crime remains. Here’s from an op-ed in the latest Harvard Crimson (bolding is mine)
At Stanford University, campus police are investigating allegations that a student wearing a shirt with the Syrian city of Damascus written in Arabic on it was struck by a car, the driver of which yelled, “Fuck you people.” At George Washington University, students reported instances of strangers ripping hijabs from the heads of Muslim students. And at Yale University, a message declaring “Death to Palestine” was found written on a whiteboard inside of a student dorm building.
On Nov. 25, this bigotry turned into bullets.
That day, three Palestinian college students in Vermont were shot while speaking Arabic and wearing keffiyehs, traditional Palestinian scarves. That attack on Hisham Awartani, a student at Brown University; Kinnan Abdalhamid, a student at Haverford University; and Tahseen Ali Ahmed, a student at Trinity University, should remind the nation of the consequences of ignoring anti-Palestinian racism.
Nope; the “troubling” bit is that his posts often appeared unhinged. Here’s what VICE dug up:
But Business Insider also cited evidence, first uncovered by Vice, of a “conspiratorial” bent in posts on what appear to be Eaton’s social media accounts, most of which have since been deleted or locked. One, on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, said “Libertarians want trans furrys to be able to protect their cannabis farms with unregistered machine guns.”
Further evidence of Eaton’s worldview comes in 2004, when the Portsmouth Herald in New Hampshire, which belongs to the USA TODAY Network, reported Eaton was presenting a lecture at a local church about, in Eaton’s words, “taking back the money and power that consumers have ceded to multinational corporations.”
And there’s this:
One of Eaton’s struggles was with romantic relationships, according to a police report. On Oct. 21, 2019, two officers from the Dewitt Police Department in New York, near Syracuse, were dispatched to the residence of a woman who had a previous relationship with Eaton, but who said he was now continuing to text her after she told him to stop.
No mention of Muslims yet. Here’s an implicit accusation of anti-Muslim bigotry from a Professor at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard:
THE FACE OF THE FUTURE?
THIS may be the face of the future—unless Americans address hate within. Jason Eaton was charged w/ 3 counts of 2nd degree attempted murder after allegedly shooting 3 Palestinian students. We need a moral makeover, if not plastic surgery. #Islamophobiapic.twitter.com/GKRJTcgVRc
— Rev. & Prof. Cornell William Brooks (@CornellWBrooks) November 27, 2023
You can find any number of Muslims who are convinced that this was a hate crime motivated by anti-Islamic sentiment itself inflamed by the war. Here’s part of an NPR interview with Abed Ayoub, National Executive Director, Arab American Anti-Discrimination Committee (my bolding)
William Brangham:
As we reported, we still don’t know what the motive is here, whether this was a random attack or whether these young men were specifically targeted because they’re Palestinian.
The families, as you know, put out a statement today saying they clearly believe that this is a hate crime. And I want to read an excerpt of this. They place the blame on: “U.S. media and even elected officials from the highest levels of the government have repeated racist and dehumanizing language in recent weeks. This hateful rhetoric emboldens people to act with violence.”
I’m curious, do you share that same belief?
Abed Ayoub:
Absolutely.
Our belief has been that the rhetoric against Arabs, against Palestinians in this country, the dehumanization of Palestinians would eventually lead to these violent hate crimes we’re seeing. That’s exactly what’s happening. That’s what happened in Chicago to Wadea, the 6-year-old was stabbed.
That’s what happened in this situation and other examples that our office has been fielding across the country since early October. So the rhetoric, the way we’re being dehumanized and the way Arabs and Palestinians are being portrayed leads to these violent hate crimes.
And, unfortunately, this may not be the last incident we hear of, unless there’s an effort to change the rhetoric and to change the way we are being portrayed.
I could give many more examples, but you can look them up yourself The point is that people are willing to believe something without any evidence, and that “something” is what fulfills the ideological narrative they’ve embraced. One would think that Muslims and advocates of comity would be happy if there were no evidence that Eaton hated Muslims. Then it would be a simple “non hate” crime, perhaps one prompted by an unstable mind, and Islamophobia wouldn’t be as pervasive. But people seem to want that not to be true.
It’s also an example of how the divisiveness of people based on their identity has become embedded in society. If a Muslim, black, or Jew has been killed, we assume automatically that their race or religion was a factor. But really: we need some evidence before rushing to judgement.
I got an email and a link from Alex, a retired lawyer who said this:
At this link there is a letter that a bunch of law firms sent to the Deans of law schools – likely triggered by what happened at Harvard and other schools.
It’s a “get-your-act-together” letter. And the statement “your students who hope to join our firms after graduation” implies that they may not want to hire students from certain law schools.
I was on the hiring committee of a major law firm (which wasn’t a signatory here) and I never saw such a joint statement issued before. The firms are clearly concerned that the schools might be fostering an ideology that the firms don’t want to be associated with.
Alex said a bit more, but first I’ll show the letter, which was signed by 41 law firms
November 1, 2023
Dear Deans,
Everyone at our law firms is entitled to be treated with respect and be free of any conduct that targets their identity and is offensive, hostile, intimidating or inconsistent with their personal dignity and rights. We prohibit any form of harassment, whether verbal, visual or physical.
Over the last several weeks, we have been alarmed at reports of anti-Semitic harassment, vandalism and assaults on college campuses, including rallies calling for the death of Jews and the elimination of the State of Israel. Such anti-Semitic activities would not be tolerated at any of our firms. We also would not tolerate outside groups engaging in acts of harassment and threats of violence, as has also been occurring on many of your campuses.
As educators at institutions of higher learning, it is imperative that you provide your students with the tools and guidance to engage in the free exchange of ideas, even on emotionally charged issues, in a manner that affirms the values we all hold dear and rejects unreservedly that which is antithetical to those values. There is no room for anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, racism or any other form of violence, hatred or bigotry on your campuses, in our workplaces or our communities.
As employers who recruit from each of your law schools, we look to you to ensure your students who hope to join our firms after graduation are prepared to be an active part of workplace communities that have zero tolerance policies for any form of discrimination or harassment, much less the kind that has been taking place on some law school campuses.
We trust you will take the same unequivocal stance against such activities as we do, and we look forward to a respectful dialogue with you to understand how you are addressing with urgency this serious situation at your law schools.
Alex added this when I asked him if he approved of the letter:
Do I approve? I would have voted to sign the letter and was surprised/disappointed to see my 800-plus lawyer firm not on the list.
However, I hope that the ““your students who hope to join our firms after graduation” sentence isn’t meant to say that the firms are threatening to forego hiring all students from those schools, since that would be too broad of a stroke. That’s how CNN interpreted it – “Top law firms signal they won’t recruit from college campuses that tolerate antisemitism.”
Surely there are students at the schools who decry antisemitism and are appalled by the actions of their fellow students and their administrations. I don’t think they should be punished for the sins of others. Rather, I think the burden falls on the law firms to vet the students carefully to make sure that they are hiring those that are qualified, fit into the culture of the firm, and won’t become a P.R. burden.
I agree with Alex. Note that the statement decries all forms of bigotry, not just antisemitism but Islamophobia and other forms of racism. As a private corporation and not a university, law firms can choose any criteria they want to hire new lawyers, and that means they’re free to reject applicants who have proven to be bigots. Colleges and universities are more constrained in their hiring because, after all, even the most vile bigotry is still freedom of speech, protected by the First Amendment. But I don’t make the rules for private businesses and corporations, and if they wish they can delve into an applicant’s past and reject them if they show signs of “violence, hatred, or bigotry.”
This is going to have law students shaking in their boots. While they are free on campus to say whatever they want about issues like the war, they also know they have to live with the consequences. So in the end this may reduce the amount of hatred on American campuses. After all, money talks, especially to lawyers. (This is not to slur the good lawyers I know!)
Give your take below. While firms can refuse people like the ones they describe, should they? This does impede their freedom of speech on campus, but of course nobody denies that freedom of speech comes with consequences.
This long new article in Science, one of the world’s premier science journals (or should I call it a “magazine”?), not only assumes that implicit (unconscious bias) is a real and pervasive thing, that it’s ubiquitous and has led to “structural racism” within institutions, that it can be assessed with a test (IAT: the “implicit association test”) that it diagnoses the severity of your bias correctly, and that making people aware of their hidden bigotry through “implicit bias training” will make them stop being bigots.
Every one of these assertions (particularly the last three) has been contested by psychologists, but you wouldn’t know that from reading the piece, which you can do by clicking below. Note that the point of this post is not to say that bias and bigotry don’t exist—you’d be a fool to claim that—but that there are grounds for questioning whether these biases are unconscious, can be diagnosed correctly with tests, and can be eliminated through training.
I’m not an expert on this topic, but I am aware that the notion of testing for and effacing unconscious bias has largely been dropped by experts—but not by “progressives”. For a documentation of the problems, with plenty of references, read this 2022 piece by Lee Jussim in Psychology Today (click on the screenshot). I’ll give his list of issues below, but note that even Scientific American has been allowed by an editor to publish a 2020 piece called “The problem with implicit bias training“, which contends that yes, implicit bias exists, but training doesn’t seem to get rid of it.
Here are Jussim’s reasons, each documented with references in the original article. The indented words and bolding are his (my comments flush left).
1. The peer-reviewed scientific literature has witnessed a great walking back of many of the most dramatic claims made on the basis of the IAT and about implicit social cognition more generally.
8. Whether IAT scores predict behavioral manifestations of bias beyond self-report prejudice scales is unclear, with some studies finding they do and others finding they do not.
9. Procedures that change IAT scores have failed to produce changes in discriminatory behavior.
10. There is currently no clear evidence that implicit bias trainings accomplish anything other than teaching people about the research on implicit bias.
11. There is no evidence that IAT scores are “unconscious.”
This last one, which claims that people are very good at predicting their IAT scores, suggests that while people may be biased, it’s not unconscious (this is the main point of the “implicit” trope: that people may think they’re unbiased but they’re not, and therefore act out their racism constantly).
12. Critiques and discussions of its limitations or weaknesses are often not presented when the IAT is taught to introductory psychology students.
This is the main flaw with the Science article above. The only caveats it offers are that people’s scores aren’t often replicable, and that “simple interventions can dampen biases. . . but the changes are usually modest and don’t persist.” Well, that’s an admission of sorts, but the rest of the article is predicated on the existence of these biases and on the need for new ways to find them and eliminate them.
Jussim’s conclusion:
Here is my advice to you: Take an IAT or two (which you can here) if you have not already, just to see what the buzz is about. But now you are armed with enough information to reject any simple-minded proclamations about unconscious racism or the supposed power of implicit biases.
Again, Jussim gives copious references for his claims.
Now the one thing I’m not sure about is whether there really is a psychological trait of “implicit” bias that people aren’t aware of. It may be possible to have prejudices that linger in your unconscious (as opposed to prejudices you’re aware of but won’t admit). When I saw the first claim below in the Science piece, for example—a study that’s gotten tons of press—I wondered if there really might be some unconscious bias leading to the effect, for the white doctors would surely assert that they don’t treat patients differently because of their race:
Of course there are competing explanations: the chest pain difference could be due to triaging of symptoms not based on race (I haven’t read the article). But I have read the other article, and the difference in death rate of black babies cared for by white versus black doctors really is a cause of deep concern: it’s a huge difference! Is it possible that it’s due to unconscious racism affecting treatment of infants? But before we go accusing white pediatricians of wholesale and strong racism that kills babies, however, we should immediately begin to pose questions about controls and the like. It turns out, though these results haven’t yet been published, that there apparently were no proper controls in this study, and there were several unassessed non-bias factors that could explain the results. We should withhold judgment about the infant-death study—and not tout it as an example of egregious racism—until other statisticians and physicians have weighted in in the literature.
The Science paper documents other inequities (disproportional representation) in science and medicine, but, as always, we have to ask whether there are other explanations for them and not just bias, much less implicit bias. At times, as in the paragraph below documenting new ways to find implicit bias, there’s a telling assumption that it’s always there but sometimes hard to sniff out. This is, after all, science journalism (bolding is mine):
Others using computer software to research implicit bias in medicine are also struggling to give physicians meaningful feedback. Nao Hagiwara, a social and health psychologist at Virginia Commonwealth University, and her team are analyzing dozens of nonverbal and verbal communication behaviors, such as facial expressions and voice changes, in recordings of primary care physicians’ interactions with people who have type 2 diabetes. Their software hasn’t yet identified behaviors that could clearly be linked to bias or had an adverse effect in the patient’s outcome. One reason for this murkiness, Hagiwara suggests, is that multiple different cues likely interact to influence patient outcomes whereas studies so far tend to analyze the impact of only one behavior at a time.
Note that the failure of the test to detect “implicitly biased behaviors” doesn’t even mention that such behavior might not exist, but assumes that the researchers haven’t yet hit on the right metric or combination of behaviors (of course, that could lead to p-hacking). That paragraph itself is biased towards the existence of biased behaviors.
Finally, here’s Science‘s pronouncement (through at the end that implicit bias exists, that it’s strong and pervasive, has resulted from “centuries of white supremacy”, and it’s structural.
Sustained implicit bias training for physicians should instead be the norm, some emphasize. Hospitals also need to monitor and collect data on health care outcomes for different groups in order to monitor equity, Sabin says. “You have to know where the disparities lie and then begin to work backwards from that.”
It won’t be easy, Hardeman says, noting that, at least in the United States, centuries of white supremacy and other forms of bigotry have resulted in deep-rooted stereotypes and other implicit biases. “Every single person should be thinking about doing this work,” she says. “But if they’re doing it within a system that hasn’t addressed its own biases and racism, then it’s not going to be fully effective.”
Among the many things to worry about in this article, including some of its disturbing assertions about racism that do bear investigating (e.g., the infant-death research), is the lack of balanced coverage of this topic and an almost complete neglect of the points Jussim notes above (his name isn’t mentioned in the piece). Such science journalism is, well, unscientific.
Here’s Jussim giving a remote Merton Seminar on the problems with implicit bias.
As always, read the article, Jussim’s piece and the literature he cites, dig further into the topic, and draw your own conclusions.
You’ve surely seen this video of comedian Chris Rock being smacked onstage at the Oscars by Will Smith, who won a Best Actor award later in the show for his performance in “King Richard”. Smith not only assaulted Rock, but cursed him out from the table after the incident. The reason: Rock made a joke about the alopecia (baldness) of Smith’s wife Jada.
Lots of people have weighed in on this, with most of them criticizing Smith for his unprofessional behavior. One of the most quoted detractors was former basketball star Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, who wrote a piece on his Substack site called “Will Smith did a Bad, Bad Thing“. (Jabbar is black.) Jabbar called out Smith for many things, deeming the slap “a blow to men, women, the entertainment industry, and the Black community.” But the part that got the most attention was Abdul-Jabbar’s assertion that the slap played into stereotypes about black violence and emotionality:
The Black community also takes a direct hit from Smith. One of the main talking points from those supporting the systemic racism in America is characterizing Blacks as more prone to violence and less able to control their emotions. Smith just gave comfort to the enemy by providing them with the perfect optics they were dreaming of. Fox News host Jeanine Pirro wasted no time going full-metal jacket racist by declaring the Oscars are “not the hood.” What would she have said if Brad Pitt slapped Ricky Gervais? This isn’t Rodeo Drive? Many will be reinvigorated to continue their campaign to marginalize African Americans and others through voter suppression campaign.
Comfort to the enemy? That already implies that the audience was predisposed to fit this violence into a racist narrative. True, black-on-black violence is much in the news, but anyone who fits the narrative of two show-business stars into a “hood” scenario is already predisposed to think badly of black people. Here’s what Martin Luther King’s daughter said in a pair of tweets:
Anybody who thinks “Black people look bad” after the #Oscars already thought Black people look bad.
Respectability doesn’t cure racism.
Be Love, but please don’t think that a person who uses one moment to malign a whole group of people did not do so before that moment.
The trope that Smith’s assault reinforced stereotypes is taken up in this article from yahoo! Life, which also criticizes the idea that individual actions should reflect on their community or group. Click on the screenshot to read:
A quote from the article:
“When I think of respectability politics, what I imagine is this idea that people, but Black people specifically, are only deserving of respect and should only be valued if they behave in a certain way and adhere to certain guidelines,” anti-racism educator and diversity & inclusion consultant Janice Gassam Asare tells Yahoo Life.
The idea that an individual’s actions can represent an entire group furthers the notion that people in marginalized communities can “behave” and “respect” their way out of oppression.
The article criticizes “respectability politics”—not just as instantiated by Smith’s slap, but also by other blacks who have called for better behavior from their community to raise the image of African-Americans:
Another recent pop-culture moment that focused on this idea came in 2021. That’s when comedian and actress Mo’Nique was accused of upholding respectability politics in an Instagram video in which she critiqued young Black women for dressing down in public, namely by wearing bonnets outside of their homes.
“Our young sisters in head bonnets, scarves, slippers, pajamas, blankets wrapped around them and this is how they showed up to the airport,” she said. The Precious star argued that the trend didn’t align with her vision for young Black women.
“When did we lose our pride in representing ourselves? When did we slip away from ‘let me make sure I’m presentable when I leave my home’?” she asked.
Bill Cosby is also famous for chastising some blacks for both behavior and clothing that, he said, tarnishes the image of the race.
Finally, the “white gaze” noted in Bernice King’s tweet above refers to “what white people think,” something King deplores because it plays into “respectability politics”. The article mentions white celebrities like Jamie Lee Curtis and Bette Midler, who re-tweeted Abdul-Jabbar’s criticism with approbation. An example:
And there’s other criticism for the approbation by white people of Abdul-Jabbar’s conclusion:
The white gaze can be referred to as the general assumption that the intended audience for anything is white, and that all behaviors are to be adjusted for the perception and comfort of white people.
In this case, Abdul-Jabbar’s critique of Smith drew further complaint after his post was shared by prominent white celebrities, including actresses Bette Midler and Jamie Lee Curtis. Both women drew backlash for appearing to support Abdul-Jabbar’s piece and the implication that Smith “perpetuated stereotypes about the Black community.”
Those celebrities don’t understand “the layers and the nuance of our experiences,” says Gassam Asare. “But hearing that from Kareem Abdul-Jabbar was off-putting to me, because it’s a classic example of ‘you can’t do certain things in front of white people.'”
The point is not to excuse Smith’s behavior, she notes, but instead to decenter whiteness in regard to morality.
“Very few people are saying violence is OK,” she says, “but I think it’s problematic when someone as notable and with as big of a platform as Abdul-Jabbar plays into this respectability idea.”
In general I agree with the article’s theme on the grounds that no one person’s actions should be taken or seen as a reason to denigrate a group. But let me qualify this a bit, for there are some group behaviors that I see as worthy of criticism. When I see a Middle Eastern man in comfortable clothes, followed several steps behind by a woman loaded with babies and dressed in a burqa, I can’t help but see that man as participating in a form of misogyny promoted by some forms of Islam. Every culture has some behaviors that can be seen as not conducive to societal well-being. Not every person in such cultures adheres to the bad behaviors, but nobody can deny that there are such differences. If you want to consider America, our callousness about universal health care is widespread, and a politician who denigrates it could be seen as “acting American.”
But there is no way that one should see Will Smith’s actions as somehow characteristic of black men. It was simply a human being reacting in the wrong way to a slight on his wife. (Smith does have a reputation for a bit of a temper.) And of course Chris Rock reacted with the utmost decorum, not by starting a brawl. Doesn’t that counteract Smith’s behavior, even for bigots? When I saw the slap, I didn’t even think about the race of the Smith. The notion that the violence was it was a “black thing” arose only when I read this article.
Yet I do want to bring up one thing that struck me (pardon the expression). In the past, and even today, black people who make it big are often encouraged by fellow blacks to behave in a certain way because they are “role models”. When Jackie Robinson became the first black major-league baseball player, he was told by his manager, Branch Rickey, to behave very politely, and not react to the inevitable racial slurs he encountered on the field. In the movie I just watched coming back from Chile, “King Richard,” Smith himself plays Richard Williams, and is seen encouraging his daughters to dress well and behave properly, because, he said, they can be role models for millions of little black girls who aspire to playing tennis. And, in the last scene, this view is vindicated.
Of course, if someone has no interest in being a role model for their group—and they don’t have to have such interest—then this whole point is moot.
My question is whether “respectability politics involves hypocrisy when it comes to “role models”? Are you supposed to behave better than others so you can be a “role model” for a group—if that’s something you want to be? Why can’t you just excel in tennis and forget about trying to look or behave better than anyone else?
And that goes for all other role models as well. Yet we know that even playing into that “role model” behavior reflects a form of bigotry that does exist. Racism isn’t gone, and there ARE those who will take advantage of an ill-timed slap to denigrate a group. The question is whether it’s worth emphasizing this as a form of behavior modification, as Abdul-Jabbar did in his article.
Or perhaps all this musing about the behavior of “role models” is simply misguided. A “role model” could simply be someone like Venus Williams whose success demonstrates to other members of their ethnic group (or gender, or whatever) that they, too, can achieve—that bigotry is no longer enough to hold people back from success. Perhaps Branch Rickey, the Brooklyn Dodgers’ manager who signed Jackie Robinson, was wrong in telling Robinson not to react to racial slurs on the field, thinking that any backtalk would just make racism more entrenched. Even if it did, then maybe Robinson didn’t feel like toeing the line to placate bigots. And perhaps, since racism is still with us, Abdul-Jabbar is just continuing the tradition of Branch Rickey, reminding people like Smith that, like it or not, they are seen as representatives of the black community and their actions can either lessen or entrench racism.
In the end, I guess I would want to say, “Nobody should have to be other than who they are to avoid fulfilling the hopes and expectations of bigots.” Yes, we should all try to behave civilly, but not tweak our behaviors because we have a certain gender or ethnicity. Yes, both individuals and groups differ in behaviors, but bigotry is imputing negative traits to an individual based solely on membership in a group. And that cannot be condoned.
But in the end, there’s still that nagging Branch-Rickeyish doubt in my mind, one that I quell by convincing myself that bigotry is not lessened when a black man wears a suit and behaves politely. (I suspect that John McWhorter might disagree.) And even if it were, is everyone supposed to be a representative of their group?
Reader Edward called my attention to a new video by Dr. Francesca Stavrakopoulou, Professor of Hebrew Bible and Ancient Religion at the University of Exeter with a specialty in the Old Testament (but she knows her Jesus, too). She’s my favorite Biblical scholar because she’s an out-and-out atheist and a strong skeptic, not accepting much of the Old Testament as true. As Wikipedia notes of her:
The main focus of Stavrakopoulou’s research is on the Hebrew bible, and on Israelite and Judahite history and religion.Stavrakopoulou supports the academic consensus that important figures in the Hebrew bible were not historical figures as represented in that text.[ She has further stated that she believes “very little, probably” of the Hebrew bible is historical fact, based on the arguments that ancient writers had an understanding of “fact” and “fiction” very different from a modern understanding, and that the Hebrew bible “wasn’t written to be a factual account of the past”; she concludes, saying she does not believe accounts of Moses and King David in the Hebrew bible to be factual, and that “as an historian of the bible, I think there is very little that is factual”. In her 2021 book, God: An Anatomy, Stavrakopoulou “presents a vividly corporeal image of God: a human-shaped deity who walks and talks and weeps and laughs, who eats, sleeps, feels, and breathes, and who is undeniably male. Here is a portrait–arrived at through the author’s close examination of and research into the Bible–of a god in ancient myths and rituals who was a product of a particular society, at a particular time, made in the image of the people who lived then, shaped by their own circumstances and experience of the world”. This book has been described by John Barton as showing that the non-corporeal God of Judaism and Christianity “was not yet so in the Bible, where God appears in a much more corporeal form”.
I bow deeply to Dr. Stavrakopoulou in Biblical expertise, but I’m wondering how she knows for sure that “the Bible wasn’t written to be a factual account of the past.” I’ll grant that it is fictional, but then why did Church fathers like Augustine the Hippo, Aquinas, and many others take both the Old and New Testaments literally? Were they unaware why the Bible was written? (Granted, some of these theologians saw both a metaphorical and literal meaning of Scripture, but the literal meaning was always there.)
That aside, Dr. Stav (pardon the shortening, but it’s laborious to write her whole name) is discussing her new book and Biblical worldview in this video with Andrew Copson, Chief Executive of Humanists UK, an organization much less woke than the American Humanist Association. Her book, which comes out in a week in the U.S., is called God: An Anatomy , and got good reviews in the UK.
I could describe the high points, but I think the whole video worth watching, for you’ll see somebody the addressing the Bible as a work of historical fiction. She also has an engaging style of speaking, why is why she often appears on British t.v. and did a 3-part BBC special that you can find, in bits, on YouTube.
She describes the story of Job as as “God screwing over Job for no reason” (true!), and my favorite bit of chat is at 8:40: “Christianity in particular has done a tremendous job of trying to pretend that there a triune God and that God is one and then three at the same time—what a scam!” How refreshing is that? I wonder if her students are flummoxed when they take her classes and learn that they’re being taught by a total nonbeliever.
As similar nonbelievers, it’s our job to know more about religion than believers themselves, for you can always best them by knowing your Scripture. If you haven’t read the Bible—painful as it is—do it. And read Dr. Stav’s book.
She pulls no punches on Twitter, either:
Remember that stupid ‘research’ about the ‘real’ event shaping the biblical story of Sodom? Here’s why arse-about-face rubbish like that is not only problematic, but damaging 👇
When Biblically Inspired Pseudoscience and Clickbait Cause Looting – SAPIENS https://t.co/wqEJKheqD3
— Prof Francesca Stavrakopoulou (@ProfFrancesca) January 9, 2022
As we all know, Scientific American is changing from a popular-science magazine into a social-justice-in-science magazine, having hardly anything the science-hungry reader wants to see any more. I urge you to peruse its website and look for the kind of article that would have inspired me when I was younger: articles about pure science. Now the rag is all about inequities and human diseases.
In the past couple of months, there have been some dire op-eds, and here’s another one—not as bad as some others, but (especially for a science magazine) riddled with unexamined assumptions. Click on the screenshot to read it. Apparently the “racial reckoning” that began last year has now crept into mathematics.
After reading it, I have two questions: Is mathematics structurally racist? And why has Scientific American changed its mission from publishing decent science pieces to flawed bits of ideology?
The article, of course, claims that mathematics is a hotbed of racism and misogyny, which explains why there are so few women and blacks in academic mathematics.
The article begins with stories of thee women mathematicians, all of whom report that they felt discriminated against or at least looked down upon. All of them have academic jobs, two as professors and one as a postdoc. I don’t doubt their stories, but what we have are three anecdotes. At face value, they show that there is some racism or sexism in academic math, but these are cherry-picked anecdotes that demonstrate little except that, like all fields, math is not entirely free of bigotry. I also procured two anecdotes with no effort. First, I asked one of my female math-y friends, Professor Anna Krylov, a theoretical and computational quantum chemist at USC, who deals extensively with mathematicians, if that had been her experience, and she said what’s indented below. (I quote her with permission; we’ve met Anna before.)
I was often a single women in a room — but so what? It did not turn me away from the subject I was passionate about. I experienced some forms of discrimination throughout my career and can tell stories… But — as McWhorter often says — “there was then and there is now”! These anecdotes [from Sci. Am.] are blown out of proportion and completely misrepresent the current climate.
She also worried that these narratives, which don’t resemble her own, cultivate a victim mentality in women. (Anna is no anti-feminist, either: she helped initiate a protest against an all-male speaker agenda at a chemistry conference.)
Anna also mentioned another female math professor in the U.S. who agrees with her own experience. So we have two anecdotes on one side, and three on the other. (I have to add that, as I’ve said before, I myself felt inferior and suffered from “imposter syndrome” for several years in graduate school, constantly thinking about dropping out. But I finally realized that I could find my own niche.)
Author Crowell also gives two examples of undeniable racial discrimination against black mathematicians, but those took place in the early 20th century and in the Fifties, and it’s undeniable that at that time there was academic racism. But, as Anna said, “there was then and there is now”. If we’re to accept that mathematics is now structurally racist and misogynist, with an endemic culture of bigotry that leads to inequities, we need to do better than that.
So beyond the academic data, the article adds this:
Racism, sexism and other forms of systematic oppression are not unique to mathematics, and they certainly are not new, yet many in the field still deny their existence. “One of the biggest challenges is how hard it can be to start a conversation” about the problem, Sawyer says, “because mathematicians are so convinced that math is the purest of all of the sciences.” Yet statistics on the mathematics profession are difficult to ignore. In 2019 a New York Times profile of Edray Herber Goins, a Black mathematics professor at Pomona College, reported that “fewer than 1 percent of doctorates in math are awarded to African-Americans.” A 2020 NSF survey revealed that out of a total of 2,012 doctorates awarded in mathematics and statistics in the U.S. in 2019, only 585 (29.1 percent) were awarded to women. That percentage is slightly lower than in 2010, when 29.4 percent of doctorates in those areas (467 out of 1,590) wereawarded to women. (Because these numbers are grouped based on sex rather than gender, that survey did not report how many of those individuals identify as a gender other than male or female.)
This is the Kendi-an idea that inequities in achievement are prima facie evidence of bias. But if you think about it for both women and African-Americans, that need not be true. This is a true case of begging the question: assuming that there is structural racism and misogyny in math and thus the lower representation is simply its result.
The problem with this, as we’ve discussed before, is that there are reasons for these inequities beyond structural racism, so you can’t just assume its existence. (As I said, nobody with any sense would deny that there are racist or sexist mathematicians; the claim is that the field is permeated with bigotry._
Regarding women, we’ve learned that the sexes differ in interests and preferences, with men being “thing people” and women being “people people” (these are of course average differences, not diagnostic traits!). As Lee Jussim points out in a Psychology Today op-ed, on the advanced high school level, men and women do about the same in math, but women do better than men in demonstrating verbal and reading skills. In other words, women are better than men at everything, but many choose areas that are more word-heavy than math-heavy. That itself, combined with different preferences, causes inequities. As Jussim writes,
This same issue of differing interests was approached in a different way by Wang, Eccles, and Kenny (2013). Disclosure: Eccles was my dissertation advisor and longterm collaborator; I am pretty sure she identifies as a feminist, has long been committed to combating barriers to women, and is one of the most objective, balanced social scientists I have ever had the pleasure to know.
In a national study of over 1,000 high school students, they found that:
1. 70 percent more girls than boys had strong math and verbal skills;
2. Boys were more than twice as likely as girls to have strong math skills but not strong verbal skills;
3. People (regardless of whether they were male or female) who had only strong math skills as students were more likely to be working in STEM fields at age 33 than were other students;
4. People (regardless of whether they were male or female) with strong math and verbal skills as students were less likely to be working in STEM fields at age 33 than were those with only strong math skills.
Thus inequities in academic math may be a matter of differential preferences or other factors not reflecting bigotry. And this may be one explanation for why, although Sci. Am. notes that only 29.1% of doctorates in math were awarded to women in 2019, it looks from Jussim’s bar graph that about 35% of first time graduate enrollees in math and computer science are women. That bespeaks only a slightly higher attrition rate among women than men—something that needs to be addressed. But again, the go-to answer is not automatically “misogyny.”
As for African-Americans, yes, there’s way too few doctorates awarded in mathematics. To me this does bespeak racism, but racism in the past, not necessarily now. The situation is that due to inequality of opportunity, blacks almost certainly lack easy entry now into mathematics studies. This is a narrowing of the pipeline from the outset that needs to be rectified. But again, the figures do not show that the low output at the pipeline’s terminus is due to racism.
As to what happened to Scientific American, well, it’s gone the way of all the science journals. It is doing performative wokeness.
One more item: Have a look at MathSafe, an organization hired by the American Mathematical Society to police meetings like beagles sniffing out impurities. It’s as if we are no longer adults who can police our own behavior at meetings, and need to pay others to do it for us.
