Category: racial issues

An indictment of DEI for being “prescriptively racist”

April 29, 2024 • 11:15 am

This article by Erec Smith was first published in the Boston Globe, where you can find an archived link here, but has also been published unpaywalled by the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank where author Erec Smith is a research fellow (he’s also “an associate professor of rhetoric and composition at York College of Pennsylvania, and cofounder of Free Black Thought”).

Smith’s thesis is that DEI is racist because it rests on prescribing “approved ways” that black people should behave and think, ways that he instantiates by giving two quotes. The first is a now-deleted tweet by Nikole Hannah-Jones:

And from President Biden:

“If you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, you ain’t Black.”

That, says Smith, is “a statement that implicitly prescribes how Black voters should think.”

Smith developed this take because as a black kid in a white school he was expected to “act black,” yet when he moved to a mostly black school he was criticized for “acting white”—speaking “white English” and so on.  DEI, he avers, practices “prescriptive racism” by expecting black people to have the opinions that other “progressive” black people have, so that there is an approved and proper way of Thinking While Black promoted by DEI. Smith also criticizes right-wing racists for their past practice of criticizing “uppity Negroes” who didn’t act like black people should, though we don’t see much of that these days.

When Smith got to college and then became a faculty member, he saw this same tendency in DEI, except that the “uppity Negroes” are now those blacks who don’t conform to the prescribed progressive ideology. You can think of some “uppity” blacks, including people like John McWhorter, Glenn Loury, Coleman Hughes, and Thomas Sowell, all worth reading or listening to.

Click to read:

I’ll give a few excerpts:

Unlike traditional racism — the belief that particular races are, in some way, inherently inferior to others — prescriptive racism dictates how a person should behave. That is, an identity type is prescribed to a group of people, and any individual who skirts that prescription is deemed inauthentic or even defective. President Biden displayed prescriptive racism when he said “If you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, you ain’t Black,” a statement that implicitly prescribes how Black voters should think.

. . .prescriptive racism casts a broader net, disadvantaging people for not abiding by a long list of things a Black person shouldn’t do. A prescriptive racist may not mind that a Black person has a master’s degree, but he may scoff at the sight of a Black man watching the Masters — especially if Tiger isn’t playing. A white prescriptive racist would look at a Black person speaking standard English the way a Black person would look at a white person wearing a dashiki. Lest you think that last statement is mere speculation, I have met several people who have voiced derision and irritation upon hearing standard English come out of my mouth. My use of language was an affront to their expectations and sensibilities.

Many prescriptive racists are often people of the same minority group. A Black person lambasting another Black person for acting in ways deemed racially inauthentic — for example, speaking in dialects coded “white” — is engaging in prescriptive racism.

And how it enters DEI:

And prescriptive racism is not just a social phenomenon; it is now being institutionalized. More and more, it is erroneously labeled diversity, equity, and inclusion, and it is winning out over initiatives more in line with the civil rights movement and classical liberal values like individuality, free speech, reason, and even equality. It is becoming policy in academia, corporate America, and even the military. To put it another way, contemporary DEI is prescriptive racism.

In academia, I’ve found, Blackness is a role, a “pre‐​script,” to which Black people are expected to conform if they want to be accepted or, sometimes, acknowledged at all. A Black scholar cannot simply study and write about Plato; she has to write about Plato from a Black perspective. Nobody shows much interest in a Black graduate student drafting a dissertation on American Transcendentalism that isn’t focused on its relevance to the Black experience. In this sense, applying for graduate school or a professorship is akin to auditioning for “Black person” in some live‐​action role‐​playing event.

I hadn’t realized the expectations outlined in the second paragraph, but I’m sure they’re true, for nearly every black academic I know of is engaged in writing about the connection between their discipline and “blackness”. (This also applies to “studies” programs, in which white people also conform to DEI expectations by imbuing scholarship with ideology approved by DEI.)  What is clear is that DEI is racist in expecting groups to behave in certain approved ways and to hold certain approved views. John McWhorter, for instance, has not done that, and he’s suffered for it. As he says, he’ll never be invited to another linguistics meeting nor get an invitation to speak about linguistics at another university.  What a pity for such a smart guy! But that’s what you suffer for thinking independently—for being “heterodox.”

One more quote on “political blackness”:

Political Blackness made much more sense several decades ago. Both Malcolm X and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. could have been construed as politically Black. Why? Because, when these men lived, whether Black Americans were gay or straight, Islamic or Christian, working class or middle class, none of them could sit at the front of the bus in the Jim Crow South. However, in this third decade of the 21st century, the efficacy of political Blackness has waned significantly. Though things are not perfect and racist environments still exist, policy changes have afforded Black Americans opportunities and resources traditionally denied them. As a result, “the Black experience” has become so varied that the use of “the” is questionable.

The idea of an indefinite abject oppression that justifies essentialism and political Blackness does not reflect reality. The facts that roughly 80 percent of Black Americans are working class or higher and that the number of Black immigrants has skyrocketed (strongly suggesting that the United States isn’t a fundamentally anti‐​Black country) are just two of many things that illustrate this. But activists who still want power must fabricate an insidious specter of oppression, and an essential victimhood has to be prescribed, whether they are homeless or Oprah Winfrey. If you are a Black American who does not abide by this prescription, be you liberal or conservative, you are seen as weakening the political power of Black Americans.

The inherent paradox of contemporary social justice is the essentialism that says “you are bad if you stereotype other people, but you are also bad if you don’t.”

Smith goes on to say that he and others have founded a new organization to combat prescriptive racism:

I and a few others have cofounded Free Black Thought, a nonprofit newsletter and podcast representing “the rich diversity of Black thought beyond the narrow spectrum of views promoted by mainstream outlets as defining ‘the Black perspective.’” We come from a classical liberal standpoint, meaning we believe people should be treated as sovereign individuals and not deindividuated members of a group. In other words, we’re sticking it to the prescriptive racists.

The “free” in Free Black Thought is both an adjective and a verb. We want to promote thought free from the tyranny of prescription, which means we publish and promote a wide array of ideological points and artistic expression, highlighting Black artists and thinkers typically neglected in mainstream media. But we also seek “to free” Black thought by offering alternatives to K‑12 curricula informed by critical social justice, like BLM in Schools and Woke Kindergarten, to let schools know that other ways to promote true DEI do exist.

Another sin laid at the door of DEI, which I’m hoping is on the way out. Note that I said “hoping”, not “predicting.”

John McWhorter: Some white Americans would applaud O. J. Simpson’s acquittal today, and that would show racial progress

April 19, 2024 • 9:30 am

I hope John McWhorter’s latest column, which I see as misguided, doesn’t show that he’s running out of gas. His point is to show that substantial progress in racial relations between blacks and whites has occurred over the years. But who could deny that? African-Americans are represented far more in the media than they were when I was a kid, they are beneficiaries of Civil Rights Acts passed in the Sixties, there is affirmative action so that universities and businesses are far more integrated, and one sees and hears far less bigotry than was evident to me as a kid. Do we need more evidence.

McWhorter has given ample evidence of this progress before, and gives more in this column, including a bit on how Mother Jefferson (Zara Cully, a black woman), despite being a better actress on television than was Mother Dexter (Judith Lowry, a white actress) on “Phyllis”, was given short shrift. That wouldn’t happen today, and black actors are getting far more roles, and good ones, than they used to.

Despite this palpable progress in racial relations—progress that, if you listen to some black activists, is illusory—McWhorter says, correctly, that overall black people are treated worse than white people by the police, and have been for years:

For Black people in Los Angeles recalling how the L.A.P.D. had treated them for decades, for Black people in Philadelphia not long past the all but open racism of the police force there under Mayor Frank Rizzo, for Black people in Chicago remembering the racist profiling and abuse by the cops called the Flying Squad, the sheer fact of a Black man getting off on a murder charge was of epic significance. If anything, the fact that he was obviously guilty only amplified the victory.

For all the statistical discrepancies between Black and white Americans, interactions with the police may be the central driver of how many Black people experience racism. I noted this in my research and conversations in preparation for my book “Losing the Race” in the late 1990s, when I was sincerely trying to figure out why so many Black people spoke of racism almost as if it were the 1890s rather than the 1990s. There is a reason that the main focus of the Black Panthers was combating police brutality, that anti-cop animus was central to gangsta rap and that today Black Lives Matter may be more influential than the N.A.A.C.P.

Well, I won’t comment on whether the differential influence in the last sentence is true, or, if true, is a good thing; but differential police treatment of races surely accounts for the different reactions of blacks and whites to O. J. Simpson’s acquittal of murder in 1995. And to McWhorter, that difference would be reduced today. McWhorter calls this “progress in race relations”. I think that, if it were true, it would be progress in performative antiracism, but not genuine progress.  But read his column by clicking on the headline, or find the article archived here:

 

First, McWhorter makes it clear, as it is be to anyone with neurons, that O. J. was guilty as hell of murdering Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman. McWhorter makes that view clear several times, including in the first paragraph, where he describes the racial differences in reaction to Simpson’s acquittal (all bolding is mine):

Among the signature images of O.J. Simpson’s acquittal of the murders of his ex-wife and her friend was the contrasting tableaus of Black people grouping in front of television screens applauding while white people watching it were shaking their heads — appalled, perplexed and even disgusted by a verdict that flew in the face of obvious fact. Those contrasting perspectives have gone down as demonstrating a gulf of understanding between the races.

That gulf persists, but it narrows apace, and if the verdict came down today, it would be a lot less perplexing to many white people than it was back then. Many would understand why the jury acted as it did. We might even see some of them applauding along with Black people.

To McWhorter, that last sentence instantiates racial progress, but more on that later.  More on his opinion of Simpson’s guilt:

The evidence of Simpson’s deed was overwhelming despite the ineptitude of the prosecution team. The verdict and the response to it among the Black community weren’t signs of support for Simpson; they were protests against a long legacy of mistreatment and even murder at the hands of the police.

. . . the sheer fact of a Black man getting off on a murder charge was of epic significance. If anything, the fact that he was obviously guilty only amplified the victory.

I agree with McWhorter. I was on Simpson’s defense team, and the DNA material I got must be kept confidential. But I will say that it’s my personal opinion, from all the evidence that came out during the trial and thereafter, that Simpson was guilty as hell. But the prosecution apparently could not convince the jury that he was guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, so he walked. (DNA evidence, for one thing, seemed to only confuse the jury. And then there was the glove and the racism of Mark Furman.)

So a black man, in the face of all the evidence (and yes, the prosecution was inept) was acquitted of murder. Black people applauded because, though perhaps many thought him guilty, his acquittal represented a black man beating a racist system. White people groaned because many also thought him guilty, and there may also have been some racism in that reaction.

I can fully understand these reactions. But understanding them doesn’t mean I approve of them.. A man was on trial for his life, yet he was apparently being judged by the public on his pigmentation and historical racism by cops. If you thought he was guilty but applauded the verdict because Simpson was black, you’ve judged the system, not the man.

And now McWhorter avers that if the trial took place today, it’s likely that, because of improved racial relations, many white people would also judge the system and join blacks in applauding the verdict:

Today I see white people far more aware. That’s why when I fast-forward the Simpson verdict to 2024, I picture some white people getting the news on their phones and doing high-fives and group hugs, some of them in tears. They would be no more likely to see Simpson himself as a hero than were the jurors of 1995, especially given that modern America is more sensitized not only to racism but also to abuse of women. But they would be more likely to see the acquittal as a kind of payback for all of the white cops who have been exonerated for murdering Black people. It would be processed, I imagine, as a teaching moment of sorts.

This smacks strongly of Robin DiAngelo. High-fiving and group hugs as a reaction to Simpson’s acquittal is a performative act: it’s saying, “Look, I understand that black people are mistreated by the cops! I’m not a racist!”  But if you’re celebrating and still thought Simpson did the crimes, then you’re happy because a guilty man went free—and only because that guilty man was black. To me, that’s making Simpson stand for all blacks, though, as McWhorter notes, Simpson really wasn’t considered part of the black community,and was not an activist. A verdict should be judged on the content of the man’s crime, not on the color of his skin.

Others may agree with McWhorter, but I think this hypothetical scenario, if it occurred, would be evidence not of real racial progress, but of performative antiracism by whites. If you see that as progress, so be it. I can give a lot of harder evidence that there’s been racial progress in the past three decades, and especially in the past six decades. You don’t need to make up some dumb scenario to show this, just as a way to mark Simpson’s death.

As for me, I am a white man who always thought Simpson guilty. His acquittal was bad for society (look what happened to him afterwards), and that was the last trial in which I acted as an expert witness for DNA.  I didn’t see the acquittal as a sign of improved racial relations, but as a miscarriage of justice largely due to the incompetence of the prosecution. I ran out of gas at the moment he was acquitted, and from then on turned down all requests by defense lawyers to use me as an expert witness.

If the acquittal happened today, I would not be high-fiving others, crying, or engaging in group hugs. That doesn’t prove that I’m a racist, because I agree that cops treat blacks worse than whites. But I also believe in evidence, and the evidence adduced in the Simpson case, and revealed soon after by reporters, is not a reason to celebrate his acquittal.

And I’m wondering why McWhorter had to confect this hypothetical, performative scenario to demonstrate that racial relations have improved in America.

McWhorter:

All that leads me to think that America has a problem with police violence in general. But here’s the thing: I am accustomed to vigorous resistance to that argument from not only Black but white people, too.

It is in this context that the stark racial divide in the reception of the Simpson verdict three decades ago seems rather antique. There has been, regardless of the disagreements that inevitably persist, progress.

There are, I’m sure, better ways to show progress.

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“If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit”:

 

 

Coleman Hughes describes what he means by “color-blindness” when it comes to race

March 31, 2024 • 1:00 pm

Well, I certainly encountered Coleman Hughes on his way up when he interviewed me for a YouTube video. Now he’s he’s hit the big time with a gig as a staff writer for The Free Press and an analyst for CNN, a new book, The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America, which is doing very well on Amazon, a podcast called “Conversations with Coleman,” a YouTube channel, and the ultimate achievement, a stint on The View, in which Whoopi Goldberg asks him to explain his thesis. The ten-minute piece is below.

His thesis, which you’ll see, is that we should use class-based categories rather than racial ones to reduce poverty. Another one of The View women (I don’t recognize her) pushes back hard on Coleman, using quotes from Dr. King that seem to have walked back King’s own famous “colorblind” quote from his “I have a dream” speech.  Coleman keeps his cool in the face of some hostility, and remains as eloquent as ever.  He might be thought of as a younger version of John McWhorter.

He’ll go a lot further, even though what he says doesn’t conform to What Black People Should Be Saying.

Ibram Kendi: why we need a new conception of “intellectual” that includes him

March 31, 2024 • 10:00 am

Ibram X. Kendi (née Ibram Henry Rogers) has a short article in The Atlantic whose thesis is summed up in the subtitle below. And I think his thesis is both self-pitying and, worse, wrong.  I am not a Kendi expert, though I have read his book How to Be An Antiracist (not that impressive: a strange gemisch of autobiography and strong antiracism that brands everyone not actively working against racism as a racist). I’m told, though, that his earlier book, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, which won the National Book Award for Nonfiction, is good.

But this essay is not good. It’s full of false claims about how nobody but straight white Christian men ever counted as “intellectuals”.   No blacks, no gays, no Jews, and no women.  Frankly, I’m surprised that The Atlantic published it, but it’s Kendi, Jake! (I suspect the magazine needs a fact checker for stuff like this.)

Click below to read it, or find it archived here:Kendi’s claim is that the term “intellectual” explicitly includes (and historically included) only white males who assume the mantle of objectivity, denigrate “lived experience”, and engage in work that deliberately avoids discussing or trying to solve what Kendi sees as the most pressing problems of society. Kendi came to this notion, he says, when he was writing How to Be An Antiracist, and worried that his style might not place him among “intellectuals.”

 

Some quotes to demonstrate what he sees as who counts as an “intellectual” (indented):

The intellectual has been traditionally framed as measured, objective, ideologically neutral, and apolitical, superior to ordinary people who allow emotion, subjectivity, ideology, and their own lived experiences to cloud their reason. Group inequality has traditionally been reasoned to stem from group hierarchy. Those who advance anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-classist, and anti-homophobic ideas have historically been framed as anti-intellectual.

The traditional construct of the intellectual has produced and reinforced bigoted ideas of group hierarchy—the most anti-intellectual constructs existing. But this framing is crumbling, leading to the crisis of the intellectual.

The crisis isn’t really mentioned further: it appears to be a crisis in Kendi’s own head, about whether he or people like him count as an intellectual/

Forty-six years later, when intellectuals of all races produce work on matters primarily affecting white people, the assumed subject of intellectual pursuits, these thinkers are seldom accused of engaging in identity politics. Their work isn’t considered dangerous. These thinkers are not framed as divisive and political. Instead, they are praised for example, for exposing the opioid crisis in white America, praised for pushing back against blaming the addicted for their addictions, praised for enriching their work with lived experiences, praised for uncovering the corporations behind the crisis, praised for advocating research-based policy solutions, praised for seeking truth based on evidence, praised for being intellectuals. As they all should be. But when anti-racist intellectuals expose the crisis of racism, push back against efforts to problematize people of color in the face of racial inequities, enrich our essays with lived experiences, point to racist power and policies as the problem, and advocate for research-based anti-racist policy solutions, the reactions couldn’t be more different. We are told that “truth seeking” and “activism” don’t mix.

I’m wondering who said that “truth seeking” and “activism” don’t mix? There is a whole tradition of people who seek the truth but also had the explicit aim of achieving social justice (in the proper sense). They are most notable in feminism, including Simone de Beauvoir, Judith Butler, Camille Paglia, bell hooks, Virginia Woolf, Betty Friedan, and so on. These women were intellectuals and activists at the same time. The same goes for gay and black thinkers, including James Baldwin (black and gay), Frederick Douglass, Angela Davis, Cornel West, Langston Hughes, and, on the working people’s side, Eric Hoffer.  And yet Kendi says this, which is so palpably false that I’ve put it in bold:

Intellectuals who are people of color, women, non-Christian, LGBTQ, or working class—indeed intellectuals of all identities who have challenged the status quo, especially traditional and bigoted conventions—have historically been cast aside as nonintellectuals.

To support this claim, Kendi cites a few people who have dismissed the work of people like W. E. B. Du Boois or Carter Woodson. But citing a few detractors (of the work, not of the identity) does not show that these people have been “cast aside”.  If they have been, how come they’re still read—and taught on college campuses—today?

As for “non-Christian” intellectuals, well, I’ll omit a list of Jewish or atheist thinkers, starting from Spinoza, because you should be able to think of them (Spinoza, Marx, etc.)   And when you read a paragraph like this, from Kendi, you sense that his definition of a “true intellectual” is “someone like Kendi.” (It’s the “No True Kendi” hypothesis):

American traditions do not breed intellectuals; they breed propagandists and careerists focusing their gaze on the prominent and privileged and powerful and on whatever challenges are afflicting them. Intellectuals today, when focused on the oppression of our own groups—as embodied in the emergence of Queer Studies, Women’s Studies, African American Studies, Native American Studies, Critical Whiteness Studies, Disability Studies, Latino Studies, Jewish Studies, Middle Eastern Studies, and Asian American Studies—are ridiculed for pursuing fields that lack “educational value,” and our books, courses, programs, and departments are shut down and banned by the action of Republicans and the inaction of Democrats. We are told to research, think, and write about people, meaning not our people. We are told to let our people die. We are told to die.

Who, exactly, tells people to die? That’s pure histrionics.

Insofar as the “studies” courses are criticized—and yes, some of these are valid and worthwhile—they are criticized in academia precisely because they do not involve the search for truth. They involve instead the inculcation of propaganda and the denigration of “heterodox” thought.  But seriously, for Kendi to say that these programs, or what he sees as faux intellectuals, argue to let “our people” die, or tell people to die (presumably blacks, LGBTQ people, women, Jews, and so on; see below) is hyperbolic and, in fact, a lie—unless I misconstrue the meaning of the word “die”.

And he says it again:

We are told not to change the inequitable present, and not to expect anything to change in the future. We are told to look away as the past rains down furiously on the present. Or we are told that intellectuals should focus only on how society has progressed, a suicidal and illogical act when a tornado is ravaging your community. Yet again, we are told to let our people die. We are told to die.

He may be referring to Pinker here, who if course has never told anybody or any group to die, but the “die” thing is just unhinged.

In the end, this article feels like a long whine, one in which Kendi, who apparently has faced charges of not being an intellectual (and his antiracism book doesn’t seem very intellectual), wants to change the meaning of “intellectual” to “someone who rationally seeks the truth in their work, but also prizes ‘lived experience”‘and, above all, has the aim of changing society in ways Kendi approves of”. But has he forgotten about Karl Marx, an intellectual by anybody’s account, whose explicit aim was to change society to make it more egalitarian, and is the author of these famous words (inscribed on his tombstone):

“The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.”

Here’s Kendi wanting to be seen as both an intellectual and an antiracist (he sees the terms as nearly synonymous), while beefing that he hasn’t yet acquired the patina of an intellectual:

Traditional notions of the intellectual were never meant to include people who looked like me or who had a background like mine, who came from a non-elite academic pedigree, emerged proudly from a historically Black university, earned a doctorate in African American Studies. Traditional notions of the intellectual were never meant to include people who researched like me, thought like me, wrote like me—or who researched, thought, or wrote for people like me. Traditional notions of the intellectual were never meant to include people who are not ranking groups of people in the face of inequity and injustice. Traditional notions of the intellectual were never meant to include those of us who are fixated and focused wholly and totally on uncovering and clarifying complex truths that can radically improve the human condition. Traditional notions of the intellectual were never meant to include our conception of the intellectual.

Well, the Oxford English Dictionary disagrees, but really, who cares? (I’ve chosen a few of many definitions that seem to be what Kendi’s talking about.)

(“Intellectual” an adjective) Possessing a high degree of understanding or intelligence; given to pursuits that exercise the intellect; spec. devoted to academic or cultural interests.

(“Intellectual” as a noun): An intellectual being; a person of superior or supposedly superior intellect; spec. (a) a highly intelligent person who pursues academic interests; (b) a person who cultivates the mind or mental powers and pursues learning and cultural interests.

Note the word “cultural” in both definitions. At any rate, here’s some beefing by Kendi about how he thought his antiracism book would be received:

When the traditionalists today disagree with the evidence-based findings of intellectuals—or envy the prominence of our work—too often they do not contest our findings with their own evidence. They do not usually engage in intellectual activity. They misrepresent our work. They play up minor typos or small miscues to take down major theses. They call us names they never define, like “leftist” or “Marxist” or “woke” or “socialist” or “prophet” or “grifter” or “political” or “racist.” All to attack our credibility as intellectuals—to reassert their own credibility. In politics, they say, when you can’t win on policy, you smear the candidate. In intellectualism, when you can’t win on evidence, you smear the intellectual.

 

I knew the smears were coming, because I knew history. What blocked my writing bound my intellectualism. What finally set me free to be an intellectual was the face of death, a face I still stare at to amass the courage to be an intellectual.

Although Kendi is not explicit about what the “crisis” of the intellectual is, it seems to be that people like Kendi, who aspire to be both a rational thinker but also someone with an explicit social agenda, don’t count as intellectuals. It may also sting him that Kendi’s Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University (he founded it and runs it) is in trouble. It has produced virtually no intellectual work, has laid off staff, and Kendi himself has been repeatedly accused of mismanagement. Kendi and the Center remain under investigation.

But I find it bizarre that Kendi even worries about whether he’s seen as an intellectual. Certainly his first two books have had a profound effect on society, whether for good or ill. They are part of the modern canon of Social Justice literature. So yes, he’s changed the thinking of many Americans, even though I see Kendi’s views as misguided and his effect on society neutral at best, malign at worst.  With the fame this young man (he’s only 41) has accrued, why this beef about intellectuals? After all, he’s accomplished what he says intellectuals are supposed to do.

At any rate, I find the ending of the piece ineffably sad, for when I read in his antiracism book that he was diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer in 2018, I thought, “Uh oh—this guy is a goner.” Fortunately, he’s still with us, as I wouldn’t want anybody, including an intellectual opponent, to go through that and die. Here’s his ending:

It took me all of 2017 to write six chapters of How to Be an Antiracist. A slog. But when doctors diagnosed me with Stage 4 colon cancer in January 2018, when I figured I probably wouldn’t survive a disease that kills 86 percent of people in five years, when I decided that this book would be my last major will and testament to the world, everything that blocked my writing wilted away, along with my prospects for living. I no longer cared about those traditional conceptions of the intellectual—just like I no longer cared about the orthodoxy of racial thinking. I no longer cared about the backlash that was likely to come. All I cared about was telling the truth through the lens of research and evidence, reaction be damned. And just like that, between chemotherapy treatments, the words started flowing, furiously: 13 chapters in a few months.

Since I wasn’t going to live, I wanted to write a book that could help prevent our people from dying at the hands of racism. Yes, I was told I would die, but I wanted to tell my people to live. Like an intellectual.

It looks like he survived, even if he isn’t seen as an “intellectual” in the way he wants.  Were I to chararacterize him, I’d call him an “activist.”

*******************

Karl Marx’s tomb at Highgate Cemetery, London. I’ve put a rectangle above the famous quote (note: Marx was a “non-Christian”, born of Jewish origin and later a diehard atheist.

From Wikimedia Commons

In what ways should scientific organizations remain politically neutral?

March 21, 2024 • 10:45 am

Agustín Fuentes is surely bucking for Social Justice Scientist of the Year, as I’ve documented in numerous posts. Whenever there’s an article about how scientists are bigoted, racist, and sexist, including Darwin, or there’s an article to be written that extols social justice in science but will have little or no effect on society, you’re likely to find Fuentes’s name on it. (He’s a professor of anthropology at Princeton.)

In his latest attempt to introduce politics into science, he’s written an “eLetter” to Science that you can read by clicking on the headline below. I didn’t know of eLetters before, but they’re constitute “a forum for ongoing peer review. eLetters are not edited, proofread, or indexed, but they are screened.”  Perhaps I should have submitted this as an eLetter instead of posting it here, but I’ve already started writing it, so let’s proceed.

In this eLetter Fuentes argues at great length that scientific journals and organizations should use their expertise to pronounce on political, social, and moral issues of the day. In other words, these organizations should not be institutionally neutral, as the University of Chicago is (see our Kalven Report).  But I think he’s dead wrong and that these institutions should strive to be neutral except when pronouncing on political issues that directly affect the science or branch of science that an organization represents. The reasons, of course, are the same ones that created our Kalven Report: official pronouncements on debatable issues tend to chill speech, they require someone to be the arbiter of what is the “right” view, and are often likely to be deeply conditioned by an ideology that’s transitory. This is the problem with many pronouncements on racial and gender disparities in the past; our views have become more moral and egalitarian, as well as more informed by data; and this will continue.

Well, read Fuentes’s view on how organizations should be making the “right” statements about society, and of course Fuentes is the arbiter of what is “right”:

Here are three statements that, says Fuentes, are ones that scientific organizations have made and should have made because they are scientifically true. (His words are indented except when noted otherwise). Only the first lacks obvious social import.

The following are three incontrovertible statements of scientific fact:

“Biological evolution is the central organizing principle of modern biology.”

“Genetics demonstrates that humans cannot be divided into biologically distinct subcategories.”

“While ‘race’ is not biology, racism does affect our biology, especially our health and well-being.”

While the first statement seems true, it is still debatable, and I have in fact seen scientists take issue with it. I would simply say that “evolution” is the explanation for how things got the way they are, and that the alternative of creationism is false. The sentence “nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution”, a famous pronouncement by my scientific grandfather Theodosius Dobzhansky, is ambiguous unless you carefully explain what “making sense” and “in the light of evolution” means. But I am less concerned with this than with the other statements.

The second statement is true in one sense, in that we cannot divide humanity into a finite and agreed-upon number of populations with big genetic differences, but in fact “race” is not a social construct, either. There’s biology behind it, even in the “crude” races that most of us can name.  If it were a purely social construct, companies like 23andMe wouldn’t work, and you couldn’t tell someone’s ancestry with a high degree of accuracy using multiple loci or even morphology.  Here’s a bit that Luana Maroja and I wrote on race in our Skeptical Inquirer paper dealing with the erosion of biology by ideology.

Even the old and outmoded view of race is not devoid of biological meaning. A group of researchers compared a broad sample of genes in over 3,600 individuals who self-identified as either African American, white, East Asian, or Hispanic. DNA analysis showed that these groups fell into genetic clusters, and there was a 99.84 percent match between which cluster someone fell into and their self-designated racial classification. This surely shows that even the old concept of race is not “without biological meaning.” But that’s not surprising because, given restricted movement in the past, human populations evolved largely in geographic isolation from one another—apart from “Hispanic,” a recently admixed population never considered a race. As any evolutionary biologist knows, geographically isolated populations become genetically differentiated over time, and this is why we can use genes to make good guesses about where populations come from.

More recent work, taking advantage of our ability to easily sequence whole genomes, confirms a high concordance between self-identified race and genetic groupings. One study of twenty-three ethnic groups found that they fell into seven broad “race/ethnicity” clusters, each associated with a different area of the world. On a finer scale, genetic analysis of Europeans show that, remarkably, a map of their genetic constitutions coincides almost perfectly with the map of Europe itself. In fact, the DNA of most Europeans can narrow down their birthplace to within roughly 500 miles.

Of what use are such ethnicity clusters? Let’s begin with something many people are familiar with: the ability to deduce one’s personal ancestry from their genes. If there were no differences between populations, this task would be impossible, and “ancestry companies” such as 23andMe wouldn’t exist. But you don’t even need DNA sequences to predict ethnicities quite accurately. Physical traits can sometimes do the job: AI programs can, for instance, predict self-reported race quite accurately from just X-ray scans of the chest.

As for the third statement, it’s totally debatable. Yes, the idea that “racism affects some people’s biology” is trivially true. But statements like “racism is responsible for the higher mortality of  black than of white both mothers and babies in America” (something widely touted in the press) assigns a debatable cause to an undisputed fact. Yes, that difference exists, but there are other explanations as well, including cultural and dietary differences, physiological conditions like liver disease and blood pressure, drug use, and so on, and nobody has bothered to even mention these alternatives in the literature. Taking the default explanation as “ongoing racism” for a phenomenon with several possible explanations is not good science. Fuentes’s third statement is debatable and can’t be taken as prima facie true. It is potentially resolvable by science, but it has not been resolved.

Because of default explanations involving ongoing and structural racism or sexism have now become pervasive in official pronouncements of scientific journals and societies—and not just about society but about internecine matters like promotions, grants, and acceptance of papers—we should be wary of statements like the following, also coming from Fuentes:

As part of this cultural shift over the past 5 years, a range of scientific organizations that focus on human biology, psychology, and health have released powerful, scientifically grounded statements against the misuse, misperception, and misrepresentation of data and analyses on human variation. These include clarifications on why and how races are not biological divisions of humanity, what human genetic diversity looks like, how racism shapes and affects human health, why IQ and economics are not best understood through aspects of one’s biology, and how disease patterns relate to human biological and social diversity. Many of these organizations have also produced critiques of their own historical and core roles in propagating bias, bad scientific practice, and harms, such as eugenics, discriminatory medical and psychological treatment, and miscegenation laws. Such statements have been released by the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine; the American Medical Association; the American Psychological Association; and American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS, the publisher of Science).

But, as Luana and I showed, scientific organizations are still propagating bias, misconceptions, and misunderstanding by trying to hew to a “progressive” ideological agenda.  The sword of non-neutrality cuts both ways.

True, many of the statements to which Fuentes refers are “scientifically grounded” in that they invoke science and sound scientific, but they’re often based on assumptions that have not been scientifically tested. In other words, they’re debatable, and that means that promoting them as if they’re “incontrovertibly true” is wrong.

Here’s what Fuentes thinks we’re doing wrong: being politically neutral:

There are, however, individual scientists, politicians, and members of the public who decry public statements by scientific organizations as “political,” asserting that the only reason they weigh in on societal issues is because of partisan pressures. Their core argument is that science should be neutral and forays into the political realm damage scientific integrity. It is true that some organizations’ statements endorsing political candidates or particular human rights stances are intentionally political and not exclusively tied to the organizations’ focal areas. In such cases, the organizations should be extremely careful and fully consider the impact, negative and positive, on their standing and credibility. Simply put, not all organizations should weigh in on all, or even most, societal topics. But it is also true that science as a field of practice, and scientific organizations as entities, have never been neutral.

Of course scientists have never been completely neutral on political, ideological, or moral issues, but that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t try to be neutral.  And that means avoiding making political, ideological, or moral pronouncements that don’t affect the progress of science (or of the branch of science promoted by a journal or society).  If there are important social issues whose outcome depend critically on science, then perhaps scientists can weigh in, but the science has to be nearly irrefutable, and people have to be careful. Far better to comment as a “private citizen” scientist (even writing op-eds like Fuentes’s, properly labeled as “personal opinions”) than for scientific organizations and journals to make official statements.

Equally important, although Fuentes pronounces early on that “science, as a human undertaking, cannot be neutral,” he’s wrong. Science is a set of tools to find out truths about the world: observation, experiment, replication, hypothesis-making and -testing, doubt, double-blind tests, and so on.  It is scientists who break neutrality, not science itself. Just because science is a human endeavor doesn’t give us license to go around making official statements about human society. Of course scientists are free, like all Americans, to give their personal views, so long as it doesn’t involve harassment, false advertising, or defamation.

If you want some examples of where this non-neutrality goes wrong, Fuentes supplies them, though inadvertently:

Case in point: As of March 2024 there are there are more than 490 legislative bills in consideration in 41 states seeking to criminalize the use of public restrooms that match one’s identified gender for some individuals, limit or deny access to gender-affirming care, and a range of other legal restrictions targeting transgender and nonbinary youth and adults. These legislative actions fly in the face of contemporary scientific understandings and the recommendations from the major medical professional organizations, including the US National Institutes of Health. At their heart, the bills have little to do with evidence-based research, science, or data, relying on decidedly unscientific contentions to support their agendas. Recently, seven professional scientific organizations that focus on human biology, human evolution, and human genetics released a joint statement in support of trans lives, including transgender, nonbinary, gender and sex diverse, and queer communities. The statement affirms the power of all persons to make the ultimate decisions over what happens to their own bodies, and based on contemporary scientific understandings opposes legislation rooted in biological essentialism affecting reproductive justice and access to health care, especially the discrimination and denial of health care for youth and adults, including care that is gender and life affirming. Although this is a small act, the reaction that it stimulated, and the likelihood of more professional science organizations acting as well, such as the American Psychological Association’s recent statement, illustrate that such organizations can, and should, effectively contribute to critical societal issues. Scientific data and analyses matter, even when their public presentation can be considered “political.”

Seriously? What can science tell us about restroom use? That is a social problem that is at best minimally informed about science, and science journals and organizations best stay well away from it. In fact, the “science” of gender-affirming care also consists largely of subjective evaluations or statements lacking evidence, and, at least in the U.S., scientists appear to have gotten it largely wrong. We don’t know the long term effects of puberty blockers, and perhaps objective rather than “affirming” therapy could kids from surgery, allowing them to become gay instead of snipping of their parts. There is very little good science behind “affirmative care.” And there is no science supporting the gender-activist issue (one supported no doubt by Fuentes) that transwomen should be allowed to compete in athletics against biological women. The science in fact says exactly the opposite: transwomen retain, perhaps for life, substantial athletic advantages over natal women. Has that stopped scientists from arguing that “transwomen are women” in every relevant sense? Nope.

To support the view that “affirmative care” isn’t supported by science, observe that countries in Europe, but not the U.S., are doing away with a lot of gender-affirming care, including deeming puberty blockers as clinical rather than normal treatments.  That’s because the science is unsettled! It is clear what Fuentes’s agenda is here, and it’s pure, unsullied gender activism, which at present rests largely on scientifically unsupported claims. Fuentes is touting ideology here, not the weight of scientific evidence.

Which brings me to my final point. Science not only gets political and ideological pronouncements wrong, but often gets the science itself wrong—and gets it wrong because the “science” touted by activists is distorted to reflect ideology. Luana and I wrote about five such areas in our paper, including “race” differences, gender differences, evolutionary psychology, and indigenous “knowledge.” If journals and societies can get the very science wrong because they are blinkered by ideology, what hope do we have for getting political or ideological issues right?

h/t: Luana

Nikole Hannah-Jones on reparations for descendants of slaves

March 19, 2024 • 11:15 am

As you know, I go back and forth on the question of affirmative action for college and professional-school admissions, and even after I thought I’d settled on a view (i.e., give some preference to minorities among those equally qualified for admission), it still keeps changing. After I read the long New York Times piece below by the notorious Nikole Hannah-Jones, it’s changed a bit more, making me wonder if the Supreme Court, in banning race-based admissions, didn’t go a bit too far.

Although I’m not a huge fan of Ms. Hannah-Jones (I, along with many historians, thought the 1619 Project was based on a dubious thesis and was historically distorted, almost propagandistic), I have to say that I found the piece readable, engaging, and making some thoughtful points.  It’s also a good run-through of the history of black civil rights and attempts to secure equality since the Civil War: Plessy v. Ferguson, Brown v. Board of Education, Bakke v. California, all the way through the recent Harvard case.

I have not gone all the way over to Hannah-Jones’s views, set out below, but it’s clear that the question of affirmative action bears more thinking, at least for me. I’ve always thought that some form of reparations are due those who still suffer historically from oppression. My only question is what those reparations should be. It can’t be money, and in the end true reparations mean giving everyone, especially members of once-oppressed groups, equal opportunities from birth. That will of course take forever, so what do we do in the interim? Affirmative action has been the answer, and is still the answer for Hannah-Jones, but the Supreme Court has pretty much killed it.

At any rate, I’d read Hannah-Jones’s piece if you have time (click headline to read; I haven’t found it archived):

The topic is whether we should have a “colorblind” society, as was supposedly limned by Martin Luther King in his “I have a dream” speech. Hannah-Jones’s answer is no.  To achieve full equality in America, we must explicitly be aware of race, taking it into account when making employment or admissions decisions.  Clearly, she thinks that all the civil rights laws enacted since 1964 have done little to fix the problem of inequality.

Here are the main points I think she makes, as well as a few of my own comments.  Her quotes are in quotation marks.

1.) Descendants of American slaves have suffered a continual disadvantage since slavery was abolished, being segregated, denied equal rights, and in general subject to pervasive discrimination. The historical residuum of this discrimination is still with us, and I don’t think people can deny that.

2.) This problem needs to be made right by some form of reparations.  A color-blind society cannot make things right; we must have some form of affirmative action: preferential treatment of the descendants of slaves.

3.) A problem here: she wants only the descendants of slaves to get these advantages. Other blacks, like recent “immigrants and children of immigrants” from Africa and other places, are not entitled to these reparations.

4.) Other minority groups who have been subject to affirmative action, like Hispanics, aren’t dealt with in her article; in fact, the word “Hispanic” isn’t even given.  It is slavery, and slavery alone, that must be considered in affirmative action, which must apply only to those who can show they are descended from slaves. Yet other blacks and minorities also suffer, perhaps not for historical reasons but from race-based oppression itself. One has to consider the moral weight of this argument.

5.) Reparations cannot be based on socioeconomic status or “condition”; it must be based on ancestry tracing back to those who were enslaved, i.e.,  the “condition” of being a descendant of slaves.

6.) Increasing “diversity” is of little consequence. What Hannah-Jones wants is to increase the representation of descendants of slaves in American life through affirmative action. That must involve some kinds of quotas, not just a subjective method for increasing the proportion of black and brown faces in schools. Her stand thus explicitly opposes the Supreme Court’s Bakke decision, which ruled that there can be affirmative action so long as it increases diversity—seen as an innate good—but not if it involves quotas. Hannah-Smith doesn’t explicitly mention a need for quotas, but I think it’s inherent in her argument.

7.) Despite the “colorblindness” touted in King’s famous speech, he also made statements that could be interpreted as favoriting affirmative action (see below).

I’ll give some of her quotes that, to be sure, make points worth considering. Please comment below on the issue, the quotes, or the points above. I do recommend your reading her article. Even though it’s long, it’s well written.

The ramifications of the recent affirmative-action decision are clear — and they are not something so inconsequential as the complexion of elite colleges and the number of students of color who attend them: We are in the midst of a radical abandonment of a compact that the civil rights movement forged, a shared understanding that racial inequality is harmful to democracy.

. . . Race, we now believe, should not be used to harm or to advantage people, whether they are Black or white. But the belief in colorblindness in a society constructed on the codification of racial difference has always been aspirational. And so achieving it requires what can seem like a paradoxical approach: a demand that our nation pay attention to race in order, at some future point, to attain a just society. As Justice Thurgood Marshall said in a 1987 speech, “The ultimate goal is the creation of a colorblind society,” but “given the position from which America began, we still have a very long way to go.”

After Brown v. Board of Education (1954):

Civil rights activists were finally seeing their decades-long struggle paying off. But the architects and maintenance crew of racial caste understood a fundamental truth about the society they had built: Systems constructed and enforced over centuries to subjugate enslaved people and their descendants based on race no longer needed race-based laws to sustain them. Racial caste was so entrenched, so intertwined with American institutions, that without race-based counteraction, it would inevitably self-replicate.

And the Bakke vs. Board of Regents of the University of California case (1978), which rejected UC Davis’s use of racial quotas in its medical school, but allowed race to be used as one factor in admissions. Note how Hannah-Jones is concerned here exclusively with the descendants of slaves:

Thus, the first time the court took up the issue of affirmative action, it took away the policy’s power. The court determined that affirmative action could not be used to redress the legacy of racial discrimination that Black Americans experienced, or the current systemic inequality that they were still experiencing. Instead, it allowed that some consideration of a student’s racial background could stand for one reason only: to achieve desired “diversity” of the student body. Powell referred to Harvard’s affirmative-action program, which he said had expanded to include students from other disadvantaged backgrounds, such as those from low-income families. He quoted an example from the plan, which said: “The race of an applicant may tip the balance in his favor, just as geographic origin or a life spent on a farm may tip the balance in other candidates’ cases. A farm boy from Idaho can bring something to Harvard College that a Bostonian cannot offer. Similarly, a Black student can usually bring something that a white person cannot offer.”

But, of course, a (white) farm boy from Idaho did not descend from people who were enslaved, because they were farmers from Idaho. There were not two centuries of case law arguing over the inherent humanity and rights of farm boys from Idaho. There was no sector of the law, no constitutional provision, that enshrined farm boys from Idaho as property who could be bought and sold. Farm boys from Idaho had no need to engage in a decades-long movement to gain basic rights of citizenship, including the fundamental right to vote. Farm boys from Idaho had not, until just a decade earlier, been denied housing, jobs, the ability to sit on juries and access to the ballot. Farm boys from Idaho had not been forced to sue for the right to attend public schools and universities.

In Bakke, the court was legally — and ideologically — severing the link between race and condition. Race became nothing more than ancestry and a collection of superficial physical traits. The 14th Amendment was no longer about alleviating the extraordinary repercussions of slavery but about treating everyone the same regardless of their “skin color,” history or present condition. With a few strokes of his pen, Powell wiped this context away, and just like that, the experience of 350 years of slavery and Jim Crow was relegated to one thing: another box to check.

According to Hannah-Jones, Martin Luther King Jr. floated ideas similar to affirmative action (Reagan campaigned on a covertly racist platform):

Reagan, who had secretly called Black people monkeys and opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, opposed the establishment of the Martin Luther King Jr. federal holiday. Yet in the first commemoration of that holiday in 1986, he trotted out King’s words to condemn racial-justice policy. “We’re committed to a society in which all men and women have equal opportunities to succeed, and so we oppose the use of quotas,” he said. “We want a colorblind society, a society that, in the words of Dr. King, judges people not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

This passage from King’s famous 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech has become a go-to for conservatives seeking to discredit efforts to address the pervasive disadvantages that Black Americans face. And it works so effectively because few Americans have read the entire speech, and even fewer have read any of the other speeches or writings in which King explicitly makes clear that colorblindness was a goal that could be reached only through race-conscious policy. Four years after giving his “Dream” speech, King wrote, “A society that has done something special against the Negro for hundreds of years must now do something special for him.” And during a 1968 sermon given less than a week before his assassination, King said that those who opposed programs to specifically help Black Americans overcome their disadvantage “never stop to realize that no other ethnic group has been a slave on American soil. The people who say this never stop to realize that the nation made the Black man’s color a stigma; but beyond this they never stop to realize that they owe a people who were kept in slavery 244 years.”

And, to finish, Hannah-Jones’s indication that we’re not where we want to be:

Today we have a society where constitutional colorblindness dictates that school segregation is unconstitutional, yet most Black students have never attended a majority-white school or had access to the same educational resources as white children. A society with a law prohibiting discrimination in housing and lending, and yet descendants of slavery remain the most residentially, educationally and economically segregated people in the country. A society where employment discrimination is illegal, and yet Black Americans are twice as likely to be unemployed as white Americans, even when they hold college degrees.

Now one could argue that equity should not be the goal if different groups have different abilities and preferences; instead he true goal should be equality of opportunity.  And I agree that we should aim for equality of opportunity rather than equality of representation. But the former will be nearly impossible to achieve given the resources needed. Perhaps one might hope that instead of trying to create equality of opportunity to  ensure equity, we should do the opposite: creating a bit more equity as a way of paving the way for equality of opportunity.

Weigh in below!

Bari Weiss interviews Roland Fryer

February 21, 2024 • 12:45 pm

A lot of readers and heterodox colleagues have sent me this link to Bari Weiss’s interview with Harvard economics professor Roland G. Fryer, Jr., often accompanied by big encomiums. Despite my unwillingness to watch long videos, I did watch all 77 minutes of it.  Unfortunately, I wasn’t mesmerized, or even much interested. There are interesting bits in it, but I can’t wholeheartedly recommend it. Readers who see it, or have seen it and feel otherwise, please weigh in below.

Fryer is famous for two things: his prize-winning economic and sociological work, which sometimes produced counterintuitive results, and also for his suspension from Harvard for two years for sexual harassment. (He’s now back again.) I have only a few comments, but here’s the intro from the Free Press on YouTube:

Roland Fryer is one of the most celebrated economists in the world. He is the author of more than 50 papers—on topics ranging from “the economic consequences of distinctively black names” to “racial differences in police shootings.” At 30, he became the youngest black tenured professor in Harvard’s history. At 34, he won a MacArthur Genius Fellowship, followed by a John Bates Clark Medal, which is given to an economist in America under 40 who is judged to have made the most significant contribution to economic thought and knowledge.

But before coming to Harvard, Fryer worked at McDonalds—drive-through, not corporate.

Fryer’s life story of rapid ascent to academic celebrity status despite abandonment by his parents at a young age, and growing up in what he calls a “drug family” is incredibly inspiring in its own right. Because based on every statistic and stereotype about race and poverty in America, he should not have become the things he became. And yet he did.

He also continues to beat the odds in a world in which much of academia has become conformist. Time and time again, Fryer refuses to conform. He has one north star, and that is the pursuit of truth, come what may. The pursuit of truth no matter how unpopular the conclusion or inconvenience to his own political biases.

He’s also rare in that he isn’t afraid to admit when he’s wrong, or to admit his mistakes and learn from them.

Bari Weiss sat down with Roland at the University of Austin for this inspiring, courageous, and long-overdue conversation.

The parts I found most absorbing are these:

  1. Fryer’s rough upbringing, raised without a mother and with most of his acquaintances being killed. And, of course, working at the McDonald’s drive-though before college.
  2. His famous paper showing that although there is police bias against blacks for some legal infractions, there is no racial bias in the Big Issue: police shootings. Fryer describes how he had to get police protection for over a month after that paper came out, for its conclusion violated the Aceepted Narrative and angered many people.
  3. His suspension from Harvard and closure of his lab. Fryer appears to have taken it well, but does explain that the incident involved his failure to understand “power dynamics”, for which he’s apologized. It’s curious, and has been pointed out by many, that Claudine Gay, who was a dean at the time (and later President of Harvard), was instrumental in getting Fryer punished. This makes Weiss ask Fryer at one point, “do you believe in karma?”  I can’t say much more about this as I haven’t followed the controversy, but I know many people think Fryer’s punishment was unduly harsh.

A Q&A session begins 49 minutes in.

In view of the Supreme Court decision, race-based college essays proliferate

January 21, 2024 • 11:30 am

In last year’s case of Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, the Supreme Court ruled, as expected, that affirmative action (the preferential admission of students based on race or ethnicity) was illegal, a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. As Wikipedia notes:

The majority opinion, written by Roberts, stated that the use of race was not a compelling interest, and the means by which the schools attempted to achieve diversity (tracking bare racial statistics) bore little or no relationship to the purported goals (viewpoint and intellectual diversity and developing a diverse future leadership).

Indeed, the arguments of my own graduate school in this case, angered me: not only did Harvard lie about its own admissions practices, but advanced the argument that Roberts shot down: racial diversity = intellectual and viewpoint diversity. This was the view that propelled the earlier Bakke decision: diversity was seen, sans evidence, as an innate good.  Had affirmative action been justified as a form of reparations for people who were still suffering the effects of bigotry, I would have been more in favor of Harvard’s practices. But for years the justification of affirmative action has been rife with dissimulation.

Colleges, determined to keep racial diversity high, perhaps up to the point of equity (representation of racial groups among students equal to their proportion in the population), quietly began working on ways to violate or at least obviate this ruling. Fortunately for colleges, the Supremes had left a loophole. As the Independent notes:

While the ruling says race may not be a conscious factor in admissions, it does not prevent universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected their life “so long as that discussion is concretely tied to a quality of character or unique ability that the particular applicant can contribute to the university”.

After this, you could have predicted the results: colleges and universities would immediately begin to ask students to write essays in which they were asked how they overcame obstacles. And of course every student in a minority group, knowing the scheme, would somehow find a way to argue that their race or ethnicity imposed high obstacles to achievement, but that they had somehow surmounted these obstacles. This would of course tip off admissions offices that the applicant was in a racial or ethnic minority, and give their applications a boost. (Of course in some cases an overcoming-bigotry story would be true and could indeed speak to a candidate’s value, though it would probably say little to help universities increase their ideological or viewpoint diversity.)

Moreover, opponents of affirmative action would find this form of “holistic admissions” hard to detect, and lawsuits like last year’s would be much harder to bring.

I predicted this change in applications, which did take effect, but of course it isn’t rocket science. Universities are wedded for life to increasing racial diversity; the Supreme Court said that this was largely illegal, but left a loophole; and so colleges would exploit this sole loophole in a big way. And that, according to the article from the NYT, has come to pass. Click the headline below to read, or you can find the article archived here.  The subtitle tells the tale:

This being the NYT, they begin the article by showing the advantages of this loophole, which enabled some students to “find themselves”. But the overwhelming impression you get is that both universities and students are gaming the system to get an admissions advantage.  After all, why do colleges even need to ask students how they overcame adversity?

Have a look, for example, at the essay questions the University of Chicago posed during the last application cycle (as well as some questions from previous years): there’s one mandatory question and seven optional questions from which you pick one to answer. None of them involve “overcoming obstacles,” though question #7 gives you some leeway to sneak in race and ethnicity. Here’s a typical one (questions are often suggested by students):

Essay Option 2

“Where have all the flowers gone?” – Pete Seeger. Pick a question from a song title or lyric and give it your best answer.
– Inspired by Ryan Murphy, AB’21

The clear goal of these questions is to look for creativity and novel viewpoints—in other words, to seek out and harvest viewpoint diversity.

I don’t think this will be the case at Chicago next year, but we shall see. But here are some quotes from the NYT article (indented). The piece begins with the upside:

Astrid Delgado first wrote her college application essay about a death in her family. Then she reshaped it around a Spanish book she read as a way to connect to her Dominican heritage.

Deshayne Curley wanted to leave his Indigenous background out of his essay. But he reworked it to focus on an heirloom necklace that reminded him of his home on the Navajo Reservation.

The first draft of Jyel Hollingsworth’s essay explored her love for chess. The final focused on the prejudice between her Korean and Black American families and the financial hardships she overcame.

WHAAT? The corruption of an essay on chess into one on bigotry, solely to gain a racially-based admissions advantage, is ludicrous. But you can’t blame the student—you have to blame the unnamed university. The piece continues:

All three students said they decided to rethink their essays to emphasize one key element: their racial identities. And they did so after the Supreme Court last year struck down affirmative action in college admissions, leaving essays the only place for applicants to directly indicate their racial and ethnic backgrounds.

Notice that all three students didn’t really intend to dwell on their racial identities, but were forced to because a). that’s what the unnamed college asked about, and b). they realized that mentioning their race and heritage would help them get admitted.  This is what’s known as “gaming the system.”

There’s more:

[The Supreme Court decision] led many students of color to reframe their essays around their identities, under the advice of college counselors and parents. And several found that the experience of rewriting helped them explore who they are.

Sophie Desmoulins, who is Guatemalan and lives in Sedona, Ariz., wrote her college essay with the court’s ruling in mind. Her personal statement explored, among other things, how her Indigenous features affected her self-esteem and how her experience volunteering with the Kaqchikel Maya people helped her build confidence and embrace her heritage.

For Julia Nguyen, a child of Vietnamese immigrants based in Biloxi, Miss., rewriting her essay made her more aware of how her family’s upbringing shaped her. Julia, 18, said she felt “more proud to have this personal statement because of the affirmative action case.”

In Keteyian’s case, he said he felt “a lot more passionate” about his essay after changing his approach. As a Black student interested in engineering — a field that has struggled to diversify its ranks —Keteyian concluded his personal statement with a mix of fear and hope.

“Coming to terms with the possibility I may be one of the few Black individuals at my workplace is intimidating,” he wrote, “but something to prepare for if the ruling stands, and an opportunity for me to rewrite reality.”

Now of course some of these answers may enable colleges to really increase their viewpoint diversity, ideological diversity, or even socioeconomic diversity, but one gets the impression that this is simply a way to obviate the law and the intent of the Supreme Court’s decision. And there’s another way to accomplish these aims, a way used by the University of Chicago. (I’m not bragging here; it’s just that our school is famous for its quirky and creative application questions.)

These essays on how you surmounted obstacles will spread throughout the country. I doubt, in fact, that more than a handful of colleges won’t have a question about “overcoming adversity” on their applications.  But, of course, if you have more than two neurons to rub together, you know what’s going on here: in effect, admissions offices are asking students, in defiance of the Supreme Court ruling, to “tick a box” indicating their race.  And then admissions officers can proceed with the same kind of race-based admissions they used before. In fact, some colleges explicitly admit this.

What this will produce is a spate of anodyne admissions questions and answers and, worse, a decrease in viewpoint diversity. Identity politics will become stronger than ever, and every student will absorb a narrative about how their racial identifies were crucial in getting them into college. More than ever, one’s race will become the dominant feature of one’s persona.

But there is the expected pushback, and at least the NYT mentions it. Many authorities and lawyers, as well as most Americans, don’t like it:

The court’s ruling was meant to make college admissions race-blind — answers to the race and ethnicity question on applications are now hidden from admissions committees. A recent Gallup poll found that nearly two-thirds of Americans showed support for the ban on affirmative action. Some strongly believe race should not be considered during the admissions process.

“I think it’s wrong,” said Edward J. Blum, the president of Students for Fair Admissions, the group that brought the case to the Supreme Court.

But the ruling also allowed admissions officers to consider race in personal essays, as long as decisions were not based on race, but on the personal qualities that grew out of an applicant’s experience with their race, like grit or courage.

Who are they fooling? If you think that mentioning that you’re black or Hispanic isn’t going to ring a bell in the admissions office, I have some land in Florida to sell you. And of course if you mention that you overcame difficulties imposed on you as an Asian or Jew, fuhgeddaboudit!

Further, even some students and parents don’t like it:

While some parents said they were glad their children got to reflect on their identities in their essays, others feared that the court ruling would make it harder for their child to find community while in college.

“Even with affirmative action in place, it’s always a struggle for people in our community to get to college and to succeed in college,” said Deshayne’s mother, Guila Curley, a college counselor on the Navajo Reservation in New Mexico.

Not all students appreciated the rewriting experience as much. Some found that the ruling made them feel like they were not writing for themselves, but for someone else.

Indeed! That is precisely the case. They are writing to alert admissions officers to their race, and then embroidering a story around that nucleus.

In her initial essay, Triniti Parker, a 16-year-old who aims to be the first doctor in her family, recalled her late grandmother, who was one of the first Black female bus drivers for the Chicago Transit Authority.

But after the Supreme Court’s decision, a college adviser told her to make clear references to her race, saying it should not “get lost in translation.” So Triniti adjusted a description of her and her grandmother’s physical features to allude to the color of their skin.

The new details made her pause. “It felt like I was abiding by somebody else’s rules,” she said. Triniti added, “Now it feels like people of color have to say something or if we don’t, we are going to get looked over.”

There you go. If this is not “ticking a box”, I don’t know what is. And some students are conflicted, as their guidance counselors force students to explicitly mention race against their wishes.

Some decided to leave out their race entirely. Karelys Andrade, who is Ecuadorean and lives in Brooklyn, kept her essay focused on her family facing eviction during the pandemic and being forced to live in a shelter. “That experience was a story that needed to be told,” said Karelys, 17.

In past years, some Asian American students avoided writing about their heritage, thinking affirmative action was largely unfavorable to them, said Mandi Morales, an adviser with Bottom Line, a nonprofit for first-generation college applicants catering mostly to students of color. But the end of affirmative action in colleges led some to reconsider, counselors said.

Ms. Morales cited one student who added a mention of his “conservative” Chinese family as an example. “The explicit disclosure of his ethnicity would not have made it to the final draft prior to the ruling,” she said.

Some experts argue that the court’s ruling encourages students to write on racial conflict, trauma and adversity.

Of course it does! Again, this is bloody obvious. But even some counselors who don’t push the “adversity” scenario still insist that the students mention their identities as people of color, merely noting that students should say that their race has been a salutary factor. But again, what’s emphasized is not the content of one’s character, but the color of one’s skin.

. . . Joe Latimer, the director of college counseling at Northfield Mount Hermon School in Massachusetts, said he believes it is not necessary for students “to sell their trauma.” Instead, he advises his students to present their identities as “strength based,” showing the positive traits they have built from their experiences as a person of color.

The NYT article begins with a positive nod towards identity applications, but ends with some people speaking truth to power:

Critics of affirmative action say they are worried about essays becoming a loophole for colleges to consider an applicant’s race. “My concern is that the system will be gamed,” said William A. Jacobson, a law professor at Cornell University who founded the nonprofit Equal Projection Project.

Since the court ruling, colleges and universities have affirmed their commitment to diversity, and some officials said their institutions will continue to foster it through outreach and tools like Landscape, a database with information about an applicant’s school and neighborhood. And officials have said race can still inform decisions, as long as they are based on the applicant’s character and its connection to the university’s mission.

But some students, including Delphi Lyra, a senior at Northfield who is half-Brazilian, have reservations about the new admissions environment.

“The idea behind the ruling is to not check a box,” said Delphi, 18, referring to the race and ethnicity question on applications. “But I think, in some ways, it has almost even created more of a need to check a box.”

Absolutely!

Again, I’m not denying that if one’s heritage does increase intellectual or ideological diversity, then that does meet the requirements of the court. But you know what will happen; I outlined it above.

It’s clear that although I favor some type of affirmative action to increase intellectual and ideological diversity, it has to be done in a way that doesn’t violate the law. After all, diversity of thoughtm does increase the proliferation of opposing viewpoints that’s essential for a good college education.  So what do we do? I have two suggestions.

1.) Eliminate all questions on college applications that require you to explain how you overcame adversity. My suggestion would be to use questions that show your creativity or ability to think outside the box—in other words, questions like the University of Chicago used in the past. This increases creativity, quirkiness, and discussion.  By concentrating on racial identities and how they held one back, the new system simply strengthens identity politics.

2.) Enforce the law.  While it will become harder for authorities to determine if colleges are ticking racial boxes, it’s not impossible. Authorities can simply determine (given that recommendation #1 is followed) whether mentioning race somewhere on your application that you’re a member of an oppressed minority correlates significantly with your chance of admission. Again, you have to be careful, but it’s not hard if you use Chicago-style questions like this—the mandatory question that all applicants had to answer last year.

How does the University of Chicago, as you know it now, satisfy your desire for a particular kind of learning, community, and future? Please address with some specificity your own wishes and how they relate to UChicago.

It’s not an inventive question (you have to answer an inventive one besides this), but neither does it prompt you to concentrate on your ethnic/racial identity. Admissions officers will be tearing their hair out, for now they have to judge solely on thoughtfulness and character.