Category: racial issues

McWhorter and Loury and a new film: George Floyd wasn’t murdered

December 11, 2023 • 9:15 am

On May 25, 2020, George Floyd had a run-in with the Minneapolis police over his passing counterfeit bills, and the result was Floyd’s death. Four officers were involved in the altercation, and one, Derek Chauvin, was subsequently charged and convicted of second-degree murder and manslaughter (with a sentence of 22.5 years) for apparently kneeling on Floyd’s neck, causing him to suffocate. Three other officers were also convicted of violating Floyd’s civil rights, and were given sentences between 3 and 4.75 years. In a civil suit, the city of Minneapolis settled with Floyd’s family for $27 million.  Recently and unsurprisingly, Chauvin was stabbed 22 times in prison, coming close to death but surviving.

After Floyd’s death, there were not only violent riots in Minneapolis (downplayed by the mayor and the media), but, importantly, the “racial reckoning” began that continues to this day. Floyd’s death could be considered the pivotal act of not only this reckoning, but the spread of DEI activities throughout America.  The man has become somewhat of a hero: a latter-day Martin Luther King.

A new 142-minute crowdfunded movie, “The Fall of Minneapolis,” takes issue with the Floyd narrative, and for the first time shows the bodycam video of the arrested Minneapolis police officers. It argues the following points:

  1. Floyd was not murdered by the police: he had serious heart problems, hypertension, artherosclerosis, COVID, and was high on near-lethal doses of fentanyl and methamphetamine during his arrest. He was also complaining about not being able to breathe well before he was brought to the ground by the police. Difficulty in breathing could easily be explained by both his heath condition and ingestion of serious drugs.
  2. The official autopsy found drugs in Floyd’s system, confirms the health problems mentioned above, and found no evidence from examining his neck that he died from asphyxiation.
  3. The bodycam videos were not allowed to be shown to jurors by the judge. They show that Floyd might have been restrained simply by having a knee on his shoulder, not on his neck. This method of restraint, called “MRT” (maximal restraint technique) is taught to all Minneapolis police recruits as a way to subdue resisting suspects. (There is no doubt from the bodycam videos that Floyd insistently resisted arrest and fought the officers.)
  4. The judge did not allow mention or a photo of MRT in the Minneapolis police manual to be shown to the jury. Further, the police captain, lying, denied that MRT was taught to all police officers.
  5. The police called for medical assistance within minutes of Floyd having a medical emergency when he was on the ground. They also tried to resuscitate him via CPR. This is inconsistent with the narrative that the officers were trying to kill Floyd.
  6. The judge, mayor, city council and police hierarchy all “conspired” to convict Chauvin and the other officers, buttressing into an official narrative that was likely wrong.

There’s a lot more—the movie is tendentious and doesn’t try to pretend it’s impartial—but there’s surely enough there to disturb the viewer about both the narrative around Floyd’s death and its aftermath±both the immediate rioting and the “racial reckoning” that still pervades America.

I watched the movie, and think that every reader should, too. Just make the time to watch it (it’s at the bottom as well as on YouTube). for you won’t be sorry. Now I wasn’t on the jury, but after watching the bodycam videos and the movie’s interviews and courtroom scenes, I think that at the very least George Floyd wasn’t obviously murdered by police. The point that Chauvin was kneeling on Floyd’s shoulder as per MRT, and not on his neck, deserves serious consideration, and the “murder” scenario is thus not beyond reasonable doubt. That makes Chauvin and the other officers innocent.

The movie was fairly successful in convincing me that there was no good ground to initially bring charges against Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd. It also suggests how corrupt and duplicitous the mayor, judge, and city officials of Minneapolis were in ignoring facts to further a convenient narrative.

But I’m not the only one to react this way to the movie. Both John McWhorter and Glenn Loury watched the movie, too, and came to the same conclusion. Their 48-minute conversation about “The Fall of Minneapolis” is below, and some of it is transcribed in Loury’s Substack post given below that.

I suggest watching the original video (at bottom) first, and then listening to the conversation between McWhorter and Loury.  But I’ve put them in reverse order if you don’t have time to watch the movie but want the précis. Seriously, though, given the impact of the Floyd death and the counternarrative of the movie, all Americans should watch “The Fall of Minneapolis” and come to their own conclusions.

Some people, of course, are impervious to fact, but there are enough facts documented in the movie, including nearly complete bodycam videos from the police officers, to raise serious doubts about The Narrative. I should add that the attacks on all Minneapolis police officers after Floyd’s death are frightening as hell. The mayor, who comes off as a subservient jerk, actually closed one police station and allowed it to be destroyed by the rioters.

The conversation:

Loury’s Substack article; click to read:

What is most striking about the Loury/McWhorter video conversation is the conviction of both men that Chauvin was not guilty of murder and that all the cops were unjustly punished. While Loury tends to be excitable, McWhorter is quieter and often more thoughtful, and yet both men arrive at the same conclusion.  In fact, McWhorter blames the rise of Ibram Kendi and his antiracist philosophy, which McWhorter denigrates, on the death of Floyd. And neither man sees Floyd as any kind of hero; Loury argues that the “racial reckoning” was “the excesses of a woke moral panic around racial issues that converted a miscreant. . . this is not a heroic figure; this is a flaky motherfucker.”  But that is how convincing the movie is, regardless of the fact that it is tendentious and aims to further its own counternarrative. But it is not a “conspiracy movie”; it’s a serious examination of the Floyd incident and the trial of the officers.

Other quotes from McWhorter:

“The idea of [Floyd] as a hero is revolting. . . absolutely revolting. . . the man was an utter and complete mess.”

“This evidence is clear, but it will not be accepted. . . It will not be allowed that Derek Chauvin got a bad rap.”

“People are not going to listen to the facts. George Floyd is going to be seen as this crucial moment on the civil rights timeline when America woke up to certain realities because of the murder of this man. And nothing we say, nothing that documentary says, will change anyone’s mind.”

“It’s difficult to make the case for black equality when there is this kind of know-nothing denialism now. .  it shouldn’t take people twenty years to admit that those riots were about something that didn’t happen.”

And a McWhorter quote from Loury’s transcript:

You know, Glenn, also, if you want to push it, if you think about what happened in the first half of 2020, also the whole racial reckoning and the grievous excesses that it’s led to that make people write books like Woke Racism, et cetera. I mean, frankly, we have to do it, we have to say it, and then we’re going to move quickly on. The elevation of Ibram Kendi really was sparked in large part by George Floyd. He was known before that, but him being a phenom whose counsel is attended to by people cowering in their boots becoming amoral people if they don’t follow it, that happens in the wake of George Floyd. And it was a lie. It was a lie.

I am still trying to grapple with the meaning of this. And so what it comes down to is George Floyd. He had serious heart disease. He wasn’t an old man, but he had serious heart disease, untreated. He had serious atherosclerosis, untreated. He was very high on both fentanyl and meth, which is a lethal combination. Very high on them, probably taking more while he was in the car to hide it from the cops. He opens his mouth in the footage, and you see he’s got something on his tongue. It’s not a Chiclet. He’s really, really high. He tested positively for COVID then. He had COVID. He smoked. He’s a very sick man.

And then all of this happens. He’s frankly out of his mind because of all of this. He couldn’t help it, but he was. And you know, he was upset. He was agitated, his heartbeat probably pumping harder. Now I’m going into a medical expertise I don’t have. But he was very agitated at being detained by the cops. And remember, they had a reason for detaining him. He was trying to pass counterfeit money. They were detaining him, and it got worse and worse. He couldn’t understand that he needed to just calm down, despite being told to by his friends. “Stop resisting, Floyd,” one of his friends said. And so, it got the best of him and his heart stopped.

But it wasn’t because he was asphyxiated. And the other thing is, there was no evidence in the autopsy report, which has not been shared with us until now—not the autopsy report that was suggested by George Floyd’s relatives, but the first one. There was no evidence of asphyxiation of any kind.

I find the autopsy report, which is shown in the movie below, to be pretty exculpatory. NO evidence of asphyxiation!

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

Click below to watch “The Fall of Minneapolis,” which you can also find on YouTube (with Polish subtitles!) here.

My letter to the Washington Post on race

October 22, 2023 • 9:15 am

About a week ago, the Washington Post published, starting on its front page, a long article arguing that race is a purely social construct without reality or utility, and thus should be eliminated. The author Sydney Trent, is a science journalist who covers social issues, and that may explain why the article was replete with scientific problems, among them the neglect of existing research on ethnic groups (my preferred term for “race”). You can see the article by clicking on the headline below. Since it’ll probably be paywalled if you subscribe, I found the whole article archived here.

Leaving aside the misleading “science says” (science doesn’t say anything, scientists do; and not all scientists agree that race isn’t real), I’ll show you three small excerpts of Trent’s piece:

Yet unlike in decades past, more ordinary Americans are coming to see “race” for what it is, [Carlos] Hoyt maintains. In interviews he conducted for his doctoral thesis and book, these people describe gradually awakening to the idea — through traumatic personal experiences with discrimination, through foreign travel or something they read — that they had been sold a bill of goods. “Race,” they decided, does not exist.

. . . The truth, [Adrian] Lyles, 37, said, is that “race has no quantifiable metric,” like socioeconomic status, for example, he said. “Where you have unreliable input, your data is trash.”

. . . In 2003, the completion of the Human Genome Project — which found that humans globally share 99.9 percent of their DNA — gave waste to the notion of “race” among the vast majority of scientists. But the public appears barely to have noticed. The idea still lives everywhere — in discrimination and criminal profiling, in the rise in hate speech and acts, in the recent Supreme Court decision ending affirmative action in college admissions, in the rhetoric of social justice advocates and the new capitalization of Black and White in the media. Racial categorization persists on job applications, medical forms, and most critically to Hoyt due to its high visibility, the Census.

Implicit in Trent’s effort to dethrone the term is the misguided idea that if you think “races” have any biological reality, then that buttresses racism.  That need not be true, but, historically, belief in races has been associated with the idea of a racial hierarchy in various traits (most often intelligence), and so I prefer to use “populations” or “ethnicity”, which doesn’t carry that historical taint.

Trent concludes that racial categories should be eliminated everywhere, especially on the census. The problem is that from the DNA figures above, she concludes that “racial categories”—the half-dozen or so “races” recognized in the past (white, black, Asian, and so on)—have no biological significance.  But she conflates “racial categories”, the named “boxes” above, with “race”, which I take to mean “a population that is genetically distinguishable from other populations of our species”.

Classical “races” were assumed to be absolutely demarcated geographically and morphologically, and to be separated by substantial genetic differences.  We know now that this conception of “race” isn’t true. There are no absolutely clear-cut categories into which everyone fits, genetic differences between even the “classical” races are not large, and there are “races within races”: populations that can be distinguished genetically from other populations often put into the same classical race. Again, that’s why I use “ethnicity”  or “population” to refer to such groups.

But there is no doubt that ethnicity, and even the “old fashioned” races, carry meaningful biological information and are genetically differentiable. If they weren’t, then you wouldn’t be able to pay companies like 23andMe to suss out your ancestry, or to trace the history of human migration by using genetic differences between populations. (23andMe told me from my DNA that I am 97.2% Ashkenazi Jew and 2.8% Eastern European, which matches perfectly with what I know from my family history.)

Ethnicity reflects evolutionary history, and if you use thousands of DNA sites (as you see in my letter below, even 99.6% identity between people—not 99.9% as Trent wrote—still leaves, in a genome of 3 billion base pairs, at least 12 million variable nucleotides. That variation is largely correlated with ancestry and geography, so that, for example, the DNA of most Europeans allows you to identify their birthplace to within 500 miles. Luana Maroja and I described the real situation in our recent paper (“The ideological subversion of biology“) in Skeptical Inquirer, a magazine published by the Center for Inquiry. (The race material is under point #5 of the paper.)

And, as I say in my published letter, one study showed that if you ask people to self-identify their “old fashioned” race (they used 3,636 Americans who self identified as either African American, white, East Asian, or Hispanic), and then independently look at their DNA in a blind study, you find that when you compare the DNA with the self-identification, you find a 99.84 percent match! That means that even the widely-reviled “classical” races are genetically differentiable using cluster analysis.  This is not surprising because these groups evolved in different parts of the world, and for much of their history they evolved in semi-isolation, leading to the accumulation of differences in the DNA by either genetic drift or natural selection.

At any rate, the Post‘s article was scientifically misleading, and so I set out to correct it by writing a letter to the paper. Mirabile dictu, they published it, and you can find it by either clicking on the screenshot or by simply reading my letter reproduced below the headline.

They edited it fairly heavily for length, so I had to leave out stuff like locating someone’s birthplace from their genes. Still, I think I did make the point that there is substantial genetic variation among people and diagnostic genetic variation among ethnic groups, and that this variation is useful in several ways.  If I could make one change, it would be to re-insert something that was cut and that I missed when I reviewed the edits: I would have inserted “large differences in” at the point where I put an asterisk in the letter below.

If you get the paper version of the Post, the letter is on page A27; if you have an online subscription, it’s here (or see my letter and another one by clicking the headline below). They changed the title of Trent’s article after the online version was published to what you see above.

The letter:

The Oct. 19 front-page article “A categorical no to the concept of race” argued that human “race” is a social construct without biological meaning. But there is important scientific data showing that race is indeed associated with diagnostic and useful biological differences.

Scientists have long rejected the simplistic view of races as groups distinguishable by appearance, geographic origin and * genes. But rejecting this view of “racial categories” and arguing that humans “share 99.9 percent of their DNA,” misses important genetic differences between populations. In fact, while humans share 99.6 percent of their genome, our genome has more than 3 billion base pairs, leaving more than 12 million DNA sites that vary among people.

This variation is correlated with ancestry and geography. It is used, for example, by genealogy services to tell people about their ancestry. In forensics, it’s used to identify criminals and bodies. And DNA variation is used to map the location of genes causing disease, an effort with great medical promise because the frequency of genetic diseases such as schizophrenia varies among populations.

Jerry A. Coyne, Chicago
The writer is emeritus professor of ecology and evolution at the University of Chicago.

There was also another letter making a different point about racial designations, and I’ll add that, too:

The front-page article “A categorical no to the concept of race” explained how treating race as objective rather than socially constructed has led to demographic confusion while shoehorning people into categories at variance with how they view themselves. As an example, the article mentioned the recent custom of uppercasing “Black” and “White” in American news media. The Post ought to champion a more nuanced standard, perhaps by using lowercase for how people (whose self-identification might be unknown) are viewed by others and uppercase for how they view themselves. The majuscule would then carry the same connotation of intentional membership as it does in the distinction between “Republican” and “republican” or between “Deaf” and “deaf.”

Charles H. Bennett, Croton-on-Hudson, N.Y.

Thanks to a reader who encouraged me to write my letter.

On “whiteness in physics”, its rebuttal, and a symposium of papers about the dangers of authoritarian control to science

October 20, 2023 • 12:15 pm

In April of last year I posted about the paper below, “Observing whiteness in introductory physics: A case study” (published in Physical Review and Physics Education Research). and I wrote this (tweaked a tiny bit for publication now):

I cannot emphasize enough how bad the paper is. Have a butcher’s [look]. First, read the abstract above, and then have a look here [there was a link to the preliminary version, which is gone now].

The first paragraph sets the tone:

Critical Race Theory names that racism and white supremacy are endemic to all aspects of U.S. society, from employment to schooling to the law [1–7]. We see the outcomes of this in, for example, differential incarceration rates, rates of infection and death in the era of COVID, and police brutality. We also see the outcomes of this in physics.

. . . and in the short incident analyzed at great length in this paper. The entire paper is, in fact, a lengthy and tendentious exegesis of six minutes of observing a presentation by three physics students, seen as “a case of whiteness”:

In this paper, we analyze a case of whiteness as social organization from an introductory physics course at a large public institution in the Western United States. We use the analytic markers from Sec. II to illustrate how whiteness shows up in this context, and we identify and discuss a number of mechanisms of control that co-produce whiteness in the six-minute episode of classroom interaction. We draw on tools of interaction analysis [59], including discourse, gesture, and gaze analysis, to unpack how whiteness is being constituted locally or interactionally. Our hope is that illustrating whiteness as social organization can contribute to readers’ awareness of and vision for disrupting and transforming this social organization in their own contexts [56,60] and support other researchers who want to do similar analyses.

You can read it for yourself by clicking on the screenshot below, and I used it as an example of how “critical studies” was pushing science toward the drain, or at least coopting science for ideological purposes.

Lawrence Krauss also went after the paper on his “Critical Mass” Substack site, saying this:

That this got published in a peer-reviewed physics journal is what makes this so surprising.  It means there is something fundamentally wrong with the system, and it isn’t systemic racism.  It is sheer stupidity combined with lethargy.

The natural tendency of academics, and scientists in particular, is to ignore this kind of nonsense and focus on their own work.   But once the bar gets this low, and the flood waters are rising, you can be certain a lot of nasty effluence will be flowing out as well.    And with the pressing need for better physics education at all levels (that is, better ways to actually teach physics), this garbage filling up journals and taking away precious research resources means that there is less room for the good stuff.

The standards of a field are determined by the practitioners in the field.  That means it is about time that physicists started doing something about it.

But rebuttal on our websites isn’t as powerful as rebuttal in a peer-reviewed journal.  And that has finally happened. Three authors wrote a critique of the article, but of course the original journal wouldn’t even look at it.  They then added to the critique of Robertson’s and Hairston’s paper their own analysis of the difficulties they getting the rebuttal published.

And, mirabile dictu, it’s now published. The author said:

We spent a long time trying to get a critical comment published in the journal to no avail. However, with the help of Anna Krylov we managed to get an article published in European Review, discussing the “whiteness” article, our critique of it, and the journal’s resistance to our critique.

Anna is a real force in pushing back against ideologically-tainted science! And now you can read the rebuttal/recount, published in European Review, for free by clicking on the screenshot below:

And the abstract:

Research framed around issues of diversity and representation in STEM is often controversial. The question of what constitutes a valid critique of such research, or the appropriate manner of airing such a critique, thus has a heavy ideological and political subtext. Here, we outline an attempt to comment on a paper recently published in the research journal Physical Review – Physics Education Research (PRPER). The article in question claimed to find evidence of ‘whiteness’ in introductory physics from analysis of a six-minute video. We argue that even if one accepts the rather tenuous proposition that ‘whiteness’ is sufficiently well defined to observe, the study lacks the proper controls, checks and methodology to allow for confirmation or disconfirmation of the authors’ interpretation of the data. The authors of the whiteness study, however, make the stunning claim that their study cannot be judged by standards common in science. We summarize our written critique and its fate, along with a brief description of its genesis as a response to an article in which senior officers of the American Physical Society (which publishes PRPER) explained that the appropriate venue for addressing issues with the paper at hand is via normal editorial processes.

Read and enjoy!

In fact, this is only one of a bunch of papers in a special issue of the European Review, derived from a symposium in Israel on the dangers of ideology and politics to science.  Here is the screenshot of the contents, and you can see all the papers (and read them) by clicking anywhere below. The title of the issue is right at the top:

I’ll single out three papers of special interest, to me at least.  First, the paper by my Chicago colleague Dorian Abbot at the bottom is about the three “foundational” principles of the University of Chicago, which Dorian calls the “Chicago Trifecta”.  Its abstract:

The purpose of this article is to discuss practical solutions to the threat to free inquiry at universities coming from the illiberal left. Based on my experiences at the University of Chicago, I propose that all universities should adopt and enforce rules requiring that: (1) the university, and any unit of it, cannot take collective positions on social and political issues; (2) faculty hiring and promotion be done solely on the basis of research and teaching merit, with nothing else taken into consideration; and (3) free expression be guaranteed on campus, even if someone claims to be offended, hurt or harmed by it. Faculty need to work together with students, alumni, journalists and politicians to get this done.

Second, the article by Ahmad Mansour points out the dangers of authoritarianism in science using his own tortuous biography, involving growing up in Israel and Palestine, and connecting that with the “cancel culture” of Germany. It resonates with the present situation going on there, and is a courageous article.

Finally, Anna and Jay Tanzman have a piece on how scientific publishing is being corrupted by ideology. The abstract:

The politicization of science – the infusion of ideology into the scientific enterprise – threatens the ability of science to serve humanity. Today, the greatest such threat comes from a set of ideological viewpoints collectively referred to as Critical Social Justice (CSJ). This contribution describes how CSJ has detrimentally affected scientific publishing by means of social engineering, censorship, and the suppression of scholarship.

Just peruse the titles, click here or on the screenshots, and download what you’d like (or read on the screen, which I can’t do). If you think that science is immune to corruption by ideology (and it’s always been, but rarely more than now—except perhaps in the Soviet Union), then you should definitely read all the pieces.

Loury and McWhorter on Kendi’s fall

October 3, 2023 • 12:45 pm

As you know, Ibram Kendi has fallen on hard times, with his Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University falling apart. Employees are leaving or being laid off, money is unaccounted for, there are accusations of lax or absent supervision, and so on.

In this nine-minute conversation between Glenn Loury and John McWhorter, John asks a good question:

“Why is there so much joy about what happened to Kendi–not only among conservatives, but in the media it’s people of all stripes who are so happy to see that guy getting his butt kicked.  What is all this joy about? . . .  There’s a part of me that says ‘it’s about time’, but not for the reasons that a lot of people are thinking. For example, I don’t think he’s a grifter, I don’t think he’s been trying to put one over on people. It’s not that a mere criminal that’s being brought to justice; I don’t think of it that way at all. Do you?”

Loury responds that yes, Schadenfreude is not a great emotion, but he feels that Kendi is an “empty suit”—a “little man behind the curtain”—who “doesn’t know anything.”  Loury asserts it’s not really about Kendi, but the failure of the extreme antiracist extremists, like Black Lives Matter or the 1619 Project to make any progress.

I agree with Loury about the problems of an unequipped Kendi being made the symbol of a movement, and if you read his book How to be an Antiracist, you’ll see the intellectual vacuity of his ideas. McWhorter agrees that Kendi was chosen to be the symbol of that movement, and wasn’t equipped to lead it, but that’s no reason to be angry at him.  In response, Loury asserts that the man is a fraud, and so he does show a bit of Schadenfreude, for Loury adds that Kendi is an “embarrassment and an absurdity.”  Isn’t that Schadenfreude?

In response, McWhorter says that Kendi was thrust into a position for which he was not equipped, and it was not his fault that his Institute fell apart. (McWhorter says that what Boston University did in founding Kendi’s antiracist center  “was an insult to black achievement.”)  In other words, Loury blames Kendi for taking money and doing what he was unequipped to do, while McWhorter blames society and Boston University for thrusting Kendi into a job that was irresistible in order to do performative antiracism.

How do I feel? In the middle, but closer to Loury than to McWhorter, I suppose, since I did read Kendi’s book and found it without value. An institute founded on his ideas was almost bound to fail.  Kendi certainly has to take some blame for not running his center properly and, as people have claimed, for having abused his authority. But I do share McWhorter’s view that it also reflects badly on people’s thoughtless rush to enact antiracism without thinking carefully about whether what you (or BU, in this case) would actually accomplish.  I don’t think Kendi is a fraud or grifter; he simply had neither the intellectual chops nor the administrative skill to become a Big Noise in the academic antiracist movement.

It’s a good discussion, but I can’t help thinking that McWhorter is pulling his punches a bit so he doesn’t look Schadenfreudy.

TED stiffs Coleman Hughes for conveying a message ideologically unpalatable to the woke

September 26, 2023 • 11:30 am

Here’s a TED talk by Coleman Hughes, a really smart young guy (he’s just 27) who’s angered the establishment by not hewing to the standard Kendi-an view on “antiracism”. (I was on his podcast and was really impressed by how much evolution he knew given that he’s a writer with a degree in philosophy who works largely on issues of race.) He’s more of the stripe of John McWhorter, saying things that run counter to what black people are expected to say.

And race is what he talks about in this 13-minute TED talk (below). His theme is basically Martin Luther King’s statement, in his “I Have A Dream” speech, that

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

Hughes goes on to discuss the obsessions of American with race, which has recently led to a worsening of relations of whites and blacks.  The solution: “color blindness”, not a pretense that you don’t notice race, but “support[ing] a principle that we should try our best to treat people without regard to race, both in our personal lives and our personal policy.”

That sounds good, or used to in the days of MLK, but the “color blindness” trope is not in good stead these days. There are many, for example who think that race is not only the most important aspect of someone’s persona, but should be a dominant aspect in how we treat individuals or members of a racial group. But Hughes points out that the “colorblind” philosophy comes not from conservatives, but from early abolitionists and black antiracists. (Also from Martin Luther King, Jr., whose words are either ignored or criticized these days.)

And then Hughes says this:

“Wouldn’t color-blindness render us unable to fight racism? Wouldn’t it mean getting rid of policies like affirmative action that benefit people of color? I believe that eliminating race-based policies does not equal eliminating policies meant to reduce inequality. It simply means that those policies should be executed on the basis of class instead of race.”

He then gives two good reasons why we should use class- rather than race-based policies and give an example of what he says was a “disastrous race-based policy”: the 2020 “Restaurant Revitalization Fund.”  He also mentions traffic cams, which cannot be racially biased, but are opposed by many because they still yield proportionally more violations by blacks than by whites. This disproportionality, or “inequity”, would indicate to a Kendi-an that the cameras are biased against blacks, but of course that’s ridiculous. The answer is that blacks are violating traffic rules more often. But that answer, which must be the correct one, is unacceptable.

At the end, Hughes answers a question by the moderator involving how to maintain colorblindness while auditioning members of orchestras. He gives a good answer.

You may disagree with Coleman, but it would be hard to unless you’re of the Kendi-an stripe. Hughes wants inequality eliminated, but finding the remedy by using class instead of race asthe best proxy for low status on the equality scale.

Watch the short talk:

So far so good. We have a TED talk that, instead of dispensing feel-good bromides, actually challenges prevailing views and inspires discussion.  But that’s not the way TED felt about it. There was pushback, and Coleman’s talk was released in a way that diluted its message. TED even required that if Coleman’s talk were posted by itself, there had to be a related discussion talk posted separately (it was, involving a 1¼ hour debate with NYT antiracist columnist Jamelle Bouie).  I haven’t watched the debate, but you can see it at the link. It’s a real debate, with fixed times to speak and respond).

Click to read Hughes’s take on his experience, published at The Free Press:

Here’s what Coleman says:

Like any young writer, I am well aware that an invitation to speak at TED can be a career-changing opportunity. So you can imagine how thrilled I was when I was invited to appear at this year’s annual conference. What I could not have imagined from an organization whose tagline is “ideas worth spreading” is that it would attempt to suppress my own.

As an independent podcaster and author, I count myself among the lucky few who can make a living doing what they truly love to do. Nothing about my experience with TED could change that. The reason this story matters is not because I was treated poorly, but because it helps explain how organizations can be captured by an ideological minority that bends even the people at the very top to its will. In that, the story of TED is the story of so many crucial and once-trustworthy institutions in American life.

The path to the required ancillary debate was long and convoluted:

TED draws a progressive crowd, so I expected that my talk might upset a handful of people. And indeed, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a handful of scowling faces. But the reaction was overwhelmingly positive. The audience applauded; some people even stood up. Throughout the meals and in hallways, people approached me to say they loved it, and those who disagreed with it offered smart and thoughtful criticisms.

But the day after my talk, I heard from Chris Anderson, the head of TED. He told me that a group called “Black@TED”—which TED’s website describes as an “Employee Resource Group that exists to provide a safe space for TED staff who identify as Black”—was “upset” by my talk. Over email, Chris asked if I’d be willing to speak with them privately.

I agreed to speak with them on principle, that principle being that you should always speak with your critics because they may expose crucial blind spots in your worldview. No sooner did I agree to speak with them than Chris told me that Black@TED actually was not willing to speak to me. I never learned why. I hoped that this strange about-face was the end of the drama. But it was only the beginning.

On the final day of the conference, TED held its yearly “town hall”—at which the audience can give feedback on the conference. The event opened with two people denouncing my talk back-to-back. The first woman called my talk “racist” as well as “dangerous and irresponsible”—comments that were met with cheers from the crowd. The second commentator, Otho Kerr, a program director at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, claimed that I was “willing to have us slide back into the days of separate but equal.” (The talk is online, so you can judge for yourself whether those accusations bear any resemblance to reality.)

TED threatened not to post the talk at all, but then agreed to do so if it were part of a single video that included a “moderated conversation” as an “extension” of the talk.  Hughes naturally didn’t like that, as it would out his talk as somehow different from the others, requiring an “asterisk”.  Finally, TED agreed to post the talk above separately and promote it as it would any other TED talk, but that an ancillary “debate” video would also be posted no fewer than two weeks after Coleman’s talk.  Along with this caveat came TED’s failure to promote Hughes’s talk, so that it got many fewer views than comparable talks (some far less challenging).

Hughes:

I held up my end of the bargain. TED did not.

My talk was posted on the TED website on July 28. The debate was posted two weeks later. By the time the debate came out, I had moved on—I assumed that TED had held up its end of the bargain and was no longer paying close attention.

Then, on August 15, Tim Urban––a popular blogger who delivered one of the most viewed TED talks of all time—pointed out that my talk had only a fraction of the views of every other TED talk released around the same time. Urban tweeted:

There have been a million talks about race at TED. For this talk and only for this talk was the speaker required to publicly debate his points after the talk as a condition for having it posted online. As it is, the lack of standard promotion by TED has Coleman’s talk at about 10% of the views of all the other talks surrounding his on their site.

Two days later, I checked to see if Tim was onto something. As of August 17, the two talks released just before mine had 569K and 787K views, respectively, on TED’s website. The two talks released immediately after mine—videos that had less time to circulate than mine—had 460K, 468K views, and 489K views, respectively. My talk, by comparison, had 73K views—only 16 percent of the views of the lowest-performing video in its immediate vicinity.

My debate with Jamelle Bouie—a New York Times columnist with almost half a million followers on X, formerly Twitter—has performed even worse on TED’s website. As of Tuesday, September 19—after having over a month to circulate—it had a whopping 5K views. That makes it the third worst-performing video released by TED in all of 2023.

Either my TED content is performing extremely poorly because it is far less interesting than most of TED’s content, or TED deliberately is not promoting it. A string of evidence points to the latter explanation: unique among the TED talks released around the same time as mine, my talk has still not been reposted to the TED Talks Daily podcast. In fact, it was not even posted to YouTube until I sent an email inquiry.

Given the stimulating nature of Hughes’s talk, at least in my opinion, I attribute its poor viewership to TED’s failure to promote it. Not putting it on YouTube until Hughes forced them to is absolutely unforgivable.

The lesson, as Hughes points out, is that TED shows all the signs of being an “institution captured by the new progressive orthodoxy,” one in danger of becoming “yet another echo chamber.” Indeed, TED is becoming the NPR of public elocution.

I’ve never been a fan of TED: to me it seems to convey bromides that make the audience feel good, telling them what they want to hear. I haven’t found it intellectually challenging, either. This account by Hughes, and the pushback by TED, confirms my opinion.  Please watch the talk above and, whether or not you agree with it, ask yourself if it deserved substandard treatment, to the extent of not even being put on YouTube.

Of course it didn’t deserve that treatment, but got it because its message challenged the progressive orthodoxy of privileged TED viewers, and TED had to somehow punish Hughes for that.

Peter Boghossian interviews Luana Maroja (and a note on “transracialism”)

August 22, 2023 • 9:30 am

When my colleague, coauthor, and conspirator in crime Luana Maroja, a professor of evolutionary biology at Williams College, was teaching a short summer course at The University of Austin, she was interviewed on video about sex and gender issues by Peter Boghossian, also teaching at the U of A.

The interview, below, speaks for itself: Luana did a superb job clarifying the biological controversies about sex and gender (and Peter asked some great questions to draw her out).  As you can see, she’s spirited, eloquent, and amiable, with the latter trait helping her convey antiwoke truths without being seen as “strident”. She’s a great collaborator. The interview is well worth listening to, and I don’t say that because Luana and Peter are friends of mine.

Here are the YouTube notes:

Luana S. Maroja is a renowned evolutionary biologist, Professor of Biology, and Chair of the Biochemistry & Molecular Biology Program at Williams College. She was taken aback when the Society for the Study of Evolution released a statement promoting sex as a spectrum and declaring the validity of “lived experience” in sexual identity. What would inspire such a misguided, conspicuously anti-scientific declaration? In this conversation with Peter, she answers that question.

In plain language, Luana explains chromosomal differences in mammals and how the sex binary is expressed in animals. She addresses popular arguments about exceptions to the binary, such as variations in sex chromosomes, hormone receptor failure, and developmental sex disorders.

They also discuss: Moralistic and naturalist fallacies, bimodality, being “born in the wrong body,” social constructs, clown fish, non-biologists teaching bad biology, and trans racialism.

Luana S. Maroja earned her undergraduate and master’s degree from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro and her PhD from Cornell University. Her research interests include population ecology, speciation, population genetics, phylogeny, and phylogeography. Luana studies a variety of organisms, including small mammals, insects, and plants, and has published more than 35 scientific papers.

Luana co-authored The Ideological Subversion of Biology, the cover article in the July/August 2023 issue of Skeptical Inquirer magazine.

Chapters

0:00 Intro

6:30 Biological view of gender vs sex

12:40 Can you change sex?

15:23 Gender binary

23:55 Reality denialism

28:00 Reaction to SSE videos

38:13 Biological differences in behavior & expression

43:10 Transitioning/Wrap up

I want to make one point about “transitioning” at the very end, where hey discuss why for the woke it’s not only fine but admirable to transition genders, but not okay to transition races (“transracialism”). The philosophical basis of these two transitions was discussed by philosopher Rebecca Tuvel in a 2017 issue of Hypatia, and caused a big controversy after Tuvel concluded this in the abstract (my bolding):

Former NAACP chapter head Rachel Dolezal’s attempted transition from the white to the black race occasioned heated controversy. Her story gained notoriety at the same time that Caitlyn Jenner1 graced the cover of Vanity Fair, signaling a growing acceptance of transgender identity. Yet criticisms of Dolezal for misrepresenting her birth race indicate a widespread social perception that it is neither possible nor acceptable to change one’s race in the way it might be to change one’s sex. Considerations that support transgenderism seem to apply equally to transracialism. Although Dolezal herself may or may not represent a genuine case of a transracial person, her story and the public reaction to it serve helpful illustrative purposes.

and in the conclusions:

I hope to have shown that, insofar as similar arguments that render transgenderism acceptable extend to transracialism, we have reason to allow racial self-identification, coupled with racial social treatment, to play a greater role in the determination of race than has previously been recognized. I conclude that society should accept such an individual’s decision to change race the same way it should accept an individual’s decision to change sex.

Wikipedia describes the blowback from what I think was Tuvel’s a reasonable conclusion. The fracas included a groveling apology by the journal and the resignation of eight editors. Yet I still don’t see any fundamental philosophical difference between a white person claiming that they have a black identity because they “feel black” and a male claiming that they have a female identity because they “feel like a woman.”

On the other hand, the video above inspired some discussion on the Heterodox STEM site about the transracialism vs. transgenderism issue, and some people perceived a meaningful difference from a woke point of view.ˆ That difference is this: transgenderism is supposedly seen by the woke as turning one into a victim or a member of a protected class: it is a disadvantage. (Although transgender women participating in women’s athletics do accrue an advantage, this is largely denied by the woke.)

In contrast, some (but by no means all) forms of transracialism can confer advantages to people—advantages that are seen by the woke as unfair. The discussion centered on white people like Rachel Dolezal who say they are black because they feel black (she also modified her appearance so she could pass as a black person).  By passing as black if you’re not, several people argued that you would accrue an unfair “affirmative-action-based” advantage in things like college admissions and getting jobs.  Other forms of transracialism could also give one advantages: we’re familiar with Elizabeth Warren claiming she had Native American ancestry, a claim that she thought would give her credibility as a member of an oppressed minority. And there’s the book below by an Indian-American who couldn’t get into medical school because of poor grades until he decided to say he was black, and was immediately accepted by many schools. (He later dropped out.) Click to see the Amazon link:

Two points here. First, not all whites who pass as black will get advantages. I’m not sure how much Dolezal benefited personally from pretending she was black, though she did become president of the Spokane branch of NAACP.  On average, a black person is worse off than a white person in terms of prospects, education, income, and so on. Thus you gain the advantage of white—>black transracialism only if you’re assuming the identity of an “elite” black person, like someone in a position to apply to graduate school. And other forms of transracialism, including blacks assuming the identity of Asians or vice versa, wouldn’t get you these advantages because the assumed identity is not credible on a physical basis (though physical appearance shouldn’t matter).

Thus you could justify a difference between transracialism and transgenderism only if you’re woke, and it’s a practical rather than a philosophical difference.  Transracialism isn’t okay because some forms of it give one an unfair advantage via forms of affirmative action, while transgenderism is always okay because it puts one into a protected class that is said to be oppressed.

That’s one way the two forms of “trans” identity can be differentiated, but only by woke people, and only using practicality and ideology rather than philosophy.  Philosophically, I still agree with Tuvel that there’s no substantive difference between assuming a different gender or assuming a different race.

Jesse Singal sees no problem with transracialism

August 10, 2023 • 10:15 am

Not long ago I pondered the question of whether someone could be “transracial”, saying that they feel like (and assuming the accoutrements of) a member of a race that was not their natal race. After all, if you can be transgender, why not transracial? Rachel Dolezal, a white woman from Spokane who passed for black, is the paradigmatic case of transracialism. But her attempt to be identified as black was rejected by everyone, and she was fired as head of the local NAACP.

Despite that, philosopher Rebecca Tuvel analyzed the transracial question thoroughly, and concluded that “similar arguments that support transgenderism support transracialism.” (For that Tuvel was also demonized, with calls for her paper on the topic to be withdrawn.)

As I reported above, most of the people who want to transition races are trying to adopt an East Asian identity instead of a white one. But as Jesse Singal (below) and I noted, the NBC article by Emi Tuyetnhi Tran about this phenomenon was not in favor of it, copiously quoting critics of transracialism but not a single supporter.

Click to read Singal’s piece on his Substack site:

Singal quotes some of the critics of transracialism, whose arguments don’t make sense to either him or me. Below are quotes from the NBC article:

Experts agree race is not genetic. But they contend that even though race is a cultural construct, it is impossible to change your race because of the systemic inequalities inherent to being born into a certain race.

David Freund, a historian of race and politics and an associate professor at the University of Maryland, College Park, corroborates the idea that a “biological race” does not exist. What we know today as “race” is a combination of inherited characteristics and cultural traditions passed down through generations, he said.

In addition, Freund said, the modern concept of race is inseparable from the systemic racial hierarchy hundreds of years in the making. Simply put, changing races is not possible, because “biological races” themselves are not real.

Just to point out one bit of mishigass: if you can change gender from male to female, aren’t there “systemic equalities to being born into that gender”? And of course being female is inherited but also comes with a “culture” (societal expectations).

At any rate, Singal is puzzled why transgenderism is not only accepted but applauded, while transracialism is throughly damned:

Maybe I’m an ignoramus on this subject, but it certainly seems like race can be “changed” in a sense in certain outlying instances, at least. A Sephardic Jew who traces his recent lineage to Iraq might “look” “blacker” than a light-skinned African American whose grandparents are all from Nigeria, by the standards of the made-up racial category of American blackness. The Sephardic Jew could perhaps “change his race” by simply starting to claim to people he’s just met that he’s black (when the subject comes up), and the African American could pass as white by doing something similar. In this situation, haven’t they effectively “changed their races,” regardless of the particular “systematic inequalities” they face?

I don’t see why “outlying instances,” where you have some phenotypic traits of the race you want to assume, are the only defensible ones. After all, there are plenty of transgender women who look not like women but men, with beards penises, and so on. Singal continues:

That being said, I can’t even tell whether my example applies, because the article doesn’t really define what is meant by “changing race” in the first place. If race is just a social construct — supposedly the progressive orthodox understanding — why couldn’t you change it? If, on the other hand, all Tran is saying is that the “listen to this subliminal audio to change your DNA” part of this online trend is nonsense, then sure, of course that’s true, but wait, I thought race isn’t genetic anyway, so of course that can’t be what’s meant by “changing race,” except race is somewhat genetic (“inherited characteristics”), and. . . well, I’m kind of lost. It’s hard even to  hold this all in your head at the same time.

But despite all this confusion, the article is very clear that whatever race is, and whatever changing your race is, you can’t do it — it’s impossible. That very term is used twice. It’s very important that people recognize that while race is (mostly) a fiction (except when it isn’t, because it has a partial genetic footprint), you just can’t change yours.

Why? I’ve never quite understood that. The article contains a lot of somewhat perfunctory-seeming moralizing about how some people are offended by the idea of someone changing race, the overarching theory, I think, being that you can’t “identify into” an oppressed group, but “this thing offends people” is obviously not the same as “this thing is impossible to do.”

In the end, there is no rational argument against transracialism that I can see that isn’t also opposition to transgenderism. And since I have no beef with transgenderism, neither do I with transracialism, so long as it’s honest. And I think Rachel Dolezal was honest.

The real reason that people oppose changing races, and oppose it no matter what kind of change you’re making, is that for some reason transracialism offends people, as if race is a proprietary characteristic, somehow coded in your being, rather than, as transracial opponents contend, a social construct. And even if race is biologically real—and Luana Maroja and I contend it is to some extent, so is sex. If you argue that a biological man can be considered a real woman, or be accepted as one, why can’t a white person be accepted as black?

Singal argues—and he may be right—that race has become such an important part of people’s identities that it simply cannot be changed, though that doesn’t seem like a good reason to me. After all, gender is also an important part of people’s identities. And so Singal argues that people should take transracialism seriously, and, if they oppose it, give us serious arguments why. He ends with a jeremiad against the ubiquity of race as the essential characteristic of people:

It seems pretty obvious to me that the only way out of racism, in the long run, is for people to recognize that race is mostly made up. Even if it’s not a complete fiction (see haplogroups), of course it’s bad to see people as “black” or “Asian” or “Latino” rather than, first and foremost, individual human beings. These categories are much too broad and they’ve done far more harm than good.

But this view feels moribund in progressive spaces. Instead, it’s important to talk about race all the time. Someone with dark skin is capital-b Black, and this is a very important part of their identity, because race is an essential component of each individual’s identity. Race is so important that we don’t dare violate its sanctity by crossing boundaries that are best left alone.

Doesn’t it seem obvious that this obsession — that’s what it is, at this point — is going to have downsides, in the long run? Shouldn’t mainstream journalism outlets demonstrate some appetite to actually investigate this worldview? Or is the point of mainstream journalism to simply remind everyone, over and over and over, what good progressives are supposed to believe?

The National Science Foundation budgets millions to fight a problem not demonstrated to exist: systemic racism in STEM

July 24, 2023 • 11:30 am

The other day I posted about what I saw as a divisive and ineffectual paper published in Nature Chemistry, a paper called “Critical Race Theory [CRT] and Its Relevance for Chemistry.” The author wasn’t a chemist, but rather an educational psychologist at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Nor did the paper have anything to do with improving chemistry: its thesis was that inequity of minority representation in chemistry was due to ongoing structural racism, and these inequities could be repaired only by thoroughly imbuing chemistry instruction with CRT.  (As one colleague noted, ““I wonder what would happen if chemists started writing papers about the need to use the scientific method in education, and published them in top educational journals.”)

At any rate, other colleagues looked up the author’s c.v., and found that he’d garnered a huge amount of funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF).  Here are the grants listed.

National Science Foundation: 2140901, Collaborative Research: EHR Racial Equity: Examining Blackness in Postsecondary STEM Education through a Multidimensional-Multiplicative Lens. Education and Human Resources Directorate, $8,826,392, Principal Investigator

National Science Foundation: 2217343, RCN-UBE: Deepening and Expanding the Mission and Outcomes of the Re-Envisioning Culture Network. Division of Biological Infrastructure, $500,000, Principal Investigator

National Science Foundation: 2100823, Community for Advancing Discovery Research in Education (CADRE): Expanding the Reach and Impact of Innovations in STEM Education. DRL – Discovery Research K-12, $3,307,943, Co-Principal Investigator

National Science Foundation: 2020709, Louis Stokes Regional Center of Excellence for the Study of STEM Interventions. Division of Human Resources Development, $1,000,000, Co-Principal Investigator

Total: $13,634,335

The researcher’s papers are also listed on the c.v. page, and you can check them out for yourself.

To some scientists who strive (and usually fail) to get NSF grants for doing “regular” science, this whopping pot of money, aimed at achieving equity in STEM, seemed unfair. (Note: I was always funded not by the NSF, but by the NIH.)  At the expense of finding out more about the universe through genuine science, the NSF is busy engaged in achieving social justice. And to do that, it appears, as you’ll see below, that they’re spending a lot of money on “solutions” that in all probability are useless.

Well, you can respond that “It’s the NSF’s job to evaluate these proposals, not the job of other government agencies. After all, the NSF evaluates proposals scientifically, and who better to judge ways to reform STEM?” That’s all well and good, but it’s reasonable to suspect that the standards for evaluating proposals like those above and below may be more lax than evaluating regular science.

But what I want to emphasize here is that the NSF is busy evaluating proposals to study a problem that is likely not even a problem: the problem of “systematic” (or “structural”) racism in STEM, which probably doesn’t exist. Yes, scientists can be racists, but “systematic racism” comprises features of science that are installed and maintained to keep minorities out. As everyone in science now realizes, the field is falling all over itself competing to hire minority professors and students, and this argues against the idea that science is trying to keep minorities out. In fact, it’s just the opposite!

A scientist sent this email after seeing the grant windfall above (and the existence of many other NSF programs addressing “structural racism” in the sciences, like the one below):

In the last couple of years, NSF established a $25 million program to fight systemic racism in science.  Not to find out if there IS systemic racism, not to document it.  No, that was assumed.  This is to fight something that hasn’t even been demonstrated to exist.  If I based a research program entirely on an untested assumption, with no intent to actually test it, I’d be laughed out of the profession.

Everyone knows how hard it is to get funding for doing science. But peddling CRT under the guise of science education — a windfall. This partially explains why universities are willing to hire these people.

Here you can read about that $25 million program (actually, it says the funding will be between $15 million and $25 million), and its aim to dismantle structural racism. Click on screenshot below:

It’s a long solicitation, and you can read it yourself, but note in the excerpts below the emphasis on the importance of addressing “systemic racism” in STEM, as well as the aim to advance equity (proportional representation). The assumption is that systemic racism is the cause of inequity.  The guidelines for the proposal are much longer than this, but you can see the implicit assumption that science is riddled with built-in forms of racism.

Bolding is mine (I haven’t bolded “inequities” as it would be too confusing, but note the word):

All proposals should conceptualize systemic racism within the context of their proposal and describe how the proposed work will advance scholarship of racial equity and address systemic racism

All proposals should have a knowledge generation component.

All proposals should be led by or in authentic partnership with those who experience inequities caused by systemic racism.

All proposals should center the voices, knowledge, and experiences of those who experience inequities caused by systemic racism.

. . . Collectively, proposals funded by this solicitation will: (1) substantively contribute to institutionalizing effective research-based practices, policies, and outcomes in STEM environments for those who experience inequities caused by systemic racism and the broader community; (2) advance scholarship and promote racial equity in STEM in ways that expand the array of epistemologies, perspectives, ideas, theoretical and methodological approaches that NSF funds; and (3) further diversify project leadership (PIs and co-PIs) and institutions funded by NSF.

. . .Efforts to address systemic racism in STEM education are complementary to NSF’s efforts in Broadening Participation in STEM. The portfolio of projects funded by this program should be diverse in theoretical approaches, epistemologies, and methodologies, yet all proposals should 1) conceptualize systemic racism in the context of the project, 2) be led by or in authentic partnership with communities impacted by systemic racism, and 3) articulate a rigorous plan to generate knowledge and/or evidence-based practice via fundamental or applied research.

Conceptualizing Systemic Racism: EDU recognizes that systemic racism is multifaceted and can be addressed in various ways, requiring varied approaches and diverse perspectives. Approaches may include but are not limited to how systemic racism influences STEM knowledge generation, STEM participation and experiences, and access and outcomes in STEM. As the constructs of systemic racism and racial equity may have different meanings in different settings, each proposal should conceptualize systemic racism within the bounds of the project context and indicate how racial equity is advanced by the proposed work. Contexts may include, but are not limited to: preK-12, two-year and four-year undergraduate, and graduate institutions; municipal organizations; STEM workplaces; and informal STEM contexts, such as museums, community organizations, and media.]

. . .Solicitation-Specific Review Criteria: For all Racial Equity projects, the proposer can decide where to include the information that addresses the following questions:

  • How does the proposal conceptualize systemic racism with respect to the proposal topic or context? In what ways will the proposed work advance scholarship of racial equity and address ssystemic racism?
  • In what ways are the voices, knowledge, and experiences of those who experience inequities caused by systemic racism are at the center of the project?
  • How is the project led by or in authentic partnership individuals and communities who experience inequities caused by systemic racism?

I’m calling attention to this just to show you how the NSF, which is part of the government, is using taxpayer dollars in what is likely to be a futile exercise in social engineering.

And, once again I hasten to add that scientists can be racists, and that might act to prevent minority scientists from succeeding. If that is the case, it’s reprehensible and should be addressed. But before you conclude that any racism is “systemic,” you’d better ensure that such is the case. As Davy Crockett said, “Be always sure you are right – then go ahead.”