Mission creep at the FFRF

December 17, 2023 • 12:30 pm

One of my favorite secular organizations is the Freedom from Religion Foundation (FFRF), of which I’m a member of the “honorary board”. But even honorary boards should play an advisory role, and so I’m doing that here by calling attention to the organization’s mission creep.

In previous posts, I noted that the organization, which is dedicated to keeping church and state separate—a most laudatory goal—had branched out into areas that didn’t really aim at that goal. For example, they’ve gotten involved in legislation that promotes the participation of trans women in women’s sports, which is not only not a church/state issue, but is unfair and, I think, harmful to women’s rights. The FFRF also branched out into disability rights. That’s a cause I do support, but is not in the stated ambit of the FFRF. At the time I posted about this, I wrote:

This time, the FFRF is making a push for disability rights. While I’m in favor of disability rights, I don’t see them as connected in any way with the separation of church and state. This latest move, on top of the unwise support for transsexual girls participating in public school sports (especially when they’re post pubescent), shows that the organization is expanding into the realm of social justice, just as the ACLU and SPLC has. In general, I see such an expansion as unwise, especially when it involves misguided stands like those about transgender women athletes.

This, too, isn’t a church/state issue, but in both cases above the FFRF has tried to justify entering these areas by saying that they’re forms of “Christian nationalism.” That is, Christian nationalists may oppose trans activism more than do “regular” Americans, and may also be more often against disability rights, though that connection seems more nebulous. Here’s what the FFRF said about that:

Disability rights are a state/church issue.

While America’s conscience has not consistently recognized this, there are clear ties between the Christian nationalist ideology that pervades legislation and the ongoing reality of stagnant and inadequate disability rights laws. The dangerous theocratic Christian ideology that led to Roe v. Wade being overturned is the same ideology that continues to play a part in the oppression of the 61 million disabled adults across the United States. This ideology has guided both harmful disability rights policy and the dismantling of abortion rights. To put it simply, if you care about disability rights, then you also care about the separation of state and church

That didn’t convince me that much. Several of us wrote to the FFRF about this expanding mission, but the organization simply stuck to its guns that these are church/state issues.

Now the FFRF has expanded its mission again—this time promoting voting rights and some legal attempts to make it hard for minorities to vote, even if they’re citizens. That, too, is a form of activism I favor, but, like the cases above, the FFRF justifies this activism as opposing Christian nationalism. In the latest issue of their paper, Freethought Today (click on the headline), there’s an article by Sammi Lawrence, “FFRF’s Anne Nicol Gaylor Legal Fellow,” justifying a push for voting rights on the grounds that opposing those rights is one goal of Christian nationalism. Click the headline to read.

Again, I favor opposing attempts to restrict voting, but that is simply not a church state issue. Here’s how Ms. Lawrence justifies it:

A vibrant, fully franchised electorate is the best guarantee to protect our secular Constitution and government. Without a functioning democracy, the wall of separation between state and church cannot be protected or rebuilt. A diverse and fully enfranchised electorate ensures that no single religion, sect or group can take charge of government and privilege itself or discriminate against others. Protecting voting rights, and thus our democracy, is therefore a state/church issue that should concern all secular Americans

. . . . A three-judge panel in Arkansas State Conference of the NAACP v. Arkansas Board of Apportionment has ruled that private parties, including membership organizations, cannot sue to enforce Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. Judge David Stras, a President Trump appointee who FFRF highlighted in its 2020 report on the Christian nationalist takeover of the federal courts, wrote for the majority, saying only the federal government may sue to enforce Section 2. For context, Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act prohibits states from creating voting laws that discriminate against voters on the basis of race, and it has become one of the cornerstones of our country’s civil rights laws since it was enacted in 1964.

This is thin gruel and tortured logic. To say that this is a church/state issue because only a fully franchised citizenry can enforce the Constitution, or that the federal courts are being infested with Christian nationalists, does not show that voting rights is a church/state issue. If you want to say that, then any belief or act that can be connected with Christianity or Christian nationalism becomes a church/state issue. But fighting for voting rights does nothing to keep that First Amendment wall up.

In fact, I’d say that those who benefit most from enforcing voting rights, minorities who are mostly black, are those most likely to be religious. As a 2018 Pew Poll found, and this has been true for decades, “Black Americans are more likely than overall public to be Christian, Protestant.” That doesn’t mean that they’re more likely to be “Christian Nationalists,” of course, but the more religious someone is, the more likely they are to favor erasing the wall between church and state. Atheists don’t oppose the Establishment Clause.

The issue is certainly one of civil rights, but not Establishment Clause rights.

If the FFRF wants to expand its mission, it should admit that frankly, and not engage in this kind of circumlocution to justify its expansion. It’s unseemly and illogical. And, in the case of transgender activisim, by buying into progressive politics, the creep can even be harmful.

And this is my say as an Honorary Board member. The ACLU and the SPLC were once fine secular organizations devoted to protecting everyone’s civil rights. Now both are circling the drain (the SPLC is actually in the drain) because they decided that social justice is as important—or more important—than civil rights. I’d hate to see my beloved FFRF go the same route.

Coleman Hughes attacks comparisons between Palestine and the struggle of blacks for freedom in South Africa and America

November 24, 2023 • 11:30 am

Coleman Hughes has published this piece in two places: on his own Substack site, and at the Free Press. Since I first noticed it at the latter site, I’ll put the screenshot for the FP version below (click it to read), but you can also access it on his own site here (be sure to subscribe if you read regularly). Hughes, only 27, has already developed into an intellectual force to be reckoned with. (In light of his comparison with the struggles of blacks that’s the subject of his piece, I feel obliged to add that Coleman is black.)

His Wikipedia bio says this:

Coleman Cruz Hughes (born February 25, 1996) is an American writer and podcast host. He was a fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research and a fellow and contributing editor at their City Journal, and he is the host of the podcast Conversations with Coleman

(I was on that podcast once, and found it very enjoyable. For a non-biologist (his undergraduate degree is in philosophy), Coleman knows a ton about evolutionary biology).

The podcast adds this:

Hughes began studying violin at age three. He is a hobbyist rapper—in 2021 and 2022, he released several rap singles on YouTube and Spotify, using the moniker COLDXMAN, including a music video for a track titled “Blasphemy”, which appeared in January 2022. Hughes also plays jazz trombone with a Charles Mingus tribute band that plays regularly at the Jazz Standard in New York City.

That’s what I’d call a polymath!

At any rate, in this piece Hughes discusses several ways in which people have compared the conflict between Israel and Palestine with the “struggle for black freedom”—not only the one right after the Civil War but the continual struggle for civil rights in America that flowered in the 1960s with the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights act of 1964 and 1965. He adds in as well the ending of apartheid in South Africa (remember, Israel is often, and wrongly, called “an apartheid state”).

He makes one valid comparison between blacks and Jews, which is the desire to return to one’s ancestral homeland. In Jews it’s reflected in the continuing migration of Jews to Israel from all over the world after pogroms and other forms of persecution; in American blacks it was the “back to Africa movements”, which began after slavery ended and are most famous for Marcus Garvey’s campaign that brought thousands of American blacks to Liberia. But as far as the struggles of both African and American blacks for freedom, Coleman doesn’t buy the comparison to Israel. But in general Coleman’s comparison is not of the blacks to Israelis Jews, but of the black struggle for freedom with the Palestinian struggle against Israel. And here he finds the common comparisons specious:

A key difference between the nature of the Israeli-Arab conflict and South African apartheid is that Israeli policies in the occupied West Bank—checkpoints, movement restrictions, and so forth—are rooted in legitimate security concerns rather than racism. Because the word security has been dulled through overuse, it is crucial to remember what it really means. Security means preventing what happened on October 7—which Hamas has promised to do over and over if given the chance. No function of the state could be more important.

Some critics of Israel will be quick to point out that defenders of South African apartheid also used “security” as a justification for the apartheid system. The difference is that in the case of South Africa, it was a false pretext. In apartheid South Africa, marriage (and even sex) between blacks and whites was punishable by prison time. South African officials would decide your race (and therefore your fate) by running a comb through your hair. If it ran all the way through without too much resistance, you were considered legally white.

These policies, which lie at the core of apartheid South Africa, were the result not of security concerns but of an ideological obsession with racial classification and a horror at the thought of “race-mixing.” Such policies would be unthinkable in Israel, where Arab Israelis are full citizens, enjoying the right to vote, serve in the Israeli parliament and the Knesset, and even sit on the Supreme Court.

Now it’s never been clear to me whether those who accuse Israel of being an “apartheid state” mean that treating Arab citizens of Israel as second class citizens, which is really the only valid way to say “Israel is an apartheid state”. Such a construal is simply wrong. Arab Israelis have all the rights of Jewish Israelis. They are on the Supreme Court, they sit in parliament (in about the proportion they exist in Israel, about 20%), and it’s forbidden to discriminate against them. In fact, Arab Israeli citizens have more rights than Jewish Israelis, in that they do not have to serve in the IDF unless they want to (all Jewish Israelis must serve at least two years). One more difference: Arab Israelis get their religious holidays off work, while Jewish Israelis get their religious holidays off work. Oh, and the Arab Israelis demanded their own school system, which they got, but they can of course send their kids to non-Arab schools (as Jews can send their kids to Arab schools). The former is more common, I hear, because the “Jewish schools” are perceived to be better. But there is no “apartheid” here: anybody can go to any school they want.

The only other way to construe Israel as an “apartheid” state is the claim that it oppresses and dominates Palestine: an inter-territory form of apartheid. This of course is open to vigorous dispute. One argument, for example, is that Palestinians in the West Bank can’t vote in Israeli elections. However all Palestinians in areas A, B (the two wholly Palestinian areas) and C (mixed Arab and Jew), can vote in Palestinian elections. (Palestine outside of Gaza consists solely of area A and B of the West Bank.) Moreover, a Palestinian Israeli citizen retains their Israeli citizenship forever (as do their kids) if they move to any of the three areas of the West Bank. (Jews are not allowed in areas A and B).

There are other arguments for “apartheid” of course, including the claims that Israel oppresses Gaza or the Palestinian territories, but I don’t want to deal with those right now, except to point out that you could apply similar arguments to other places, like North and South Korea, or Russia and Crimea; but those arguments are never applied.”Apartheid state” is reserved for one country, and one country only.

But I digress. Back to Coleman, who I was glad to see agrees with me that the real apartheid state in this conflict is Palestine. Within the territory they do not allow Jews to settle, much less vote, and they oppress women, gays, apostates, and infidels. Hamas differentially treats its own members compared to Gazan citizens. And if you’re talking between territories, it is Palestine who continually commits terrorism against the citizens of Israel, not the other way around. Further, it is Palestine which inundates its children with hatred of Israel and Jews, while this simply doesn’t happen in Israeli schools. That hasn’t escaped Hughes’s notice:

As with every society on Earth, there is racism in Israel. But the truth is that if you’re looking for the closest analogue to the racist propaganda experienced by blacks in European-offshoot societies, you will find it not on the Israeli side but on the Palestinian side. Consider the ghoulish, antisemitic TV programs that indoctrinate Palestinian children. There is no Israeli equivalent.

There is yet another inconvenient fact for those who want to reduce the Israeli-Arab conflict to a competition between European settlers and people of color: the majority of Israeli Jews are not European. They are Mizrahi Jews—hailing from the Middle East and North Africa. What’s more, it is not the European Jews but the Mizrahi Jews—who are difficult to visually distinguish from Palestinians—that form most of the voting base of the right-wing parties that Israel’s critics consider to be the truly racist ones.

This difference between Israel and Palestine in the degree and nature of intra-country oppression as well as in the kind of brainwashing and hatred poured into Palestinian but not Israeli children is so striking that those who make accusations of Israel as the world’s only “apartheid state” are sliding towards antisemitism—if they aren’t that way already. Those accusations, as unfounded as they are, are touchstones of either active or latent antisemitism—similar to those who shout the genocidal “From the river to the sea. . ” chant.

As for the American struggle for black freedom, Hughes also rejects comparisons with Palestine and Israel:

When ideologues co-opt the African American freedom struggle and compare it to the Palestinian national movement, they do black Americans a grave disservice. Black Americans (aside from a fringe) did not seek to dominate and destroy white society, as Martin Luther King Jr. emphasized frequently in his speeches. African Americans pursued equality before the law and better economic circumstances. In black history, you can find the occasional Nat Turner, the slave who led a rebellion and advocated killing all whites. But compared to the leaders of the struggle—giants like Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King—radicals like Turner amount to a footnote in the black American struggle for equality.

Even early Malcolm X, the most prominent mouthpiece for black radicalism, was not interested in a violent takeover whereby blacks would run all of America and render whites second-class citizens. When he expressed black nationalism as more than a metaphor, he made clear that he was interested in a partitioning of black and white states inside America or a black ethnostate somewhere outside of America entirely.

Palestinian leaders, by contrast, seek dominion over all the land existing between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.

. . . .As for tactics, there is nothing in the history of mainstream African American political activism analogous to Hamas’s use of its own people as human shields; their use of a civilian hospital as a torture chamber; their denial of resources to their own people despite billions of dollars in international aid; their system of cash rewards to incentivize suicide bombings against civilian targets; their indiscriminate rocket fire on civilians; their practice of taking children and the elderly as hostages; and the combination of millenarianism and genocidal bloodlust evoked in their founding charter.

If you’d like to defend Hamas, then go ahead. But do not take the easy way out by making farcical comparisons between the black freedom struggle and Palestinian nationalism or between European colonialism and Zionism.

If you disagree, you’re free to do so here, even though most of these words are Coleman’s. However, I happen to agree with them.

The degree of historical ignorance—probably willful ignorance—of sloganeering in this war is appalling. We have not only the “apartheid state” trope, but also the “from the river to the sea” mantra, and, finally, the “anti-Zionism is not antisemitism” claim. I’ve already discussed the last one, explained why it’s wrong, and discussed why there’s no coherent interpretation of antizionism that isn’t at bottom antisemitism. But I’ll leave that one for now.

Debate tomorrow: “Resolved, that STEM is systematically racist”

November 1, 2023 • 10:30 am

My partner in crime, evolutionist Luana Maroja of Williams College, is going to be debating a touchy question tomorrow evening: the proposition given in the title (she’s on the Negative side). Her debate partner, Erec Smith, is a research fellow at The Cato Institute and teaches rhetoric and composition at York College. The Affirmative team includes Chad Womack (Senior Director of National STEM Programs and Initiatives) and Jaret Riddick (Senior Fellow at Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology); while the moderator, Nadine Strossen, is a lawyer and activist who used to be the national president of the ACLU.

The debate is TOMORROW, Thursday November 2, at 8 p.m. Eastern time, and will be broadcast live on YouTube (site given at bottom). Mark your calendars.

Here’s the announcement:

Join MIT Free Speech Alliance (host) and Heterodox Academy (co-sponsor) at MIT on November 2 at 8:00 pm ET for an Oxford-Union style debate about whether STEM is systemically racist.

The event will be conducted as a modified Oxford-Union style debate between two teams. There will be an audience Q&A period at the end. Every listener will be their own judge, no “winner” will be declared.

Debate proposition: “Resolved, that STEM is systemically racist.”

Time and place: Thursday, November 2, 2023, at MIT’s Wong Auditorium (E51-115). Lobby opens at 7pm for light refreshments and interaction with sponsors. Auditorium doors open at 7:45pm. Debate and streaming video begins at 8:00pm. The debate will run for approximately one hour followed by audience Q&A.

Attendance is free. Registration is not required; however only registered attendees will be guaranteed a seat in the auditorium. Speakers will be set up in the lobby for any overflow. In-person attendees can register at this link. Those without an MIT Sloan Login can sign up for a free account by pressing “Sign Up” under the First Time User button.

No pre-registration will be required to watch the livestream video, which will be broadcast nationally via YouTube.

And here’s the YouTube site; just click on it tomorrow at 8 p.m. Eastern time.

UPDATE: Now that this is posted (click below), Luana has added a transcript of her remarks and some post-debate notes at Heterodox STEM.

Co-leader of N.Z.’s Māori Party claims that Māori are a genetically superior group

September 15, 2023 • 11:30 am

Is it okay for oppressed minorities to evince blatantly racist attitudes, claiming, for example, that they are “genetically superior to other groups”? (Needless to say, the claim I’m discussing here is not backed by evidence.)

I’d argue that no, dismissing entire groups as inferior based purely on stereotypes is wrong, whoever does it. But it’s even worse when the racist is a co-leader of an important political party in a Western nation. And what’s triply bad is that the national press and government of that country, which happens to be New Zealand, fails to call out the racist.

That is, of course, because the racist is Rawiri Waititi, a Māori who is co-leader of Te Pāti Māori (TPM): the Māori party in New Zealand’s House of Representatives. And the report, which I can’t find elsewhere, comes from the World Socialist Website (click below to read). On the other hand, the racist quote seconded by Waititi comes from The Northland Age, part of the New Zealand Herald, the country’s most widely read newspaper:

Here’s the new excerpt, and the bolding is mine:

In an interview with TVNZ on Sunday, Rawiri Waititi, co-leader of Te Pāti Māori (TPM, the Māori Party) defended the blatantly racist statement: “It is a known fact that Māori genetic makeup is stronger than others.”

The statement was made to the Northland Age in September 2020 by TPM candidate Heather Te Au-Skipworth while outlining the party’s call for a $100 million fund to invest in “Māori sport.” It was then added to TPM’s website and was only removed last year after the far-right ACT Party complained about it.

TPM did not issue a public retraction or apology. Now, with an election approaching on October 14, Waititi has doubled down on defending the claim that indigenous Māori are a superior race.

His comments reveal the utterly reactionary character of Māori nationalism, a form of racial identity politics that is dressed up as progressive by the New Zealand political and media establishment. They highlight the sham being perpetrated by liberal commentators such as the Daily Blog and pseudo-left groups like the International Socialist Organisation (ISO), which are supporting TPM as a “left-wing” party.

Speaking to TVNZ interviewer Jack Tame, Waititi defended the comment by stating: “How can it be racist when you’re trying to empower a people that are climbing out from the bottom of the bonnet [sic] of colonial violence for the last 183 years?”

He continued: “We’re trying to rebuild our people… [after] years and years of colonial violence on our people. And so why can’t we call ourselves magic? Why can’t we call ourselves proud? Why can’t we believe in ourselves? And why can’t we say to our people that your genetics mean something, that you can be proud of that?

Umm. . . yes, of course the Māori can believe in themselves and empower their people. Yes, they can be proud, though calling themselves “magic” is a bit too close to superstition for my taste. And of course your genetics does “mean something”, like which group you’re most closely related to (I’m betting on Polynesians).

But what you can’t say is that your group has a “stronger genetic makeup” than other groups. The term “stronger” is meaningless here, and is not used by geneticists to compare genomes of different groups.

The original statement was apparently meant to refer to sports, as seen in the quote below from Heather Te Au-Skipworth, but then she extended it to intellect as well. Here’s the statement from the 2020 NZ Herald:

“Exercise has been a big part of who we are, how we came here and how we would traverse the lands of Aotearoa,” TeAu-Skipworth said.

“Māori invented many sports prior to European arrival – running, swimming, fishing, waka, hunting, kī o rahi, taiaha/mau rakau/te whare tū taua, to name a few – all examples of a tūpuna mindset, an ancestral way of being and acting that we call Whānau Pakari…

To interrupt, I doubt that hunting, swimming, fishing, and running were literally invented by Māori. This cannot be true because people were doing these things all over the world well before the Māori came to New Zealand about 800 years ago (e.g., the Olympics in ancient Greece). Hers is just a dumb statement that is not at all specific to the Māori.

Te Au-Skipworth continued:

“There is much to be taught and learnt from the navigators of our past and how we can use that mātauranga to sail and paddle our way into a future frame by Whānau Pakari.

“It is a known fact that Māori genetic makeup is stronger than others. When there is commitment, dedication and great support around Māori to achieve a high standard in sport, it is guaranteed that Māori will thrive.

“Our ancestors were not just athletic, they were also strategic thinkers with intentions to survive. This all required stamina, resilience, endurance, speed, agility and logic.

It was racist when she said it, and it’s racist when Waititi says it. As the anonymous Kiwi who sent me this link said:

Surprisingly (or not), neither the media nor the Race Relations Commissioner has shown any interest.

If a white New Zealander said that “colonialist genetics were stronger than Māori genetics”, it would be all over the Kiwi news as an arrant example of racism, which it would be. So it’s telling that when a big-time Māori politicians says something equivalent, it’s ignored by the press, the government, and the public. That is what is known as “the soft bigotry of low expectations,” and all decent Kiwis, whether Māori or “colonialists”, should be demanding retractions and apologies.

Don’t hold your breath. It would be considered racist to call anything said by a Māori “racist.” That’s how far the fear has spread in New Zealand.

The end of affirmative action

June 27, 2023 • 10:45 am

Here’s a prediction that’s a no-brainer: this week the Supreme Court will override the Bakke decision and rule that race-based school admissions are unconstitutional. (Several states, including California, have already done this.) This will leave schools in a quandary, since nearly all universities have declared that they’re in favor of “diversity” (they mean ethnic diversity), but they’ll no longer be able to attain it using race as one criterion for admission. (Bakke prohibited “quotas”.)

The title of the article below, from the Free Press, is a bit misleading, as we already know what will happen: schools will try to do an end run around the Court’s ruling by eliminating or downgrading indices of “merit” like grades or test scores, and concentrate intead on “holistic admissions”, a backet of intangibles that includes skin color, ethnicity, and “personality”.

And it’s the “personality” issue that ultimately brought this case to the Supreme Court. Investigation of Harvard’s admissions policy revealed that assessment of personality scores was used, probably deliberately, to lower the apparent “merit” of Asian American Applicants. As the article below notes:

A 2018 analysis of 160,000 applicant records uncovered during discovery in the suit showed that Asian Americans, while outperforming every other group on academics and extracurriculars, received low marks from Harvard admissions officers when it came to personality traits—lowering their odds of admission. Asian American students were consistently deemed less “likable, courageous, kind, and respectable.”

That this method was invidious was revealed by showing that when applicants were interviewed in person by Harvard alums or other university people, their scores were not lower than those of other groups. They were lower only when Asian Americans were assessed on paper by admissions officers who never met them. To me, this gave little doubt that there was deliberate discrimination going on here, though two sets of Federal courts unaccountably ignored this and ruled for Harvard. An appeal took the case to the Supreme Court.

As I’ve said before, affirmative action is a tough one for me. I am pretty much a merit-based admission person, but I don’t want to see colleges—especially “elite ones”—devoid of people of color. There’s something about the “optics” of that situation that bothers me. We are a multicultural and multiethnic America, and that should be reflected in higher education. On the other hand, I don’t favor using “holisitic” admissions, which, in the Harvard case (and probably others) led to palpable racism against Asian Americans. One solution I’m gravitating towards is class based admissions, which acts to give up a leg to all the socioeconomically disadvantaged regardless of ethnicity, and it’s legal.

I do not, however, favor lowering the merit bar so much that people unqualified to attend a college get in. After all, there are tons of colleges with widely varying admission standards, there are also technical colleges, and, as John McWhorter claims, perhaps not everyone needs to go to college. But in effect, there’s higher education for everyone.

At any rate, this article tells you what you really know: “holistic admissions” is in the offing. Click to read

Quotes from the piece are indented. The article begins by recounting what UC Berkeley did to boost diversity after affirmative action was banned in California, first by university rules and then by law:

Ultimately, the task force concluded that, to achieve racial diversity and not violate University of California policy, it had to deemphasize quantitative yardsticks like grades and test scores and focus on other things. “The prevailing opinion was that if we focused on these qualitative assessments of a person’s interests, lived experience, that would contribute to the diversity of students,” Carson said.

The task force’s conclusion was borne out when, in the spring of 1997—after affirmative action had been prohibited at the University of California but before Boalt could implement the task force’s recommendations—the numbers of minority students admitted to the law school plummeted.

That year, the number of black students admitted to Boalt declined from 9.2 percent the year before to 1.8 percent. Latino admits dropped from 4.2 percent to 2 percent. Meanwhile, the proportion of Asian American students jumped from 15.5 percent to nearly 19 percent, and that of white students, from 57.3 percent to nearly 68 percent.

Which made the task force’s proposal all the more urgent.

Within a few years, admissions officers across the country started to call the new ideas “holistic admissions” or “holistic review.” It sounded more palatable than affirmative action, but really it was a way of achieving the same outcome without saying so explicitly.

Over the past three decades, colleges across the country—public and private—have adopted this approach in an effort to boost their student bodies’ racial diversity.

“Holistic” now includes as a criterion “lived experience”:

Yvonne Berumen, the vice president of admissions and financial aid at Pitzer College, east of Los Angeles, shared Green’s perspective. “One of the most important things in the admission process is the lived experience,” she said. “Race is a part of that.” (“Lived experience,” affirmative action critics said, is like “holistic admissions” or “diversity.” It’s a way of signaling a preference for black and Latino students, while not appearing to be discriminatory.)

If schools are barred from taking all that into account, Berumen said, “it would really change the demographic landscape of higher education.”

The “Green” above is Sonia Green, a black student at Duke, who makes no apologies for using “lived experience” as a criterion:

Green said that the old, meritocratic way of determining who gets into elite universities was actually discriminatory. “Being colorblind is racist, because it erases part of somebody’s identity,” Green said. “By saying that you don’t see someone’s race or you don’t see their color and you just see them as a person, it tells black students that you don’t see the communities that they’ve grown up in and you don’t see the experiences that have made them who they are.”

She suggested that Asian Americans who felt as though they’d been discriminated against by elite universities should rethink that. “I don’t think it’s just because you’re Asian,” Green said. “It’s probably because the school didn’t see you as being a good fit, or the school didn’t get to know enough about you as a person.”

But the problem with this is that ethnicity is not a great indicator of “lived experience”. Does a well-off Nigerian student, or a black student from a middle-class home, have the same “lived experience” as, say, a kid from an impoverished home on Chicago’ South Side? I doubt it, yet I don’t doubt that race will be an important component (if not the only component) of “lived experience.” Green’s view seems to be that there is a relevant commonality of the communities that black student grew up in that should give them a leg up in admissions. Well, you can make the argument that ethnicity is a good index of lived experience, but you don’t need it if you use socioeconomic status, combined with merit, as criteria for admissions.

Further, the “holistic” route was exactly what was used to keep Jews out of places like Harvard in the earlier 20th century:

In the 1920s, he recalled, Ivy League schools introduced “holistic admissions” to keep out high-achieving Jewish newcomers—only then they simply called them quotas. The much revered Harvard Man (or, for that matter, the Yale Man or Princeton Man) was a type: WASPy, athletic, well-connected, well to do.

After World War II, the old antisemitism gave way to the new meritocracy, which emphasized quantitative metrics like the SAT and grade point average to ensure that discrimination against Jews or any other unwanted minority wouldn’t rear its ugly head.

One asks: why do we consider it odious to have used holistic criteria to keep Jews out of schools, but perfectly fine to use the same criteria to keep Asian Americans (or whites out of schools)? You can respond that “discrimination like that is okay if it allows for more blacks and Hispanics to get into college,” but the whole problem is moot if you use socioeconomic criteria, which of course are correlated with ethnicity, but not perfectly. And to me, the imperfect correlation makes the whole process fairer, for there are disadvantaged people in every group.

The article winds up by noting that Asian Americans are pretty divided on the “holistic admissions” issue, but are gradually moving against this kind of affirmative action as they’re gravitating more towards the political right. In fact, as a new YouGov poll reveals, “considering race at all in the admissions process is viewed as unacceptable by 65% of Americans, while 25% say race should be allowed to be considered among other factors. About half of Democrats (48%) and Black Americans (47%) reject allowing colleges to consider race in admissions decisions.”

The graph:

I didn’t realize that so many Americans were opposed to any consideration of an applicant’s race. Surprisingly, 9% more black and 34% more Hispanics oppose using race as even one of several criteria. Even 8% more Democrats oppose affirmative action than support it. (The gap, of course, is much larger among Republicans, who don’t differ much from Independents.

Well, the decision will come down, perhaps today but almost surely within a week. Affirmative action will be dead, singing with the Choir Invisible. And colleges are already plotting workarounds. This will involve devaluating data like grades and test scores, and more “holistic” admissions. But I don’t think that, in the future, universities will be able to get away with what Harvard did: using bogus “holistic” criteria to achieve the ethnic mix they want. Let’s just think about to socioeconomic status, with more consideration of measurable “merit” and less “holism”.

h/t: Rosemary, R.

Big Brother is coming: machines to catch implicit bias in the workplace

March 20, 2023 • 1:15 pm

What if you had an Alexa-like device around to monitor your behavior, especially your “implicit biases”? Would that bother you? And if you knew you were being monitored, would it affect your behavior? And if it did affect your behavior, would it do so permanently, or only so long as you knew you were being monitored?

Well, first we have to know if the concept of “implicit bias” is meaningful. People may be biased, but it may be something that they recognize: explicit bias that’s kept largely private. In fact, that’s what seems to be the case: data show that not only is there no commonly accepted definition of “implicit bias”, but ways to measure it, most notably the “implicit association test” (IAT) are dubious and give widely varying results for single individuals. Further, ways to rectify it don’t seem to work.

In a post from earlier this month, I reprise psychologist Lee Jussim’s many criticisms of implicit bias. Even if you take the most generous view of the topic, you have to admit that we know little about it, very little about how to measure it if it’s real, and nothing about how to rectify what the tests say is “implicit bias.”. In other word, it’s way too early to start ferreting it out, much less asserting that it’s ubiquitous. Implicit bias (henceforth “IB”) is one of those concepts that we can’t get a handle on, has been largely rejected by psychologists and sociologists, but is nevertheless taken for granted by the woke. Who needs stinking data when a concept meets your needs? The first paragraph of the piece below shows that a highly controversial topic is just accepted as true when it’s ideologically convenient.

The piece below, from Northeastern University in Boston, outlines the proposals of two researchers to measure “implicit bias” remotely, with the aim of eliminating it. Click to read:

The article assumes from the outset, without any justification, that the bias is there and is also ubiquitous. It further claims that implicit bias is costly because (again assuming again that it’s real), it demoralizes workers who are its targets—and that costs money:

Studies have shown that implicit bias—the automatic, and often unintentional, associations people have in their minds about groups of people—is ubiquitous in the workplace, and can hurt not just employees, but also a company’s bottom line.

For example, employees who perceive bias are nearly three times as likely to be disengaged at work, and the cost of disengagement to employers isn’t cheap—to the tune of $450 billion to $550 billion a year. Despite the growing adoption of implicit bias training, some in the field of human resources have raised doubts about its effectiveness in improving diversity and inclusion within organizations.

I reject the assertion of the first paragraph entirely, for the data (while sometimes conflicting) do not show that this kind of bias is ubiquitous—or even exists. Note as well that in the second paragraph “implicit bias” has now become “bias”, yet they are two different things. One is a subconscious form of bias, the other more explicit and recognized by its proponent. And, of course, the paragraph assumes that employees who perceive bias are actually receiving bias rather than acting out a victim mentality, and we just don’t know that. (I’m not denying that racism and sexism exist; just that it’s subconscious, ubiquitous, and has the financial effects noted above.) This being America, of course, the goal is not a more moral business, but a more lucrative one.

But technology is here to fix the problem! All we have to do is eavesdrop on people interacting, analyze what you find, and then use it to “rectify” the behavior of the transgressors. Problem solved!

But what if a smart device, similar to the Amazon Alexa, could tell when your boss inadvertently left a female colleague out of an important decision, or made her feel that her perspective wasn’t valued?

. . .This device doesn’t yet exist, but Northeastern associate professors Christoph Riedl and Brooke Foucault Welles are preparing to embark on a three-year project that could yield such a gadget. The researchers will be studying from a social science perspective how teams communicate with each other as well as with smart devices while solving problems together.

“The vision that we have [for this project] is that you would have a device, maybe something like Amazon Alexa, that sits on the table and observes the human team members while they are working on a problem, and supports them in various ways,” says Riedl, an associate professor who studies crowdsourcing, open innovation, and network science. “One of the ways in which we think we can support that team is by ensuring equal inclusion of all team members.”

The pair have received a $1.5 million, three-year grant from the U.S. Army Research Laboratory to study teams using a combination of social science theories, machine learning, and audio-visual and physiological sensors.

Welles says the grant—which she and Riedl will undertake in collaboration with research colleagues from Columbia University, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and the Army Research Lab—will allow her and her colleagues to program a sensor-equipped, smart device to pick up on both verbal and nonverbal cues, and eventually physiological signals, shared between members of a team. The device would keep track of their interactions over time, and then based on those interactions, make recommendations for improving the team’s productivity.

. . .As a woman, Welles says she knows all too well how it feels to be excluded in a professional setting.

“When you’re having this experience, it’s really hard as the woman in the room to intervene and be like, ‘you’re not listening to me,’ or ‘I said that and he repeated it and now suddenly we believe it,’” she says. “I really love the idea of building a system that both empowers women with evidence that this is happening so that we can feel validated and also helps us point out opportunities for intervention.”

Addressing these issues as soon as they occur could help cultivate a culture where all employees feel included, suggests Riedl.

A device on the table watching and filming everyone! Now THAT will lead to a freewheeling discussion, right?

But the problem Welles addresses is real. As I’ve said before, when I started teaching graduate seminars, one of the first things I noticed, since these were mostly discussion of readings, was that the men tended not only to talk more than the women, but tended to talk over the women. Not only that, but many times I’ve seen a woman student make a good comment, followed up by a comment from a man, only to have the good comment attributed to the man. Since then, discussions with other women have convinced me that this problem is widespread. It doesn’t make for a good learning environment, and it saps the confidence of women.

Now I’m not sure if the male behavior I saw reflects bias, much less implicit bias: it could just be the tendency of men, especially young ones, to be more aggressive and domineering. But it still needed fixing.

The way I fixed this was simple. At the beginning of the quarter I laid out discussion rules including these: everybody gets to finish what they’re saying, and every comment must either address the previous comment or say something like, “I’d like to switch gears now.” If a woman wasn’t participating enough, I would call on her more often to summarize papers, and myself follow up on her comments.

In my mind, at least, this solved the problem, so that by seminar’s end both men and women students were pretty much equal in participation. I did NOT have to take the most vociferous men aside and tell them that they were being domineering and bossy. That might have solved the problem, but at the expense of hurt feelings and divisiveness, as well as resentment.

So would it improve matters to have an Alexa and a camera on the table, some kind of “implicit bias” or “body language” analyst to go through the data, and then rectify the problem: presumably by calling out the offender? This not only smacks of Big Brotherhood, but is confrontational, divisive, likely to breed resentment, and, most of all, not a fix of the problem. I’m not saying that my own rules fixed the problem permanently, either, but I am not a machine but a human being who could act on the spot, and my job was to promote learning for everyone by giving everyone equal opportunity to participate. In contrast, the goal of an Alexa Bias Controller seems to be not the promotion of learning, but social engineering based on post facto analysis.

Just sayin’.

A black doctor speaks up against implicit bias training (required for all California MDs, including her)

February 23, 2023 • 10:00 am

We all know that data show implicit bias training doesn’t work, and could even be counterproductive by making blacks and whites more suspicious of each other. And yet there’s been no move to ditch implicit bias training; in fact, it seems to be spreading. As physician Marilyn SIngleton, a black doctor in California, reports, it’s required in California as part of “continuing education” for doctors—50 hours of implicit bias training—mostly involving race, but also gender, age, and disability—every two years. That’s a lot of hours for a method that doesn’t work! Its continuance and spread serve only to show that the organizations that mandate the training are doing something. But because the training is useless, this is purely a show of virtue.

You can read Singleton’s Washington Post op-ed by clicking on the screenshot below, and I found it archived here for free. I recommend reading the whole thing because it’s very good. (And it’s in the WaPo!)

Singleton is identified this way:

Marilyn Singleton is a board-certified anesthesiologist and a visiting fellow at the medical advocacy organization Do No Harm.

She’s also pretty courageous, because I can imagine the social-media opprobrium, not to mention ostracism among her fellow doctors, for speaking the truth:

A few quotes, but really, I’d like to quote the whole thing:

When I graduated with a medical degree in 1973, a Black woman in a class of mostly White men, there was a real sense that the days of obsessing over skin color and making race-based assumptions about our fellow human beings was finally fading — and, hopefully, soon gone for good.

Apparently not. That racial obsession has come rushing back — in academia, politics, business and even in my beloved medical profession. But now it’s coming from the opposite direction. The malignant false assumption that Black people are inherently inferior intellectually has been traded in for the malignant false assumption that White people are inherently racist.

That is the basic message conveyed by “implicit bias training,” which is now mandatory for California physicians; it is a message that I believe is harmful both to physicians and patients. There is a sad irony in all this, because the misguided focus on racism is intended to improve the health and well-being of Black patients in particular.

. . . In California, where I’ve been licensed since 1974, every physician is required by law to participate in this racially regressive practice. Doctors must take implicit bias training not just once but as part of the curriculum of “continuing medical education,” for at least 50 hours every two years, required for their medical license renewal.

The training’s focus is on exactly what the name suggests: Deeply ingrained prejudice toward people of different races. There is no room for debate, for the law states baldly: “Implicit bias, meaning the attitudes or internalized stereotypes that affect our perceptions, actions, and decisions in an unconscious manner, exists.”

And the law asserts as fact that implicit bias is responsible for “racial and ethnic disparities in health care,” particularly for Black women.

JAC note added later: It’s not clear exactly how many hours of the continuing education is devoted to implicit bias training, as one reader points out below. However, more than one hour is too much. I’ve been to a class on implicit bias at the U of C, and have also taken implicit bias tests (I was diagnosed as “not biased,” but I can see how easy it would be to game those tests.) I found the class patronizing and almost insulting when they asked us to tell stories about how we may have manifested implicit bias.

Here’s part of what that law says: flat assertions with no evidence to back them up (bolding is mine)

Section 1.

The Legislature finds and declares all of the following:

Implicit bias, meaning the attitudes or internalized stereotypes that affect our perceptions, actions, and decisions in an unconscious manner, exists, and often contributes to unequal treatment of people based on race, ethnicity, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, disability, and other characteristics.

Implicit bias contributes to health disparities by affecting the behavior of physicians and surgeons, nurses, physician assistants, and other healing arts licensees.

Evidence of racial and ethnic disparities in health care is remarkably consistent across a range of illnesses and health care services. Racial and ethnic disparities remain even after adjusting for socioeconomic differences, insurance status, and other factors influencing access to health care.

African American women are three to four times more likely than white women to die from pregnancy-related causes nationwide. African American patients often are prescribed less pain medication than white patients who present the same complaints, and African American patients with signs of heart problems are not referred for advanced cardiovascular procedures as often as white patients with the same symptoms.

Implicit gender bias also impacts treatment decisions and outcomes. Women are less likely to survive a heart attack when they are treated by a male physician and surgeon. LGBTQ and gender-nonconforming patients are less likely to seek timely medical care because they experience disrespect and discrimination from health care staff, with one out of five transgender patients nationwide reporting that they were outright denied medical care due to bias.

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