Category: racism

Quillette’s most popular article of 2021: A piece by Glenn Loury

December 27, 2021 • 1:00 pm

Quillette sent out an email listing the ten most popular articles of 2021, with ranking judged by page views.  This article, which made #1, which featured in a post I made in February. If you’ve read it, it bears reading again. Or perhaps you missed it. At any rate, it’s by Glenn Loury, a Professor of Economics at Brown University and a black man who can risk writing such an article without being called a racist. But that didn’t stop him from being called an “Uncle Tom”, an “Oreo” (brown on the outside, white on the inside), or “white adjacent.” I think the article is very good in discussing the taboo subjects that must be tackled if we’re to be honest about racial divisiveness and earnest about how to solve it. . My own take is in the first link above.

This a transcript of a talk he gave at Brown University on February 8, and I would have loved to be there to see the audience reaction.  Wait! I just found out, as I should have known, that the lecture is a virtual one, and there’s a YouTube video, which I’ve put below the screenshot. (Click to read, or watch if you want to hear.)

Was the D. C. librarian anti-Semitic?

December 22, 2021 • 12:45 pm

A few days ago I wrote about Kimberlynn Jurkowsky, a librarian in a Washington, D.C. elementary school who was fired for making third-graders re-enact the Holocaust in the school library. These performances included one Jewish kid ordered to play Hitler and then pretend to shoot himself, children pretending to ride trains to the concentration camps, children pretending to dig graves for other children and then  pretend to shoot them, and children pretending to be gassed. The children reported to parents that Jurkowsky, an African-American women, made anti-Semitic remarks during the grotesque theater, told one child that the Nazis killed the Jews because “the Jews ruined Christmas,” and then told the children not to tell anyone what happened.

To me the most likely explanation for this is anti-Semitism. Why else would Jurkowsky tell the children to keep their mouths shut, and make that remark about the “Jews ruining Christmas”? Could it be that I grossly misinterpreted her gesture, and she really was trying to evoke sympathy for the Jews through this charade?  I doubt it, yet some readers thought that.  Here’s part of one comment from a regular reader:

Ok, reading this I got a different impression. I’m going to make a guess that the librarian wasn’t trying to use this role-playing exercise to make a point against the Jews, but against brutal fascist regimes in general, and/or the Nazis in particular. The “anti-Semitic” comment here might have been a ham-fisted way of saying the Germans did it “for a stupid reason.” She didn’t think the school was doing a good enough job at depicting the horrors and wanted to test out her better idea by “tutoring” them. For real.

I’m not saying there’s not been a rise in antisemitism. There obviously has. But this story doesn’t strike me like that. It would have been different if she’d had the “Jews” rounding up the “Palestinians” for the Death Camps, of course.

Of course I had to examine my conclusions, especially because I know some of these commenters as thoughtful people who shouldn’t be dismissed.  But upon re-examination, and some new information, I stand by my first conclusion: Jurkowski was an unstable woman trying to traumatize children and denigrate Jews out of anti-Semitism.

Some of the reasons are given above, but some readers said the children might have misreported the anti-Semitic comments, or the statement about Jews and Christmas might be misinterpreted. I think the most probable hypothesis is that the children reported correctly. I have no idea about how a statement that “the Jews ruined Christmas” as the librarian’s explanation of why the Nazis killed Jews cannot be plausibly interpreted in any way as sympathetic to Jews.

The woman also has a record for fraud, and was fired from her previous job:

Apparently Jurkowski was suspended from teaching in New Jersey after she was convicted of theft and falsifying documents in a tutoring scam. She also lost her teaching license for three years; and there’s one report that she faced a cruelty to animals charge in 2009. How she managed to get the job in Washington with a record like that baffles me.

Remarkably, her Twitter feed is still up, but appears to have been cleansed of her own tweets and contains mostly retweets.  But the only retweets about Palestine and Israel she made that I could find were these. They surely don’t bolster the idea that Ms. Jurkowski is sympathetic to Jews or Israel:

There are, as Angy Ngo says below, pro-Antifa tweets, and Ngo finds pro-BLM tweets, and pro-Nation of Islam tweets. The Nation of Islam is explicitly anti-Semitic, while BLM is pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel.

Now I know all the criticisms that have been leveled at Ngo for not being an objective reporter and for being anti-Antifa.  But I don’t think he’d forge tweets.

I’m just wondering whether, in light of this, and in the complete absence of evidence that Jurkowski had any sympathy for Jews (indeed, she evinces the opposite), people still maintain that her actions were sympathetic to Jews, and that the bizarre Holocaust Exercise she promulgated was designed to make her students (probably mostly black, since she teaches in SW Washington, D.C) more fully feel the horrors of the Holocaust.  To maintain that “She didn’t think the school was doing a good enough job at depicting the horrors and wanted to test out her better idea by ‘tutoring” them. For real.” seems to me a misguided attempt to gild Jurkowski’s acts in the face of all the evidence.

Given all of the above, I’d say that the priors make the best Bayesian inference one of anti-Semitism on Jurkowski’s part. If you have other evidence that she is sympathetic to Jews and wanted to impress on all her students the horrors of the Holocaust, by all means tell me.

Head of Swedish Academy announces that Nobel Prizes will be awarded solely for merit, without gender or ethnicity quotas

December 20, 2021 • 10:00 am
I can’t say I disagree with this announcement, by Goran Hansson, that the Nobel Prizes will continue to be awarded for merit alone and not for fulfilling quotas involving gender and ethnicity. Click on the article from BBC News to see the story, below which we’ll look at another piece on “quotas.”

For some time there have been complaints that there has not been “equity” in Nobel Prizes: that too few women and people of color have won them. These inequities could result from several causes, or a combination of causes, but the one that’s always touted by those who complain is existing structural bias and discrimination. (See this article in Nature for such indictments by two powerful women in science, though it doesn’t mention the Nobels.) The equation of inequities in representation with ongoing bias is a pillar of Ibram Kendi’s ideas on anti-racism.

But there are two other reasons besides structural bias in science.  One is that the dearth of women and people of color reflects past discrimination, so that only now, with biases diminishing towards zero, women and people are color are entering the pipeline to achievement—but haven’t yet reached the stage of professional accomplishment that would garner a Nobel.

The last explanation is a difference in preference coupled with comparative advantage.  It’s well known that, at least in some Western countries, women score as well as men on science achievement tests, and score better than men in reading. That is, women are better overall than men. This means that any lack of achievement of women scientists cannot be due to a comparative lack of scientific ability. Rather, researchers have suggested that women prefer going into the humanities because they are better at it, and want to do what they’re better at (“comparative advantage”). Alternatively it may be that STEM fields simply aren’t as attractive to women as to men. All of these are suggested in the BBC article. (I don’t know any such data on people of color, but of course in the U.S. black and Hispanics score lower than whites and Asians on tests of reading, math, and science.)

But let me quote from the BBC piece:

The head of the academy that awards the Nobel Prizes in science has said it will not introduce gender quotas.

Goran Hansson, head of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, said they want people to win “because they made the most important discovery”.

Since its inception in 1901, 59 Nobel Prizes have gone to women. [JAC: There have been 975 prizes total. The 59 Prizes to women involve 58 women as Marie Curie won twice.]

Maria Ressa was the only woman honoured this year. Marie Curie was the first woman to get the prize – and remains the only woman to get it twice.

“It’s sad that there are so few women Nobel laureates and it reflects the unfair conditions in society, particularly in years past, but still existing. And there’s so much more to do,” Mr Hansson told the AFP news agency.

“We have decided we will not have quotas for gender or ethnicity,” he said, adding that the decision was “in line with the spirit of Alfred Nobel’s last will”.

“In the end, we will give the prize to those who are found the most worthy, those who have made the most important contributions,” he said.

I think that’s a fair decision. If they had decided to fulfill quotas, that would mean giving prizes not to those who make the most important contributions, but to help even out a disparity in sexes and races. So, for example, the 2020 Medicine and Physiology prize shared by Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna was an excellent choice (and one that cut out male competitors), for their work was highly important by anyone’s standards. Nobody can say that these women were chosen to achieve gender parity!

We’ll focus on gender, as we have more data on that, and this is the focus of the BBC article and most complaints about disparity in Nobels.  It’s true that women haven’t received half of the Nobel Prizes over time, and this can be explained by all three factors above, but largely because, due to bias or oppression in the past, there simply weren’t that many women in science (or in literature). I think most of us recognize that this gender bias is disappearing rapidly; indeed, universities throughout the West are trying very hard to recruit women professor and students. But there’s still a disparity in STEM participation. This may or may not  change much in the future (though it’s certainly changed during my lifetime!), but whether we’ll ever achieve gender parity in academic representation—or Nobel Prizes—is something I don’t know. All we can do, and must do, is offer everyone equal opportunity to enter the scientific pipeline, and avoid gender or racial discrimination within the pipe.

More from the BBC and Hansson:

And while more women are being recognised now compared to previous decades, Mr Hansson said, that number was increasing “from a very low level”.

“Keep in mind that only about 10% of the professors in natural sciences in western Europe or North America are women, and even lower if you go to East Asia,” he said.

However, the scientist said they would “make sure that we have an increasing portion of women scientists being invited to nominate, and we will continue to make sure we have women on our committees – but we need help, and society needs to help here”.

“We need different attitudes to women going into sciences… so that they get a chance to make these discoveries that are being awarded,” he added.

Again, the last statement implies structural bias against women, but where are the data that there are “different attitudes to women”? There is no consistent data showing discrimination against women in STEM hiring or grant-getting; in fact, one can cite research showing both sides.  In the absence of consistent evidence, all we can do is avoid personal bias and offer equal opportunities. Note that Hansson also mentions the severe dearth of women in the natural sciences in Asia, Europe, and North America.

When Charpentier got her Prize, she hoped the award would encourage women to go into STEM, but she also noted a comparative lack of interest of women in going into STEM.

From the BBC again:

Last year, scientists Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna became the first two women to share the honour when they were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for developing the tools to edit DNA.

It was the first time any of the science prizes had been awarded to two women without a male collaborator also listed on the award.

At the time, Prof Charpentier said: “I wish that this will provide a positive message specifically for young girls who would like to follow the path of science… and to show them that women in science can also have an impact with the research they are performing.”

She added that there was “a clear lack of interest in following a scientific path, which is very worrying”.

I’ve given my position many times on this site. I favor some forms of affirmative action in academia for minorities, including women (they’re actually more numerous than men), though settling on how to structure that affirmative action is tricky. The affirmative action I have in mind involves accepting students in colleges and universities, and in hiring faculty.  But these preferences should, I think, stop once someone is hired, and they should certainly not apply to awards and prizes. Thus I think the Nobel Committee’s statement is appropriate, though I’m not sure why they made it. Could it be that public pressure was bearing down on the Academy?

Again, all one can do in the face of the latter is to be sure that everyone is made aware of the excitement of science and then to avoid bias. As the following article states, we need to ensure equal opportunity, not equal outcome, for equal outcomes assumes that all groups have identical preferences or interests.

I love this photo of Doudna and Charpentier. I think this is in Stockholm when they got their prizes, but I can’t be sure. It does show some joint award, though, and the affection between the two women, who weren’t really collaborators but independent researchers.

There are those who think that there should be no affirmative action in any aspect of science—that hiring, promotion, funding, and awards in STEM be solely on the basis of merit. One of these is Lawrence Krauss, who wrote the following piece in a recent Quillette (click on screenshot to read):

 

Now Lawrence is talking about disparities between men and women in funding by NSERC in Canada and other countries, not in hiring or awards, but the principle he sets forth is one I agree with:

The standard of “fair access” that NSERC planners set out here implies a fundamental misunderstanding of the difference between mandating equality of opportunity—which is desirable—and mandating equality of outcome. The latter would lead to overt identity-based discrimination against members of groups whose applications, in some cases, would otherwise be successful under a purely merit-based approach. That a major research-funding agency is promoting such a misunderstanding in regard to policy formulation is an issue of some concern.

Where I differ from Krauss is that I favor equality of opportunity above the college-admissions or academic-hiring level, but also some tweaking of outcomes (a bit of equity) to bump up minorities at both levels. Once people are hired, again, the affirmative action should stop. (It goes without saying that I don’t think grossly unqualified people should be admitted to college or hired for professor jobs, as that does nobody any favors.)

Krauss notes that the funding disparity between men and women in Canada (and Australia) is immediately imputed to systemic sexist bias at the present time, but gives data showing that the difference is explained completely by different career stages of grant applicants. At early stages, funding is roughly equal between men and women, but at senior stages men get more funding. But that’s solely because there are simply more men at senior stages of their careers. Here are the data of grants given in Australia and what Krauss says about them:

A bar chart included in a previous Nature article on this subject shows the total value of grants awarded to men and women in 2019, categorized by seniority quintile. In the first (most junior) quintile, women actually were awarded more grant money than men got. In the second quintile, men had a slight edge. This edge grew substantially in the third and fourth quintiles, leading up to a massive difference in the fifth (i.e., most senior) quintile, which shows the most senior male scientists being awarded $81 million, compared to just $21 million for the most senior female scientists. This means that, of the money going to senior scientists, women got just over 20 percent.

The caption: “Male (red) vs. Female (green) Investigator Grant recipients in 2019, by applicant seniority.”

Krauss’s analysis:

The latest Nature article concludes with a quote from Teresa Woodruff, an obstetrician and advocate for women in science at Northwestern University. She describes the data as a wake-up call to funders, who now should “address the issues.” But the Nature analysis glides over one of the more obvious issues lying in plain sight: As the 2019 article showed, there tends to be fewer senior women (just 17 in 2019) applying for grants, as compared to senior men (75). In 2021, the numbers were similar: According to Nature, “at the most senior level … there were about four times more male than female applicants”—an 80/20 male-female applicant split that corresponds almost exactly to the $81 million/$21 million split in awarded 2021 grants.

This pattern has an obvious explanation: There are simply more men than women in the senior ranks of Australia’s health and medical researchers—a fact that shouldn’t surprise anyone, since most scientific fields were, until just a few decades ago, almost entirely dominated by men. Thankfully, this era is over, and Australia’s medical schools achieved gender parity in admissions a long time ago. Thus, one might expect that the funding of male and female medical researchers at the junior level would be roughly even, while being progressively more skewed toward men among older generations—which is exactly what the data reported by Nature shows to be the case.

While this is the kind of data regularly adduced to show structural sexism in STEM, the explanation is not nearly as insidious.

Finally, Krauss makes a more general statement that goes beyond funding:

We have gone down this road before, when strict quotas were placed on Jewish scientists within my own academic sphere, physics, as a means of excluding Jews (including very nearly, future Nobel Prize winner Richard Feynman) from US graduate schools. Today, we properly regard such policies as shameful, both for discriminating against individual human beings and for misdirecting society’s scientific resources. Medical science is a life-and-death endeavor, and decisions about how that science should be funded must be based on the quality of research proposals, not the skin color or sex of those submitting them.

The comparison with Jews isn’t really apposite, however, as Jews were discriminated against: the quotas were the maximum number of Jews allowed to be admitted.  The minority group, in other words, was discriminated against. What Krauss is attacking here are quotas against the majority group that favor minority groups. (I suppose you could see this as a “male quota”).

And I still favor preferential admission and hiring of minorities (but not grossly preferential, is as happening in California) as a form of reparations for past discrimination and, as Charpentier noted, to provide some role models. Again, we should accept only qualified applicants, and any deficit in training can be addressed with mentoring or tutoring.

All applicants for jobs or admissions, however, should exceed some bar decided as “qualified for the slot”. What that means is above my pay grade, but surely far more qualified people apply to America’s best colleges than get into them.

I know the arguments against affirmative action, but I won’t try to counter them now.

h/t: Anna

More infighting among academics about the 1619 Project

December 13, 2021 • 1:30 pm

I can’t remember how I found this article at the American Institute for Economic Research (if a reader told me, apologies for forgetting); I suspect it’s a conservative site but I’m not going to check. I did check on the author of the piece, Phillip Magness, who is an economic historian and Education director at the Institute. The article below also describes his work:

Magness’s work encompasses the economic history of the United States and Atlantic world, with specializations in the economic dimensions of slavery and racial discrimination, the history of taxation, and measurements of economic inequality over time. He also maintains active research interest in higher education policy and the history of economic thought. In addition to his scholarship, Magness’s popular writings have appeared in numerous venues including the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Newsweek, Politico, Reason, National Review, and the Chronicle of Higher Education.

His website shows he’s written a number of books, including one called The 1619 Project: A Critique, which shows you that he’s no fan of the New York Times Initiative. And here’s a screenshot of his book’s contents: Amazon:

The book gets 4.5 stars out of 5 on Amazon, with 793 ratings, but I’ll discount those because those might come from people who object to the 1619 Project on principle because it calls attention to oppression. (I’m trying here to avoid being overly critical of the 1619 Project despite its publicly-revealed problems—some revealed by Magness—because the project’s intentions were generally good. I don’t recommend its curriculum being taught in schools because of the historical inaccuracies, nor do I approve of a woke newspaper using its power to indoctrinate schoolchildren—but past teaching about the history of African Americans, at least when I was a kid, was woefully deficient, and I hope that the Project calls attention to any remaining wrong impressions that need to be righted.

At any rate, what is Magness’s problem? In this article, it’s that Nikole Hannah-Smith, the Pulitzer-Prize-winning instigator of the 1619 Project, used Magness’s own research on slavery extensively to support her thesis, but then deep-sixed his findings and used other sources when she found that Magness was highly critical of other aspects of the Project. The article does have a whiff of sour grapes, but it also reveals the mess that the 1619 Project has become, and the unprofessional way that Hannah-Jones behaves, including ad hominem questioning of historical credentials when someone disagrees with her.

Click on the screenshot to read:

 

The stuff that Hannah-Jones used in the 1619 Project from Magness was his finding that even up to his assassination, Lincoln was looking for a way to export black people (slaves, I presume) to other countries. This was not done as a “Final Solution,” but as a way to remove blacks from the hate and oppression that they’d encounter in the U.S. I suppose Hannah-Jones likes this idea because it seems to knock Lincoln down as “The Great Emancipator”, buttressing the 1619 Project’s initial claim that African-American progress in the U.S. barely depended on white people.

Here’s what Magness says, and it’s not at all flattering towards Lincoln:

Reality is much more straightforward. In addition to being a sincere antislavery man, Lincoln was also a sincere colonizationist who meant what he said when he espoused this position. A substantial body of my own work on the Civil War era investigates this exact question, conclusively showing that Lincoln continued to pursue colonization schemes through diplomatic channels well beyond the Emancipation Proclamation, and likely into the last months of his presidency. When Nikole Hannah-Jones made similar claims in 2019, she was drawing directly on my work as a historian of that subject.

In fact, Hannah-Jones stated as much in a series of now-deleted comments as some of the other historian-critics questioned her claims about Lincoln and colonization.

Then things went sour.

There were certain interpretive differences between my work and the 1619 Project on this point – for example, Hannah-Jones understated the extent to which antislavery motives shaped Lincoln’s support for the measure, which he saw as a pathway to wean the country away from the brutal plantation system. But the historical evidence of Lincoln’s deep connections to colonization was clear, and at least on that point the 1619 Project got it right.

That is, until Hannah-Jones realized that the historian she was citing was also an outspoken critic of other aspects of the 1619 Project.

“What are the credentials, exactly of Phil Magness?” Hannah-Jones fumed in another now-deleted comment after she realized that I had offered a less-than-favorable assessment of her project’s other historical claims, and particularly its error-riddled essay on the economics of slavery by Matthew Desmond. Her fury intensified in January 2020 after Alex Lichtenstein published a lengthy defense of the 1619 Project against his historian critics, attempting to invoke his authority as the editor of the American Historical Review to arbitrate the disputes over its claims about slavery in the Revolutionary through Civil War eras. At the time I pointed out that Lichtenstein – a 20th century historian – was not an expert in the antebellum United States, and was thus not qualified to assume the role of historical judge and jury on specialist claims about that era. Hannah-Jones snapped back, “Lol. You aren’t a specialist in that era either yet that didn’t stop you.”

Setting aside the fact that only a few weeks prior Hannah-Jones herself had been explicitly touting my work on Lincoln’s colonization projects to justify her own claims in the 1619 Project, I’ll simply note that I’ve authored over two dozen scholarly works on slavery and the Civil War era. This includes my aforementioned book, the chapter on colonization in the Essential Civil War Curriculum, as well as multiple peer-reviewed articles on slavery in the U.S. and broader Atlantic world. Hannah-Jones, by contrast, has no known original scholarship to her name of any kind on slavery or this period of American history.

This is more or less academic gossip, but it does show that the academic underpinnings of the 1619 Project, at least insofar as how its director deals with actual historical data, are shaky, especially when she doesn’t argue the data (she just deletes tweets), but questions credentials. That’s not the way to argue, particularly because professional historians with more training and accomplishment than Hannah-Jones have taken issue with important conclusions of the 1619 Project. Those she dismisses because the criticism is from white people:

When James McPherson offered his own less-than-flattering take on Hannah-Jones’s work in November 2019, she responded dismissively: “Who considers him preeminent? I don’t.” McPherson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian of the Civil War, and author of what is widely considered the standard single-volume treatment of the subject, Battle Cry of Freedom. In December 2019, McPherson joined distinguished scholars Gordon Wood, Sean Wilentz, Victoria Bynum, and James Oakes in questioning Hannah-Jones’s attempts to recast the American Revolution as a fight to preserve slavery. Rather than answer them, she dismissed the group as a whole by labeling them “white historians.”

And she’s criticized academics who aren’t professional historians but who weighed in against the Project; you’ll know these people:

Hannah-Jones saved her most brazenly abusive attacks though for African-American critics of the 1619 Project, such as Columbia University professor John McWhorter and journalist Coleman Hughes. When McWhorter, Hughes, and other African-American scholars launched a competitor 1776 Project in February 2020 through the Robert Woodson Center, Hannah-Jones lashed out on Twitter by posting photos of herself making derogatory gestures at her black interlocutors. Although she later deleted the tweets at the apparent request of her employer, Hannah-Jones made Hughes in particular a focus of her continued verbal abuse. “That Ivy League education certainly didn’t do you any favors,” she wrote in another comment to Hughes in August 2020. “Next time screenshot me and don’t quote text me because I’d rather not read your drivel. I tried to find something to quote tweet in that profoundly mediocre 1776 Project essay you wrote, but alas, nothing was worthy.”

Here’s one of those derogatory gestures, though I’m not quite sure what it means. Readers?

At any rate, the idea that Lincoln may not have been as anti-slavery as we thought, something raised by Magness and used and touted by Hannah-Jones, was credited to someone else when Hannah-Jones found that Magness wasn’t fully on board with the 1619 Project:

The 1619 Project book now states only that Lincoln supported “colonization schemes as late as 1862,” and further implies that Lincoln abandoned the program after he issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863. Hannah-Jones’s new source for this revised claim appeared in footnote 38 of her essay: a 2016 popular press book entitled Stamped From the Beginning by Critical Race Theory activist Ibram X. Kendi.

And, having observed Hannah Jones’s behavior through all the criticism, I’ve realized that no real scholar would act the way she did in the face of that criticism, including questioning credentials, making gestures, changing what you wrote without admitting it, and so on.  The Project could have been so much better—and it still has some very good stuff—but the moment the NYT decided to call it the 1619 Project was the moment that they wedded themselves to an ideology and a narrative that could not be altered.

But as a broader matter of principle, Hannah-Jones’s behavior illustrates the absence of basic scholarly integrity from her approach to writing history. Rather than following the evidence where it leads, Hannah-Jones picks and chooses bits and pieces of her arguments from a secondary literature based on whether it conforms to her preconceived political narrative. She approaches citations as a tool by which she can reward other scholars who affirm that narrative. And if a previously-cited scholar runs afoul of Hannah-Jones, she is perfectly willing to alter the “history” presented in the 1619 Project in ways that excise the offending work and replace it with a completely different narrative – provided that its author flatters Hannah-Jones’s own personal politics and ambitions in the process.

Chair of Stanford’s Department of Computer Science sends out woke and confusing email affirming his department’s virtue

December 12, 2021 • 12:30 pm

I’ve spent a lot of time writing and working to try to get colleges and universities—especially mine—to refrain from issuing official political, ideological, or moral statements save under exceptional circumstances.  Freedom of speech is a sine qua non for a decent university, and that goes along with a university not trying to stifle or chill speech by issuing their “own” official positions.  For institutional statements of morality and ideology will necessarily stifle  the speech of those opposed to approved sentiments. We already know that half of college students, and a goodly proportion of professors, are self-censoring lest they incur the wrath of those who have power over them. In colleges, those with power are the Woke. Students and faculty who have issues with wokeness have, by and large decided to keep their mouths shut, and that is not what should be happening in colleges.

It’s for this reason that the University of Chicago not only has the nation’s most respected speech code, the “Chicago Principles of Free Expression“, but also a supporting set of principles to prevent units of the university from establishing official or “approved” political and ideological positions: the Kalven report. Without the latter, the former is toothless, for speech will be chilled and the Chicago Principles will mean nothing. Let me quote the heart of the Kalven Report once again (my emphases):

The instrument of dissent and criticism is the individual faculty member or the individual student. The university is the home and sponsor of critics; it is not itself the critic. It is, to go back once again to the classic phrase, a community of scholars. To perform its mission in the society, a university must sustain an extraordinary environment of freedom of inquiry and maintain an independence from political fashions, passions, and pressures. A university, if it is to be true to its faith in intellectual inquiry, must embrace, be hospitable to, and encourage the widest diversity of views within its own community. It is a community but only for the limited, albeit great, purposes of teaching and research. It is not a club, it is not a trade association, it is not a lobby.

Since the university is a community only for these limited and distinctive purposes, it is a community which cannot take collective action on the issues of the day without endangering the conditions for its existence and effectiveness. There is no mechanism by which it can reach a collective position without inhibiting that full freedom of dissent on which it thrives. It cannot insist that all of its members favor a given view of social policy; if it takes collective action, therefore, it does so at the price of censuring any minority who do not agree with the view adopted. In brief, it is a community which cannot resort to majority vote to reach positions on public issues.

Two caveats: of course individuals may comment as individuals, so long as it’s clear they are not speaking for the university but expressing a personal view (caveats are always useful to that end). And there can be some political statements allowed if they further the mission of the University: to teach, learn, and do research. (One okay statement would be opposing initiatives that may affect foreign students, like a government attempt to rescinding the DACA act.)

By and large, my university observes these principles, but departments are beginning to violate them, for they can’t resist commenting on issues of the day, even if it has no bearing on their department.  This also allows universities, who are increasingly taken over by administrators and hired diversity advocates, to issue statements that show how virtuous they are. Most of these statements, like the one below, are performative wokeness. They accomplish nothing except to call attention to a universty or department as being on the Side of the Angels. (For a similar example from UC Irvine, go here.)

And so the head of Stanford’s highly reputed Department of Computer Science, John Mitchell, in league with Breauna Spencer, the CS Department’s Director of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, issued a strongly worded but confusing statement on December 5 connecting the verdicts in the Rittenhouse trial (not guilty) and trial of the McMichaels and William Bryan for murdering Ahmaud Arbery (guilty). I happen to think that these verdicts were both correct and in accordance with the law. But they have little to do with one another save that racial tension (a demonstration in one case, bigotry in the other) was involved.

The Stanford Review, which I gather is the conservative student newspaper, has an article about the email that went out from Mitchell and Spencer to all the students and faculty in the Computer Science Department. It thus has the cachet of an official statement. Moreover, it tells students and faculty how they should be thinking and acting. There’s more to the article, too, but I’ll mention only briefly what I consider an irrelevant bit.

Here’s the email as reprinted in the newspaper:

On Friday, November 19th, a jury found Kyle Rittenhouse not guilty on all charges. It was not disputed that Rittenhouse brought a firearm to a Black Lives Matter protest in Kenosha, Wisconsin, killed Anthony Huber and Joseph Rosenbaum, and wounded Gaige Grosskreutz. As a department, we bemoan the loss of life.  We are deeply saddened and disappointed by these events and acknowledge the pain and suffering they have caused many members of the community.

On Wednesday, November 24th, Travis McMichael, Gregory McMichael, and William Bryan were convicted on nine counts, including malice murder, felony murder, aggravated assault, false imprisonment, and criminal attempt for shooting and killing Ahmaud Arbery. Arbery’s case reflects a longstanding legacy of racial injustice. We offer our heartfelt condolences to Arbery’s family.

We condemn the violence, trauma, and suffering that the Black community has both historically and contemporarily endured. The pervasiveness of anti-Black racism reaffirms our department’s mission to create an equitable, diverse, and inclusive community that centers, affirms, and uplifts everyone and prioritizes an enduring sense of belonging and community for all.

For those personally affected by these events, the Stanford CS Department takes your well-being seriously. We understand that recent and ongoing affronts to the principle of racial equality or the Black Lives Matter Social Movement continue to be distressing, burdensome, and mentally and physically exhausting…

The Rittenhouse and Arbery sequences of events remind us of the work we must continue to do to eradicate anti-Blackness and systemic racism in our society. As Martin Luther King Jr. stated in his “I Have a Dream Speech” on August 28th, 1963, “we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt.” Therefore, we call for accountability and powerful change. We fiercely and unapologetically ask that each person within our department take a stance against racism and other forms of oppression impacting marginalized communities and that we all educate ourselves on how to become anti-racists. Ibram Kendi writes that “to be antiracist is a radical choice in the face of history, requiring a radical reorientation of our consciousness.”

The email had appended to it a link to the “Stanford CS Anti-Racism Resource Toolkit“, a list of suggested readings, some of which are good, others not so good, but you can be sure that there’s nothing on it that would contravene CRT ideology. John McWhorter (who is an anti-racist)? Forget it. But you’ll certainly see the 1619 Project and books by Ibram Kendi and Robin DiAngelo.

Anyway, read the email.  It somehow manages to link the Rittenhouse affair, in which a young white man killed two white people and wounded one (in self-defense, the jury decided) while an anti-racist demonstration was going on, with the acts of three bigots who killed a black man, surely largely because he was black.  There is no connection between these two incidents save that race played a big role in one and a tangential and irrelevant role in the other. Nevertheless, Stanford manages to connect them as both showing that racism is bad, and that Stanford’s Computer Science Department stands strongly against it.

The final paragraph is a call to action for students and faculty, urging them to adhere to CRT’s version of anti-racism, even citing Ibram Kendi. They also cite Dr. King in his famous “I Have a Dream” speech, but they tellingly leave out other words from that speech, “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.”  That of course didn’t mean that King thought race was irrelevant—he spent his life fighting for justice for African-Americans—but that it should not be the basis on which people make decisions about individuals.  And making decisions about individuals is precisely what this email is doing by connecting the murderers of Arbery, who were racists, to the actions of Rittenhouse, who is white and implicitly deemed bad, though he was found not guilty.

The upshot is that the Computer Science chair and diversity dean had no business issuing a statement like this. It is empty words, performative, devoid of meaning, and almost surely ineffectual. Those who disagree with Professor Mitchell will be afraid to take issue with his views. Others will simply not want to drop their computer science work and start fighting against racism. In the end, this statement, full of innuendo and debatable points, will chill the speech of people in the department.  If Mitchell wanted to issue his personal opinion, saying that “this is my personal view only and others may disagree”, that’s fine, though his position itself gives the statement an air of official-ness. Were I Mitchell, I would simply have shut up.

The article dwells a lot on one CS-recommended book by Assata Shakur, who fled to Cuba after being imprisoned for murdering a cop in the U.S. The piece decries her being made a heroine by being on the book list (she is a hero to many on the far Left). I don’t agree that she should be admired, but I’m more concerned with free speech in America, as Shakur, who is 74, will be free until she dies in Cuba. Ignore that bit and focus on what’s happening in science departments throughout America, something that I thought would never occur. STEM groups are loci of some of the most ludicrous performative antiracism you can find.  The editorial ends this way:

This debacle should serve as a warning to professors and departmental leaders everywhere, but especially in the sciences and engineering: DEI is poison, and if you let it take hold in your department, prepare to be taken for a ride. Today you’ll be promoting fuzzy concepts like “inclusion” and tomorrow what you’ll be including are terrorist memoirs on departmental reading lists. Don’t say we didn’t warn you.

I would qualify the “DEI is poison” statement, for DEI is not poison in itself; it’s what many of its advocates do in practice that is toxic. And what they’re doing is taking the science out of science departments, turning them all into Departments of Social Engineering.

Jussie Smollett, considered a hoaxer by all sentient beings, is defended by BLM

December 9, 2021 • 9:45 am

You must, at least if you’re American, know about l’affaire Jussie Smollett, or, as Dave Chappelle calls him, “the French actor Juicy Smollyé”.  (Smollett was a character in the television series “Empire.”)

In 2019, Smollett reported that he was a victim of a “hate crime” in Chicago perpetrated by two men who accosted him as he was going out to get a Subway sandwich after midnight. He claimed that the men were white, wearing MAGA hats, shouted racial and homophobic slurs, poured bleach on him, and then put a noose around his neck. You can read all the details at the Wikipedia article, “Alleged assault of Jussie Smollett.”

Police investigations soon revealed that this was likely a hoax perpetrated by Smollett to draw attention to himself, and, sure enough, two brothers, who were black, were located as co-conspirators. They;had worked on Smollett’s set, knew him, and investigation turned up a check from Smollett to one of the brothers, as well as text messages and videos incriminating Smollett.

After this, nobody with a lick of sense thought that Smollett had been the victim of a hate crime; it was realized, even in the black community, that he had perpetrated a hoax. If you want to see a funny video about that, Dave Chappelle’s bit below is very good and hilarious (warning: racist language):

Here’s the history of Smollett’s run-ins with the law about this “assault”, taken from Wikipedia:

On February 13, 2019, Chicago police raided the home of two brothers who had worked with Smollett as extras on his television show’s set. Police recovered records indicating the brothers had been paid $3,500 by Smollett. They had purchased the rope found around Smollett’s neck at a hardware store in Ravenswood over the weekend of January 25. They were also seen in the security camera footage in a clothing store where they bought gloves, ski masks, and a red hat that police said was used in the attack. On February 20, 2019, Smollett was indicted for disorderly conduct for paying the brothers to stage a fake hate crime assault on him and filing a false police report. Smollett’s defense team reached a deal with prosecutors on March 26, 2019, in which all charges were dropped in return for Smollett performing community service and forfeiting his $10,000 bond.

The charges were dropped, but Smollett was also dropped from the “Empire” show.

On April 12, 2019, the city of Chicago filed a lawsuit in the Cook County Circuit Court against Smollett for the cost of overtime authorities expended investigating the alleged attack, totalling $130,105.15. In November 2019, Smollett filed a counter-suit against the city of Chicago alleging he was the victim of “mass public ridicule and harm” and arguing he should not be made to reimburse the city for the cost of the investigation.

On February 11, 2020, after further investigation by a special prosecutor was completed, Smollett was indicted again by a Cook County grand jury on six counts pertaining to making four false police reports. On June 12, 2020, a judge rejected Smollett’s claim that his reindictment violated his right against double jeopardy. Smollett’s trial began on November 29, 2021.

So Smollett is on trial again for six felony counts. The trial ended yesterday and if the jury has any neurons, they’ll find him guilty today. If they don’t, I’ll be completely flummoxed and baffled given the overwhelming evidence against him. But it’s unlikely that, even if convicted, he’ll go to jail. Still, if he’s convicted he’ll have a felony record and will likely be fined the amount that it cost Chicago to investigate his allegations (about $130,000). He’s maintained his innocence the whole time, and even took the stand in his own defense, whereupon his story and explanations (the check was for “exercise and nutrition” for the brothers) was ripped apart by the prosecution.

Reader Luana sent me this tweet by the black conservative Coleman Hughes, who agrees with Chappelle (and me). But regardless of the source, the item of interest is the BLM statement below Jussie’s picture. I’ll put the entire statement below, as it’s worth reading.

Here’s the statement in its entirety (click on screenshot):

As abolitionists, we approach situations of injustice with love and align ourselves with our community. Because we got us. So let’s be clear: we love everybody in our community. It’s not about a trial or a verdict decided in a white supremacist charade, it’s about how we treat our community when corrupt systems are working to devalue their lives. In an abolitionist society, this trial would not be taking place, and our communities would not have to fight and suffer to prove our worth. Instead, we find ourselves, once again, being forced to put our lives and our value in the hands of judges and juries operating in a system that is designed to oppress us, while continuing to face a corrupt and violent police department, which has proven time and again to have no respect for our lives.

In our commitment to abolition, we can never believe police, especially the Chicago Police Department (CPD) over Jussie Smollett, a Black man who has been courageously present, visible, and vocal in the struggle for Black freedom. While policing at-large is an irredeemable institution, CPD is notorious for its long and deep history of corruption, racism, and brutality. From the murders of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, to the Burge tortures, to the murder of Laquan McDonald and subsequent cover-up, to the hundreds of others killed by Chicago police over the years and the thousands who survived abuse, Chicago police consistently demonstrate that they are among the worst of the worst. Police lie and Chicago police lie especially.

Black Lives Matter will continue to work towards the abolition of police and every unjust system. We will continue to love and protect one another, and wrap our arms around those who do the work to usher in Black freedom and, by extension, freedom for everyone else.

They clearly believe Smollett’s story, but for only two reasons: it fits in with a narrative of oppression (two whites supposedly attacked a black man and made racist statements), and, second the investigation was conducted by the police (BLM are police “abolitionists”).  The evidence isn’t even a consideration here; they say “we can never believe police”. But the evidence came from much more than the police: it came from video cameras and especially the two black brothers who testified against Smollett. It also came from the check, which Smollett admitted he wrote to pay the brothers.

Now the claims of police violence and racism are not totally unjustified given the past. The murder of Fred Hampton in 1969, for example, was a horrible police execution of a black activist who had been deliberately drugged. No shots were fired; the cops just pumped bullets into a sleeping man. And yes, there’s been police racism since them, but I would not characterize the police as inevitably racist, liars, and white supremacists.

But this trial is not a matter of police claims versus Smollett’s claims: it’s a matter of what the empirical evidence shows, and Smollett himself, as well as his attorneys, were given a chance to have their say. The BLM statement thus implicates the jury itself as instantiating white supremacy and injustice.

What we see here is how strongly an ideological commitment can override evidence. If the system is so committed to oppressing blacks no matter what, why did O. J. Simpson, whom I believe was a murderer, get off?

But of course anecdotes won’t settle this. What will settle the Smollett case is evidence—evidence that can be both adduced and inspected by Smollett and his lawyers. If the jury finds him innocent, I will be very, very surprised.

About the BLM call to abolish the police: I think that’s impractical and ridiculous. Remember, they’re not calling for “defunding” police, but abolishing them.  While I appreciate that the principle of BLM is to secure equality of blacks and whites, and I support that goal, I am not behind some of their other principles. Abolition of the police, which is palpably insane, is one of them. I can’t stand behind BLM so long as they remain “police abolitionists.

A Gallup poll last year showed that 81% of blacks wanted the police to spend as much or more time as they do now patrolling where they live. That means that BLM is not even close to expressing the wishes of the people they claim to represent, at least as far as policing is concerned.

The stuff John McWhorter likes, including land acknowledgments

December 5, 2021 • 9:45 am

I usually go wrong when I psychoanalyze John McWhorter, as he’s a complex individual and I know him only through his writings. The last time I erred was when I predicted he’d become less anti-woke when he took up his twice-weekly column at the NYT, expecting that editorial pressure would soften his words or beliefs. I was wrong: his next column was a hilarious and decidedly anti-woke column on the “n-wordhead” rock at the University of Wisconsin.

So I’m loath to explain part of his latest column at the NYT, which is a list of things he likes about progressive antiracism. One thing I do sense about McWhorter is that he’s defensive, but that’s no vice in a black man who spends his time attacking the likes of Ibram Kendi and Robin DiAngelo. Perhaps showing us that he actually likes some stuff rather than deploring everything is meant to show us his human side. I haven’t kept up with the reviews of his new book Woke Racism, though I’ve read parts of it and will give a brief take when I’ve finished. In fact, the only one I saw was in the Washington Post, which was not only negative, but mean-spirited (also written by an African-American). That must have stung, and perhaps played a role in what we consider today.

So here we have his latest piece (click on webshot to read; if you subscribe to the NYT you can subscribe to his pieces as well):

There are four things that McWhorter admires about true progressivist changes in race and racial relations. I agree with him about 2.5 of them, and disagree with the other 1.5. The first is the one with which I disagree (McWhorter’s words are indented, and bolding in indents is his).

1.) Land acknowledgments. I find it very odd that in his previous writings, and in his new book, McWhorter properly decries “performative antiracism”: antiracism that really doesn’t accomplish anything to lift up minorities or repair racial relations. He thinks that most of these “performative” acts exist to signal the virtue of the actor, and I agree with him. But among the most conspicuous of the performative acts are the increasingly ubiquitous “land acknowledgments” that are especially obvious in woke academia. Yet McWhorter likes these, and I know that some readers do. His reasons (all bolding is McWhorter’s):

So, after the Thanksgiving holiday seems a good time to point out some other things I appreciate about our times.

One of them is land acknowledgments. There is an increasingly common practice, especially in academic circles, of prefacing public presentations or events with a ritual acknowledgment that the land the event is taking place on was originally occupied and cared for by Native Americans, with a specification of the particular Indigenous nation of that land.

I’m glad this is happening, despite the opinion of some, such as the New York Post columnist Kyle Smith, who called land acknowledgments “the latest in meaningless self-scourging progressive fashion statements.” I’ve always found it quietly dismaying that the land that America occupies was wrested from people who had lived on it for millenniums before, and that today Native Americans represent such as small percentage of our body politic, and so much has been built up on the land, that there’s no realistic way, given the magnitude of the injustice, to reverse it or even adequately redress it. I’ve often thought, “Under this parking lot, right where that subdivision is, whole lives and societies existed that are now utterly lost.” The least we can do is to regularly — yes, ritually — mention this, especially if this least is the best we’re willing to do.

We’ve discussed the flaws in these acknowledgments: that Native Americans continually displaced each other, so whose land is to be acknowledged, and sometimes the land wasn’t even “owned” by Native Americans (most of whom had no concept of owning land, but did use it). I know of one college where they decided to create a land acknowledgment and hired a historian to suss out the past usage of the land. He found that the land wasn’t used regularly by any Native Americans, but very occasionally a few of them hunted on the land. When he scheduled a talk to the school to impart this information, he was deplatformed.

But most of all, land acknowledgments are virtue signals, pure and simple. Native Americans aren’t there to hear them, so they are just liberals telling each other how good they are. And the acknowledgments do absolutely nothing to help Native Americans.  If colleges wanted to actually accomplish something, they’d contribute to the welfare of the tribes whose land they “stole” by giving them money or giving back land (untenable, of course), or do something real. McWhorter is recommending these ritual invocations as history lessons, but imagine what would happen if they had these in Europe? The acknowledgments would go on for hours. If the absence of firm knowledge, the odious history of colonists’ genocide of Americans is best taught in history books where it can be described in broad sweep, not proclaimed at the beginning of every talk referring to a few acres of land.

2.) Television for kids increasingly shows black characters.  

I like what I see on television. Particularly children’s television. I look over my daughters’ shoulders and see a heartening multiplicity of Black stars and characters on their favorite shows that just wasn’t there a few years ago. One that comes to mind: Netflix’s delightful baking show, “Nailed It!” is hosted to perfection by Nicole Byer, a young Black woman. No, I haven’t forgotten that the wonderfully diverse “Sesame Street” has been with us since 1969. But the sheer frequency with which today’s children’s shows (and not just the stuff of public television) are, yes, centering people of color feels different. “Sesame Street” once felt like a televised utopia; today’s fare, especially animated, commercial programming, often presents diversity as something blissfully unremarkable.

I agree completely. I don’t watch kids’ shows, but I do watch the news and some newslike shows like “60 Minutes”, and I’ve also noticed that the commericals increasingly feature black people and black families. When I was a kid all you saw were white people. It’s very heartening to see African-Americans appearing in ads without any notice or emphasis that they are not white.

3.) Television for adults is changing the same way. 

Interestingly, the same thing is happening on popular animated shows for adults: On the long-running “Family Guy,” Blackness has often been played for comedy; but on a recent episode, the main character, Peter, gets a new boss, a Black guy, whose race is incidental. He stood out not for being Black but for trying to squeeze the fun out of at-work birthday parties — you know, like a stereotypical boss. A recent episode of the also long-running “Bob’s Burgers” introduced a character as the game master of a Dungeons & Dragons-style game who was nerdy, charmingly awkward and a Black woman — i.e. a full spectrum of a human being. The hit “Ted Lasso” portrays today’s United Kingdom, where whiteness is hardly default as Black and brown people are part of the warp and woof of all levels of society. A recent “Archer” episode even jokes about today’s Britain, when Lana (voiced, as it happens, by the Black actress Aisha Tyler, who had a recurring role as Ross’s girlfriend on “Friends” back when there was a mild uproar about that show’s lack of Black friends!) wrongly assumes a Black man will stand out in a London crowd.

This is also a welcome change. Although McWhorter notes that these changes could be seen as superficial, like land acknowledgments, they are not: television shows are an important part of the fabric of American life, and we need to realize that American life is multiracial and multicultural.

4.) People are becoming increasingly aware of “systemic racism”. 

The idea of systemic racism — societal inequities rooted in racism of the past or present that represent barriers, in many instances, for people of color — is now common coin to a greater extent.

Sure, I have documented my issues with the way we are taught to think about systemic racism, and to say that opinions about how to address it differ is putting it mildly. The argument for reparations, for instance, is not the utterly settled question some suppose. And controversy will continue over whether the take on systemic racism originating in, and taking a cue from, critical race theory is a useful one.

However, I welcome the increased awareness of the notion of systemic racism.

. . . an undergrad today would be much less likely to see race matters only that far. The racial reckoning of recent years; the cultural decentering of whiteness; and the airing of what is meant by systemic racism have brought about that positive evolution. The other day I heard some white kids — upper-middle-class New Yorkers — casually referring in passing to systemic racism while walking down the street from school, clearly thinking of it as an assumed concept.

But as I recall, McWhorter has previously discussed the problems with systemic racism, and not just with reparations. The problem, which he doesn’t mention but has in the past, is that “systemic racism” is now seen as racism presently built into institutions and societal structures (laws, universities, science, etc), creating present-day bias that is taken to be the cause of inequities (disproportionate representation of “majority” people and underrepresentation of minorities).

So when the white kids in McWhorter’s last paragraph casually refer to systemic racism, are they correct? For example—and I know this well—the underrepresentation of minorities in STEM fields is very often described as a result of systemic racism (or, in the case of sexes, “systemic sexism”): racism pervasive among scientists who, it is said, are biased against blacks, Hispanics, and women (consciously or not). But this is not the case: science is bending over backwards to hire and promote women and minorities, and to urge students to go into STEM. The inequities we see in STEM are simply not due to “systemic racism” in science. Yes, of course a few scientists may be racists (though I’ve never met one), but you will find that in all fields. I would describe STEM as “strongly antiracist”. The inequities are due to racism in the past that put minorities in situations where they don’t get opportunities needed to get into STEM.

You must distinguish—and McWhorter does this all the time—between present-day biases and the residuum of older biases stemming from slavery, racism of the past, and so on. And groups may also differ in their preferences. Here are medical fields which have the greatest imbalance in favor of women (data from the AMA):

  • Obstetrics and gynecology—83.4%.
  • Allergy and immunology—73.5%.
  • Pediatrics—72.1%.
  • Medical genetics and genomics—66.7%.
  • Hospice and palliative medicine—66.3%.
  • Dermatology—60.8%.

I refuse to believe that this is due to anti-male bias in those professions, and I suspect that a large proportion of these inequities is due to sex differences in preference, with women preferring more patient-oriented, hands-on fields than men. (Surgeons and radiologists, whose contacts with patients as humans are minimal, are overwhelmingly male.)

At any rate, I agree with McWhorter that if you construe “systemic racism” as “equities rooted in racism of the past or present that present barriers” then yes, there’s systemic racism. But it’s vitally important, if we’re to achieve more equality or equity, that we distinguish between “present” and “past” biases. This is why I agree only 50% with this contention.

Regardless, I am still curious as to why McWhorter wrote this column. He explains it as follows, and I suppose that’s as good a take as any.

Whether you think of me as a contrarian, as I’m often labeled, or a cranky liberal, as I sometimes refer to myself, I do a lot of complaining about our supposedly brave new world: Cancel culture is real, and out of hand; wokeness frequently oversimplifies and infantilizes us; the term “woke” is broke. But believe it or not, there are things I like about our current era, including, as you know, cheering on “they” as a singular pronoun. So, after the Thanksgiving holiday seems a good time to point out some other things I appreciate about our times.