Rufo Institute Bari Austin Weiss DEATH SENTENCE White Supremacy Intersectionality Triumphant: John McWhorter and Glenn Loury Are the New BOOKATEE!
David Shasha
Proving Racists Wrong Is Not a Trivial Pursuit
By: John McWhorter
To be a “heterodox” Black thinker on race is to be often accused of claiming that racism is extinct or doesn’t matter. For example, when he reviewed my book “Woke Racism” for The Washington Post, The Nation’s Elie Mystal described it as “a pleasing bedtime story to a certain kind of white person who is always looking for a magic Black person to tell them what they want to hear.”
But I’ve never said racism is defunct. I don’t think so now, and I didn’t think so back when I was a graduate student in the late ’80s and early ’90s. One semester, I decided to try my hand at a campus College Bowl-style competition. It was a quiz contest, questioning people on facts, lore — trivia.
Potential teammates gathered in a room, mostly unknown to one another until that day. We all crowded in, and I couldn’t help noticing that within about 60 seconds, the natural mixing process led to all the guys (there weren’t any women in that particular cluster) huddling over to one side to start forming teams — and excluding me and only me.
Yes, they were all white, and I was the only Black guy there.
But I’m not especially inept socially. It was pretty clear to me that the reason I was so baldly excluded was that they had quietly assumed that a Black guy wouldn’t know enough obscure information. That a Black guy wouldn’t be a nerd.
So I went, all hurt, to the campus diversity coordinator? I left, feeling “unwelcome”? I’m afraid not.
The reason I showed up at that event is because I knew I had something to offer when it came to knowing useless facts, thank you very much. And I figured that if those guys concluded otherwise because I’m Black, then as a bonus I could make a small contribution to our civic fabric, laying down one brick in a big wall of a case by showing them that in fact, you can both be Black and know some obscure things for no particular reason. Plenty of Black people do, after all.
Almost as if scripted, the question I was first given when called upon was about old-time musical theater. As readers of this newsletter know, that’s one of my favorite subjects, and I gave the correct answer. Those white guys saw something different from what they would have expected, and you could almost see it from their reaction. Mission accomplished; life went on.
My point isn’t that this trivial episode was somehow on a par with integrating a lunch counter in the segregated South, believe me. But it’s what comes to mind, from my own experience, when I worry that our era teaches us that racism is more interesting than achievement, that calling people out is more useful than proving them wrong. Last week, I explored the idea that the supposedly progressive approach to a standardized test with a disparate pass rate is to eliminate it. Related are ideas such as that antiracism means not requiring classics majors to learn Latin or Greek, or that the very idea of remedial education or the term “remediation” might be racist.
I will never embrace that perspective. Underestimation must be countered with demonstration, not indignation. If people stereotype me, what I want to do is show them just how wrong they are, not protest that they engaged in stereotyping. An analogy: No one would be swayed by someone who, accused of, for example, infidelity, sobs “You’re mean!” and has no further answer.
Now, there are times when history has made it challenging for us to show what we are made of, unlike when I happened to know the answer to that little quiz question. But the ordinary, vital, self-loving response to such a problem is to step up and learn how to show ourselves at our best. Yep, it’s a kind of Black Tax — having to demonstrate your worth before people consider you their equal. But in response to a slight or a remark, just saying “You shouldn’t have said that” instead? It just leaves us looking weak.
Freeman Hrabowski is a Black mathematician who helped found, at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, the Meyerhoff Scholars Program. The program has been fostering and guiding students of color through the challenges of STEM fields and preparing them for academic research since the late 1980s. Many Black and Latino students face obstacles to high achievement in STEM subjects — and the Meyerhoff program is geared toward solving that problem. Students are closely mentored, live in the same dormitory during their first year, are shunted to summer internships and are strongly encouraged to work in groups. There are over a thousand alumni of the program, most of whom are Black or Latino. According to the Meyerhoff website, program alumni hold 385 Ph.D.s, including 71 joint M.D./Ph.D.s, and 155 M.D.s or D.O.s. I recommend reading “Beating the Odds: Raising Academically Successful African American Males” and “Overcoming the Odds: Raising Academically Successful African American Young Women,” both by Hrabowski and several co-authors.
Hrabowski is, to adopt a fashionable expression, doing the work. Others, however, strike me as more interested in the obstacles than in getting past them. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein is an accomplished Black physicist at the University of New Hampshire who has argued that the exclusion of Black women in her field is linked to her notion of “white empiricism.” Namely, “white empiricism is the phenomenon through which only white people (particularly white men) are read has having a fundamental capacity for objectivity and Black people (particularly Black women) are produced as an ontological other.” Prescod-Weinstein wants us to consider that “white epistemic claims about science — which are not rooted in empirical evidence — receive more credence and attention than Black women’s epistemic claims about their own lives.”
Her argument is rather involved, and sincere from what I can see. However, at the end of the day, I doubt we gain more from its approach than Hrabowski’s.
There’s room for questioning standards, of course. Not every undergraduate needs to master ancient Greek. It was good that years ago, the College Board was prompted to remove SAT questions with verbal analogies that assumed middle-class life as the default.
But the general theme should be that Black people can meet standards that other groups are meeting. The question shouldn’t be whether the standards themselves are appropriate. There will be skepticism, from some quarters, about our capabilities. But I see no Black pride in finding that skepticism — and the prejudice it entails — more interesting than countering it with actual achievement. What we are is what we have done, not what we have said.
Shelby Steele, whose classic, “The Content of Our Character: A New Vision of Race in America,” won a 1990 National Book Critics Circle Award, captured the essence of the matter in a 1989 essay. The increased opportunity of the post-civil rights era presented “a brutal proposition” to Black Americans: “If you’re not inferior, prove it.”
Black pride means, at the end of the day, proving it.
From The New York Times, September 3, 2022
Race Is a Reality in America. Here’s How We Deal with It.
By Clifton Roscoe
https://glennloury.substack.com/p/race-is-a-reality-in-america-heres
More people are growing skeptical of programs, policies, and politics that prioritize race above all things. To my mind, that’s all to the good. We should want an even playing field in hiring, college admissions, and most other domains of public life, where the person who gets a position is the person who’s best qualified for it, who earns it on their own merit, or who out-competes everyone else. As more people see our present orthodoxies about race for what they are, we will hopefully move closer to that ideal.
But race is a social fact in America and has been for hundreds of years. It’s not going away any time soon. And I’m not sure it should. As I’ve said elsewhere, I draw sustenance from traditions particular to my African American heritage, and I wouldn’t give those traditions up for anything. Given that race will likely remain a social fact for the foreseeable future, what part should it play in our society?
My man Clifton Roscoe has been thinking about this very question. On the one hand, he’s a critic of the kind of programs, policies, and politics I refer to above. On the other, he doubts that the goal of “deracializing” public life is a realistic one. In the following piece, he suggests some ways of thinking through the problem of race and meritocracy. How do you think we should move forward? Let us know in the comments.
Glenn
I’ve noticed that a small but growing number of voices want to “deracialize” America. Dr. Loury has talked about this with some of his recent guests (e.g., Rajiv Sethi, Reihan Salam). Coleman Hughes has a new book about this, Racialized, that will be released soon. No offense to those who think we should deracialize America, but that train left the station long ago. We can’t deracialize America any more than we can eradicate Covid. The best we can do is to learn to live with both.
In fact, I would argue that the racialization of America is just as pervasive as Covid. We are now at a point where most aspects of our lives have been subjected to racial dissection and categorization. Here are a few recent examples that show just how far people are willing to push this, ostensibly in the pursuit of social justice:
· California has become the first state to break down black employee data by lineage. The goal is to determine which of the state’s black employees are the descendants of slaves and therefore might be eligible for reparations.
· The new contract with the Minneapolis teachers union says that white teachers will be reassigned or laid off outside of seniority order before “educators of color” if Minneapolis Public Schools needs to reduce staff.
· LGBTQ advocates say the federal government is missing communities of color in its monkeypox response. The data is limited, so there’s no real proof that something sinister is afoot, but those who focus on social justice are already sounding the alarm.
Perhaps the best argument for why we can’t deracialize America is that activists won’t allow it. They use race as both an offensive weapon (“Everything about America is racist, and so are you if you don’t agree!”) and a defensive weapon (“You’re not black, so shut up and listen to us!”). They even use race as a weapon against black people who disagree with them (“You’re not ‘authentically’ black, so you shut up, too!”). Consider this excerpt from a long article about Clarence Thomas that was published in Esquire:
The question is: What then is Clarence Thomas to this Black man?
To that, the man himself may well say, “Black man, all you see is race. You’ll never get anywhere that way.”
Nah. All America has ever seen is race. To pretend otherwise is to deny the truth of your and my life. Ain’t no amount of Federalist Society cant or jurisprudence dressed up in novel and abstruse legal theories or self-serving advice cautioning Black people to cease talking about race is gone change that. How can we stop talking? It boggles my mind that you fetishize a document that held in its original form that women were not and wouldn’t ever be citizens, that your/our people were not and wouldn’t ever be humans.
The writer, Mitchell S. Jackson, is a black man.
So what should we do about today’s racialized America? Let’s start by acknowledging that not all efforts to racialize America are harmful. It’s important to know when groups within our nation are being mistreated. We’re better off if we acknowledge and address injustices in a straightforward and timely manner. What we can’t do, however, is lower standards in the name of racial “equity.” We can’t create double standards either. That creates divisions, jealousy, and cynicism. Double standards create incentives for special interest groups to “game the system.” Last, but not least, they lessen the odds that marginalized people will ever become the equal of their peers.
All of us have to hold the line when it comes to standards—standards of behavior and standards of excellence. We can’t accept antisocial behavior because we think that enforcing the law might disproportionately ensnare this group or that group in our criminal justice system. We can debate the best ways to hold people accountable for their actions, but we can’t ignore obvious misbehavior. We shouldn’t ignore the harm done to victims and communities or embrace social justice ideas that are essentially “pro-criminal.” We shouldn’t lower standards of excellence within our institutions either. Nobody wins when we do this.
America’s competitive position in the global marketplace is tenuous at best. We should strive to level the playing fields within our institutions and do all that we can to ensure that our best and brightest are nurtured and rewarded for their efforts. We should do all we can to ensure that all of us are given an opportunity to reach our full potential. That means the people who run our institutions should call “balls and strikes” when evaluating talent, no matter who's on the mound or who's in the batter's box.
Many Americans share these views. New research from Populance suggests that a lot of Americans are afraid to share their true feelings about contentious issues in public. Consider this excerpt from their research:
Statement 22
Racism is built into the American economy, government, and educational system
Based on a March 2021 poll conducted by Ipsos, a majority of American adults (61%) believed that racism is built into the American economy, government, and educational system. More than one year later, in June 2022, Private Opinion in America’s public opinion polling revealed a slightly lower majority (53%) of Americans endorsing the belief that racism is ingrained in American institutions. However, private opinion polling revealed a potentially false majority: when guaranteed privacy, only 44% of American adults agree that racism is built into the American economy, government, and educational system.
Use this link, download the report titled “Private Opinion in America,” and go to pages 29 and 59 if you want to do a deep dive.
We’re not at a place where folks feel free to speak their minds openly, but we should keep chipping away at the misinformation and wrong-headed ideas that inform public policy. We should push back against cancel culture and demagogues. There’s a hidden reservoir of support that can be tapped if more of us keep pointing out the obvious and others gain the courage to speak up.
There's no easy answer to what comes next regarding race if we could get to purely meritocratic standards. There are a couple of issues that need to be addressed beforehand:
1. We have to level the playing field for everybody. Even colleges with multi-billion dollar endowments (e.g. Harvard, Princeton, Yale) tend to favor jocks, '“legacies,” and the children of wealthy donors over other kids applying for admission. They're also reluctant to ignore the push to make our institutions reflect the broader society. Harvard doesn't want to be Caltech, a place that mostly ignores race when making admissions decisions, but it needs to move in that direction.
2. Hiring decisions are never totally based upon merit. The old way of evaluating job candidates involved:
o Can this person do the job?
o Will they do the job?
o Will they fit in my organization?
Determining whether a candidate is qualified for the job is often straightforward and can be done with rigor, but that's not always the case. We can ask if a civil engineer is licensed, but how do we determine if an inexperienced recruit would be good in a customer-facing role? Deciding if a candidate is a good worker and a good fit for your organization involves a lot of subjectivity. Management gurus like Jim Collins (Good to Great) talk about the need to get the right people on the bus (and the wrong people off the bus) as a necessary step in transitioning an organization towards superior performance. Most successful organizations have a unique culture and set of values. Leaders can strive for “inclusion,” but it's impossible to be totally inclusive while trying to instill and maintain institutional values and culture. This complexity means that diversity, equity, and inclusion considerations will be part of hiring and promotion decisions for the foreseeable future.
3. Black leaders have to be more judicious with the race card. They have to acknowledge that there are fields where the pool of black candidates is small. Their efforts should be focused on developing a bigger pool of talent instead of hiding behind racism as the reason why there aren't more black people in STEM fields, for example. We've got to get away from this idea that these fields aren't “open” to black people. Here's an example of what I'm describing from Pew Research:
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F2678322d-3199-48c4-b417-311df45759b0_840x806.pngThere's no doubt that organizations have struggled to recruit and retain diverse candidates for STEM jobs. Concerted efforts have been made to make STEM more inclusive and welcoming, but there are those who say more needs to be done. I won't argue the point, because the real issue is that the pool of available black STEM workers, for example, is small. Not many black college students pursue and earn degrees in STEM subjects. Use this link if you want to do a deep dive into an analysis titled “African Americans: College Majors and Earnings” that was done by researchers at Georgetown University a few years ago. Here’s an excerpt from the press release:
While more African Americans are going to college, new research from the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce (Georgetown Center) finds that they are overrepresented in majors that lead to low-paying jobs. African Americans: College Majors and Earnings notes that while this reality reflects personal choice, it also reflects the fact that African American students are concentrated in open-access and four-year institutions that often offer a more limited menu of major choices.
“The low-paying majors that African Americans are concentrated in are of high social value but low economic value,” said Anthony P. Carnevale, director of the Georgetown Center and co-author of the report. “Meaningful career planning before college can provide transparency about major choice and potentially prevent onerous debt and underemployment down the road.”
African Americans comprise 12 percent of the US population, but they are underrepresented in the number of degree holders in college majors associated with the fastest-growing, highest-paying occupations—STEM, health, and business. African-American students account for 7 percent of STEM majors. And even though they account for 10 percent of all health majors, they are clustered in the lowest-earning major: health and medical administrative services.
Developing a robust pipeline of black talent for STEM would take a long time, at least 15 years but probably longer. Black leaders generally don't come from these fields and they tend to have short-term orientations. Not many of them are open to the suggestion that creating a bumper crop of black STEM workers would require working with a select group of middle school kids and maintaining the effort for 15 years or longer. Many of them wouldn't buy the idea that kids who haven't pursued STEM in earnest by high school are unlikely to become doctors, engineers or scientists. They wouldn't say “lower standards,” but they would argue that STEM needs to become more “inclusive” and “welcoming.” They would argue that there are plenty of black people who could do STEM jobs if employers, colleges, laboratories, etc. were willing to be more creative in the ways they acquire and develop talent.
They have a point, but there are limits to creativity. You might be able to take somebody off the street and teach them to code, but you can't do that when it comes to medicine, engineering, math, or most scientific fields. There's no way around that basic point.
It's unlikely that we'll ever get to a perfectly meritocratic system. There would be trade-offs even if we could. There's a spectrum of potential outcomes. One end involves being inclusive and forcing our institutions to reflect America's demographics. The other involves an uncompromising pursuit of excellence. There are pros and cons to both. I don't know how to resolve this ideological tug of war in a way that works politically, but fact-based discussions would be a good place to start.
From author Substack page, August 28, 2022
The Institutional Contradictions of Affirmative Action
By: Glenn Loury
https://glennloury.substack.com/p/the-institutional-contradictions
Amy Wax is a controversial figure. There’s no denying that. But she is also a noteworthy legal scholar and an award-winning teacher whose accomplishments have been recognized by her peers and her institution, the University of Pennsylvania Law School. As a tenured professor, she is guaranteed academic freedom, the very purpose of which is to ensure that researchers are able to pursue knowledge and truth wherever it may lead and to teach their students without the interference of political and institutional power.
Whatever Amy’s views on race and nationalism—I ask her about them in detail in the full version of this week’s episode—they are well within the purview of academic freedom. So too her critiques of race-based affirmative action, many of which I share. It seems to me that part of the reason Amy is being persecuted by her university’s administration is her refusal to parrot the nonsensical company line on affirmative action and her pointing out of its contradictions and their deleterious consequences for the institution and its students.
In the following excerpt from this week’s episode, Amy and I discuss those contradictions and what her university’s investigation of her means for the broader debate about affirmative action. The irony, of course, is that both Amy and I are champions of the American university system. We don’t want to see it come down, we want to see it flourish. But the only way to do that is to look its problems square in the face and call them by their name.
AMY WAX: Here's the attitude of the students, the attitude of university: We love affirmative action. It's absolutely essential. We can't do without it. If we don't have it, the number of black students will be a fraction of what it is. You can go to the Harvard case before the Supreme Court. The briefs say all of this stuff.
GLENN LOURY: Yep.
But on the other hand, nobody wants to admit that they're a beneficiary of affirmative action. They view it as an insult. So how do you reconcile, Glenn, these two statements? Well, they're completely contradictory. But you see, they don't care, because contradiction, being consistent, being rigorous, being logical, that's whiteness, Glenn. That's whiteness. That's the stuff they wanna get rid of. That is the actual priority here, unspoken.
All of these standards, all of these requirements: intellectual integrity, consistency analysis, rigor, logic, evidence. Get rid of it. If we want this person out, we can accuse her of anything. We can contradict ourselves all over the place. Have you heard the concept, Michael Anton's concept of "parallax celebration"? Do you know what that is?
I have not. Spell it out for us. And by the way, let me just say this before you go on. I just wanna say this. I agree a hundred percent with the concerns that you've just been expressing about the subtle underhandedness and corruption of affirmative action. It leads us to telling lies. And the paradox that you just called attention to—can't take away affirmative action, otherwise no blacks would be here, but there's no black person whom you can point to who is actually there because of affirmative action—is just the tip of the iceberg.
It seems to me here, with respect to how it is that using different standards for selecting people into highly competitive and elite venues, corrupts the process of evaluating individual performance. I'll repeat myself. If you use a lower threshold on average, it's a statistical necessity that you're gonna get lower performance if the criteria are correlated with the post-admissions performance. So now you've got what you could not help but get, given how you're behaving, and then you're telling me don't believe my lying eyes and shut up about it.
That is, it seems to me, the corner that they've got you painted into. You refuse to go along with the lie that there's nothing to see here. There are no issues here. Don't worry about it. And as a result, you have to be hung out the dry. That's what I see.
Well, I mean, the lie is even bigger than that. Let me just quote Richard Hanania who tweeted something very wise. He said the problem with affirmative action is not that you let in some people who might be over-placed or aren't quite up to snuff. No, it's the effect it has on institutions and the distortions that it introduces in what people are allowed to say, the lies that they are forced to tell, the contradictions that they are forced to embrace.
I mean, it's bigger than that, Glenn, in the following sense. You said, well, if you lower the criteria for admission that is going to affect performance. Well, that's precisely what they're at pains to deny. The criteria mean nothing. They're an illusion. They're a tool for oppression. Performance, that's just this notion that white people come up with to oppress minorities. It's meaningless, it's empty. It's just a ruse. The whole meritocracy is a joke. It needs to be abolished and demolished. That is the broader agenda. So all of these categories, all of these predictions, all these correlations, they can't be spoken of because they're just part of this whiteness conspiracy that we have to get rid of.
I mean, this is a very, very broad and deep project, Glenn, that is growing. We are far along in advancing this project. And of course there's huge duplicity and deceit here, because on the one hand we have all of this palaver about excellence and achievement and all of that. But on the other hand, in the very same institutions, we have this sneering at and this denigration—[phone rings] I'm sorry, that's my phone. Ignore it. These things are happening simultaneously, Glenn, and people like us are caught in this bind. We are the sacrificial lambs here. That's that's what's going on.
Okay, I can anticipate objections to making ourselves—I'll include myself in that—into victims when we are, in fact, very privileged and powerful people. We're tenured professors at Ivy League institutions. We live in big houses and we have a nice retirement account to fall back on. And the storm troopers are not exactly at our door, so [laughs]. But I hear you.
They're at my door.
Okay. But Amy ...
My kids have been trolled, my husband ... No, they're at our door.
Okay. I want you to address this.
I mean, I haven't been fired yet.
No, you haven't. And I doubt that you will. I doubt that you will. And if you do get fired—God help that that doesn't happen. I don't want that to happen at all. But should it happen, it'll be a signature case in the history of academic freedom in this country. It would be an outrage beyond belief that you would be relieved of your teaching responsibilities and the sinecure that you've earned because of your opinions, because you don't believe, you haven't drunk the Kool-Aid, you don't believe the hype, because you have views. I mean, my view is, if she's wrong, refute her. That’s what you do. You don't tell her to shut up. You don't call her a name. You argue.
Okay, Glenn, let me say one thing about that. Of course, I a hundred percent agree with you. But here's the thing. If I'm stripped of tenure, whatever, and I'm not saying that's going to happen. But if it did, here's the question. And this goes to Penn's calculation, which is what can we get away with? Will anybody care? This is a really important question I am asking you. Because right now, even though this is happening to me, people are still giving money to Penn. Students are applying in record numbers.
I think that these universities have become emboldened and their attitude right now is, how many divisions does the Academic Freedom Alliance have? How much power does FIRE have? It's sort of like Disney and Governor DeSantis. “Well, our stock is going up, so why should we stand down in the culture war?” I really think we're at the point where these universities are so woke and so arrogant and so bold that their view is, let's see what we can get away with. Will the alumni rebel? Will the students rebel? Will the donors rebel? I mean, I think the government could rebel if the Republicans get control, but I'm not even sure they'll do that.
There are lots of things they could do, and we could discuss some of those things. But it requires political will. It requires leadership. It requires recognizing that this is a problem, a major problem. The far-far-left control of the universities really is a crisis for our nation because it is resulting in the indoctrination and miseducation of our most influential young people. And I consider that catastrophic. I don't know about you.
From Glenn Loury Substack page, August 23, 2022