Thursday, July 08, 2021

Online Conversations Vs. Real Life

I don't talk about racial issues face-to-face. Even when I discuss them with people I know in real life, it is nearly always via email. When I first began to notice things about IQ in the 1980s, I did speak quietly to two testing psychologists about how much was genetic (it was not popular to suggest any number above 10% at that point, but they both wincingly copped to about 60%), and whether the racial disparity was real. One hemmed and hawed but eventually said yes, there was something to that, though he didn't think think the full standard deviation gap was going to hold up, while the other (older and from New York City, if that's pertinent) told me it was entirely true, but not to get caught ever saying it out loud. Other than that, I don't think I ever discussed race and IQ at work, at church, at Bible Study, and certainly not with people I barely knew.  It did come up in correspondence and the newsletter of the Prometheus Society, but even there, seldom.  

"Noticing things" about the racial disparity in violence did not occur until decades later. Up until about 2000 or even later I was aware of a cultural difference, in that the New England states had had lower homicide rates since colonial times, but did not even ask myself if it were racial. I don't bring it up in live conversation anywhere. It comes into a couple of my email groups, but even there it is entirely responsive - only when someone brings up the suggestion that it might be gun ownership or some other possibility for which we have good counterevidence do I go into my standard rant about it.  For the record, even though it looks to me as if genetic explanations have the inside track on that one, I very much hope it turns out to be culture, or some epigenetic phenomenon of being exposed to violence or living in an adrenalised, cortisol-activated environment activating a suite of behaviors that might somehow be avoided if we only knew how. My rant is mostly about people not acknowledging how enormous the difference is, and offering solutions without thinking that through. I'm not fussing about causes.

I don't bring these up live because these would unnecessarily hurt people's feelings. Though I have noted several times I don't think it is less hurtful to say "Sure you have the ability, it's just that the culture of your people sucks," or "You start on the same plane of abstract reasoning as everyone else, so you just must have poor character and don't work hard or pay attention."  I would think that would be worse, myself.  But I note empirically that African-Americans prefer those latter explanations, perhaps because they believe they are not universal and are more fixable - and usually, that they themselves are exempt.  But you can see why the explanation "No, it has to be racism, somewhere, somehow" looks attractive. In online discussions, I am now at the point of challenging by saying "Be specific.  What are the racist things that are still happening?" Ross Douhat, who I often like, just had one of those "Well it just must be something structurally racist" a day or two ago.  The evidence that he cited is that slavery existed for a long time, and then oppression, so it's just overwhelmingly likely there's still some structural racism going on.  Could be.  But where is it?  What is it?  I agree it sounds likely.  But said the pieman to Simple Simon, "First show me your money."

So there is this huge discrepancy between my online and my live conversations, with email threads running somewhere in between, but closer to online. I can't be the only one.  This strikes me as a very large cultural difference from the world I grew up in. The alternative to public conversations were private ones, sometimes whispered and secret ones. Yet even in my private conversations I don't discuss race.  If it were the old world I grew up in would my live conversations both public and private be different? If I had read things or learned things about testing and violence would I just have to find someone to talk about those things with?

An additional note: I believe these conversations could be had face-to-face, but they require a lot of context and explanation.  Those take time, and they take a willingness to hear and understand careful distinctions.  The one time the racial gap in school testing came up at work I agreed that it was real and that "a lot of" the environmental explanations had come up empty.  But I also quickly put in the point that the discussion was complicated, and everyone seemed to want to see only what they wanted.  

This does remind me that I did discuss male-female school issues with moderate openness at work, largely because it was a mostly-female environment that kept insisting that schools were biased against girls, which I felt I needed to smack down whenever it came up.  I would often take the frustration that some mother was feeling about how her son was being treated at school as my entry point. "Yes, the women of my generation were always told how prejudiced schools were against them. Then they had sons and learned the opposite. Schools had some poor attitudes toward girls, and probably still do.  But they are designed by women for girls, and boys get crushed."  Often, the penny dropped, because it was their boy.  Arguments ensued, but I didn't much mind in that instance. (The opening data, for those who doubt this:  Girls average nearly a letter grade higher.  They make the honor roll twice as often, and high honors three times as often. Unless you think they actually are much smarter than boys - show your work - then it must be that other qualities are being measured.  And they are, beginning with conscientiousness, which is a nice thing to have, but not the only thing we expect from a school. Even now, schools as designed are harder for those with attentional problems, which seem to be predominantly boys.)

16 comments:

james said...

For decades the only times anybody in my orbit has tried to discuss it has been
1) Trump is racist [ invariably they mean dogwhistles or "supports the racist system" ]
2) If you don't support Obama you must be racist

The town and gown have both indulged in dialog (aka shut up and listen) sessions, but I've been able to avoid those.

james said...

“Religious liberty might be supposed to mean that everybody is free to discuss religion. In practice it means that hardly anybody is allowed to mention it.”

Mike Guenther said...

In a lot of work places, discussion about religion and politics are off limits.

Assistant Village Idiot said...

@ Mike Guenther - people said that where I worked, but it just meant that liberals could say what they wanted and no one could push back without being thought divisive.

Christopher B said...

@james

The more I watch things the more I think your first bullet point flows from your second. It was such an easy and effective tactic that the Democrats just can't give it up.

That opinion are racist.
Your candidate ​is racist.
You are racists.

ErisGuy said...

The defect in people isn’t that IQ varies by race or individually, but that people categorize then treat people as members of the category.

To paraphrase the “X-Files,” not Buddha, not Muhammad, not Confucius, not Jesus could fix this. And the Left thinks the government can do it. Like every other “paradise” from Muenster to Moscow, hell on Earth will be the only result. And those who pretend to wisdom will ponder why? And promise next, oh, next time, it will all be different.

Zachriel said...

Assistant Village Idiot: The evidence that he cited is that slavery existed for a long time, and then oppression, so it's just overwhelmingly likely there's still some structural racism going on. Could be. But where is it?

As a fish in water, a fish doesn't see the water. Structural racism is everywhere in modern society. Those in power tend to take actions which maintain their power, and then rationalize those actions.

A simple example is the old boy network, which is a natural and rational means of hiring. But consider a racially segregated society. Assume that a miracle occurs and one day everyone stops being racist. That very day, Whites will still control the power and hold the best jobs. So the society is already unfair even though racism has disappeared. A White manager now looks to hire. He talks to his White friends at his White country club and hires the White son of a member of his White church. The racial disparity persists.

Even if the manager considers hiring a Black person, he doesn't have the qualifications or experience (and the manager, as open-minded as he thinks he is, is a bit uncomfortable, because, let's face it, Blacks are culturally different). If some people are still racist (it could happen that way, you know), then racial disparities can persist for generations.

Assistant Village Idiot: For the record, even though it looks to me as if genetic explanations have the inside track on that one, I very much hope it turns out to be culture, or some epigenetic phenomenon of being exposed to violence or living in an adrenalised, cortisol-activated environment activating a suite of behaviors that might somehow be avoided if we only knew how.

Those outside the mainstream society, especially in urban areas, have higher violent crime rates. The experience of various immigrant groups show why and how violence can become the rational response to environmental conditions. (Think The Godfather.) Also, there is much less violence in the modern world than there was in the medieval context. That argues against an ethno-genetic basis for violent crime.

Assistant Village Idiot said...

I will break my own rule and respond. I imagine I will regret it.

The old boy network idea is plausible, and was certainly a factor in years past. I see no evidence it is a big deal anymore. It did not exist where I worked, where my wife worked, and I don't think where any of my sons and daughters-in-law worked, except that there is an old-girl network in nursing around women who went to the same school you did. So you can say that Structural racism is everywhere until you are blue in the face, but affirmative action is a countermeasure that has long been in place, and there are other factors besides race in an old boy network even if did exist. You are making assertion after assertion that "just sounds right" to you, but has no current basis. Frankly, you are the fish that doesn't see the water, the evidence being that you miraculously produce the conventional wisdom as the explanation for every phenomenon.

That there is less violence in the modern world is likely to be partly genetic, as I have discussed here before, noting the increase in broadly cooperative genes due to avoidance of cousin marriage. That those outside the mainstream of society have higher crime rates is why they are outside, not a result. The rate for black violent crime is not somewhat higher because of some vague environmental theories, it is ten times higher, and that is similar across every one of the 3000 counties in America. They can't all be equally structurally racist. People do act differently in different environments and i have never said otherwise. But when you get 10x more violence from one group over another (including those who come from backgrounds of oppression), no matter what environment you put people in, a genetic explanation has to be considered. Italians never had the rate of violent crime in any neighborhood since their arrival in the US that the AA community is showing now. I will agree that substance abuse is an environmental factor that leads to violence by a few separate routes. Yet even that does not begin to explain the 10x difference. BTW, the numbers are 2-4x for Hispanics and Natives, and 0.5x for most Asian populations and Jews.

Zachriel said...

Assistant Village Idiot: affirmative action is a countermeasure that has long been in place

That's right. It is a measure adopted to help rectify systemic racism. Perhaps we can agree that systemic racism is a real historical phenomenon.

Assistant Village Idiot: That there is less violence in the modern world is likely to be partly genetic, as I have discussed here before, noting the increase in broadly cooperative genes due to avoidance of cousin marriage.

Genetics can't explain why Italians, for instance, exhibited high rates of violence, violence which receded as they were integrated into the larger White culture. Indeed, many immigrant groups congregated into ethnic enclaves that were beset by organized crime.

Here's is the historical murder rate:
https://quod.lib.umich.edu/h/humfig/images/11217607.0002.206-00000002.jpg

Donna B. said...

@Zach -- any idea what happened in the 1970s and 1980s that plunged in the 2000s? Any idea what that graph would show for "England" if updated to the UK in 2021?

Forget apples to oranges, the best bet is to compare asparagus to kumquats.

G. Poulin said...

"Systemic racism" is one of those all-purpose explanations for everything that conspiracy theorists are so fond of. "Slavery existed for hundreds of years, therefore systemic racism must have existed" is a piece of false reasoning. Racism had little or nothing to do with the existence of slavery; racist theories were adopted after the fact in order to rationalize an institution that hadn't needed rationalizing previously. Affirmative action was not a response to "systemic racism"; it was a response to chronic black failure to achieve much on their own even with equality of opportunity. "Aha!", says the conspiracy theorist, "that chronic failure proves that the racism must be even more systemic than we thought!" The more obvious explanation, Occam-style, is the genetic one. But that goes against our national civil religion, and is therefore forbidden.

Zachriel said...

Donna B: any idea what happened in the 1970s and 1980s that plunged in the 2000s?

We can be fairly certain it didn't have to do with an overall change in the genetic composition of the population of the U.S. One factor may have been the demographic age of the population.

Unknown: "Slavery existed for hundreds of years, therefore systemic racism must have existed" is a piece of false reasoning.

Are you actually arguing systemic racism didn't exist in the U.S. in 1857? Or in 1896?

G. Poulin said...

Yes. Systemic racism is an ideological construct unrelated to the real world, and a convenient excuse for any number of bad social policies. As I stated already, racism had nothing to do with the existence of slavery. The planters didn't say "There's some black people, they're inferior so let's enslave them". No, they discovered that the newly arrived Africans made better slaves than the Europeans they were using before ---sturdier, more resistant to tropical disease, better adapted to the climate, etc.. So they developed a preference for African slaves. That's it. No voodoo explanations necessary. Get back to me when you've learned how to think.

Zachriel said...

Unknown: The planters didn't say "There's some black people, they're inferior so let's enslave them". No, they discovered that the newly arrived Africans made better slaves than the Europeans they were using before ---sturdier, more resistant to tropical disease, better adapted to the climate, etc.. So they developed a preference for African slaves.

Even accepting your claim at face value, that doesn't mean there has never been systemic racism.

Indeed, 1857 was the year of the U.S. Supreme Court decision, Dred Scott v. Sandford: "{blacks} had no rights which the white man was bound to respect." That's systemic racism, by definition.

The Plessy v. Ferguson decision was in 1896: "We consider the underlying fallacy of the plaintiff's argument to consist in the assumption that the enforced separation of the two races stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority. If this be so, it is not by reason of anything found in the act, but solely because the colored race chooses to put that construction on it." History showed that Jim Crow was systemically racist.

Zachriel said...

James Joyner blogged on an interesting case of systemic racism; title to land handed down in black families in the South, a vestige of the Jim Crow era.
https://www.outsidethebeltway.com/heirs-property-and-fema-relief/

HMS Defiant said...

For my 30 years in the navy and my fathers and grandfathers years in the Army we followed the rules of the mess. We didn't talk about politics, religion or women. Other topics simply weren't worth discussing. It made for a fairly restful experience.
I personally don't find anything at all wrong with racism. It's a realistic combination of facts one knows and the stereotypes that seem to apply even though everyone is eager to denounce them and those who allow such thinking to 'prejudice' their attitudes toward their fellow man.
I used to live a couple of streets over from the Childrens Hospital in Oakland, CA. I never met more overt racists in my life. It goes without saying, they were all black. I think it is worse now then 30 years ago and now worse all over the country. I don't see it getting better or improving since every action, thought and deed seems designed to reinforce hate and contempt for the other and is taught by educators at every level and most corporate enterprises with HR departments.