I’d say this is just about right.

(cross-posted from the United States of Jamerica)

Patterico, a conservative blogger, describes his “pontifications” as “harangues that make sense.”  Assuming the definition of sense has remained relatively constant, this can’t possibly be the case.  Especially when the blogger in question — in a post linked approvingly by America’s Worst Race Theorist — cites African-American discomfort with interracial marriage as a modern-day example of racism.

Ignoring the fact that it is completely ridiculous to cite a single news article as indicative of a larger trend of “Racist Black People Oppressing the White Man,” it is simply the case that black attitudes regarding interracial marriage make a lot of sense when considered in context (which I understand is a scary word for conservatives).  The simple fact is that in this culture, “blackness” is bad, and to be black and female is to be considered fundamentally problematic (see: most depictions of black women in media) and undesirable.  And the worry among a lot of black women is that black men who date “outside the race” have internalized this frame of black women as being undesirable.  Accordingly, many black women and black men feel uncomfortable when they see prominent black men dating white women, as they take it as an explicit rejection of their blackness (hence the fact that Michelle Obama bolstered Barack’s appeal among black voters – it convinced them that he wasn’t ashamed of his blackness).

To call this racist is, well, stupid.  It is no different than the in-group preference you see in any other racial or ethnic minority.  Indeed, it is best understood as another way to preserve cultural cohesion and push back against negative depictions of ones ethnic group.  Of course, seeing as how conservatives are constantly on the hunt for anything to deflect charges of racism onto minorities, it’s not really a shock that they would latch on to this as an “example” of racism.

*Now is probably a good time to add that I’ll be blogging at my own place more often. So if you’re remotely interested in reading what I have to say, you should probably head over there from time to time.

On the fringes of the internet, you often hear that the science of hereditary racial differences is settled, that racial equality is a convenient fiction that doesn’t stand up to real scrutiny. So you’ll understand my amusement at this half-baked post from Half Sigma, which takes issue with an article that suggests immigration and military infrastructure, not the innate racial superiority of its population, are behind Israel’s  economic success:

Immigration is offered as an explanation [for Israeli success]:

“A key lesson from Israel is that innovation is not just something that goes on inside companies; it comes from a wider culture that fosters both innovation and entrepreneurship. Israel is a country of immigrants — there are over 70 nationalities represented in this tiny country. Two out of every three Israelis are newcomers, or the children or grandchildren of newcomers. . . . Immigrants are natural risk takers since they were willing to uproot themselves and start over.”

Ah yes, how convenient that Israeli economic success can teach us a politically correct lesson about the importance of allowing more immigrants into the United States.

The thing about Israeli immigration is that it’s mostly composed of high-IQ Ashkenazi Jews from Eastern Bloc countries, who share a cultural and racial heritage with Israel’s existing Jewish population. In contrast, United States immigration is mostly low-IQ Hispanics, and most of the high-IQ immigration comes from Asia and they don’t share a cultural background with America’s predominant white European population, nor are they of the same race.

Politically correct? Or factually accurate? It’s worth noting that immigrants are generally more innovative and intelligent than those who stay behind, regardless of their ethnic or geographic origins (emphasis mine):

Geneticists have shown that there is literally such a thing as American DNA, not surprising when nearly all of us are descended from immigrants. We therefore carry an immigrant-specific genotype, a genetic marker expressing itself—in some environments, at least—as energetic risk-taking and competitive self-promotion. Even when famine, warfare, or another calamity strikes, most people stay in their homeland. The self-selecting group that migrates, seldom more than 2 percent, is disproportionally inclined to take chances. They also have above-average intelligence and are quicker decision makers. Something about their dopamine-receptor systems, the neural pathway associated with a taste for novelty and risk, sets them apart from those who stay put.

Of course, the actual science makes no distinction between Ashkenazi Jews and ‘low-IQ Hispanics’, but why let that stop mindless speculation?

The author, wholly committed to making a fool out of himself, follows up with this gem:

The blog post also suggests that military service benefits Israel.

–

This is a big red herring. I worked for the U.S. Army as a civilian, and it was the most poorly managed organization I ever worked for. I was able to see firsthand that battlefield experience does not result in skills which are especially useful in white collar office jobs.

Ah, of course. Anecdotal evidence trumps the testimony of various industry insiders. Never mind the fact that the Israeli military is dramatically different from the United States’. Never mind the fact that people who have actually studied Israel’s high tech economy came to similar conclusions:

Jeffrey Goldberg: One of your arguments is that it’s not necessarily Jewish culture that created this, but Israel Defense Force culture, that many of the great entrepreneurs and innovators come out of the Air Force, out of the technical branches of the IDF. And that this is replicable. Is that fair to say?

–

Dan Senor: Shimon Peres told us that Jews have a tendency throughout our history to be dissatisfied. That’s a big theme, so this is obviously a big part of IDF culture. I’m of two minds on how applicable this is to the American military. On the one hand, I feel that the Israeli military is just a more entrepreneurial military than any military I know of or that we’ve studied. I mean, it’s just so much more built around improvisation. The fact that when you’re being promoted in the Israeli military, your subordinates have input, or can have input, in those decisions. So it’s a very entrepreneurial, start-up military. There are very few bosses.  The only way you can cultivate that culture and ethos is if you have very few bosses, because the moment you have a lot of bosses, you have a lot of people who need to justify their existence, and they justify their existence by giving commands. I saw this on military bases I’ve worked on and when I’ve been in government –  the U.S. military is top-heavy, and you have a lot of people standing around giving orders to sort of justify their existence.

Half Sigma’s post is supposed to be a fearless exercise in truth-telling, an unvarnished look at the genetic superiority of certain racial groups. Instead, it’s a laughably thin excuse to trot-out easily debunked racialist theories. It’s not as if you need any particular expertise in genetics or Israeli society to disprove this stuff, either. Behind the author’s self-satisfied ranting about “political correctness” is a post that doesn’t stand up to the scrutiny of a few well-placed Google searches.

I agree with conservatives like David Horowitz and John Hinderacker; in light of the shooting at Ft. Hood, we need to reassert and protect our values.  The question of course, is the who we’re protecting our values from.  Hint: it’s not Muslims.  But first, a few quick points about Muslim-American attitudes:

1. Muslim-American are overwhelmingly happy with their place in the United States:

Back in 2007, the Pew Research Center released the first comprehensive survey of Muslim-American attitudes.  According to the survey, nearly eight out of ten Muslim-Americans say that they are happy with their lives in the United States.  To break that down a bit, 24 percent of Muslim Americans would say that they are “very happy” with their lives, 54 percent would say that they are “pretty happy,” and only 18 percent would say “not too happy.”  Among the general public, those numbers are 36 percent, 51 percent and 12 percent respectively.  Which brings me to my next point…

2. Most Muslim-Americans see no conflict between religious commitment and living in a modern society:

63 percent of Muslim-Americans say that they see no conflict between being a devout Muslim and living in a modern society.  What’s more, a strong plurality of Muslims (43 percent) say that Muslims coming to America today should adopt American customs.  By contrast, only 26 percent say that they should remain distinct, and 16 percent say that they should try both.  Indeed, reading through the report, the vast majority of data suggests that on the whole, Muslims are glad to be in the United States and happy with the opportunities the country provides them.

Unfortunately, a good majority of Muslims are also worried about various forms of discrimination, racism, prejudice and stereotyping.  19 percent of Muslims say that they are worried about discrimination/racism/prejudice, 15 percent are worried about being viewed as terrorists, 14 percent are worried about ignorance of Islam, and 12 percent are worried about stereotyping.

This is a really important point.  Contra the Hinderaker’s and Horowitz’s, we have absolutely nothing to fear from the 2.5 million Muslims who call the United States home.  It’s to our credit as Americans that we have built a society where people of different religious beliefs and cultural traditions can live and work in peace without fear of harassment.  Insofar that we should worry about anything, it’s those who would ostracize Muslims and use the weight of the federal government to isolate them.  Anger and hostility breed hatred and extremism, and if we want to remain a society committed to tolerance and mutual respect, then we should work our hardest to marginalize anti-Muslim voices.

But it’s pretty damn close. You really should read the whole thing.

Even if Rasmussen’s poll is accurate and only 14 percent of African-Americans say that American society “is generally fair and decent” (down from 55 percent from February), this – from Powerline’s John Hinderaker – is still pretty stupid:

It’s interesting that Latinos and Asians evidently have a higher opinion of the decency of American society than whites. But the main point here, obviously, is the dramatic shift among African-Americans. What could have caused it?

The only possible answer is that many Americans have opposed President Obama’s policies. But why would that cause African-Americans to think that our society is “discriminatory” rather than “decent”? No mystery there: in a well-coordinated campaign, the Democratic Party has relentlessly portrayed all disagreement with the Obama administration’s policies as “racist.” That contemptible and divisive tactic had seemed to produce no results, but we now see that it had one consequence: alienating African-Americans from their country.

I wonder what would cause African-Americans to think that our society is discriminatory rather than decent?  The institutional racism and massive economic inequalities notwithstanding, I’m inclined to think that it has something to do with the indiscriminate killing of black people by police, or the thinly-veiled racist outrage surrounding Sonia Sotomayor, or the GOP’s race-baiting spokesmen, or the fact that Republican congressmen refer to the president as “boy” and ask him to “show some humility.”  And then there’s the whole “tea party” thing.

Yeah, I’m pretty sure that has something to do with it.

I see this story percolating through the left side of the blogosphere today.  It seems to be missing the context necessary to accurately interpret what Limbaugh was actually saying, which was a different kind of crazy than alleged, though just as explicitly vile.

If you’ve been following the movement Right’s reaction to this story, you’d understand that one of their central themes has been that this incident shows that in Obama’s America, white people are legally second-class citizens.  In their bizarre world, this bus incident was a hate crime, and the refusal to consider it as such is proof that the law doesn’t apply with equal force to white people.  As or even more disturbingly, they are also claiming that liberals are actively supporting the notion that the victim deserved what he got because he was trying to sit in the “black” part of the bus. 

Given that context, and given the full transcript of Limbaugh’s insanity, it’s pretty clear that Limbaugh was not actually advocating racially segregated busing.  What he was instead doing was claiming that the Left and Obama are advocating racially segregated busing of a sort. 

This is yet another step down the Right’s obsession with creating totally unsupportable claims of racial victimization of white people.  This obsession may well be a form of racism in and of itself, but it takes a different form than “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!”  The form instead is “Don’t let TEH BROWN PEOPLE impose segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever on us decent and law-abiding whites!”  And yes, it really is that deranged.

For the prosecution: Bruce Western. For the defense: Heather Mac Donald. As someone who is inclined to find fault with the status quo, I expected agree with Western, but Mac Donald’s defense of the criminal justice system is both thorough and compelling. In light of the Gates affair, I recommend giving both essays a read.

One cost-free way for conservatives to appeal to minority voters would be to do a better job of policing internal discourse. After all, repeating “Party of Lincoln!” ad nauseum doesn’t really help things when pervasive racism seems alive and well on the right wing of the political spectrum. But conservative operatives have evidently decided that disassociating themselves from racist remarks is too high a price to pay for reaching out, having gone ahead and elected this woman head of the Young Republicans. Change!

Via Ta-Nehisi Coates comes this piece by Pat Buchanan that centers around the following allegation:

Sotomayor got into Princeton, got her No. 1 ranking, was whisked into Yale Law School and made editor of the Yale Law Review — all because she was a Hispanic woman. And those two Ivy League institutions cheated more deserving students of what they had worked a lifetime to achieve, for reasons of race, gender or ethnicity.

This is bigotry pure and simple. To salve their consciences for past societal sins, the Ivy League is deep into discrimination again, this time with white males as victims rather than as beneficiaries.

Now whatever Pat Buchanan’s, uhh, complicated relationship with mainstream American conservatism and libertarianism, the sentiment in this statement is a pretty common one – i.e., affirmative action programs reward mediocrity, discriminate against whites, and a whole host of other evils.  Buchanan then even goes so far as to insinuate that the credentials Judge Sotomayor earned once at those schools were themselves the product of racial favoritism:

Two weeks ago, The New York Times reported that, to get up to speed on her English skills at Princeton, Sotomayor was advised to read children’s classics and study basic grammar books during her summers. How do you graduate first in your class at Princeton if your summer reading consists of “Chicken Little” and “The Troll Under the Bridge”?

There is a sentiment in these specific arguments, when made in this way, that really bugs me.  That sentiment is that Judge Sotomayor achieved not a thing because of her own talents or intelligence – not only did she get into those schools solely because of affirmative action, but once she was there she succeeded only because of racial favoritism.  Since Judge Sotomayor graduated first in her class and received all sorts of honors (e.g. editor of the Yale Law Review), this argument thus implies, intentionally or unintentionally, that not a single other minority student deserved to be at those schools or even hypothetically could deserve to be at those schools.  Otherwise, why would Judge Sotomayor, of all the other minority students, reach the top of her class? 

But there’s also some sentiments in these arguments that I encounter pretty regularly in discussions of affirmative action.  They’re sentiments that are easy to arrive at, but which just don’t hold up to close scrutiny and are part of why I’ve become less opposed to, and even downright supportive of, affirmative action programs even as I’ve gotten more passionate about my libertarianism.  Specifically, I’m referring to the notion that somehow affirmative action programs represent a form of bigotry and racism against whites and that they stand in the way of a “color-blind” society.

First, let’s be clear that we’re talking in this case about private affirmative action programs, not public ones.  So why should anyone care, unless they want to advocate that it’s perfectly acceptable for a government to force a private employer to adopt a sort of affirmative action for white people?  By this I mean that the original more or less Goldwater-esque (and definitely libertarian) argument against discrimination laws was that people should have the right to be racist douchebags.  If you really think that affirmative action programs are a form of reverse racism and that private colleges should thus be prohibited from implementing them, then you are abandoning the argument that people should have a right to be racist douchebags.  (And yes, I know that Ivy League schools get federal money…so do plenty of private businesses, though.  Regardless, see below). 

But more importantly, there’s this question – how are affirmative action programs, whether public or private, for purposes of “diversity” or for purposes of remedying some other discrimination, really worth getting upset about in the first place?  Don’t get me wrong – I’m sure there are cases where a more qualified white candidate gets rejected because of an affirmative action program that is based on a “diversity” rationale.  This after all was the basis for the claims in both Gratz and Gruttinger.  But as I’ll show, the “diversity” rationale isn’t really the underlying rationale. 

When an affirmative action program is set up as a means of remedying some other form of discrimination, then the presumption is that the only reason the average minority applicant would be less qualfied than a white applicant would be that other form of discrimination, whether past or present.  Thus, if you factor that past discrimination into the equation, the two applicants would be equally qualified.  In that situation, affirmative action is absolutely necessary to restore a meritocracy – it doesn’t stand in the way of meritocracy.  In other words, it’s an attempt to approximate what would happen in a discrimination-free environment.  This rationale strikes me as doubly relevant in the public context, since government is supposed to serve all of its people, and representat all of its people.  Allowing the legacy of past discrimination to take longer to work its way through the system strikes me as pretty insidious, and the only reasons to be concerned about such programs are if you think that other forms of discrimination need not be remedied or are unnecessary because we’ve already achieved a “color-blind” society.  Few people are willing to admit to the former reason (although there may be good arguments in support), but the latter reason winds up being pretty weak: even if we’ve achieved a “color-blind” society, then the worst that can be said about affirmative action policies is that they are unnecessary and on some rare occasions affect qualified applicants at the margins.  This is unfortunate and wrong, but it’s also not exactly something that threatens the fabric of our society either.

The supposedly bigger problem with affirmative action arises when it is justified based on a diversity rationale because other forms of discrimination have supposedly been rooted out of the system (often a debatable proposition).  But even here, the argument just doesn’t hold up on a macro-level.  Affirmative action programs are intended to ensure that people of different races are represented in a proportion that is roughly reflective of the rest of society.  So, if we assume that no particular race is inherently more qualified than another particular race – i.e., we sincerely believe we are or should be ”color-blind,” then in most instances, and particularly when we’re discussing large institutions, affirmative action programs will have exceedingly little effect.  All races are equally capable of being qualified, so therefore if there were no affirmative action program, the result would be almost exactly the same.  At worst, we have a policy that is useless but does no real harm in the aggregate (there may, again, be exceptions to this, but they’re likely to be pretty rare). 

Of course, quota systems are prohibited, so instead we wind up with race being a “plus” rather than creating something along the lines of a separate applicant pool.  Oddly, this results in a situation where the more clearly “race-neutral” result is somewhat less likely - a “plus” system actively prefers a minority over an otherwise equal candidate solely as a means of increasing diversity even though, assuming a colorblind world, such a “plus” would be unnecessary – the accepted candidates would already represent the relevant society at-large.

This leaves opponents of affirmative action in a tough spot – they have to at least implicitly argue that policies based on diversity result in blacks and Latinos being over-represented relative to their representation in the population, an argument that is easily disproven with statistics. 

All that said, there’s something else here: affirmative action programs based on diversity do not result in overrepresentation of blacks and Latinos at just about any university that is not an HBC, and at most non-Ivy private schools that use the diversity rationale, they are severely under-represented.  This can only lead to two conclusions, both of which are uncomfortable though they shouldn’t be equally so: either (a)blacks and Latinos are inherently inferior, or (b) we still have not overcome the legacy of racial discrimination, and affirmative action policies based on “diversity” are just an attempt to make up for racial discrimination that the institution doesn’t want to acknowledge is racially discriminatory. 

I don’t intend to sign up with the KKK anytime soon, so I’m going to say option (b) is about 1000% more likely.  And indeed, when you look at the case of the Ivies, there is something that is pretty damn racially discriminatory that they should be making up for: the legacy system.  Suffice to say: if we want a color-blind society anytime in the next several decades, legacy systems will have to go first.  Until that time or until something resembling racial economic equality is achieved through the effects of affirmative action, poor and middle-class whites will be the ones to bear the costs of legacy admissions policies.

“Judge Sotomayor was raised in public housing? So was I. Her mother was a nurse working late shifts? So was mine. When did white working poor people disappear off the face of the earth? Where are the eager listeners to their “compelling stories”?”

~John Derbyshire

John “Derb” Derbyshire pendulates between very sensible and very silly.  His defense of evolution and attacks against the ID nonsense in Ben Stein’s Expelled mockumentary (wait – that was a real documentary?) were typical Sensible Derbyshire.  Likewise, his recent assault on talk radio’s wrecking of the Right was brilliant and timely.

But there is also the silly Derbyshire.  The man is undoubtedly as sharp as they come, but he manages, nonetheless, to say some pretty stupid things.  I won’t necessarily hold his opinions against him – it’s his prerogative to be “a homophobe, though a mild and tolerant one, and a racist, though an even more mild and tolerant one” as he once put it (and later clarified).  I, of course, disagree with him – especially on his points on homosexuality which I do not view as a “net negative” on society.  [Read more →]