In the wake of the unrest in Ferguson – just as in the wake of the Martin-Zimmerman incident, and every other racial episode in recent memory – there’s been a call for a “dialogue about race”.
Of course, the “dialogue” that most people are calling for involves one side doing all the talking, and the other shutting up and taking whatever’s dished out.
Not that listening isn’t a bad idea. I’ve long since found that when the subject is race, I’m much better off listening than talking.
One of the few substantive things I’ve ever had to say, when I do talk about the subject, is that everyone in the world is a “we-ist”; that everyone on this planet comes practically from the womb more comfortable around, forgiving of, and accepting of people who look, sound and act like them.
And it’s not just my theory. No. It’s settled science™:
Science has bad news, though, for anyone who claims to not see race: They’re deluding themselves, say several bias experts. A body of scientific research over the past 50 years shows that people notice not only race but gender, wealth, even weight.
When babies are as young as 3 months old, research shows they start preferring to be around people of their own race, says Howard J. Ross, author of “Everyday Bias” …
Other studies confirm the power of racial bias, Ross says.
One study conducted by a Brigham Young University economics professor showed that white NBA referees call more fouls on black players, and black referees call more fouls on white players. Another study that was published in the American Journal of Sociology showed that newly released white felons experience better job hunting success than young black men with no criminal record, Ross says.
“Human beings are consistently, routinely and profoundly biased,” Ross says.
And humans being humans, they ladle all sorts of learned behavior on top of that human trait, down to the languages they learn; some languages codify “we-ism”; Farsi and Lakota are two examples of languages where the world for “person” gets less and less complimentary, the more removed from one’s own tribe the “person” comes from.
And it’s everyone, not just white people. And it shows; middle class blacks get uncomfortable around white bikers; Koreans are leery of Latinos. Pick your combination; whoever you and they are, everyone is wired to keep people who are different from them at arm’s length.
That, of course, is never part of the proposed “dialog about race”.
Interesting comment, but it strikes me that the correct measure of bias in the NBA is not the portion of calls made against players of whatever race. It is the portion of incorrect calls made against players of whatever race, and the portion of missed calls made against players of whatever race. That may correlate with the overall numbers, but perhaps not as tightly as we would like.
And it also strikes me that when we are looking at job hunting success for white felons vs. blacks with no criminal record, don’t we have to look at the neighborhood they’re going back to? For example, Martha Stewart has a felony record, I believe, but she’s not exactly living in the South Side of Chicago, Detroit, or Gary. She also has a degree and a long resume/curriculum vitae.
Put gently, before we used these examples to “prove” we are naturally biased/racist, we need to handle some obvious objections like this.
And yes, black are nervous around whites who ride Harleys. For that matter, so am I. They’re not people of interest to the FBI because they stay stone cold sober and stop their hogs to pick up little duckies off the road.
Honestly, this really indicates more about the limitations of social science research than it does about natural biases.
Black college dorms self-segregate, Black parents give their children unique names, Urban Black is its own dialect of American English . . . but White Liberals cannot accept that Blacks don’t WANT to be White, act White, live with Whites. For all their chatter about tolerance and diversisty, White Liberals are remarkably fascist.
Is this a joke?
“”The more we assume that the problem of racism is limited to the Klan, the birthers, the tea party or to the Republican Party, the less we understand that racial domination is a collective process and we are all in this game.”
Who is the “we” group this so-called social scientist belongs to? Why does he use the word “we” rather than “they”?
It is part of the proposed ‘dialog about race.’ It’s the statist idea that has been around for more than century. “Individuals act irrationally. Their ideas are a result of their upbringing, neuroses, and prejudices. Only the State is able to act in a rational manner.”
You are incapable of determining whether you, or anyone else, is a racist. Only the sate can do this and take appropriate action.
Lots of crazy over there. From a white paper cited by the article:
“It turns out that there is a dramatic difference
between the average death rates of the storms
named for men (23) and those named for women
(45). Was this because the WMA chose female
names for the harshest storms? Not unless they
had a crystal ball. The names, it turns out, are
designated years before the actual hurricanes.
The difference, it seems, lies not in the naming
of the storms, but in the reaction to the storms’
names. “People may be dying as a result of the
femininity of a hurricane (name),” said Sharon
Shavitt, one of the studies co-authors. “In
judging the intensity of a storm, people appear
to be applying their beliefs about how men and
women behave,” Shavitt says. “This makes a
female-named hurricane, especially one with a
very feminine name such as Belle or Cindy, seem
gentler and less violent.””
The white paper, http://www.cookross.com/docs/everyday_bias.pdf, was written by Howard Ross, Founder and Chief Learning Officer, Cook Ross Inc.
Cook-ross inc. calls itself “. . . a certified woman-owned organizational transformation firm that specializes in organizational development, leadership development and diversity and inclusion. We are committed to transforming organizations around the world towards becoming more conscious, inclusive and humane communities.”
Anecdote provided in a sales brochure is not science. We need better journalists.
Perusing the actual study cited by the white paper raises a lot of interesting questions. The authors are forthright about their wish to find a positive correlation. Not surprising that after they got done massaging the data they “proved” there was one. Of course, they couldn’t just use the actual names. They had to construct a MF “index” that supposedly added a gradation scale of increased or decreased feminine or masculine quality. For that they used a panel of four female graders, blind to what they were really being asked to do. OK, I can buy that, but the perceived need to construct the index instead of using simple male versus female name suggests that the binary approach didn’t give them the results they wanted to see. To their credit, they excluded two female named hurricanes (Katrina and Audrey) that had produced enormous death tolls. However, the relatively small sample size of 92 hurricanes, many of which produced small death tolls, suggests that the true statistical significance may be non-existent.
One other point: The Bell Curve, a book much maligned by liberals, in which the heritability of intelligence is discussed, uses pretty convincing statistics to show that intelligence predicts many things like drop out rates, out of wedlock births, criminality, SES and that it is inherited along with racial characteristics. Try bringing that up at your next class reunion or post it on social media and expect your head to be taken off at the neck. So science is “settled” only if it agrees with pre-conceived ideas about equality.
I am a retired curmudgeon, therefore I had enough free time to crunch hurricane numbers and have concluded that the authors of the female hurricane killer hypothesis thoroughly cooked the books. I looked at all Atlantic hurricanes making landfall in the US from 1979 (when male and female names started being used) to 2012. The study went back to 1950, for unclear reasons. Only female names were used from 1953 – 1978.
The study claimed they studied 94 storms. I found 121 named storms that made landfall during 1979-2012. I included tropical storms, because they were sometime hurricanes and if the hypothesis of the study was that female names caused people to be less vigilant, why not include all named storms?
Like the study, I excluded Katrina, which was an outlier of such proportions that it skewed the results. It broke down to 61 male and 60 female. Total US deaths in the male named storms were 721; US deaths in female named storms were 617. Number of deaths per storm in the male named storms were 12.02; in the female 10.11. I’m not enough of a statistician to establish if that is a statistically significant result. I tend to doubt that it is, believing that the “gender” of a hurricane makes no difference in the number of deaths. In any case, it absolutely lays waste to the incredible BS of the published study. But I will bet from now on, the gerbils of the left will refer to that study as more “proof” of the sexism of our culture.