Category: science

3 You’re not “a racist”; you’re just racist

July 26, 2011
by Crommunist
· blog · critical thinking · crommunism · psychology · racism

This past weekend I was chatting with a friend of mine about a variety of topics, including the tragic shootings in Norway. He was trying to establish that the event was an isolated incident by one crazy person, while I was suggesting that those kinds of things don’t happen in a vacuum. I pointed to a parallel argument I had when it comes to hate groups like Blood and Honour – the extremists are often the outliers of a group that holds similar views but would stop short of violence.

His response was fairly typical: “well there are always going to be some racists out there, but that doesn’t mean everyone is responsible.”

He was wrong, for reasons that I discuss in the linked post above, but it was the language he used that particularly irked me. “Some racists” is not a phrase I could ever see myself using, except in an unthinking moment. Not only is it an unwieldy phrase that could be convicted for abuse of the English language, it tips its hand as to how deeply the speaker misunderstands the origins and mechanisms of racism. I’ve touched on this discussion before, but I would like to talk explicitly about why this phrase is either a) meaningless, or b) profoundly ignorant.

First, we must revisit our operational definition of racism. Please note that I am using the term ‘operational definition’ intentionally – I use this definition for my own purposes, but it means many different things to different people. I think that my definition is the most accurate I’ve come across (obviously), but others would disagree. The chief component of my definition is that racism happens when attitudes or beliefs about a racial group are ascribed to an individual. Essentially, it makes the assumption that a person’s racial background provides sufficient information to predict their behaviours, which is not supported by evidence. This is to say nothing of the fact that the attitudes or beliefs about a group could be (and often are) fundamentally flawed.

It becomes fairly clear, when we consider this definition, that all people are potentially susceptible to this kind of heuristic thinking. I am sure that I have gone on rants about what “conservatives” do and do not believe, when conservativism does not necessitate given beliefs on any topic – rather conservative thinking tends to lead to a cluster of beliefs, many of which are often shared by those that describe themselves as “conservative”. It is a cognitive shortcut, but one that oversimplifies a process that is important to understand – what the mental scaffolding supporting conservative beliefs (or liberal beliefs) is. Simply labeling people as “conservatives” masks that thought process, putting effect in the place of cause.

Similarly, I rankle whenever someone uses the phrase “a racist”, because it commits the same error. Racism is a cognitive process, and as such exists as the engine behind actions and attitudes, rather than their essential component. Calling someone “a racist” suggests that there is some kind of binary state of ‘racist’ and ‘not racist’ in which people can exist. It supposes further that when someone performs an action or voices an attitude that is itself racist, that it is their existence in the first of these binary conditions that is primarily responsible – as though there is something organically racist within them that doesn’t exist in the general population. You know, the general population of ‘not racists’.

Of course it’s trivially easy to recognize the fallacious thinking at work here. All we have to do is look back over the last few decades and note the monumental rate of spontaneous remission that happened in ‘racists’. A sudden seroconversion that has removed all the malignant racist cells and replaced them with healthy non-racistocytes. Or, perhaps racism isn’t quite so simple as that. When we see racism as simply a product of human cognitive shortcuts, the idea of being “a racist” starts to fall apart. After all, if we’re all susceptible to racist thoughts and behaviours (that are, for most of us, subconscious), then can anyone be described as “not racist”? Does it exist on some kind of continuum like the DSM where people that exhibit a certain pattern of behaviour can be diagnosed with “racist personality disorder”?

No. Racism is best understood as the product of ideas, both conscious and unconscious, about other people, and our tendency to try and reduce people to convenient labels (like… oh, I dunno… ‘a racist’). I can certainly understand why people like to use this term, because it allows them to preserve their self-concept of being a good person and scapegoat racist activities as the product of “racists”. Once blame has been assigned in this way, then the speaker can dust her/his hands off and say “it’s not my problem – I’m not a racist.” However, that simply means the problems never get solved, because the only people whose self-concept allows them to brand themselves as being “a racist” are proud of that appellation.

This is why I am in favour of using my own definition of racism, because it renders the idea of being ‘a racist’ completely ridiculous. While it may be convenient to describe people as being ‘a racist’, it distracts from what is actually happening behind the scenes in such a way as to increase societal inertia when it comes to dealing with race issues. It is far more accurate and useful to think of racism as a set of cognitive conditions that encourage a certain kind of behaviour – conditions that are present in us all. What this allows us to do is confront our own biases – no matter how uncomfortable they might make us – and in so doing, make positive changes to minimize the harms they may cause.

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2 Movie Friday: Fear of Numbers

July 22, 2011
by Crommunist
· blog · bmusic · science

It’s no secret that I’m a big fan of Neil DeGrasse Tyson. Here’s why:

When Carl Sagan died, there was a hole left for a science educator that could engage with average people and get them excited by new scientific concepts. I feel like that role has gone to Dr. Tyson, though I’m sure he would forswear the comparison. I had a conversation with a couple of friends and raised the point that like basic math skills and basic language skills (although still not in many cases), it should be a prerequisite of having a career as a scientist that you can communicate your research with ordinary people (i.e., non-scientists). If the scientific community can’t manage to bring the fire of the gods to the people (I am making a Prometheus allusion), then what are they (we) doing this for?

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4 Same planet, different worlds

July 21, 2011
by Crommunist
· blog · psychology · race · racism · religion

“Intersectionality” is a word that is new to my lexicon – a lexicon that constantly expands as I delve deeper into the anti-racist and feminist literature. The word intersectionality refers to (so far as I can tell) the way in which identical variations in one variable can elicit a differential result based on a third variable that doesn’t seem to be related. For example, men and women have good reason to react differently to seemingly-innocuous stimuli, like being approached for sex late at night on an elevator. It is not the nature of the stimulus on its own, but the intersection of the stimulus with the third variable of gender that determines the nature of the response.

Those of us familiar with multivariate regression modeling (yes – this is the single lamest thing I have ever bragged about on the internet) can easily wrap our heads around this concept. For others, it can become quite difficult to grasp how something that might seem completely unrelated to an event could completely change the way we react to that event. To help illustrate the concept, and to tip my hat to one of my favourite comic artists, I am entitling this post Same Planet, Different Worlds.

For historical reasons, race and religion in the United States are not independent variables. However, in a scientific sense there is no biological or chemical reason why, for instance, black people would be more religious than white people. However, we do see an interesting intersection between race, religion, and attitude toward interracial marriage:

Pew’s February Political Typology Poll asked people about recent trends in American society. Pew asked if “more people of different races marrying each other” was good or bad society. Overall, only nine percent of Americans said it was bad for society. However, 16 percent of white evangelicals said this, more than twice the opposition found among other Americans (7 percent). The survey found that 27 percent of Americans overall said more interracial marriage was good for society, compared to 17 percent of evangelicals.

The first thing I want to draw your attention to in the above excerpt and figure is the difference that simply being religious makes on one’s attitude toward interracial marriage. When compared to those who reported having no religion, far fewer Christians look at an increase in marriages that transcend racial barriers as a positive outcome for society. There is nothing inherent in Christianity stating that racial groups are created separate. That kind of idea has been imprinted onto Christianity in the United States since the days of Emancipation, but it is not biblically doctrinal. That being said, because it has become doctrine in many branches of American Christianity, it is no surprise to me that religion would have this effect.

The second thing to look at, however, is the effect that being black and religious has on these attitudes. While the number who view such marriages positively is more or less neck-and-neck with their coreligionists, the number that view them negatively is tiny. It is the intersection of the dueling identities of ‘black’ and ‘Protestant’ that fuels this outcome. Because ‘miscegenation’ is still anathema to the American Christian,* there can be no approval of race mixing. However, at the same time black people have remarkably different attitudes toward interracial marriage. Because of the prevailing societal attitudes about the different races, there are remarkably different social implications for a black person in an interracial marriage than a white person.

I have tried my best so far to avoid using judgmental language in this discussion. It’s difficult, because obviously the subject of interracial marriage is very personal to me. However, I have to remain mindful of the fact that these peoples’ opinions are the product of their environments, rather than some deficit in their character (more on that on Monday). That being said, I can definitely attack the ideas they hold with no restraint, which I will do now.

The kind of evil that fuels the nearly 20% of white evangelical Christians is possible only when you think your small-mindedness is justified by some kind of divine mandate. While there will always be some hateful people in every group, please let these findings put to rest the idea that Christianity makes people more tolerant or better people. What it does, what all religions do, is give people permission to throw aside introspection and thought-based ethics in favour of easy answers and a false sense of superiority. Considering the insular nature of many evangelical communities, the lack of exposure to dissenting opinions simply serves to make matters worse.

I have a sneaking suspicion that most people I know would think that “doesn’t make much of a difference” is the ‘correct’ answer. After all, we are told we are not supposed to have feelings about race, either positive or negative. Personally, if I were asked this question I’d say that more intermingling of racial groups is definitely a good thing for society, since it furthers the erosion and blurring of the lines separating racial groups. When you have kids whose parents are two different ‘things’, then it’s kind of difficult to see either one or the other as superior (though God knows South Africa tried).

To bring it back to my original point, it’s important to recognize that ‘intersectionality’ is a real force, and understanding it is key to understanding why members of a group might have different reactions to an event. It’s certainly important to understand if you, for instance, want to increase the number of visible minorities in your political movement (wink wink, nudge nudge).

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*It is important at this point to note that I don’t think that all Christians in the United States are race-baiting hate mongers. I am merely making the point that this type of ‘safeguarding’ of ‘racial purity’, when couched in religious language, comes from a uniquely American brand of Christianity.

4 Health care; we still live in the world

July 19, 2011
by Crommunist
· blog · critical thinking · health · medicine · science

So as you may have deduced from yesterday’s marathon post, I am back from my trip. While I spent the first week in sunny and beautiful Amsterdam, I spent the second week in sunnier Toronto – my old home. This trip wasn’t all pleasure though; in fact, I was traveling for business. I don’t talk about this on the blog often, but I work as a health economist. Basically, health economics is a branch of research concerned with resource allocation and decision-making in health care. We look at alternative methods of health care delivery, technologies, programs, etc. and apply the scientific method to work out which options are worth the investment of time, energy, and (ultimately) money. The goal, at least for me, is to maintain the public health system so that it is viable in the long term.

The biggest problem with public provision of health care (or really, any kind of health care provision) is that there are a finite amount of resources available. At every turn, we are confronted by the fact that while costs of care are climbing steadily, the amount of money available to fund treatment can’t even come close to keeping up. At some point, while we’d like to see that everyone gets all the treatment she/he needs and would like, we have to draw a line.

Sometimes we get in our own way a little:

A B.C. woman with a rare, serious skin disease can’t understand why the province refuses to cover a one-time treatment that would likely put it into remission — but will pay for much more expensive treatment that only helps relieve her symptoms…

Dermatologist Gabriele Weichert wrote to PharmaCare, recommending a one-time treatment with Rituximab instead. The drug is approved for treatment of rheumatoid arthritis and other conditions, and Weichert said the drug has also shown much better results in treating pemphigus.

So here it seems there is a clear-cut case where government bureaucracy is getting in the way of medical decision-making. We’ve got a disease, a drug that treats it (at lower cost, no less), and a bloated, inefficient system that won’t cover the cost of the medication because it’s not on “the list”. Pretty shocking, right? Well, until we read this:

A spokesperson for PharmaCare told CBC News approval was denied because Health Canada has yet to approve Rituximab for treatment of pemphigus. Using it to treat that condition is considered “off-label”.

Rituximab is part of a class of drugs called ‘monoclonal antibodies’ that basically mimic the body’s own immune response to foreign proteins. When a strange substance (in immunology, called an “antigen”) enters the body, it is recognized by the white blood cells. They form a chemical impression of the proteins that make up the antigen and begin creating antibodies. Those antibodies coat the foreign protein, signalling other blood cells to envelop and destroy them. Sort of like adding bacon bits to an otherwise-unpalatable salad. Monoclonal antibody drugs do this, but for tumour cells (which are not recognized as ‘foreign’ because they come from the body’s own tissue).

As you might suspect, these drugs are typically used for cancer. Using rituximab for skin disease is indeed an ‘off-label’ usage, and those can be potentially disastrous. The kind of cowboy prescription involved in giving treatments for which efficacy is not established can have potentially fatal consequences, as we’ve seen in the furore around so-called ‘Liberation Therapy’ for multiple sclerosis. The problem here is that there is likely never going to be the kind of trial that we would consider sufficiently strong evidence to justify covering rituximab for use in this setting – the disease is just too rare.

So why not just give it anyway? It’s medicine, right? What possible harm could there be in prescribing it? Well… how about death?

Four people with rheumatoid arthritis have died after being treated with Rituxan, says the drug’s manufacturer, which has issued safety information about the medication in conjunction with Health Canada. None of the deaths caused by a severe infusion-related reaction occurred among Canadian patients, Hoffmann-La Roche Ltd. said in a release.

All drugs have potential adverse effects, and some of those effects might be fatal. Doctors know this, which is why they take such precaution with filling prescriptions (well… that’s debatable I suppose). Giving a medication for an indication that is unknown may result in a miraculous cure, but it might also kill the patient. Because of the vast divide in knowledge between the doctor and the patient, and the unique level of trust that characterizes that relationship, physicians must be extremely careful in the advice they give. When the stakes are high, patients will often leap at opportunities for cures without really understanding all of the variables involved.

This is the tightrope that the health care system must walk every day. If they adhere to the rules and regulations too strictly, they run the risk of undertreating patients, or promoting practices that are inefficient and ineffective. Relax the rules too much and they run the risk of seeing patients die from inappropriate or experimental treatment at the hands of well-intentioned but ultimately misguided care providers. There are horror stories on either side of this divide, which can be (and are) milked in order to shift policy and public opinion.

There is no perfect solution to this set of problems. Different countries employ a variety of different approaches to find a way to maximize patient autonomy whilst simultaneously protecting them from the consequences of their own ignorance. Whenever there are failures, they should be brought up and discussed. The key to any system is one that is not so intractably bound by regulation that it cannot respond to times of crisis (like in the treatment of pehphigus), but not so flexible as to undermine its own ability to safeguard its stakeholders.

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4 Banking on poverty

June 16, 2011
by Crommunist
· blog · crommunism · First Nations · politics · psychology

So at various points in the past I’ve talked about the pernicious lie that is the idea of Africa as a barren wasteland. Because Africa’s people are poor, we assume that the continent itself is poor. After all, isn’t that what we see in the charity commercials? People (mostly children) poking through rubble, having to walk miles across a barren wasteland for fresh water, dry savannah with no resources to exploit? It’s a lie, all of it: Africa isn’t poor because it lacks resources; it is poor because it is kept poor:

Hedge funds are behind “land grabs” in Africa to boost their profits in the food and biofuel sectors, a US think-tank says. In a report, the Oakland Institute said hedge funds and other foreign firms had acquired large swathes of African land, often without proper contracts. It said the acquisitions had displaced millions of small farmers.

When colonial powers officially left Africa, they left behind a long legacy of abuse and destabilization of local government. The lack of domestic education and infrastructure meant that newly-minted African leaders were woefully unprepared to resist sweet-sounding offers that came from foreign corporate entities, promising high-paying jobs and modern conveniences. What people didn’t realize was that, much in the same way European powers had taken control of American land from its native people, Africans were signing their lands away.

Africa is incredibly resource rich, but lacks the human capital to exploit its own powers in the way that, say, the United States was able to do to become a world power (of course the fact that outside Mauritania, Africa doesn’t really have a thriving slave trade prevents them from really matching the USA’s rise to dominance). The result is that Africans have a choice – work for foreign corporate powers or starve. Whatever political will there is for change is tamped down by well-funded and armed warlords that act as political leaders, but reap the rewards of selling their people back into slavery chez nous.

Of course with no real options for self-improvement, people who wish to survive in Africa agree to work for the corporations. It is only by allowing the conditions to remain oppressive and hopeless that the corporations can maintain an economic stranglehold on the nations of Africa. That is why I am particularly skeptical when one of the same hedge funds that owns African land roughly the same acreage as the country of France (wait… isn’t colonialism over?) say something like this:

One company, EmVest Asset Management, strongly denied that it was involved in exploitative or illegal practices. “There are no shady deals. We acquire all land in terms of legal tender,” EmVest’s Africa director Anthony Poorter told the BBC. He said that in Mozambique the company’s employees earned salaries 40% higher than the minimum wage. The company was also involved in development projects such as the supply of clean water to rural communities. “They are extremely happy with us,” Mr Poorter said.

Anyone who knows about the existence of a “company town” knows to be wary of statements like this. When the entire economic health of a municipality is dependent on jobs from one source, the citizens of the town basically become 24/7 employees. Without strong labour unions and the rule of law, this kind of arrangement can persist in perpetuity, or at least until the company decides that there’s no more value to be squeezed from that area and the entire town collapses, creating generations of impoverished people.

Much like we say in yesterday’s discussion of First Nations reserves, when there is not a strong force for domestic development – whether governmental or otherwise – people are kept trapped in a cycle of poverty. Poverty goes beyond simply not having money – it means that one has no hope of pulling themselves out. When you lack the means, the education, and the wherewithal to “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” (a term I hate for both rhetorical and mechanical reasons – wouldn’t you just flip your feet over your own head and land up on your ass?), all of the Randian/Nietzschean fantasies of some kind of superman building his fortune from scratch can’t save you.

Which is why well-fed free-market capitalist ideologues annoy me so much. The private sector is not bound by ethics, and most of the companies doing this kind of exploitation aren’t the kind of things you can boycott (as though boycotts actually work, which they don’t – just ask BP). When profit is your only motive and law is your only restraint, you’ll immediately flock to places with the least laws and most profits. I’m not suggesting that more government is necessarily the answer – most of the governments in Africa are so corrupt that they simply watch the exploitation happen and count their kickbacks – but neither is rampant and unchecked free market involvement.

Like Canada’s First Nations people, Africans must be given not only the resources but the knowledge and tools to learn how to develop their own land. They must be treated as potential partners and allies, rather than rubes from whom a buck can be wrung. Small-scale development projects that put the control in the hands of the community rather than the land-owners are the way to accomplish this. Not only does it build a sense of psychological pride and move the locus of control back into people’s hands, but there are effects that echo into the future, as new generations of self-sufficient people grow up with ideas and the skills to make them happen.

While it’s all well and good to talk about bootstraps, when there’s a boot on your neck then all the pulling in the world won’t get you onto your own feet.

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3 Mining the depths of “reverse racism”

June 1, 2011
by Crommunist
· blog · privilege · psychology · race · racism

A version of this post appears at Phil Ferguson’s ‘Skeptic Money’ blog.

In the past I have spoken, a couple of times actually, about the phenomenon of “regression to the mean”. Basically, this describes the process where repeated observations tend to distribute around the average value. Extreme values – those that lie far away from the average – tend to ‘move’ toward the middle. However, if you’re looking from the perspective of this extreme value, it might look like movement toward the middle is you losing something. It’s a completely understandable misapprehension, borne from a lack of ability to see the full field from any perspective other than your own (also known as privilege).

I’ve talked about this issue in terms of religious privilege – the mistaken belief that religious people are being “persecuted” when secular authority insists on enforcing laws equally for everyone, instead of giving the majority religious group their accustomed preferential treatment. However, it’s easier to spot this phenomenon in the case of what is called “reverse racism”. My problem with this term is twofold: first, it makes the assumption that “racism” is from white people to people of colour (PoCs), and anything else is the “reverse” of normal; second, it’s patently ridiculous. While it is undoubtedly true that white people face racial discrimination at an individual level, they still comprise the majority group in this part of the world (and hold a great deal of power in others).

And yet, whenever one talks about any step being taken to either treat white people according to the same standard that everyone else is treated, or to allow targeted preferential treatment for marginalized ethnic groups, the cry of “reverse racism” goes up, and it appears to have taken deep root in the common psyche:

Whites believe that they have replaced blacks as the primary victims of racial discrimination in contemporary America, according to a new study from researchers at Tufts University’s School of Arts and Sciences and Harvard Business School. The findings, say the authors, show that America has not achieved the “post-racial” society that some predicted in the wake of Barack Obama’s election.

Both whites and blacks agree that anti-black racism has decreased over the last 60 years, according to the study. However, whites believe that anti-white racism has increased and is now a bigger problem than anti-black racism.

I’m going to be honest with you: I didn’t think that the average person was this dumb. Given what we know about rates of incarceration, employment, home ownership, relative wealth, and proposed legislations that disproportionately target PoCs, I thought for sure that people would realize that it’s still a burden to be dark-skinned in the United States. However, it seems as though white America (if you’ll forgive the term) has bought wholesale into the idea that, despite all indications, they are the group most discriminated against.

It is centrally important to note that this about perceived racial discrimination, not observed. This cannot be used to demonstrate the actual existence of racism against white people, let alone to the extent that it outweighs racism against blacks or latinos. These kinds of findings are useful only in understanding what the public perception of a phenomenon is – not the strength of the phenomenon. We should be, and have reason to be, extremely skeptical of the claim that white people are the most discriminated against ethnic group – they disproportionately represent the political and economic power in the United States, and it would be quite something if that’s somehow completely reversed out among ‘the little people’.

Perhaps the most interesting and potentially revealing finding from the study, and potentially a place where work can be done, is this:

Both within each decade and across time, White respondents were more likely to see decreases in bias against Blacks as related to increases in bias against Whites—consistent with a zero- sum view of racism among Whites—whereas Blacks were less likely to see the two as linked.

Whereas both groups tended to see anti-black discrimination decreasing over the years, blacks saw this as the two groups getting closer together. Whites, on the other hand, seem to view any improvement of non-white groups as taking ‘their’ resources away. In essence, there have to be winners and losers in the game of life, and if black people are getting closer to winning then whites must be losing by definition.

The problem with this type of reasoning is that it is entirely possible for groups to grow and improve together. A higher rate of, for example, black home ownership means a reduction in crime, improvements in education, and increased entrepreneurship. This means a stronger economy, as white and black consumers alike begin innovating and producing more wealth. Having a large group of poor black people means not only that racial groups stay segregated, but that the status quo of black people on the bottom remains (with all the negative aspects associated with that).

It is entirely possible that minority ethnic groups have become more vocal in their criticism of white people. Most of this criticism comes in the form that you see here – description of phenomena that fall along racial lines that are not due to inherent genetic differences between groups but where those trivial genetic differences collide with social structures. Some of this is due to the fact that PoCs are less afraid of speaking up and becoming politically active. Some of it, to be sure, is legitimate anti-white racism based on resentment or misunderstandings of history or whatever dumb reasons anyone has to be racist.

However, the mere existence of legitimate anti-white racism does not grant the majority group the victim status. What we’re seeing is the idea of “reverse racism” coming to full fruition – white people aren’t supposed to be discriminated against, and therefore any discrimination is the worst thing that’s ever happened. Hopefully by learning to re-frame racial issues in terms of mutual benefit for all groups, we can begin to finally do away with this oh-so-stupid of ideas.

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8 Movie Friday: A Girl Like Me – unpacking societal racism

May 27, 2011
by Crommunist
· blog · critical thinking · liberalism · psychology · race · racism · skepticism

On Wednesday I talked a bit about the subconscious realm in which racist ideologies often lie. If we’re careful, we can measure and observe exactly how these thoughts and ideations affect our decision-making. The question then arises as to where these ideas come from in the first place. Do secret cabals of white supremacists slip into our rooms as children and whisper hate-speech in our ears as we sleep (well, maybe that’s the case for some of us, I have no idea). More likely, we notice patterns of behaviour and external stimuli, and our minds forms patterns and ideas about them long before we are able to put them into words.

We have these ideas sitting in our brains, doing work on our minds without our even noticing them. This may be particularly true for black women, as the above video may suggest, simply because we simultaneously have such a negative view of black features and place such a premium on appearance in women. This kind of implicit attitude formation happens to us as children, as we are surrounded by imagines that imply the superiority of whiteness and the inferiority of colour. It is only natural that not only would white children think negatively of children of colour, but that children of colour would similarly internalize these attitudes and think poorly of themselves.

Of course these kinds of things are hard to unpack, and as we get older our conscious minds can be taught to recognize these attitudes and reverse them. However, if we are so hell-bent on denying our own racist thoughts in some fit of arch-liberal self-righteousness, we will never learn to check our own assumptions. When the chips are down and we’re under pressure, we will continue to make decisions based on these gut instincts that we learn as children.

It’s not a black/white issue either:

Society gives us narratives about the people around us, and we internalize them without thinking. Evolutionarily, this is a useful trait for ensuring group cohesion – we will tend to reach consensus and can do so instinctively. However, when it comes to trying to break out of the evolutionary mould and design a society that is equitable to all people, we run into serious problems if we rely on these instincts rather than consistent introspection and vigilance. That kind of constant self-monitoring isn’t easy (trust me, I have a propensity to say stupid misogynistic stuff in the service of getting a laugh – deprogramming yourself is hard work), but it’s the only way to overcome biases that might otherwise go completely unnoticed.

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0 Cracking the code

May 25, 2011
by Crommunist
· blog · critical thinking · psychology · race · racism · science

I screwed up. A couple of weeks ago I introduced a new term into the discussion – “coded racism” – without doing my usual thought-piece beforehand:

To the list of code words that don’t sound racist but are, I would add ‘personal responsibility’. While personal responsibility is a good thing, its usage in discussions of race inevitably cast black and brown people as being personally irresponsible, as though some genetic flaw makes us incapable of achievement (which, in turn, explains why we deserve to be poor and why any attempt to balance the scales is ‘reverse racism’).

I have danced around the idea, and I have made occasional reference to the concept behind it, but I haven’t really explained what coded racism is. I will have to do that in next Monday’s post, so stay tuned for that. As a teaser explanation, I will simply point out that oftentimes phrases are used to identify groups in a sort of wink/nudge way, where everyone listening knows who the speaker is really talking about. It’s phrases like “Welfare queen” and “illegal immigrant” that do not explicitly name the group being criticized, but still carry with them the image of a particular race. It is not, as is the common objection, simply a phrase describing any criticism of racial minority groups.

Before we can really delve too deeply into coded racism, there is a truth that we must acknowledge and grok – that racism (like all cognitive biases) can happen at levels not available to our conscious mind. The second part of the grokking is that even though we are not aware of it, racism can influence the decisions we make. As much as we like to believe that we are free-willed agents of our own decision-making, closer to the truth is that a wide variety of things operate in our subconscious before we are even aware that a decision is being made. This is why an artist, an engineer and a physicist could all look at the same blank piece of canvas and see completely different things (a surface upon which to draw, a flat planar surface with coefficient of friction µ, a collection of molecules). We then build conscious thoughts on top of the framework of our subconscious impressions and arrive at a decision.

So when we tell ourselves “I don’t have a racist bone in my body“, what we are really referring to are those conscious thoughts. Most people refuse to entertain overtly racist attitudes, because those attitudes have become wildly unpopular and people recognize that racism is destructive. However, our decisions are only partially decided by our overt ideas, and we can end up engaging in patterns of behaviour that may surprise even us:

You are more likely to land a job interview if your name is John Martin or Emily Brown rather than Lei Li or Tara Singh – even if you have the same Canadian education and work experience. These are the findings of a new study analyzing how employers in the Greater Toronto Area responded to 6,000 mock résumés for jobs ranging from administrative assistant to accountant.

Across the board, those with English names such as Greg Johnson and Michael Smith were 40 per cent more likely to receive callbacks than people with the same education and job experience with Indian, Chinese or Pakistani names such as Maya Kumar, Dong Liu and Fatima Sheikh. The findings not only challenge Canada’s reputation as a country that celebrates diversity, but also underscore the difficulties that even highly skilled immigrants have in the labour market.

This phenomenon is well-known to people who study race disparity, but it is rare to see it make the pages of a paper like The Globe and Mail – hardly a leftist rag. People of colour (PoCs), or in this case people who seem non-Anglo, are at a disadvantage not because of how they look, or how they act, but simply because they have funny-sounding names. Now one would have to be particularly cynical to think that a human resources professional is sitting there saying “Fatima Sheikh? I don’t want no towel-head working for ME!” and throwing résumés in the trash. As I said, that kind of overt racism is rare, even in the privacy of one’s own head. What is far more likely is that, given a situation in which a choice had to be made between a number of potential candidates, the HR person made a ‘gut instinct’ decision to call back the person that they felt most comfortable with.

The problem is that when we feel different levels of comfort with people of different ethnic backgrounds, our aggregate decisions tend to benefit white people and disadvantage PoCs. This isn’t because we’re all card-carrying KKK members, but because we are products of a racist society. This kind of thinking isn’t relegated to how we hire, either:

An experiment was conducted to demonstrate the perceptual confirmation of racial stereotypes about Black and White athletes… Whereas the Black targets were rated as exhibiting significantly more athletic ability and having played a better game, White targets were rated as exhibiting significantly more basketball intelligence and hustle. The results suggest that participants relied on a stereotype of Black and White athletes to guide their evaluations of the target’s abilities and performance.

In a situation where an athlete is identified to study participants as either black or white, but performance is kept exactly the same (they listen to a radio broadcast), what is considered ‘athletic ability’ in a black player is ‘basketball intelligence’ and ‘hustle’ in a white player. The identical stimulus is perceived in different ways, based on racial ideas that are not readily available to the subjects (and, by extension, the rest of us). This finding on its own may be benign enough, but extrapolate the fact that innate ‘athletic talent’ in one race is seen as ‘intelligence and hustle’ in another – the black players are just naturally good; the white ones had to work for it. Poor white folks are ‘down on their luck’, poor black folks are ‘waiting for a handout’. Jobless white folks are ‘hit hard by the economy’; jobless brown folks are ‘lazy’.

And so, when we discuss the idea of words that are simply coded racial evaluations, we have to keep in mind that it is this subconscious type of racism that these phrases appeal to. Far from simply being a macro description of a real problem, the way they are used bypasses our conscious filters and taps right into the part of our mind we don’t know is there, and like to deny.

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1 So predictable

May 19, 2011
by Crommunist
· blog · crapitalism · critical thinking · forces of stupid · religion · science · skepticism

One of the first posts I ever wrote for this blog was discussing why belief based in science is much better than belief based in religious faith. Even if we were to grant the wildly unsupported and ridiculous assertion that religious narratives and scientific observations are equally accurate methods to describe the way the world came to be, the fact remains that religious narratives are consistently inaccurate when it comes to predicting the future. For all the talk of ‘prophecy’ that is in the Bible, most of it is simply an expression of rudimentary understanding of human nature. If you couch your predictions in vague enough language, everything becomes a ‘fulfilled’ prophecy.

Of course those who do dare to tip-toe outside the safe boundaries of non-specific prognostication and actually put their reputations on the line by selecting a specific date and location for an event are always proved wrong. Predictions of this specific type would actually be useful – being able to, for example, know when a plague or a famine or a natural disaster was going to strike a certain region would be incredibly useful. Assuming for a moment that religious truth picks up where science leaves off, and science isn’t capable of predicting these events, using this other ‘way of knowing’ would be an incredible boon to mankind. We could use the Bible (or Qu’ran or Vedas or whatever you want to use) to predict when this would happen, and then use science to minimize the damage such things would cause.

However, that’s not the case. So instead we get stuff like this:

More than 22 earthquakes struck Italy by noon on Wednesday, as is normal for the quake-prone country but none was the devastating temblor purportedly predicted by a now-dead scientist to strike Rome. Despite efforts by seismologists to debunk the myth of a major Roman quake on May 11, 2011 and stress that quakes can never be predicted, some Romans left town just in case, spurred by rumour-fueled fears that ignore science.

Many storefronts were shuttered, for example, in a neighbourhood of Chinese-owned shops near Rome’s central train station. And an agriculture farm lobby group said a survey of farm-hotels outside the capital indicated some superstitious Romans had headed to the countryside for the day.

Some people I know are superstitious, or believe in horroscopes and the like. Contexually, it is a harmless enough fancy – for the most part they use logic and good sense to make their life decisions. In principle however, these kinds of beliefs can be incredibly destructive. When people begin abandoning their homes and work over a superstition that violates scientific principles it’s not simply something to laugh off. People leaving their jobs means a serious burden to the national economy; people leaving town ties up roads and puts an additional strain on emergency services; the efforts spent trying to disabuse people of a false belief could have been better spent in any number of fields. I’m not saying that people can’t take a day off, but when hundreds do so at the same time for an extremely poor reason, you kind of have to give your head a shake.

When those same people spend millions of dollars to propogate a superstitious belief, you kind of wish you could shake them instead:

Billboards are popping up around the globe, including in major Canadian cities, proclaiming May 21 as Judgment Day. “Cry mightily unto GOD for HIS mercy,” says one of the mounted signs from Family Radio, a California-based sectarian Christian group that is sending one of its four travelling caravans of believers into Vancouver and Calgary within the next 10 days. Family Radio’s website is blunt in its prediction of Judgment Day and the rolling earthquake that will mark the beginning of the end. “The Bible guarantees it!” the site proclaims, under a passage from the book of Ezekiel, which says “blow the trumpet … warn the people.”

You didn’t misread that – Family Radio (why is every fundagelical group ‘Family’ something – as though only Christians have families?) has determined through some serious Biblical research that the final judgment of all mankind is happening two days from now (or maybe less, depending on when you’re reading this). Oh, and when I say “serious Biblical research”, I mean some random shit that he’s made up:

I remember a few years ago, I was reading an article by a Rastafari preacher in a Bajan newspaper. He was telling people that you shouldn’t eat ice cream, because it sounds like “I scream”, and therefore it meant that your soul is screaming when you eat it.

Year earlier than that, a guy in one of my high school classes used the same ‘logic’ as Harold Camping to demonstrate that Barney the Dinosaur was actually the devil – apparently the letters in BIG PURPLE DINOSAUR, when converted to Roman numerals (substituting ‘V’ for ‘U’, as is the style in Latin), and removing all letters that don’t correspond to numerals, add to “666”. At least when Lee said it, he was joking. The followers of Mr. Camping are selling their homes, quitting their jobs, and basically giving themselves no Plan B. This is seriously disruptive not only to their lives, but to the lives of those that depend on them. The sad part is what will happen to all of these people when the sun rises on May 22nd and nothing’s changed.

If I am moved by a spirit of uncharacteristic generosity, I will grant that religion helps people deal with existential crises by giving them convenient and non-falsifiable answers to complicated questions (by teaching them not to deal with them at all, but whatever). However, when it comes to making claims about the material world, religion can and must be completely ignored as a source of reliable information. Faith is simply one of the remainders that falls out of the long-division of our evolution-crafted mental processes. Just like we can control our urge to defecate on the ground and have sex with teenagers (well… most of us anyway), we can control our urge to believe in ridiculous claims of superstition when it comes to answering the only questions that matter – how are we to live in the world?

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28 I’ll just leave these here…

May 10, 2011
by Crommunist
· blog · crapitalism · forces of stupid · privilege · race · racism · science

Sometimes things get said so well that there’s no point in my digesting and putting my own spin on them. Today we have a few of those, which I’m just going to leave here and suggest you read.

1. 90% of prominent Climate Change deniers are linked to Exxon Mobil

A recent analysis conducted by Carbon Brief which investigated the authors of more than 900 published papers that cast doubt on the science underlying climate change, found that nine of the ten most prolific had some kind of relationship with ExxonMobil.

Links to these papers were proudly displayed on the denialist Global Warming Policy Foundation website, where they are still fanning the dying embers ofClimategate hoping something will catch, under the heading, “900+ Peer-Reviewed Papers Supporting Skepticism Of ‘Man-Made’ Global Warming (AGW) Alarm.”

The top ten contributors to this list were responsible for 186 of the 938 papers cited.

Hey denialists (coughcoughcoughgrassrutecough) – want to talk some more about how climate change is just a scam? Just be aware that your position was bought and paid for by oil companies. Why don’t we look at the evidence rather than accusing each other of having some secret financial motive?

2. The appeal of the “New Racism”

The New Racism manifests itself in many ways–school choice, the obsession with property values, including the rise of Neighborhood Watch in the 1980s; the differences in prison sentences for those convicted of possessing crack as opposed to cocaine, etc.

We’ve lost an understanding of what racism means in this country. We’ve forgotten that it’s race hate combined with power. A white person being harassed in a black neighborhood is not experiencing racism–that person can call the police and get a response. My students refer to anything other than whatever they think of as Martin Luther King’s dream as racism. Like with so many other words, conservatives have won the rhetorical war. We need to define racism as what it actually is and reclaim the rhetorical ground on moving toward real equality.

To the list of code words that don’t sound racist but are, I would add ‘personal responsibility’. While personal responsibility is a good thing, its usage in discussions of race inevitably cast black and brown people as being personally irresponsible, as though some genetic flaw makes us incapable of achievement (which, in turn, explains why we deserve to be poor and why any attempt to balance the scales is ‘reverse racism’).

3. Seriously, Fuck Ayn Rand

We all know that liberalism is for the (naive, inexperienced, foolish) young while conservatism is a natural byproduct of aging, maturing, and gaining experience with the world, right? Conventional wisdom gets it wrong yet again. The surge in popularity of objectivism and libertarianism on campus underscores how right wing ideology, not pie-in-sky liberalism, is the real fantasyland for kids who have absolutely no experience in the real world.

Yes, Ayn Rand is making a comeback among the college-aged. Objectivism is even getting some mainstream press in light of Commissar Obama frog-marching the nation toward hardcore Communism. Heroic individualists are threatening to “go galt” now that Obama has completely eliminated all incentive for anyone to work ever again, re-enacting their own version of the “producers’ strike” in Atlas Shrugged.

I’ve gotten a little more mellow in recent years, believe it or not, less keen to argue and more able to see middle ground. But there is no middle ground here, no way for us to meet halfway in intellectual compromise: If you are an Objectivist, you are retarded. This is a judgment call, and I just made it. Grow up or fuck off. Those are your two options.

So I decided to give you 1000 words on objectivism last week. Gin and Tacos gives us an… alternative take on the same position. While I’m not a fan of the use of the word ‘retarded’, the rest of the piece is worth reading. Edit: I should note that there is at least one person who is a Rand devotee and whose intelligence and opinion I respect, even if I do not agree.

4. 10 Ways the Birthers are an Object Lesson in White Privilege

Ultimately, the election of Barack Obama has provided a series of object lessons in the durability of the colorline in American life. Most pointedly, Obama’s tenure has provided an opportunity for the worst aspects of White privilege to rear their ugly head. In doing so, the continuing significance of Whiteness is made ever more clear in a moment when the old bugaboo of White racism was thought to have been slain on November 4, 2008.

To point: Imagine if Sarah Palin, a person who wallows in mediocrity and wears failure as a virtue, were any race other than White. Would a black (or Latino or Asian or Hispanic) woman with Palin’s credentials have gotten a tenth as far? Let’s entertain another counter-factual: If the Tea Party and their supporters were a group of black or brown folk, who showed up with guns at events attended by the President, threatening nullification and secession, and engaging in treasonous talk, how many seconds would pass before they were locked up and taken out by the F.B.I. as threats to the security of the State? If the Tea Party were black they would have been disappeared to Gitmo or some other secret site faster than you can say Fox News.

Earlier this week President Obama tried to be the adult in the room by surrendering his birth certificate in an effort to satisfy the Birthers and their cabal leaders Donald Trump and Pat Buchanan. Of course, his generous act does nothing to satisfy the Birther beast for it is insatiable in its madness. Nevertheless, a lesson can still be salvaged by exploring the rank bigotry which drives the Birther movement. In an era of racism without racists, the Tea Party GOP Birther brigands provide one more lesson in the permanence of the social evil known as White privilege.

Still confused about how white privilege works? Here’s a few concrete examples.

I guess I should get a tumblr or something for this stuff…

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