Yes, in the case of your post, there is a question as to which it is. An accusation of blatant racism should be a fighting word. An accusation of being related to casual racists is much less powerful. People use the latter while pretending that it carries the heaviness and seriousness and intentionality of the former.
I don’t know about that. I think that people use the latter while acknowledge that it does as much harm as the former.
The argument that it seems we get into is whether someone should be chastised for unintentional racism, while ignoring that the effects are identical whether the racism is out of hatred or out of ignorance.
When it is pointed out to those who are unaware of what their actions are doing, they get offended that they are thought of as being racist, and the argument becomes about their feelings, rather than the harm that they are causing to society.
I started a thread a few years ago as to whether an incorrect accusation of racism ever cause anyone significant harm in the US:
Several examples were proposed, but I thought most of them were either insignificant harm, or the racism accusation was reasonable and just. Others might have a different opinion, but IMO there was only a single example of significant harm from an unjust accusation of racism.
So I still hold that the threat and danger of incorrect accusations of racism is vastly overblown. There’s no reason a mistaken accusation can’t just lead to a reasonable conversation, as opposed to craziness and defensiveness.
Looking back at the thread, maybe 2 examples.
People often even call themselves a racists, and take offense to that.
You point out that something that they are doing, or a policy that they advocate or benefit from has racial bias to it, and they accuse you of calling them a racist.
In Ludovic’s example, people are informed that they are the “latter”, and then take exception to being called the “former.”
In any case, it’s all a distraction from allowing the discussion to go forward to determine causes and solutions, as we have to spend all the time trying to keep the people who are perpetuating the problem from having their feelings hurt.
Oh, before I forget, this needed to be pointed out about Murray:
Nope, as many like Reich pointed out, what Murray and others are doing is racism.
Currently, the context is that the racists do think that they have a voice in high levels of the government. And we see now the increased influence of groups like the AEI that not only has racists like Murray as his members but also climate change deniers. As pointed before, unscientific theories or conspiracies for that kind of crowd are not about a single issue: like potato chips, they cannot have just one.
[Okay, y’all were busy in my absence, so I’m only partway through the backlog. But let’s get this much responded to, more later.]
Rat avatar, I thought you were GBCWing this thread? I guess, like xxandyxxx, you are going to repeatedly make those proclamations and then come back here and there to take a quick potshot when you think you’re a little safer from getting dunked on. Craven and cowardly, but whatevs.
Anyway, I don’t support charter schools (I’m a Democrat—that’s a Republican thing), and I don’t like private schools at all. But my understanding is that charter schools get the same funding per student as other schools. A quick Google search seems to indicate that they get less, in fact. Which is often true of private schools as well, but parents see a perceived benefit (in both cases I suspect) of keeping their kids away from the “riff raff”. I think this is really shady, and I will always oppose any legislation that supports charters or “school choice”. But beyond that, it wouldn’t be right to ban private schools (even though I think parents who send their kids to one should be ashamed of themselves) and it doesn’t have a bearing on the funding question.
Really? Then I’d say you are not real familiar with the word. After all, even if you go with its narrow meaning, it is a question of fact whether God exists. Agnostics are proclaiming that they don’t know whether or not God exists (the older and now mostly outdated usage is that they declare it to be unknowable, presumably meaning before death—and also presumably meaning they have ruled out the possibility of miracles and direct communication with God as described in the Bible). My sense of the word as used in intellectual discourse is “I don’t know what the facts are on that specific data point, but it is irrelevant to the argument I’m making.”
See above, and my reply to kb as well. The fact that they don’t have similar needs is my whole point: they have greater needs because they come to school with lower aptitude. So more money is spent on them, much of which takes the form of special education (but also Title 1 reading help, nutrition programs, summer school, preschool, tutoring, etc.). They still end up with lower aptitude on average, but not as low as if they got the same money spent on them as white students get on average.
Stop and think about this for a second: if you told black high school students in 1950 that within their lifetimes, black schoolkids would get more per capita funding from the education system, disproportionately provided by white taxpayers, they would be stunned. But you shrug it off or try to find ways to nitpick it. (The reason being that if you told white liberals this in 1950, they would be sure that it would erase any aptitude gaps, and the very disappointing fact that it has stubbornly refused to do so is what makes people like you feel you have to flail about and move the goalposts in order to avoid seeing, or at least admitting, what’s right in front of you.)
There are BTW civil rights activists who have their noses bent out of joint about this fact. They gripe that black kids, boys especially, are being “warehoused” in special education. Which, to begin with, is ridiculous. If you wanted to “warehouse” black kids, you could do it for pennies on the dollar of what is spent on white kids. Put them in a big old room (a warehouse, even!), hire some minders (not teachers, they cost too much) and give them the authority to use corporal punishment on anyone who gets out of line. Solved. To “warehouse” them in SpEd, where they will cost you more than twice as much as the reg ed kids, where they will be surrounded by highly educated bleeding heart nurturing types like my wife all day long, people who are constantly seeking research-based continuing education on how better to serve kids with special needs? Mmmkay then.
And then how would you effect equality in assignment to SpEd? It’s based on a variety of testing that is carried out by experts and has very little subjectivity involved. So you’d have to declare some kind of cap on black kids in SpEd, or make the standards for them to get in more stringent than for white kids—which would obviously get a different group of activists hopping mad, and rightly so. And then the “reformers” would have even more to get on their high horses about, since the aptitude gap would be guaranteed to increase.
That’s pretty interesting, and exactly what Cyril Kornbluth was concerned about in 1951 (The Marching Morons - Wikipedia), but I’m surprised you would offer this up given the disparity in offspring between whites and blacks.
But it hasn’t justified any atrocities. It may have been raised as a defense of atrocities, but it’s a very weak defense indeed, and you are the one who should be regarded as suspect for implying that if this were proven to be true, it would be a justification for atrocities.
Look, no one can dispute that people with Down syndrome have something in their DNA that gives them (among other things) an intellectual disability. And indeed, Nazis and other eugenicists were all for eliminating such people from the gene pool. But the rebuttal to this idea is not “well, actually, we don’t have ironclad proof that it’s DNA that is to blame for their low IQ”! The rebuttal is “It’s wrong to commit atrocities against people simply because of intellectual deficits they were born with. If anything, we should give such people more compassion, and more help.”
Ezra Klein raised basically this point in the most recent podcast, when he wondered aloud why there weren’t more racialists taking this sympathetic tack. And as I keep saying over and over, I agree with him! I think the likely reason you don’t hear more people expressing this viewpoint is that (1) they will not be embraced by the bigoted haters, nor would they want to be; (2) they will also get tons of shit from the anti-racists, as we see on this thread. So they just keep quiet, except for a few people like me.
You say this as though the moderators can be axiomatically presumed to be accurate or fair in their judgments about what qualifies as “hate speech”.
“Blacks - they’re more like people with birth defects than monkeys, I guess” is going to be a really winning argument for you, I suggest you run with it!
The fact that you can’t address my cites but resort to ad hominem attacks shows you really don’t have a pot to piss in for your argument.
It doesn’t amount to a hill of beans if you support charter schools or not, you are cherry picking statistics to support your views, which are based in bigotry.
Can you define what a white person is yet in a meaningful fashion?
Can you address the cites I showed that demonstrated that when adopted these inferior “negros” IQ scores increase?
Can you address the cites I offered that showed that of ALL of the known markers for educational attainment only accounted for less than 1% of outcomes?
Can you even make an argument that race and ancestry are related?
How can you rectify that almost all descendants of American slaves are mixed with some European and Native American blood which should make them “superior” in your mind, yet immigrant black high-school graduates attend college at a much higher rate than black or white students born in the U.S.
Face it, your are a racist, at least you could own that. Your willful actions in ignoring the problems with the naive theory makes it quite clear that it is not related to the implicit biases that we all suffer from.
(And FYI Being a Democrat doesn’t mean you aren’t a bigot, it was the Republican Party that passed the civil rights act as an example.)
Perhaps you are afraid to not be special? Is not being a snowflake what scares you? Because really I don’t see what is to be lost by just admitting that race is a pretty shitty method of categorization from a scientific perspective.
Have fun moving the goal posts, or building another strawman.
He never really addressed most of my questions and challenges either. He just enjoys playing the victim. Kind of like Murray.
So says that guy that admits to paternalistic racism, compared to other pseudosciences out there you are like the lukewarmers of climate science, the “teach the controversy” of evolutionary science. The “Velikowsky light” proponents. Etc. *
Plausible on different levels, but still wrong.
- Dr Evil: “just one calorie, not evil enough!”
Sorry, I’m still not understanding you. Here’s my very simple question: black students get less funding than white students with similar needs–yes or no? That seems like a simple yes or no question to me.
The above may be too complex for you, Mr Category 2, so I’ll dumb it down a little:
Black special needs students get less funding than white special needs students, yes or no?
Black regular needs students get less funding than white regular needs students, yes or no?
Since you and I both happen to know that the answer to the above three questions is “yes” (though you seem to be avoiding saying so for some reason that probably rhymes with “weasel”), there’s a follow-up question:
The above is an example of our schools failing black students, yes or no?
All that stuff I wrote upthread? I retract it. My understanding of R2 and the correlation coefficient was mucked, and in a way that qualitatively mattered. I would need to trace through then recast my analysis entirely. Haven’t done that yet. Any aspersions directed at Sam Harris or anyone else are retracted as well. Clean slate.
:dubious: SlackerInc, we’ve had to speak to you before about this conclusion-jumping habit of yours. And when we do, after a few posts being a little more logically scrupulous, you slide right back in to the conclusion-jumping, as with this remark.
To remind you once again: There is as yet no scientific evidence indicating that black-white IQ test score differences have any genetic basis. Not just “there isn’t any ironclad proof”, but there is not even any evidence raising that hypothesis to the working-theory level.
There are various data that are consistent to some extent with that hypothesis (which nobody here is denying), but there are none that at present are better explained by that hypothesis than by various rival hypotheses.
Even the fact that black students in a persistently racist society underperform compared to white students on IQ tests, even after their share of education funding is increased, does not constitute support for the genetic-basis hypothesis. At best, it’s consistent with it, but it certainly doesn’t demonstrate or confirm it.
So, once again: No, people who are currently still skeptical about the genetic-basis hypothesis as an explanation for IQ test score differences between racial groups are not refusing to see (or admit) anything that’s “right in front of” them. When you try to claim that the available data constitute persuasive evidence for the genetic-basis hypothesis and thus that any reasonable and honest person should agree with you about it, you are grossly overstating the weight of the data and misrepresenting the state of the science. You should stop doing that.
Earlier in this thread I forced you to admit that there was zero scientific proof of a genetic basis for race IQ differences. That was on Friday, so you managed to forget it in less than three days. Now I understand why you want sympathy for the intellectual deficits people were born with.
I’m under the gun to get our taxes done (they are too complicated for TurboTax, yet our income is too modest to afford an accountant, a truly fiendish combination), so after the response earlier I have not had time to respond more–only to read for now. I am saving quoted posts to get to, I promise!
But I wanted to quickly interject that I respect what M4M owned up to, and I almost always respect Kimstu’s approach, even though she is still pretty hard on me in her own way (and due to the respect factor, that has a lot more impact than the invective hurled by others).
So Kimstu, my interjection is addressed to you. Will you please respond to Evil Economist (post #1232)? I have a feeling you know EE’s argument is bullshit: some kind of circular reasoning or begging the question, in that ballpark. Right?
Hahahaha, nope!
I’m moving you down to Category 1.
Sorry, I’m not sure I’m understanding the question. The issue seems to be whether black special-needs students get less funding than white special-needs students, and also whether black mainstreamed students get less funding than white mainstreamed students.
If I understand your objection correctly, you’re saying that there’s some kind of logical fallacy in making those points because black students have a higher proportion of special-needs to mainstreamed population than white students.
Even if we leave out the question of why the special-needs/mainstream ratios are different between the two racial groups, I can’t see why that’s a valid objection.
For comparison, say I’ve got two groups of Armed Forces veterans, tall soldiers and short soldiers. Let’s say the tall soldiers have a higher ratio of wounded to unwounded among their veterans than the short soldiers do.
Now if the VA is spending less on healthcare for wounded tall vets than for wounded short vets, and also spending less on healthcare for unwounded tall vets than for unwounded short vets, those are facts that may impact the overall health status of tall vets vis-a-vis short vets. The higher wounded-to-unwounded ratio for the tall vets is a phenomenon worth exploring in its own right, but doesn’t necessarily somehow cancel out the tall-vs-short spending differentials in each category.
What I would need to know to better understand this is, first of all, whether we’re talking about overall or per-student spending amounts. Could somebody do me the favor of pointing out the posts that have the agreed-upon spending stats cites? Txxx.
I think your explanation is too complicated for him–$100 says he still doesn’t understand.
Of course the racial hereditarians will hand wave dozens of cites like this, without even offering a real definition of race.
https://ir.library.oregonstate.edu/downloads/0z708z33c
But as a reminder it is the hereditarians that need to provide DIRECT evidence. The philosophic burden of proof lies upon a person making unfalsifiable claims, this burden is not satisfied by shifting the burden of disproof to others.