Trump keeps doing it, and his supporters seem OK with it.
He calls Black people "Low IQ."
He has used the phrase "low IQ" in reference to U.S. Reps. Maxine Walters, Hakeem Jeffries, and Jasmine Crockett; Vice President Kamala Harris; Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson; the podcaster known as Charlamange tha God; and Somalis as a group. This week Trump added ESPN host Stephen A. Smith.
Trump is saying aloud an idea that floats in the zeitgeist, that White people are smart, effective, and hard-working, and that Blacks and Hispanics are inferior, criminal, and lazy, a burden to the country. Trump says that DEI hurts the people who have genuine merit, Whites.
It goes beyond "dog whistle." I am uncomfortable with it. A former reader and active commenter on this blog, a White male attorney, echoed Trump in comments on this blog, repeatedly calling Kamala Harris "low IQ." I pushed him off the blog by calling him a pathetic nepo-baby who graduated from a third-rate law school practicing in a distressed small-town dogpatch, a loser compared to Kamala Harris whose achievements far outshined his. That worked. He unsubscribed.
Harvard's demographic make-up has changed over the past 55 years. It is a new America, especially visible in supposed meritocracies where bright type-A ambitious people get educated. I estimate that the Harvard I attended in the late 1960s was 88 percent White, 10 percent Black. Of the Whites, maybe 20 percent were Jewish of Ashkenazi heritage. The other two percent were Asians and Hispanics, born in the U.S.
Current students are perhaps 35 percent Asian. Graduate students in STEM fields appear to have an even higher Asian component. It is an international university now.
In the unscientific survey of 350 people in my college Class of 1971 that I described on Monday, 60 percent said we wanted Harvard to continue to use race and ethnicity as a factor in admissions. Twenty percent did not, and 20 percent were unsure.
I voted yes. Race and ethnicity are salient enough issues that I want the university to manage its ethnic and racial makeup. Leadership capabilities, emotional intelligence, persuasiveness, originality, courage, conscientiousness, and grit are all valuable qualities in a person, a worker, and a citizen. They aren't subject to objective meritorious scoring.
Trump is stuck in an imagined past, voiced by Ronald Reagan, with his trope about the Black "welfare queen" and the idea of White male disadvantage. Trump's premise is that objective "meritocracy" would favor his team: White Americans. Maybe not. The people who baffled me by presenting their research on mimicking human thought with artificial intelligence were not White. Two were from South Asia (India); one was from East Asia (China.)
For decades the winners of the International Mathematical Olympiad reflected the rivalry between high school whizzes from China and South Korea. The U.S. finally rose to earn second place honors, with this U.S team. Notice anything?
A different team won first place in another competition in the United Kingdom:
Trump, who is widely suspected of having had someone else take his admission test to the Wharton School, and who was judged by a former professor as the worst student he ever encountered, is expressing an idea of objective White superiority that may run into an uncomfortable reality. White MAGA racists do not want meritocracy. They want a comfortable return to an America that is default-White, with White privilege being so assumed that it is invisible. That train has left the station. Immigration has made us a multicultural, multiethnic nation. Trump said he wants more immigrants from Norway, but Norwegians aren't coming here. They have it good in Norway.
The path to domestic tranquility isn't going to be a retreat to supposed objective "merit," but it isn't hard quotas, either. Or maybe even "soft quotas." A norm of "strict fairness" and objectivity is better for building strong institutions, but institutions need to be conscious of different skillsets. It is an imperfect solution because it requires judgment and finesse. Former NBA star Kareem Abdul-Jabbar made the point with a metaphor that I think Harvard is looking for in its admissions, and which probably should be the policy for the U.S. military and other institutions now being purged of DEI by Trump. Abdul-Jabbar wrote that a team consisting solely of the "best" players, all seven-foot-plus centers with team-leading scores, would lose every game. They would have a hard time getting the ball to center court because it would be stripped from them by quicker guards. A championship team has a mix of abilities from the best players with different sizes and skillsets.
Trump has no interest in making Abdul-Jabbar's point. He wants to provoke White resentment. But a wise Democrat might voice it.
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31 comments:
Evolution did not stop with the emergence of homo sapiens. We have continued to evolve under selection pressures that are more cultural than environmental.
Consider the Chinese. Success in that civilization over the past 250 generations required mastering an ideographic alphabet with over 50,000 characters. 250 generations of that is definitely enough for natural selection to produce genetic effects.
Given the different cultural selection pressures that various subpopulations of homo sapiens have been subjected to, there is no reason to assume that there are no genetic differences in intelligence between those populations.
I understand that this is a topic that can quickly turn toxic. It has turned toxic right here on this blog. Given current conditions, the best thing to do is probably to leave the topic entirely alone.
But there’s a problem: policies that either explicitly or subtly demand racial quotas contain an assumption that intelligence is evenly distributed among all the different racial groups. These policies step right into the toxic controversy and demand that we all take a particular, politically correct position on it.
I am unwilling to do this. I am totally willing to not take a position on the toxic controversy as long as everyone else also does not take a position on it. But I will not allow myself to be forced to take a position on it by any level of public condemnation or political hysteria.
The demand that we support some degree of racial quotas necessarily requires a particular position on the toxic controversy. People who deny this and demand quotas anyway are either being dishonest or at best unwilling to look into the logical consequences of the policies they support.
I know this isn’t original, but I’m still astounded by the extent to which Trump has normalized cruelty. And more astonishing is how victims of his cruelty accept it. There must be some social psychologists who can explain this.
What makes America great isn’t all its wealth (which is in the hands of so few) or it’s military might (which is so prone to misuse), but its diversity. We have people here of every ethnicity and major religion living and working together in relative harmony, thanks to our rule of law. The bad news is that Trump and his party are doing everything in their power to sabotage it. The good news is their malice is exceeded only by their incompetence.
Trump is notorious for calling people stupid names: scum, vermin, parasites, stupid, piggy, etc. Obviously, he’s projecting.
White voters in the south seem comfortable calling black peoples low IQ. I wonder what percent of southern whites are comfortable with being prejudiced toward Hispanics and Blacks? Surely it’s the majority.
MT, doesn't evolution have to do with the viability of a species in competition with other species to fill an environmental niche? Are you saying that the Chinese are developing as a species separate from other nationalities? If so, then what happens with the offspring of Chinese Americans who succeed in school, including at Harvard, but do not know how to speak or read Chinese (or, for that matter, any non-Indo European foreign language)? Asking for a friend...
It sounds like MT is espousing “race science,” also known as “scientific racism.” As a computer programmer, he might be interested in what A.I. has to say about it:
“Contemporary scientific consensus across genetics, anthropology and sociology firmly rejects the idea that human races are biologically distinct or hierarchical. Decades of rigorous research have proven that “scientific racism” is a pseudoscience – an ideology that distorts or misinterprets data to justify pre-existing racial biases and social inequalities.”
Systematic suppression and oppression of Black people in what is now the U.S. lasted for approximately 350 years. As a result, there remain huge, persistent disparities between Blacks and Whites in health, wealth, education, etc. The antipathy some Whites feel toward giving them a leg up is no different than the antipathy they felt toward giving them their freedom or the vote.
Natural selection also has to do with relative levels of success at producing offspring in a particular society/culture. This process can produce genetic differences that do not go so far as creating a new species, i.e. a population. that cannot interbreed with other populations.
Clearly, all humans can still interbreed with each other. That does not mean that different populations are not genetically distinct because of different selection pressures.
I am espousing common sense, and commonly accepted evolutionary/genetic science. Skin color, for instance, is genetically encoded. Are you so sure that skin color is the only human attribute with a genetic component?
As a computer scientist, I am familiar with AI hallucinations, and with the principle of “garbage in, garbage out.“ “Scientific consensus” used to think that the continents did not drift. AI is not infallible. Neither is “scientific consensus.“
Equating what I said with a desire to subjugate particular racial groups is a rhetorical tactic designed to enforce political correctness via intimidation. Nasty stuff, and at least in my case, it doesn’t work.
I have a strong antipathy towards racial discrimination in any direction. Equating that antipathy with a desire to racially discriminate isn’t right. It isn’t even wrong.*
————
* Physicist Wolfgang Pauli is famous for having said this about a student’s work.
Those of you who are interested in further exploration of these issues could make a good start by looking up the fields of “sociobiology“ and “evolutionary psychology.”
Here is an article that was just published today about this topic.
Here is an article that was just published today on this topic.
Since race is a social construct, couldn’t the disparities noted in this post and comments thread derive from social and cultural differences among races, or perhaps ethnicities? In the case of American blacks and Latinos, perhaps comparatively lower familial focus or value placed upon formal education.
Affirmative action in our universities negatively affects Asians (India/Pakistan plus the Far East) most of all, then Jews, more than conventional whites. The math successes dominating this post’s photos include no blacks or Latinos, one woman, and one white male.
Lowering standards for feelgood diversity optics benefits no one long-term—that includes those who benefit short-term. It fixes group-based entitlements over individual merit. Meanwhile, I’m not sure Kareem’s basketball metaphor is best suited here. The vast bulk of ALL top-end position players are black. Plus the best of the best all-time, Magic, MJ, and Kobe, were all guards!
It’s true, scientific consensus has been wrong in the past. Over time we’ve learned the Earth isn’t flat, and the heavens don’t rotate around it. The current consensus is based on what we know now, but many cling desperately to the past.
“Contemporary scientific consensus agrees that race has no biological basis, but scientific racism still exists. While it's now more subtle than craniometry, its long history demonstrates the influence social ideas about race can have on supposedly unbiased research.”
https://guides.library.harvard.edu/scientificracism
It's more likely the problem is less access to education, not less emphasis. Education is one of those things that have become unaffordable. Blacks and Latinos have less wealth.
“Many cling …”
Did you have anyone particular in mind, Mike? If you are aiming that particular characterization at me, what past belief are you referring to?
I don’t want to racially discriminate against anyone. In which version of the past was that a common belief?
No, Kareem is the GOAT. And, although Victor Wembanyama's team lost tonight, watch Wemby; FWIW, he's half white.
How do we know that no one in the pictures is Latino? Aren't we just assuming that everyone pictured is a so-called "Asian"?
The black/Latino standardized disparities hold up in modern times, even as adjusted for socioeconomic status. Conferring targeted “access” has been the program of several decades now. Latino emphasis on formal education remains comparatively low, especially for women. Modern black culture often disparages “white” (and Asian) educational aims and norms. Perhaps not enough time has passed. Or perhaps racism is not the all-purpose boogeyman it once was, nor sexism—even if Trump himself displays retrograde self-indulgences.
The common argument cited by the opponents s of MT, that racial differences do not exist because the category of "race" is not strictly biologically coherent is a bit of a doublethink. Notice that many who use it are nonetheless happy to say college admissions should take race into consideration.
The politically correct term nowadays is not race but "ancestry", as in "African ancestry". OK, fine. But really, BFD. That's what most people mean when they use the term race.
I'd argue that a strong social consensus in the US can be built around hiring and admissions that would be basically meritocratic, with the following adjustments:
1) Positive weight should be given in inverse proportion to the income and education of a person's parents or primary caregivers.
2) This weight should be minor that it is effectively just a "tiebreaker" and not a preference category that Trump's all others. So, for example poor kid with non-college grad parents who gets a score on the SATs that is "close"(statistically equivalent) to that of a rich kid whose parents went to Harvard should be preferred -- other things being equal.
These are all great theories to debate, but I want to share a simple story . About eight years ago I hired a young engineering graduate who grew up in Ethiopia. This is one of those classic stories of the underprivileged Third World country immigrant comes to America And flourishes in a way he never could in his own country. He was the son of a poor chicken farmer who applied and got the lottery for a green card to come to the United States. He was literally dirt poor.
He came to America and slept on couches delivered pizza and worked as an Uber driver. He got accepted into the University of Washington and worked his way through electrical engineering school with those hustles.
I hired him as an intern, and he was one of the smartest most creative on my team. I gave him problems to solve and told him to research the tools to solve them and he took things on his own, collaborated with others learned coding and integrated systems. He just was so intuitively bright.
In his first year working for me, he bought a house near what would be the new light rail station, knowing that transit oriented development would increase the value of his investment. He rented out his rooms to other Ethiopians, which covered his mortgage payments. His house did increase in value as he had imagined , which he then leveraged and along with others invested in another house to create a group Home, which they rent. He has been able to use his financial position to expanded his family‘s chicken farm to commercial production in Ethiopia. Oh yes, he also has time to be a leader in his local Ethiopian church here in Seattle. He’s not yet 30 years old.
I texted him the other day and he was touring Japan, which he never would’ve been able to do if he had not come to the US. And it was all the luck of the draw. He may never be one of the world changing, billionaires that Peter talked about when he was at Harvard, and I’ll leave the debate about what is fair and just And true to the rest of you but it’s an inspiring story of what happens when one person is given an opportunity.
The names and backgrounds are available online.
I was referring, of course, to this long-discredited belief:
"Given the different cultural selection pressures that various subpopulations of homo sapiens have been subjected to, there is no reason to assume that there are no genetic differences in intelligence between those populations."
Thank you. Very nice illustration of how immigration is good for us as well as them.
Work ethic, family ethic, educational and vocational ethics....
All we are pointing out is that higher melanin levels do not make people inferior in any way, yet it has been used as a basis for discrimination in this country for hundreds of years.
Continental drift was also “long discredited.“ then it turned out to actually be true. There is new research on this issue that was just published in Nature, referenced in the article that I posted a link to.
When it comes to who is trapped in the past, you might want to take a look in the mirror.
A form of hell is having dark skin and the "wrong" name, as much as Rivera or Labron, and white people wonder whether you value education and whether you're lazy or dumb.
Before ‘drifting’ even further into Irrelevant whataboutisms, I repeat: There is no credible basis for scientific racism, yet having higher melanin levels has been used to discriminate against people in this country for hundreds of years. It’s ignorant and indefensible.
Reading an article and learning something could be a better alternative to reflexively rejecting new research because it falls afoul of liberal shibboleths.
The Nature article, containing the new scientific research on how humans have continued to evolve genetically under cultural influences.
It’s no surprise that people evolve differently in different environments. There’s nothing mentioned in the research, however, indicating any particular group is more intelligent. All individuals differ in so many ways. Each is unique. It would be nice if we lived in a society where we could all be judged on the content of our character, but we obviously don’t or else Trump would be in prison instead of what’s left of our White House.
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