Diversity makes us smarter

I often find myself drawn to discussions of ‘diversity’, which, it should be noted, is a term that can have a lot of different meanings – a diversity of meanings, if you will. Oh, you won’t? *Gulp* Sorry.

When I talk about diversity, I generally refer to a non-sociological definition – one that is really more grounded in colloquial usage: having representation of a variety of different groups, all working toward the same goal. So ‘diversity’ in a classroom means that you have many different types of students, all working toward the goal of learning. ‘Diversity’ in a government agency might refer to having people with differing socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds, working toward the goal of achieving the agency’s objectives.

Another colloquial usage of ‘diversity’ refers explicitly to increasing the number of minority group members in an organization. Usually this refers to racial minorities and women, since many of our institutions tend to be white and male dominated (although we have been getting better about this). It has also become a dirty word for that same reason, since many see any advancement of minority groups as taking something away from the majority group. My argument has always been that this isn’t the case.

This post was supposed to follow a post that’s planned for this Monday, but I have decided to push it up for a couple of reasons. First, because it’s easy to write about and I have limited time while I’m away from home. Second, because it’s interesting. Third, because it’s relevant to a fight that’s currently happening on my Facebook wall:

Professors Woolley and Malone, along with Christopher Chabris, Sandy Pentland, and Nada Hashmi, gave subjects aged 18 to 60 standard intelligence tests and assigned them randomly to teams. Each team was asked to complete several tasks—including brainstorming, decision making, and visual puzzles—and to solve one complex problem. Teams were given intelligence scores based on their performance. Though the teams that had members with higher IQs didn’t earn much higher scores, those that had more women did.

This isn’t really the substance of the fight – it has more to do with the so-called ‘glass ceiling’ (which I have discussed in depth before) and wage equality for women. However, the issue of ‘tokenism’ has come up, and I feel the need to respond to it in more words than are really wieldy on a Facebook comment. The argument that a certain friend made is that there are women in positions of power, so we should really consider the issue of accessibility more or less solved – at least we shouldn’t consider it something worth making a big deal about.

‘Tokenism’, for those of you that haven’t encountered the phrase before, refers to having a single member of a non-majority group present in an organization, who can then be pointed to whenever discussions of diversity come up (“we’re not _____ist, we’ve got Pat, who is a _____!”). The problem with this ‘solution’ to the problem is that it does not reflect real diversity, only the wish to avoid appearances of selective hiring. This study I’ve cited above seems to suggest that having more diverse groups (at least gender-diverse groups) makes those groups actually work better.

Woolley: We’ve replicated the findings twice now. Many of the factors you might think would be predictive of group performance were not. Things like group satisfaction, group cohesion, group motivation—none were correlated with collective intelligence. And, of course, individual intelligence wasn’t highly correlated, either.

Malone: Before we did the research, we were afraid that collective intelligence would be just the average of all the individual IQs in a group. So we were surprised but intrigued to find that group intelligence had relatively little to do with individual intelligence.

So if the individual IQ of the group members doesn’t predict group performance, what is important? Apparently, women are (for reasons that are likely sociological as much as – or more than – biological) better at understanding non-verbal communication and can facilitate group co-operation and problem solving more adeptly than men, allowing the group to get the best from all of its members. While it is obvious from even a cursory examination of the people in your life, there are some men that are better at this skill than some women, the underlying point remains – having a variety of kinds of people and kinds of skills is a boon to group effectiveness that goes far beyond the simple appearance of diversity.

While it is certainly convenient to point to individual examples of women in positions of power as evidence that sexism isn’t as bad as it once was, nobody is making the argument that there has been zero progress along the lines of gender inequality. The point is that we can still do better about addressing the inequalities we continue to see. If and when we do that, we will have done more than simply righted a moral injustice, or made women stop complaining, or reached some faux-liberal goal of making sure nobody feels excluded ever. We will have improved our society in such a way that it improves life for everyone.

It is a stretch to cite this article as proof that reducing racial inequalities will have the same effect, and I am not claiming this to be conclusive evidence of that. My personal belief in this matter is that increasing diversity in general results in a similar outcome – more people who can bring unique experience and perspective to a novel problem will tend to outperform groups that are more homogeneous, regardless of individual merit of the members of those groups. I will flesh this idea out in greater detail on Monday.

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Deport the reporter

Canada is a nation that was built by immigrant labour. Under the auspices of French and English immigrants, generation after generation of immigrant populations have left their mark on what has become a great nation. Canada’s birth rate is such that without an influx of at least 200,000 immigrants per year, our population will begin to dwindle. The implication is clear – without immigration Canada will fail.

There are few in this country that will deny these facts. We are lucky to be mostly insulated from the kind of “illegal immigrant” hysteria that has gripped the European countries, and even our friends to the south. A major part of this insulation is the fact that we share our only land border with a country that is (for now) a more attractive target for immigration than our frozen north. We don’t have to worry nearly as much about people sneaking across the border.

All that being said, it is no less true that the United States relies on its immigrant populations for its survival as well. Far above and beyond the jingoistic image of immigrants “doing the jobs that Americans don’t want to do” – which is certainly part of the picture of the immigrant experience – immigrants are and have been an integral part of the development of the United States since the very beginning. There is a strong move afoot in American politics to round up and deport anyone who has come into the country illegally, which on its face sounds like a reasonable idea, until you consider the sheer number of people who are undocumented.

While it might make good political sense to be against immigrants, it makes poor economic sense. Immigrants, even those that haven’t entered according to the rules, provide essential services in many walks of life. Rounding up and deporting them would create huge vacancies in the job market, and while the ranks of the unemployed will fill some of those spaces, the training and skill needed for many of those positions would preclude most on the unemployment rolls from entering without doing lasting damage to the economy. For example, how many unemployed people do you think are capable of winning a Pulitzer?

One August morning nearly two decades ago, my mother woke me and put me in a cab. She handed me a jacket. “Baka malamig doon” were among the few words she said. (“It might be cold there.”) When I arrived at the Philippines’ Ninoy Aquino International Airport with her, my aunt and a family friend, I was introduced to a man I’d never seen. They told me he was my uncle. He held my hand as I boarded an airplane for the first time. It was 1993, and I was 12.

Antonio Vargaz, New York Times reporter and Pulitzer Prize winning journalist ‘came out’ as ‘an illegal’ in the pages of his host paper, without knowing what the consequences of such an action would be. His story is amazing:

I decided then that I could never give anyone reason to doubt I was an American. I convinced myself that if I worked enough, if I achieved enough, I would be rewarded with citizenship. I felt I could earn it. I’ve tried. Over the past 14 years, I’ve graduated from high school and college and built a career as a journalist, interviewing some of the most famous people in the country. On the surface, I’ve created a good life. I’ve lived the American dream.

But I am still an undocumented immigrant. And that means living a different kind of reality. It means going about my day in fear of being found out. It means rarely trusting people, even those closest to me, with who I really am. It means keeping my family photos in a shoebox rather than displaying them on shelves in my home, so friends don’t ask about them. It means reluctantly, even painfully, doing things I know are wrong and unlawful. And it has meant relying on a sort of 21st-century underground railroad of supporters, people who took an interest in my future and took risks for me.

I am the child of a “legal” immigrant. My father emigrated from Guyana in 1978, and has since become financially independent and has contributed to Canada both economically and politically. Even though I am not an immigrant (the technical term for me is “second generation immigrant”), I am acutely aware of carrying the stigma of someone whose ancestors are “not from here”. This is, perhaps, a very small price to pay to be born in a country that has helped me survive and flourish from literally the time I was conceived.

While my classmates awaited their college acceptance letters, I hoped to get a full-time job at The Mountain View Voice after graduation. It’s not that I didn’t want to go to college, but I couldn’t apply for state and federal financial aid. Without that, my family couldn’t afford to send me. But when I finally told Pat and Rich about my immigration “problem” — as we called it from then on — they helped me look for a solution. At first, they even wondered if one of them could adopt me and fix the situation that way, but a lawyer Rich consulted told him it wouldn’t change my legal status because I was too old.

Eventually they connected me to a new scholarship fund for high-potential students who were usually the first in their families to attend college. Most important, the fund was not concerned with immigration status. I was among the first recipients, with the scholarship covering tuition, lodging, books and other expenses for my studies at San Francisco State University.

Immigrants have to work hard to get ahead in this country. That’s a good thing – allegiances easily won are just as easily forsaken. That being said, it is to the benefit of us all to create ways to make getting ahead a little less fraught with pitfalls. Especially in a place in which immigration is the lifeblood of stability, it is simple spite that motivates us to demonize those that weren’t born here – spite that only ends up hurting ourselves more in the end.

Early this year, just two weeks before my 30th birthday, I won a small reprieve: I obtained a driver’s license in the state of Washington. The license is valid until 2016. This offered me five more years of acceptable identification — but also five more years of fear, of lying to people I respect and institutions that trusted me, of running away from who I am. I’m done running. I’m exhausted. I don’t want that life anymore.

So I’ve decided to come forward, own up to what I’ve done, and tell my story to the best of my recollection. I’ve reached out to former bosses and employers and apologized for misleading them — a mix of humiliation and liberation coming with each disclosure. All the people mentioned in this article gave me permission to use their names. I’ve also talked to family and friends about my situation and am working with legal counsel to review my options. I don’t know what the consequences will be of telling my story.

So anyone who is a rabid anti-immigrant crusader, even if they restrict their condemnation to those that are “illegal”, ask them this: is the world a worse place because Antonio Vargaz was allowed his shot at success?

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Learning a new language

Part of my reason for starting this blog is because I have been led to believe by multiple interactions with people my own age (and occasionally older) who are terrified to discuss race. Part of this comes from a general distaste for even the concept of race, such that certain people think it is not a subject to be discussed in polite society. Still others (fewer of my own friends, to be sure) think that the discussion of race is redundant, and that talking about race is what causes racism in the same way that Wile E. Coyote was immune from the effects of gravity until he noticed he’d walked off the cliff.

Those two camps aside, the most common response I get from people when discussing why they don’t like talking about race is that they are uncomfortable discussing the subject for fear of being perceived as racist. We have a strong societal taboo about racism – so strong in fact that it has begun to interfere with our ability to discuss strategies for dealing with racism. We thereby get mired in the morass of a kind of “hear/see/speak no evil” approach to a major societal problem.

My reason (one among many others) for speaking about racism as candidly and frequently and publicly as I do is to try and equip the average person with some basic vocabulary that we can use in our discussions of inequities of various types, racism being one of those. Given that our (my) generation is born into a discussion of race that has never really happened before, we are in the unique (and perhaps unenviable) position of inventing a new language to talk about it:

There’s little question that most Millennials [those people born after 1980] struggle to articulate their views on how race and racism operate in their lives. But our focus groups’ deeper discussions revealed that a structural understanding of racism—of racism as something that grows out of political and economic systems rather than individual animus—is not completely lost on this generation. And that, of course, has serious implications for how they will go about eradicating it from our society.

It’s certainly unusual to find yourself in the position of having to describe something that operates outside our capacity to tangibly identify. Racism is a bad idea – a product of crappy human brains and superficial but prominent differences between groups. Because it is folded into our societal interactions, most of it happens in such a way as to appear completely normal, but resulting in disparity that runs in a consistent direction.

This report, abstracts of which are published in Colorlines, is an attempt to determine how the conversation is having on the “front lines” of the discussion – the people who are inheriting the problem and charting the course for society’s future:

“This is a hard one. Racism today would be, um…” stumbled Jenny, a 21-year-old Asian-American college student in the Los Angeles area, where we held focus 16 groups in late 2010 and early 2011. “I guess discriminating based on the color of someone’s skin,” Jenny continued, falling back upon the type of relatively generic description that many participants of all races and ethnicities used.

I have given my own ham-handed attempt to define racism, or at least what racism means to me. Briefly, racism is what happens when ideas about an ethnic group are applied to an individual. So when someone thinks that I am handy in a fight because I’m black, or assumes that my buddy Joel is good with money because he’s Jewish, or assumes that Brian is a habitual drunk because he’s Irish, we’re all being judged as individuals by group characteristics. Inherent is this judgment is the embedded assumption that your ethnic group comprises a meaningful encapsulation of your entire persona – that there is enough truth in stereotypes that you can judge someone entirely based on something as superficial as skin colour or cultural background.

What’s interesting is that while we all struggle with this problem, some differences in understanding do seem to fall along group lines:

Of course, the fact that most Millennials believe race still shapes American life should not mask the very real differences of opinion both across and within racial groups about the extent to which it matters. Which is the second theme that emerged from our focus groups: There are real differences in how young people of different races and ethnicities think and talk about this subject. Young people of color are more likely to independently bring up race, resources and access to them, while white Millennials are less likely to make connections across systems like housing and education, and less likely to prescribe political action to fix it.

It is fairly elementary psychology to understand why white kids may see racism as being an individual failing, and youth of colour are more likely to see a systematic process. These are more or less th realms in which these groups experience racism – white kids as seeing the actions of racist people as those people victimize people of colour (PoCs); PoCs seeing a systemic lack of both respect and access coming from all areas in their lives, without having to encounter too many white-hood-wearing “racists”. In this way, both groups are protected from having to make negative judgments about themselves: white kids don’t feel like they’re responsible for a system they can’t exert control over (and which was laid down before they were born), and kids of colour can point to racism as a reason for lack of success.

Whether either of these narrative is true (it is my opinion that they are both false), it reveals a significant disconnect between the way that white people and PoCs understand race and racism:

[One participant’s answer that the public school system isn’t racist…] revealed a broad tendency among our participants who were white college students, and came from comparatively privileged backgrounds. They didn’t believe their high schools intentionally discriminated against anyone; the segregation they witnessed and the corresponding difference in resources were just “the way it is,” and there was no need to question that fact. Participants like Justin generally did not talk about the policies and practices that created their public school systems—property tax-based funding, abundant availability of college-prep courses, and low student-counselor ratios, among others.

And until we can begin to speak each other’s languages and learn from each other’s experiences, we cannot get ourselves dislodged from our reluctance to talk to each other about problems and potential solutions. I strongly recommend, regardless of your pigment, you read these articles in their entirety. They’re quite interesting.

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So you think you might be a troll…

There’s a video that has been running through the feminist segment of the atheism community from popular atheist, skeptic and feminist Rebecca Watson from The Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe and Skepchick:

The video describes an interaction that Rebecca had with an attendee of an atheist/skeptic conference. She had been hanging out int he hotel bar with some of the people at the conference. It was late, and she said goodnight to everyone and went to head back to her room. One of the people who had been at the bar followed her onto the elevator and asked Rebecca if she wanted to go back to his hotel room with him, which she didn’t. Rebecca thought this was a clear-cut example of behaviour that men should avoid when attending conferences – don’t assume that just because a woman is out drinking that she wants to have sex with you. It was particularly on the nose for her, since she was there to talk about how to make these conferences more woman-friendly.

I had a difficult time getting on board with Rebecca on this one, because I couldn’t really see where the offense was. When I read Jen McCreight’s response, I was even more baffled. Surely she wasn’t suggesting that atheists ought not to proposition each other for casual sex – that’s really much more puritanical than the general atheist community tends to be. Was she suggesting that we don’t do it when we’re drunk? Or when it’s that late at night? Or when you don’t know the person well? I was sincerely confused.

Also, there’s Elevator Guy to consider. It seemed as though he was being passed off as a clueless lout that made sexual advances at someone and should have known better. But how? How could he have known his interests were unwanted? We don’t know if they’d spoken before, or if he was just a random creeper. We don’t know if he was drunk we don’t know how he asked the question (it might have been super-awkward, or it might have been with Don Draper-like poise and suaveness). As a guy who’s been rejected for making the first move, and also rejected for taking too long to make the first move, I wanted to make sure I understood what was going on so I didn’t make the same mistake.

So I posted a comment:

“cornering a woman in an elevator at 4AM and asking her up to your hotel room, after not having said two words to her the whole night, is about a 9.0 on the creepy scale.”

And here’s my problem with this whole discussion. Even from Rebecca’s video, we don’t know that he “cornered” her except insofar as there isn’t much besides corners in an elevator. We don’t know that they hadn’t spoken before. We don’t know what his reaction was when she said “no” – he might have just said “okay, cool.” It’s entirely conceivable to me that he was waiting for the crowd to thin out before making his proposition, but when she went for the elevator he threw a last-ditch “Hail Mary” pass, got shot down, and went on his merry way.

I can understand feeling threatened by an unwelcome advance in an elevator, but why are we assuming that this guy was physically threatening her, or that he was particularly creepy about it? There are some salient details missing from this story that we should have before we pass judgment on this guy for being a 9.0 creep.

The response to what I thought was a totally innocuous comment was… less than friendly. I suddenly realized that, to all eyes, I was trolling the comment threads trying to pick a fight, or to make some stupid statement about “men’s rights”, standing up for every guy’s right to sexually harass whomever he wants. Having dealt with trolls before, I knew immediately what would and wouldn’t work, and so I thought I would share some of those insights with you.

If you ever find yourself commenting on a forum where your opinion is in the strong minority (especially if it is diametrically opposed to the position of the author of the forum/blog post), here are some important lessons to keep in mind if you don’t want to get written off as a troll.

1. Listen

The hallmark of a troll, in fact the defining characteristic of a troll, is that she/he is not posting to gain information or change a perspective – she/he is there to propagate conflict. If you are sincerely interested in offering a dissenting opinion, make sure you actually listen to the responses that come back your way.

2. Relax

You will accomplish nothing besides looking silly if you lose your temper. You’re going to need to maintain a level of zen-like calm to avoid being drawn into a flame war. Since you are surrounded by people that disagree with you, they will be ready to dismiss your perspective if you look like a raving lunatic.

3. Realize there’s a good chance that you’re wrong

It’s far more likely that your disagreement is due to misunderstanding some point or nuance of the argument than it is that everyone (including the author) is a moron.

4. Assume they’ve already heard your arguments

When dealing with a group of people who are passionately defending a position, it’s reasonable to assume that they’ve already heard what you have to say. If it’s a topic you’re very unfamiliar with, it’s not a bad idea to point that out. Some websites are “101 level” websites, meaning they are populated by people who are willing to explain basic concepts to newcomers. Others assume that you have a certain level of knowledge. Asking “how come there are still monkeys” on a biology blog won’t go over well. (Note: I like to consider this a 101-level blog, although sometimes I forget).

5. Prepare to be Insulted

It’s going to happen. Learn to deal with it. If your self-esteem gets tied up in what people on the internet think about you, then you’ve got to stay away from forums.

6. Don’t respond to insults

The knee-jerk reaction to being attacked is to fight back. Avoid this temptation. You’re only hurting yourself (see #2). A tactic I like to use is to agree with the person insulting you (‘I must be as stupid as you say, but please try to show me where I’m wrong anyway’) – it pivots you away from emotional reactions and shows people that you’re not going to get stuck in the mud.

7. Point out areas of agreement

This one is major. If you can identify where you agree, it’s easier for both sides to tone things down a bit. It may also help you to realize where the other side is coming from (see #1).

8. Admit your mistakes

If you take a statement out of context, get called on a fallacy, or are proven to be incorrect in one or more assertions, acknowledge it. “Yeah, but…” isn’t an acknowledgment, it’s a dodge. It’s a sign of maturity when you can say “You’re right, and I shouldn’t have said that” or “You’re right, and I should have made that more clear.”

9. Prepare to walk away

If after all the talk you still think you’re right and they’re wrong, there’s no shame in just walking away. Don’t burn the bridge (“I’m done with you idiots”) or try to get the last word (“I guess you’ll never understand X”), just bow out gracefully (“I guess I’m just not getting it. I’ll take some time to think about what you said”). Many people will prefer to communicate through e-mail rather than continue spam on a forum. I myself have received e-mails from people who want to talk about an issue outside the context of a public forum – sometimes the venue inhibits the conversation. Be the bigger person genuinely – don’t try to win by walking away.

10. Be honest

This is probably the most important of these points. Don’t go in trying to win, don’t go in trying to score points or shove it in someone’s face. Be honest about your intentions, be honest in your words. Part of honesty is logical consistency – don’t twist or distort facts or others’ statements. This is where every troll fails – if you want to not be seen as trolling then you need to obey this scrupulously.

Keep in mind, of course, that none of this will save you from being seen as a troll, or being called a troll, but then the problem is with your accuser, not you. If you’re not trolling, then hopefully your audience will pick up on that and extend you the benefit of the doubt. Of course, if you’re not willing to do these steps then you probably are trolling, in which case you deserve whatever treatment you get 😛

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Perhaps a more attractive droid?

There is a particular paradox with my post this morning that I didn’t really go out of my way to point out. That paradox has to do with finding a case that we (as free speech advocates) can sell to the public as an argument for unrestricted free speech rights. Its self-contradictory nature comes from the fact that in a liberal society that respects the rule of law, there aren’t a lot of examples of unpopular speech that the public can really get behind. The most common form of unpopular speech is based in hatred and intolerance, and you can’t really rally too many people behind that message.

But perhaps, with a bit of work, we can convince people of the merit in this:

A Dutch court acquitted right-wing politician Geert Wilders of hate speech and discrimination Thursday, ruling that his anti-Islam statements, while offensive to many Muslims, fell within the bounds of legitimate political debate. Judge Marcel van Oosten said Wilders’s claims that Islam is violent by nature, and his calls to halt Muslim immigration and ban the Muslim holy book, the Qur’an, must be seen in a wider context of debate over immigration policy. The Amsterdam court said his public statement could not be directly linked to increased discrimination against Dutch Muslims.

I will do myself the favour of stating unequivocally that I don’t like Geert Wilders, and will explain briefly why that is.

I do not buy the argument that the forces of Islamism are plotting a gradual takeover of Western society. It’s a fear-driven conspiracy theory carefully stoked in the xenophobic parts that inhabit all of us. It is convenient to our story-telling brains to dichotomize world events into “forces of good” and “forces of evil”. Hell, even I’m guilty of it (kind of… I trust my readers are aware of the sarcastic irony behind my categorization).

The reality is more like a variety of several ideologies, each competing for finite political real estate. The Islamist ideology is indeed fighting for supremacy, but not at the expense of Christianity. Islamism isn’t trying to “take over” any more than communism is trying to “take over” – all ideologies are fighting for dominance. This is where Wilders is wrong – he contrasts Islamic domination with Christian domination, when neither of these ideologies is truly dominant. While modern-day Europe owes a great deal to traditions laid down under true Christian ideological domination, most of the freedoms we enjoy today were despite Christian dominance (or rather, in the face of it) rather than because of it.

That being said, the world would be a much better place under the current situation of formerly-Christian secularism rather than an Islamic theocracy. Islam is, as written, much more hostile to the idea of religious pluralism than Christianity – I am happy to grant that. But the fight is not between an Islamic state and a Christian one – it’s between an absolutist state and a pluralistic one. Christian theocracy frightens me just as much as Islamic theocracy. Insofar as Wilders opposes an absolutist state, I am 100% with him. Where he and I differ has to do with his inability to divorce the ideas of Islam and absolutism. The two concepts are overlapping, but only mildly more so than are Christianity and absolutism.

Now, that covers basically where my position differs from Wilders’. The purpose of this post is to point out that what he said was a critique of an ideology, not the people who hold it. Mr. Wilders has gone out of his way several times to make this distinction – it is the religion of Islam he is criticizing as barbaric and dangerous. To the extent that individuals belonging to a religious group follow its strictures to varying degrees (and each insisting that theirs is the ‘true’ way), individual Muslims may or may not represent threats to secular society, just as individual liberals may or not represent threats to capitalism, for example. The courts have ruled precisely along these lines – criticism of ideas does not constitute hate speech, even if those ideas are religious or belong to a minority group.

It is precisely because this case lies on the balance of opposing concerns – distrust of religious extremism and distaste for intolerance – that it can be such a useful case to bring the free speech argument into the public sphere. You don’t have to like Geert Wilders to recognize that categorizing criticism of fanaticism as “hate speech” has very dangerous consequences that will do more to undermine secular society than all the forces of Islamism ever could.

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In defense of my bigoted moron brothers

Black Nonbelievers of Atlanta is a non-crazy freethinkers group in Atlanta, and you should check them out.

This morning I went on a bit of a tirade against KD and Black Son, two of the hosts of a public access television show called “Black Atheists of Atlanta” for their completely non-scientific rationalization of their anti-gay stance. I got so fired up about tearing them a new asshole, that I forgot to talk about the original point I wanted to make about the show.

The first point was that being a member of a minority group (whether that be a racial or ideological minority) doesn’t make you immune from being a bigot or an idiot. Similarly, being an atheist doesn’t automatically mean you’re intelligent – it just means you have at least one thing right. KD and Black Son are just as seeped in the heterosexism of their society as anyone else. While we might be surprised to see someone that is a religious skeptic use the same kind of nonsensical “reasoning” we complain about in apologists, it’s not completely mysterious. The challenge is to be skeptical about all claims, and to apportion belief to the evidence – KD and Black Son clearly aren’t very skilled at appraising the quality of evidence.

The other thing I wanted to say but didn’t get a chance to was a response to something that Hemant wrote:

At one point, someone calls in to say that there is, in fact, a biological basis for homosexuality. The response?

KD: “Those scientists were white, weren’t they?”
Caller: “Why does that matter?”
KD: “It matters to me because I’m black… if you’re not careful, even science can be racist.”

(I’ll admit it’s true that black people have been victims in some experiments, but that’s the fault of individual scientists, not science as a process.)

Hemant’s comment represents a fundamental misunderstanding of racism, and the climate from which things like the Tuskegee experiment came. It wasn’t simply a handful of unscrupulous scientists operating outside the norms that were responsible for the atrocities of the now-infamous abuses done in the name of science. Rather, the rationalization for using these people as they were used sprang from the societal idea that black people were little better than animals, and as such could be used as instruments of medical testing rather than treated as people.

KD’s remark about science being prone to racism is not then an indictment of the process of science, nor is it a misplaced criticism of a few people. It is justifiable skepticism about truths that come from the scientific establishment – an establishment that has demonstrated again and again its vulnerability to racism, sexism, heterosexism… all the flaws we see in human beings. Seen from this perspective, KD’s point is entirely justified – one does have to be careful to ensure that science isn’t racist. We see this taking place in clinical trials, where medicines are tested in primarily white, male populations, and then distributed to the population at large without checking to see if the results are generalizable. To be sure, this is getting better, but we haven’t reached the point where we have to stop being careful.

That being said, the correct response is to remain skeptical – not to reject the science. Animal studies of homosexuality have been performed by a variety of scientists in many countries, and they are based on observation. They were also not performed with the purpose of proving that gay sex happens in the animal kingdom, they are based on field observations and followup hypothesis testing. This is quite ancillary to the fact that there is nothing inherent in people of European descent that is pro-gay; white people and black people alike hate LGBT people, in equal measure, and with equally little rational support.

So while I am still appalled and horrified by what KD and Black Son said in their broadcast, and find it just as stupid and meritless as I did this morning, I have to defend that particular comment, because it is rooted in a justifiable and rational response to a scientific establishment that is predominantly white and has a long history of racism. Science, properly applied, leads to the acceptance of homosexuality in humans just as sure as it does lead to the conclusion that black people are equal in all meaningful ways to all other people.

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Anti-racism: gettin’ skeptical on yo’ ass

I’m a skeptic. For those of you who don’t know, that means that I subscribe to the general principle that the strength of a person’s belief in an idea or position should be proportionate to the amount of evidence. Ideas for which there is no evidence I do not accept, and ideas for which there is mixed evidence I can be persuaded either way.

I take an identical approach to all positions – if you show me the evidence that something works then I believe it. If the only thing you’ve got supporting your position is vague ideas and logical fallacies, you’ll be unlikely to persuade me. However, I’m only human, meaning that you’ll have to work harder to convince me of something I don’t agree with than you would to gain my agreement on a subject I support. This is bad skepticism – I should apply the identical standard to all things.

I care about race and racism, and that desire to understand the topic better has given me a position that is based partially on experience, partially on research, and partially on verifiable evidence (to the extent that these kinds of things can be observed scientifically). However, it behooves me to apply my same skeptical look for positions I agree with as I do for ones I don’t (like this morning’s example). In the interest of being a fair race skeptic, here’s a position that doesn’t pass muster for me:

University coursework should be marked anonymously to deal with concerns that potential bias against a “foreign-sounding name” can cost students marks, a report by the National Union of Students recommends. The report also urges universities to minimise “eurocentric bias” when drawing up curriculums. “This is critical, not only to demonstrate to black students that their learning reflects their own experience, but to promote understanding among their white peers,” it states. It is standard practice for universities to assess exams anonymously because of concerns about preconceptions relating to race, sex or previous knowledge of a candidate, but the NUS report calls for anonymity to be extended across all “assessment procedures”, which would include coursework…

The report, Race for Equality, is based on a survey of 900 students with African, Asian and Caribbean backgrounds. The survey found that, while most students were positive about their institutions, 23% described the universities they attended as “cliquey” and 7% as “racist”. There was also widespread frustration that courses did not reflect non-white backgrounds and views.

I have the same criticism of this finding as I do of the Tufts study – it measures perception and not reality. Are these schools actually cliquey? Are they actually racist? We can’t use the results of student opinion surveys to draw that conclusion, especially given the multitude of possible explanations for the perception. One has to do actual observational work to justify making a huge policy change, not simply jump at every measurement of how people feel.

While I am generally inclined to believe the claims of the respondents (based on my own experience of what institutes of higher education look like as a black student), I think that these responses – like the ones from this morning – are useful and interesting areas for scrutiny. If the scrutiny yields results then a policy change is in order. However, until then, we should remain skeptical of all claims – even those we agree with; perhaps especially so.

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The normal kind of crazy

I might be the only atheist blogger in the world that hasn’t yet talked about the absurdity of the Family Radio rapture announcement last Saturday. For those of you that didn’t read my post that preceded the event, a radio host from the United States (of course) named Harold Camping performed a rigorous mathematical analysis of the Bible (read: pulled some numbers out of his ass) and announced that the world would be judged on May 21st, 2011. Jesus would return in glory and take faithful to heaven. He also ‘prophesied’ that there would be massive earthquakes and millions of deaths on that day, which would continue until the world actually ends in October of this year.

As you’ll remember, he was totally correct, and that’s exactly what happened.

Well, no. What actually happened is that the universe has existed for billions of years. For some of those billions, there has been one star among trillions that had a handful of planets. On one of those planets existed the proper chemical conditions for self-replicating molecules to form and propagate. Some of those molecules spontaneously organized to form multicellular organisms, one of which eventually became capable of organizing into units capable of exchanging ideas. Among the thousands of stupid ideas that this random process inevitably spit out, one of them was about a man who was the son of one of the gods who was killed but promised to come back and avenge his death in a most bloody fashion.

One of the multicellular organisms took the stupid idea to a wacky conclusion based on weird information, and got it dead wrong. Instead of being among the small minority of multicellulars that is willing to admit when it does something wrong, this one decided instead to engage in stereotypical hand-waving and try to change its story:

As crestfallen followers of a California preacher who foresaw the world’s end strained to find meaning in their lives, Harold Camping revised his apocalyptic prophecy, saying he was off by five months and the Earth actually will be obliterated on Oct. 21. Camping, who predicted that 200 million Christians would be taken to heaven Saturday before global cataclysm struck the planet, said Monday that he felt so terrible when his doomsday message did not come true that he left home and took refuge in a motel with his wife. His independent ministry, Family Radio International, spent millions — some of it from donations made by followers — on more than 5,000 billboards and 20 recreational vehicles plastered with the Judgment Day message.

First off, I have a bone to pick not only with this article, but with the slavering hordes of people eager to make jokes at Camping’s expense. Strictly speaking, he did not predict the world would end on May 21st; he predicted that Jesus would judge mankind on that day. All along he said that the final day of the Earth would be in October, and he hasn’t changed his mind about that.

Secondly, there’s a larger point to be made here. Harold Camping is a guy with really weird ideas. They’re bizarre and nonsensical and have only a fleeting and occasional relationship with observable reality. He has taken those beliefs out of the privacy of his head and has decided to plaster them all over the place, gathering followers and collecting vast sums of money in the process. The people who follow him appear to be earnest and kind but simple-minded fools who have fallen victim to Camping’s particular brand of lunacy.

Here’s the point: what Harold Camping believes is different from what the Pope or the Archbishop of Canterbury or Billy Graham or (insert famous religious personality) believes only in terms of magnitude, not type. Belief in a supernatural entity in the absence of evidence is what licenses all kinds of weird beliefs, even those as extreme as Camping’s. I will avoid, for now, the obvious temptation of comparing his nuttiness to fanatics like Ayatollah Khomeni or Joseph Kony – Camping did not advocate violence or totalitarian rule. However, the fundamental basis of his position is rooted on identical grounds: the will of an undefinable and unobservable supreme being.

And so while believers and non-believers alike spent the day laughing at the stupidity of the May 21st Rapture, we were laughing at two different things. Believers (the Christian ones, anyway) were yukking it up at the audacity of trying to pick a date for the return of the human son of the supreme being on the universe:

Tim LaHaye, co-author of the bestselling Left Behind novels about the end times, recently called Camping’s prediction “not only bizarre but 100 per cent wrong!” He cited the Bible verse Matthew 24:36, “but about that day or hour no one knows” except God. “While it may be in the near future, many signs of our times certainly indicate so, but anyone who thinks they ‘know’ the day and the hour is flat out wrong,” LaHaye wrote on his website, leftbehind.com.

Everyone else was laughing at how stupid the idea is.

When black people in the United States jumped on the Proposition 8 bandwagon to pass an amendment to ban gay marriage, I couldn’t fathom how a group that has experienced (and continues to experience) the suppression of its civil rights would be so eager to take the same rights away from other people. It was the same blindness I saw at work in believers who were happy to deride Camping but couldn’t see that their own religious beliefs were simply a diluted aspect of the same irrationality at work. While I’ve discussed the recalcitrance of the religious to examine their own behaviour, I am slowly learning that this is simply a product of human brains, not something unique to religious faith alone.

So what happened on the 21st? As it had for the past billions of years, the particular planet orbited about the particular star in the particular far-flung region of the universe, completely oblivious to the stupidity happening on its surface. Who wants to take bets on what’s going to happen in 5 months?

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Coded racism

Nobody likes to be called a racist. Well, almost nobody, but nobody who wishes to be taken seriously by the general public. We have developed a knee-jerk reaction to racism that has made even the mention of race-sensitive issues abhorrent. This reaction is far from irrational – people have seen how destructive the ideologies of racism are, and how deeply-wounded marginalized communities have become as a result of societal racism. Most people have friends, romantic partners, perhaps even relatives, that are from a different racial group; everyone recognizes that discriminating based on race is a bad thing.

The problem arises when this aversion to racism causes us to become willfully blind to racist practices around us. When confronted with them, we are more likely to explain them away rather than simply admit that we might not be perfect “non-racists”. I’m a particular fan of the way that Stewart Lee characterized it: “…if political correctness has achieved one thing, it’s to make the Conservative party cloak its inherent racism behind more creative language.” Of course we can substitute “Conservative party” with “general public” in most cases. We live in a racist society, and nobody is immune from the subtle voice of cultural indoctrination whispering in our ears.

Given this lack of immunity, the only tools we have to combat the effects of racism are self-awareness and intellectual courage (and surprise…). However, it seems that we prefer instead to use a lexicon that allows us to continue our racist behaviour without seeming racist. This is referred to generally as ‘coded racism’, which I will define as statements of racist ideologies that are carefully designed not to appear racist. I will, for the sake of illustration, give a few examples.

Arizona’s anti-immigration law

Those of you who have been paying attention to the news probably know about Arizona’s new anti-immigration bill, supposedly designed to reduce the amount of illegal immigration to the state. Leaving aside the fact that illegal immigration has absolutely nothing to do with Arizona’s financial woes, the bill reeks of coded racism. The most debated aspect of the bill is the provisions that require police officers to detain anyone that “looks illegal”. No standard has been provided for determining what an illegal immigrant looks like, or how to distinguish someone that “looks illegal” from someone that looks like a legal immigrant. The process is simply left up to a sort of “c’mon… you know what we’re talking about” process.

Defenders of the bill (and there are many) repeatedly affirm that racism and racial profiling are not the purpose of the legislation, stating instead that it is about fighting illegal immigration; and if all the illegals just happen to be brown-skinned people, that’s just an accident of statistics. We are asked to simply ignore the ‘wink-nudge’ aspects of the bill, along with the extreme anti-Hispanic attitudes that accompany it, and pretend that we don’t see how clearly it targets one group of people. Illegal immigration may be a serious issue in Arizona, and if it were, a program that finds a way to minimize the damage would certainly be necessary. However, one that simply gives police discretion to start locking up people based on the way they look is quite clearly racist, even if we don’t want to use those words to describe it.

The “Ground Zero Mosque”

Many of you will likely remember a year ago when a group intended to build an Islamic community centre in Manhattan, a few blocks away from the former site of the World Trade Center. People immediately began frothing at the mouth, calling it the “Ground Zero Mosque” and claiming that it was a plot by terrorists to insult America. Again, leaving aside for a moment that there was already a mosque there, that they weren’t building a mosque, that the construction would have modeled religious tolerance (something that that particular group of terrorists hates), and that Muslims died in the Sept 11th attacks too, the language used was couched in a kind of “this is about terrorists, not Muslims” language that the frothiest of opponents quickly turned to whenever the racist aspects arose.

I will happily concede the point that ‘Muslim’ isn’t a race. That still doesn’t help the argument. The faces of the fight, of the “secret terrorists” was not that of members of the Nation of Islam (with its militant history) or recently-converted white people (converts are among the most zealous); it was Arabs. When a group of protesters mistakenly confronted a construction worker and began screaming at him, it was based on the fact that he was dark-skinned (black, in fact, but he looked Muslim :P). The particularly galling aspect of this particular issue is that these same opponents would like us to give credence to the ‘wink-nudge’ of putting up an Islamic centre at Ground Zero – “c’mon, you know it’s a thinly-veiled insult to those that died”, but then completely reject the “c’mon, you know it’s racist” criticism from the other side.

Birthers

Remember that time that a majority of Americans elected someone with a long history of community service and patriotic dedication, and how his racial identity was the sign of a new, more mature America? Yeah, me either. What I remember is how every excuse was leveled at a black president (“He’s a secret Muslim!”, “He’s a Black Panther!”, “He’s a Kenyan communist sympathizer”) including the accusation that he was foreign-born. This of course despite the fact that he had released his birth certificate during the campaign, that being born in another country doesn’t necessarily preclude you from holding the office of President, and that the guy on the other side of the election actually was born in another country. No, it was pretty clear that the narrative was about Barack Obama being an “other”, and therefore being a bad choice for president.

The Birthers would have us believe that their chief concern is adherence to the Constitution, and certainly not anything that is motivated by racism. I will certainly accede that a lot of their motivation has to do with hating Democrats and liberals rather than simply blind racial hatred. However, their actions and staunch refusal to accept the evidence (even when presented over and over again), coupled with their close ties to the Tea Party, who is making these accusations (how many black, hispanic, or Asian birthers do you think there are?), and the nature of the rhetoric buzzing around Obama that wasn’t there for Clinton, one can’t help but see that race enmity is very much a part of the Birther ideology.

You’ll undoubtedly have noticed that all three of the examples I’ve provided are American. This isn’t in any way to suggest that we here in Canada don’t do the exact same thing, particularly when it comes to talking about First Nations people and their ‘government handouts’. That being said, Canadians are much more stealthy in our use of coded racism, being far more shy about it than our neighbours to the south. These are three dramatic and notorious examples of this process at work.

As I said earlier in this post, it is only by having the courage and integrity to confront our own ideas and motivations that we can identify and eliminate this kind of verbal cloaking. Being able to identify racism and being unafraid to call it out is the first (and second, I guess) step to ameliorating the problem. Failure to do that will only serve to keep us looking the other way, to the detriment of racial minority groups in perpetuity.

TL/DR: As racism has become more unpopular (but no less rare), we have developed a new lexicon to express racist ideas without appearing overtly racist.

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Movie Friday: A Girl Like Me – unpacking societal racism

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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