Behold, Matt Walsh, nakedly Nazi

You knew this had to be coming. Matt Walsh, the know-nothing pundit who got mad attention for asking “what is a woman?” and insisting on a fundamental distinction between the sexes, all to justify his hatred of trans people, is airing a different idea now: white supremacy, white extinction theory, the whole kit-and-caboodle of racist Nazi dog whistles. He’s promoting Great Replacement Theory now.

There are really two parts of this story. The first is the story itself, which is the demographic trend where whites are trending towards extinction in the United States. Like, that’s the way it’s headed. And then the other part of the story is the veil of silence around this issue, the wall that is erected around it. And I know you’re gonna say, well, you just read a story about it. So it’s not a silence. They can report on it. So you report and you celebrate diversity, and then you just move on. We don’t talk about it. We don’t think much about it, and that’s it. You aren’t allowed to talk much about it. You certainly – you certainly can’t be concerned about it. You’re not allowed to express any concern. That’s unthinkable. To hear that whites are on their way to minority status and the white population is declining, the worst that you could possibly do is – to talk about it at all is already a problem, but to suggest that there’s any reason at all to be concerned about that, or to be anything less than thrilled by that development is incredibly racist, we’re told.

Notice how the first two thirds of that paragraph are to set up the idea that he’s being persecuted, that no one is allowed to say these stupid words, and how society is policing your thoughts. That’s essential to his strategy, that you consider that his claim is so obvious and strong that people need to censor it even before he makes it. He’s not even going to consider that his great idea is so stupid and indefensible that intelligent people are already tired of hearing it.

People who identify as white are declining in proportion to those who identify with other ethnicities. That’s it. That’s all that is happening. There is no extinction. No one is being “replaced.” It’s how biology works — our species reproduces by mingling DNA between pairs of individuals, so everyone is a hybrid of their parents. It’s also a product of arbitrary cultural biases: if a white person has a child with a non-white person, there is no more loss of identity than if they had a child with a white person, but because of bigoted attitudes, the child is considered non-white. So of course, by definition, the frequency of “pure” white children declines with every generation, even if there is no decline in the frequency of genes contributed by white people. It’s an invented problem with no basis in reality.

Walsh continues, still feeling the need to prefix his comments with the idea that he’s a brave truth-teller that people want to silence.

We know that it’s — like, it doesn’t even need to be said, but I’ll say it anyway because we all know that’s true. But we know that the continued existence of any other race of people is considered deeply important. And the preservation of the historical and traditional racial identity of any nation is considered deeply important. You know? So, for example, if there was an influx of white immigration to a historically Black country, and that was resulting in a giant demographic shift wherein it was becoming a predominantly white country rather than predominantly Black, this would be considered a major, major problem. And there’s no doubt about it. And yet, in the reverse, it is either neutral or cause for celebration. But really it should be a cause for celebration.

Uh, yes — the continued existence of people is important. I’d also add that preserving unique cultures is also valuable. That is not something to worry about here, because the American historical and traditional identity is not at risk, nor are any white individuals. The culture is thriving and expanding as more people contribute to it, which is what you expect of a healthy evolving population.

He seems to have confused what is happening in the US to colonialism, where an external culture invades, takes over, and works to eradicate the native population … you know, like white Europeans did to the native populations of the Americas. That’s what’s really at the root of his problem, though. He thinks that they will do to us what we did to them. Except that’s not applicable: there is no alien “they”. “They” is us. Immigrants are joining us, not conquering us. The white population is diminishing in relative frequency, not because “they” are murdering us, but because we’re happily having consensual sex with each other.

As usual, he then goes off with half-assed distortions of biology.

And you know what? This pertains even to the the animal kingdom. I mean — think if there’s a particular type of, I don’t know, hummingbird that’s going extinct. Even for that, we’re supposed to panic. And if I were to say, hey, whatever. I mean, what does it matter? We — so we don’t have that of hummingbird. We got plenty of other hummingbirds. What does it matter what type of hummingbird it is? What difference does it make? So, yeah, this type of hummingbird is — there’s more of that then there’s less of this. Like, who cares? If I say that, I’m callous because, no, it’s very important that we have all varieties of hummingbirds. Every variety is very, very important. We have to keep them all around. Every part, every animal in the animal kingdom, we gotta keep them all around. It’s extremely important. If any particular variety starts to dwindle, if any particular type of species of animal gets driven out of its territory, it’s a very bad thing. So, it’s interesting that we can see this with hummingbirds, but not with certain kinds of people — well, in particular, one kind of person, which would be white person. The preservation of the hummingbird community is more important than the preservation of the white race.

No. Just no. Race and species are not synonyms. The analogy falls apart from its onset, and is in fact an extremely common trope among racists. I won’t take it apart word by word because that job has already been done: read Human races are not like dog breeds: refuting a racist analogy by HL Norton et al. Here’s the abstract.

In 1956, evolutionary biologist J.B.S. Haldane posed a question to anthropologists: “Are the biological differences between human groups comparable with those between groups of domestic animals such as greyhounds and bulldogs…?” It reads as if it were posted on social media today. The analogy comparing human races to dog breeds is not only widespread in history and pop culture, but also sounds like scientific justification for eschewing the social construction of race, or for holding racist beliefs about human nature. Here we answer Haldane’s question in an effort to improve the public understanding of human biological variation and “race”—two phenomena that are not synonymous. Speaking to everyone without expert levels of familiarity with this material, we investigate whether the dog breed analogy for human race stands up to biology. It does not. Groups of humans that are culturally labeled as “races” differ in population structure, genotype–phenotype relationships, and phenotypic diversity from breeds of dogs in unsurprising ways, given how artificial selection has shaped the evolution of dogs, not humans. Our demonstration complements the vast body of existing knowledge about how human “races” differ in fundamental sociocultural, historical, and political ways from categories of nonhuman animals. By the end of this paper, readers will understand how the assumption that human races are the same as dog breeds is a racist strategy for justifying social, political, and economic inequality.

Just the fact that Walsh brings this argument up is an indictment, biologists can tell you that it is rank bullshit. It’s old-fashioned garbage that I’d expect of Nazis or the KKK, but Walsh takes it for granted.

Once again, have you noticed how you don’t have to probe a transphobe very deeply before you uncover a Nazi?

Another racist outed, time to follow the threads to his promoters

I hadn’t heard of this guy, Richard Hanania, until recently — but I sure was familiar with his old pseudonym, Richard Hoste. He was one of the more hateful, obnoxious, stupid racists who was busy stuffing the internet with lies a decade ago. Now I learn, in one of the most thorough, devastating journalistic takedowns I’ve ever read that Hoste and Hanania were one and the same, and that he’s broken into the mainstream with the complicity of conservative billionaires.

A prominent conservative writer, lionized by Silicon Valley billionaires and a U.S. senator, used a pen name for years to write for white supremacist publications and was a formative voice during the rise of the racist “alt-right,” according to a new HuffPost investigation.

Richard Hanania, a visiting scholar at the University of Texas, used the pen name “Richard Hoste” in the early 2010s to write articles where he identified himself as a “race realist.” He expressed support for eugenics and the forced sterilization of “low IQ” people, who he argued were most often Black. He opposed “miscegenation” and “race-mixing.” And once, while arguing that Black people cannot govern themselves, he cited the neo-Nazi author of “The Turner Diaries,” the infamous novel that celebrates a future race war.

A decade later, writing under his real name, Hanania has ensconced himself in the national mainstream media, writing op-eds in the country’s biggest papers, bending the ears of some of the world’s wealthiest men and lecturing at prestigious universities, all while keeping his past white supremacist writings under wraps.

I remember Hoste, because I’ve long kept half an eye on nasty little websites like Taki’s Magazine, The Unz Review, VDARE, the Occidental Observer, and anything linked to the Pioneer Fund. These are the places some of the most openly racist people, like Richard Spencer or Steve Sailer, let it all hang out nakedly. I’ve always marveled at how they can write such vile, repugnant articles in their safe little hugboxes full of racists, and then walk out in public without shame, even to friendly appreciation from notable academics. It’s one of the tells I recognize for closet racists — people who praise Sailer, for instance, are the kind of slimeballs who read VDARE approvingly, even if they’d never dare to write such things themselves.

Now I’m going to have to add “following Richard Hanania” as another marker for the shy racists.

You’re on notice, guys. Scuttle for the kitchen cabinets as fast as you can, the light has been turned on.

Anyway, a major data leak from Disqus has exposed Hanania’s history, and it’s interesting to see how a low-life troll mainstreamed himself and started grabbing attention and money from more respectable venues. First, he dropped the pseudonym and was writing under his real name, Hanania. Then he started writing somewhat less inflammatory, but still crackling with racism, op-eds and articles that he’d submit to big-name sites, where he’d get picked up by sympathetic editors (they’re everywhere). It also helps to cozy up to rich white people, many of whom already share his views.

The 37-year-old has been published by The New York Times and The Washington Post. He delivered a lecture to the Yale Federalist Society and was interviewed by the Harvard College Economics Review. He appeared twice on “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” Fox News’ former prime-time juggernaut. He was a recent guest on a podcast hosted by the CEO of Substack, the $650 million publishing platform where Hanania has nearly 20,000 subscribers.

Hanania has his own podcast, too, interviewing the likes of Steven Pinker, the famous Harvard cognitive psychologist, and Marc Andreessen, the billionaire software engineer. Another billionaire, Elon Musk, reads Hanania’s articles and replies approvingly to his tweets. A third billionaire, Peter Thiel, provided a blurb to promote Hanania’s book, “The Origins of Woke,” which HarperCollins plans to publish this September. In October, Hanania is scheduled to deliver a lecture at Stanford.

Meanwhile, rich benefactors, some of whose identities are unknown, have funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars into a think tank run by Hanania. The think tank doles out cash to conservative academics, and produces political studies that are cited across right-wing media.

Yes, he has a “think tank,” a term that is long past its past-due date. Hanania’s is called the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology. It’s run out of his house, and mainly seems to be a drop-box for donations that pay his substantial salary. The function of CSPI is…

In addition to being a laundering service for handing out money to reactionary academics, it is a paper mill for “studies” that back up reactionary talking points, to be spun into articles and opinion pieces with headlines such as “Social trends causing rapid growth in people identifying as LGBT, report says” (from the ideological astroturfing Sinclair Broadcast Group), “The Lockdowns Weren’t Worth It” (WSJ) and “The new class war is over identity” (Washington Examiner) — the latter being an anti-LGBTQ screed that ended, “My name is Dominic. I’m a trans woman, and my pronouns are me, me, me.”

It’s a profitable gig, collecting donations from insufferable rich Republicans and shuffling it into bad publications that pollute the body politic, but there’s no “thinking” involved in a think-tank. But it paid off for Hanania! He could use that illusion of serious scholarship to work his way up the grifter’s ladder.

Hanania was making a name for himself. By 2022, he was selected as a visiting scholar at the Salem Center at the University of Texas at Austin. The center — funded through right-wing donors including billionaire Harlan Crow — is led by executive director Carlos Carvalho. “I have no comment,” Carvalho told HuffPost when asked about Hanania.

Hanania was also tapped to be a lecturer for the “Forbidden Courses” program at the University of Austin, the unaccredited school funded by venture capitalists and founded by former New York Times columnist Bari Weiss, now a prominent right-wing influencer herself. The university did not respond to a request for comment about Hanania.

Earlier this year, Hanania spoke to the Yale Federalist Society, the school’s chapter of the conservative legal organization, about what the government has done to “discriminate against whites and men.” The chapter did not respond when asked for comment.

And this October, Hanania is scheduled to teach a seminar at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business. The school did not respond to HuffPost’s request for comment.

He may be dropping a few rungs off that ladder, though. Bari Weiss has said she didn’t know him and wouldn’t have hired him if she had. Oops.

The University of Austin, founded by a group including Bari Weiss in reaction to progressive campus culture and promising freer speech, has drawn a line at the right-wing writer Richard Hanania, after HuffPost revealed that he’d written in favor of eugenics and racism under a pseudonym.

“Richard Hanania has no affiliation with UATX. He was invited once as a speaker. Like many other institutions, we were completely unaware of his pseudonymous, racist writings. Had we known, we would not have invited him,” a spokesman, Hillel Ofek, told Semafor in an email.

His invitations to speak at the Federalist Society probably still stand — they eat up the racist white nationalist stuff there. He’s probably going to face some opposition at Stanford, I hope, but you never know. Apologists for hate seem to have infiltrated many higher levels of society. You don’t have to worry about Hanania’s prospects, he was already gearing up to jump to a new grift.

Hanania mentioned all of these men [Andreesen, Sacks, Ramaswamy, Thiel] in a June Substack post while describing what he celebrated as the “Tech Right,” a new Silicon Valley-based conservative movement that, among other beliefs, embraces transhumanism and “longtermism.”

The cult of “longtermism” has swept through Silicon Valley in recent years, with Musk and Thiel among its most well-known acolytes. It’s a worldview that often prioritizes the health of future generations of humans — even ones millions of years hence — over people currently living in the here and now, suffering and getting by on planet Earth. (Musk’s goal to colonize Mars, for example, is a longtermist project.)

Its adherents are often obsessed with IQ scores and scientific racism, and the famous computer scientist Timnit Gebru has criticized longtermism as “eugenics under a different name.”

The scholar Émile Torres has also noted that longtermism’s “transhumanist vision of creating a superior new race of ‘posthumans’ is eugenics on steroids,” a recapitulation of 20th-century beliefs that ushered in “a wide range of illiberal policies, including restrictions on immigration, anti-miscegenation laws and forced sterilizations.”

It’s maybe unsurprising, then, that Hanania has emerged as a scribe for this new “Tech Right.” After all, he had years of practice writing about eugenics as Richard Hoste, advocating for precisely those types of policies.

“The maintenance of the quality of the population requires not just a stable population at all levels but the active weeding out of the unfit,” Hoste wrote in 2011 for Counter-Currents, the white supremacist site.

“There is no rational reason,” he wrote, “why eugenics can’t capture the hearts and minds of policy makers the way it did 100 years ago.”

New grift, same as the old grift.

The rational reason to reject eugenics is, of course, that we know where it led when it captured “the hearts and minds of policy makers” over a century ago: to suffering and death and a world where an asshole like Hanania can thrive.

P.S. I neglected to mention that another important rung on the racist grift ladder is publishing in Quillette. You will not be surprised to learn that Claire Lehman, the creepy mastermind behind Quillette, still supports Hanania.

How to make the medical establishment very angry

Just publish the truth about their history.

During the mid-nineteenth century, medical schools embraced a white supremacist belief in black inferiority and subhumanness. Racism was a social sport upper-class men played to solidify a professional identity rooted in whiteness (figure 1). These heinous ‘educational’ activities included torturing enslaved black people with ‘experiments’, graverobbing their bodies from cemeteries and attempting to detect whether they were faking illness while torturing them as ‘treatment’ (Willoughby 2016). This white supremacy persisted long after legalised slavery ended. The 1910 Flexner Report closed five of the seven black medical schools, preventing 35 000 black physicians from graduating in subsequent decades, amidst deadly black–white health inequities (Campbell et al. 2020). The American Medical Association (AMA) sanctioned this disregard for humanity, banning black physicians from local AMA chapters through the 1960s, thereby denying licensing, board certification and hospital privileges (Baker et al. 2008). This anti-black racism was nothing new. During the early twentieth century, organised medicine cultivated a symbiotic relationship with the Ku Klux Klan, promoting its white supremacist conceptions of race, gender, and sexuality and their related violence (Antonovich 2021). White psychiatrists diagnosed black men protesting during the Civil Rights movement with a dangerous ‘protest psychosis’. Pathologising black people’s resistance to oppression while normalising white people’s violently oppressive behaviour is a long historical arc. It is reflected in diagnoses like drapetomania from the mid-nineteenth century and the overdiagnosis of conduct disorder in racially minoritised children today (Metzl 2010).

That photo is genuinely horrible and shameful. The account is true, every word, and damning. Yet the article that was from triggered outrage from medical institutions. It shouldn’t. I like this comment from Dr Brandy Schillace, about how they should respond:

That’s how we build. That’s how we have real conversation and community. There is amazing relief, Grace, growth, in admitting we are wrong AND acknowledging that the wrong has deeply hurt others. Then both apology and amendment will be genuine, and accepted as such.

The George Floyd murder only exposed a deeper rot in Minnesota

The Minneapolis Police Department has received some, shall we say, rather negative press for a series of ugly incidents — not just the George Floyd murder, but also other outrages. So the United States Department of Justice carried out an investigation. The results have been released in a 92 page document. It’s not pretty. Here is the summary of the major conclusions.

FINDINGS
The Department of Justice has reasonable cause to believe that the City of Minneapolis and the Minneapolis Police Department engage in a pattern or practice of conduct that deprives people of their rights under the Constitution and federal law:

MPD uses excessive force, including unjustified deadly force and other types of force.

MPD unlawfully discriminates against Black and Native American people in its enforcement activities.

MPD violates the rights of people engaged in protected speech.

MPD and the City discriminate against people with behavioral health disabilities when responding to calls for assistance.

We like to think that Minnesota is a pretty good place to live — good schools, progressive politics, relatively good cost of living, etc., etc., etc. — but that only applies if you’re white. The report also documents some of our deeper problems.

Not everyone in Minneapolis shares in its prosperity. The metropolitan area that includes Minneapolis and neighboring St. Paul—known as the Twin Cities—has some of the nation’s starkest racial disparities on economic measures, including income, homeownership, poverty, unemployment, and educational attainment. By nearly all of these measures, the typical white family in the Twin Cities is doing better than the national average for white families, and the typical Black family in the Twin Cities is doing worse than the national average or Black families. The median Black family in the Twin Cities earns just 44% as much as the median white family, and the poverty rate among Black households is nearly five times higher than the rate among white households. Of the United States’ 100 largest metropolitan areas, only one has a larger gap between Black and white earnings.

In case you’re wondering how we ended up this way…

Some researchers have traced Minneapolis’ homeownership gap and other economic disparities back to the restrictive racial covenants that barred non-white people from living in many parts of Minneapolis in the first half of the 20th century. Beginning in 1910, local and federal public officials and mortgage lenders embraced racial covenants, and lenders engaged in redlining by routinely denying loans for properties in majority Black or mixed-race neighborhoods. The racially restrictive covenants, which the Supreme Court sanctioned in 1926 but later ruled unenforceable in 1948, funneled the City’s growing Black population into a few small areas and laid the groundwork for enduring patterns of residential segregation.

It’s as if there is an effect of history that is harming current generations, and a deep institutional racism routinely propped up by the courts.

Rerouting around the damage

Our conservative Supreme Court has decided that affirmative action in university admissions must end. By that, they mean that we need to make it easier for white students to get a college education than black students. It’s a white supremacist sort of decision, although white supremacists do love to couch their position as only fair.

Elite universities have contended that without considering race as one factor in admissions, their student bodies will contain more Whites and Asian Americans, and fewer Blacks and Hispanics.

But, “the student must be treated based on his or her experiences as an individual — not on the basis of race,” Roberts wrote, joined by Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel A. Alito Jr., Neil M. Gorsuch, Brett M. Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett. “Many universities have for too long done just the opposite. And in doing so, they have concluded, wrongly, that the touchstone of an individual’s identity is not challenges bested, skills built, or lessons learned but the color of their skin. Our constitutional history does not tolerate that choice.”

Our constitutional history is built on a document written by wealthy slaveholders, in a country that has long discriminated against people based on the color of their skin. Those Supreme Court wankers may not understand that history, but universities are full of people who do, and are going to be working hard to defy the court and continue to promote diversity. So, for instance…

Elizabeth H. Bradley, president of Vassar College in New York, said she thinks colleges like hers will figure out how to maintain an inclusive environment. “It’s just so core to who we are,” Bradley said. “We will find a legal way in which that can be accomplished.”

Everyone at my university was sent this memo yesterday from our vice president and provost saying the same thing.

Dear University of Minnesota students, faculty, and staff,

As you may know, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled today on two cases regarding college admissions. The decisions limit the ability of colleges and universities that receive federal funding to consider an applicant’s race or ethnicity in decision-making for admission.

We remain steadfast in our commitments to our educational mission of inclusion and access, to remove barriers to higher education for underrepresented populations, and to ensure that all members of our community have equitable access to the University and its resources.

A working group led by the Provost’s Office, in close consultation with the Office of the General Counsel (OGC), has been preparing for this decision for many months. That group will ensure that our processes in undergraduate, graduate, and professional education are compliant with the new state of the law, and that we continue to live out our values of inclusion and access.

We will continue our recruiting efforts that have yielded increased diversity in our entering classes. We remain committed to diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice on all our campuses.

I’m afraid the Supreme Court will have to hand down an injunction blatantly stating that we can’t admit black students before it will stop the march of diversity. Remember, white people will be a minority in this country in a few years.

Meanwhile, another tool to maintain white majorities is allowed to continue: legacies. 43% of white students at Harvard are legacies, to name an example. What legacies are are admissions based on family connections — your dad was a Harvard grad? Well then, we’ll just ignore those Cs and Ds on your transcript and your low SAT scores, and whisk you right into our school.

I don’t see much of it here in the Midwest, but it was infuriatingly common in East coast schools. It was egregious at the Temple medical school. One year I had two students working in my lab at Temple, and both were applying to the med school. One was a rather lackadaisical student who was full of confidence that they would get in — they didn’t have to worry about grades (and it showed) because they had a grandparent and two parents who were Temple med grads, and they were white. The other was a passionate, hard-working young person with near perfect grades who wanted to get a degree and open a clinic in their black, North Philadelphia neighborhood.

Guess which one waltzed into med school, and which one was repeatedly denied? It drove me crazy. I was writing these glowing recommendation letters, but they didn’t help at all. The students were all fully aware of how the deck was stacked, too. The white students counted on it, the black students had to work twice as hard to overcome it.

And that’s what this court decision is all about: protecting and promoting the advantages of inherited wealth and privilege. Now we’re going to all have to work twice as hard to defy the oligarchs.

DEI working exactly as intended

Conservatives like to dismiss Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion statements as empty posturing and virtue signaling, as the politicization of science, as discrimination against conservative points of view. I would counter that by saying that they work.

Case in point: UCLA didn’t hire a professor, Yoel Inbar, in part because grad students pointed out that he didn’t support DEI. This annoyed Matt Yglesias, who wrote:

Guy says DEI statements as a hiring tool is just way to screen candidates for “an allegiance to a certain set of beliefs.”

Grad students pen letter saying that shows he shouldn’t be hired since he doesn’t pledge allegiance to the right beliefs.

That “certain set of beliefs” is the idea that we should respect all of our students, and give every one an equal opportunity to succeed. (I don’t know what happened to Yglesias’s brain, I think he has a terminal case of centrism.)

Inbar’s case was well-researched by the students, and they responded with a lengthy letter documenting his inadequacies. Inbar has a podcast with 101 episodes in which “he discusses various topics relating to current events in academia, including but not limited to: diversity statements, anti-racism in psychological organizations, sexism and racism on college campuses, freedom of speech, polarization, and conservatism in psychology.” Isn’t that nice? He provided a wealth of data, the data was evaluated, and his proposal was rejected. Evidence-based scientific reasoning! Exactly what we want!

Most concerning to us as students is Dr. Inbar’s opposition to institutions endorsing positions on sociopolitical issues he has deemed “contentious” or “controversial.” In particular, he takes a strong stance against promoting DEI initiatives through the use of diversity statements and DEI criterion to evaluate research. He also takes a firm position against the use of diversity statements as a tool in the hiring process, and specifically criticizes their use in the University of California system’s faculty application process. In episode 15, he remarks that his “skepticism about these [diversity statements] is they sort of seem like administrator value signaling. It is not clear what good they do, how they’re going to be used…” He continues, “to lots of people on the left, diversity is such an obviously positive thing,” and says that the left fails to acknowledge that these statements “[signal] an allegiance to a certain set of beliefs.” Rather than recognizing the value of DEI initiatives to improve representation and inclusion of marginalized scholars, he casts valuing diversity, equity, and inclusion as uniquely “liberal” values reflective of ideological bias. These comments frame diversity statements as a threat to ideological diversity, and reflect a lack of prioritization of the needs and experiences of historically marginalized individuals across the lines of race, class, gender, sexuality, and ability. In contrast, our institution’s position on this issue is unequivocal: page one of the UCLA Office of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion FAQ proclaims “Equity, diversity, and inclusion are integral to how the University of California conceives of “merit.”

So here’s this guy who opposes a key value promoted by the university, the need “to improve representation and inclusion of marginalized scholars,” and he didn’t get hired. Are we supposed to hire people who oppose representation and inclusion?

Inbar did not do well in his on-campus interview, either.

Our concerns were deepened after the graduate student meeting with Dr. Inbar on Monday, January 23rd. During this meeting—which traditionally takes the shape of graduate students asking questions and interviewing faculty candidates—he initially prioritized asking us questions about the Psychology Department and life as graduate students, which would presumably inform his decision on whether to accept a job offer from our program. We interjected to reframe the discussion and ask pointed questions about his past and prospective efforts in advocating for diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts both in mentorship and in his line of research. To most of us in the room, his answers to these questions were less than satisfactory, and some responses were outright disconcerting. For example, he responded by indicating that his “work does not really deal with identity, so these issues don’t come up for [him] in a research context.”

As Dr. Inbar studies issues of morality, social attitudes, and political ideology, including how moral psychology shapes prejudice (e.g., Inbar et al., 2009; Inbar et al., 2012), it was deeply troubling to hear that he does not believe identity (i.e., individual background as it pertains to race, gender, sexuality, class, or ability) has bearing on these research questions. It is our perspective that considerations of identity cannot accurately be disentangled from the study of prejudice and moral behavior, and that disseminating these findings requires a high level of sensitivity to how results might be misrepresented or misunderstood given real-world sociopolitical conditions.

Wow. He studies “morality, social attitudes, and political ideology,” but he doesn’t think identity is relevant to his work. OK, man, you don’t get the job, and further, that calls into the question the value of all your published work.

This is exactly what job applications and interviews are supposed to do, screen applicants to determine whether they are good candidates for a position. We also want students to contribute to the decision — every time we have a job candidate on my campus, I announce it in my classes and tell them that we truly, honestly want their input. If they don’t think the person is someone they’d want teaching them, say so! We don’t usually expect a detailed four-page analysis that required research into the papers and podcasts of the candidate, but that is an impressive effort.

Of course, now the media are irate that Students Pressured University Not To Hire Professor Who Questioned ‘Diversity’ Statements. Pressured? No. The students did as requested and as they were supposed to do and evaluated the quality of a candidate and made a recommendation. That’s going to be the message everywhere, though, and they seem to be unaware of the fact that they are effectively poisoning his job search. If he were desperate enough to apply to UMM, for instance, his notoriety means he wouldn’t get past the initial screening of applications. Like we’d want to hire someone at our minority-serving institution who thinks diversity is a waste of time.

On the other hand, he’ll be greeted with open arms at the University of Austin.

Good riddance to non-compete clauses

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