How have I not heard of Elaine, Arkansas before?

It was yesterday, just yesterday, I read about the events that occurred there over 100 years ago. I attended respectable public schools, I went to two well-funded undergraduate universities, and I took courses in American history. I come from a blue-collar family with a deep devotion to unions and labor, I grew up in the Pacific Northwest, land of the Wobblies, and was informally schooled in union history. I’ve long known who Joe Hill was. But Elaine, Arkansas? What was that about?

Well, as I learned only on 15 November 2021, just by chance, that in 1919 a group of black farmers, sharecroppers, met in a church to organize, form a union, and get better prices for their crops and hard work. Since this was intolerable to the wealthy white landowners who got rich off their labor, and since it was easy to inflame the poor whites in the region against their black neighbors, what followed was four days of slaughter.

When white leaders heard, they reacted with violence. Newspapers reported that white mobs, over four days, chased Black men, women and children, slaughtering them in Elaine and across the green farms and swamps of Phillips County.

All the Black farmers wanted were fair prices, but “that’s like the revolution has occurred because that threatens to shift the entire power structure of the South in the favor of Black farmers,” said Dr. Paul Ortiz, a history professor and director of the University of Florida’s Samuel Proctor Oral History Program.

Historians say the massacre claimed five white lives and more than 200 Black lives, though the true number of Black deaths is unknown and some estimates put it much higher.

What? Furthermore, this was one incident in many which occurred over Red Summer, which I’d also never heard about. There were riots all across the Midwest and South, from Chicago, IL down to Port Arthur, TX. White people were rampaging. And I knew nothing about it.

Yesterday was humbling. I had no idea how ignorant I was. Sure, I’d heard of the Tulsa Massacre in 1921, but did not realize it was part of a vast evil wave of vicious, blatant racism.

But how? How could such horrific events by quietly buried?

White newspapers filled their front pages with sensational headlines about a Black uprising, ignoring the economic inequality at the core of the conflict.

As the U.S. has reckoned with its racist past, the 1919 Elaine Massacre — one of the deadliest acts of violence against Black people in American history — has drawn new attention, especially in the years surrounding its 100th anniversary. That year, hundreds of Black people were killed in at least 25 cities across the country, a violent siege today called “Red Summer.”

The cover-up orchestrated by Elaine’s wealthy white landowners and the government, aided by the white-centric reporting of white-owned newspapers, led to a scarcity of information about the massacre.

…

Headlines such as “VICIOUS BLACKS WERE PLANNING GREAT UPRISING” and “NEGROES HAVE BEEN AROUSED BY PROPAGANDA” were atop the front pages of the Arkansas Gazette on Oct. 3, 1919, and Oct. 4, 1919, respectively.

“NEGROES HAD PLOT TO RISE AGAINST WHITES, CHARGED,” read the front page of the Arkansas Democrat on the third day of the massacre.

Surely, the impartial American justice system would levy righteous retribution on the mob? Nope.

Despite the work of the Black press, white newspapers continued to perpetuate their false story. After hundreds of Black people were massacred, no white people were tried in their deaths.

Black people were rounded up, jailed in Helena and tortured until they confessed a role in the deaths of the five white people — part of a legal cover-up concocted by a committee of wealthy white farmers and businessmen appointed by the governor.

In the end, estimates range between 65-75 Black men were sentenced to long-term prison sentences and 12 were sentenced to death. A years-long legal battle fought by the NAACP resulted in two cases, one of which went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court (Moore v. Dempsey) while the other went to the Arkansas Supreme Court. The high courts agreed that the men’s due-process rights had been violated, and none of the 12 were executed.

Now I think of all the black people murdered in recent history, and it’s clear — this is the arc of our history. George Floyd could be murdered by an armed white thug on the most trivial of pretexts, and the press tells us that Floyd was “no angel”. Trayvon Martin can walk out to buy Skittles and come home to be shot to death by a vigilante…and we hear that he was “no angel”, either, and his murderer is acquitted. It’s all the same story, told over and over again, and echoed and reinforced by our incompetent, unprincipled media.

And so it goes.

Today, of course, the Republican party is animated by a fanatical desire to paper over our shame, to keep our kids ignorant of the systematic injustices perpetrated in this country by whiteness and white people for centuries. I also am the beneficiary of the historical crimes that bled black and brown people to give me some relative prosperity, but I have no desire to close my eyes to it — I want to know. It’s the only way we can end this cycle of oppression. All these complaints about CRT are nothing but attempts to blind us to the truth, and keep the hate going.

God damn it, I’m 64 years old and the media has succeeded in keeping me in the dark almost my entire life.

Ta-Nehisi Coates always provides a good start to the day

Even if it is a little depressing. Here he comments on a book by Tony Judt.

I had never read so merciless a book. Tony had no use for pieties—no tolerance for invocations of a “Good War” or the “Greatest Generation.” Power reigns in Postwar, often in brutal ways. Tony writes of Jewish survivors of the Holocaust returning to Poland only to be asked, “Why have you come back?” He introduced me to intellectuals, such as François Furet, forced to reckon not just with Stalin’s crimes but with a discrediting of a “Grand Narrative” of history itself. “All the lives lost, and resources wasted in transforming societies under state direction,” Tony writes of this reckoning, were “just what their critics had always said they were: loss, waste, failure and crime.” Early in Postwar, Tony quotes the observations of a journalist covering the ethnic cleansings that characterized postwar Europe. The journalist self-satisfyingly claims that history will “exact a terrible retribution.” But, Tony tells us, history “exacted no such retribution.” No righteous, God-ordained price was to be paid for this crime against humanity. The arc of history did not magically bend. It was bent, even broken, by those with power.

That resonates with me, too. There is no trajectory of history in evolution, either, just a story we tell ourselves after the fact. There’s nothing but chance and a directionless, generation-by-generation stumbling, with no goal but survival, and afterwards the survivors pat themselves on the back and pretend it was destiny that they made it.

It’s also why I have no sympathy for Pinkerisms. It’s all retrospective coronations all the way down, self-defeating reassurances from the so-far successful that the status quo will carry us forward into a glorious future. It never works that way. Every advancement is the product of a battle by those who say “Not good enough!” and who strive to do better.

And sometimes the better don’t make it anyway.

Another example of our neutered “justice” system

Jennifer Gosar, sister to the demented fascist Paul Gosar, condemns his behavior and asks how we can sit back and watch him promote racism and genocide.

Good questions. And yet he was elected. The rot goes deep.

Some heroes sit at a keyboard

Did you know that social media has a Nazi problem? Of course it does. But often it is subtle and requires expert scrutiny.

When Ksenia Coffman started editing Wikipedia, she was like a tourist in Buenos Aires in the 1950s. She came to learn the tango, admire the architecture, sip maté. She didn’t know there was a Nazi problem. But Coffman, who was born in Soviet-era Russia and lives in Silicon Valley, is an intensely observant traveler. As she link-hopped through articles about the Second World War, one of her favorite subjects, she saw what seemed like a concerted effort to look the other way about Germany’s wartime atrocities.

Coffman can’t recall exactly when her concern set in. Maybe it was when she read the article about the SS, the Nazi Party’s paramilitary, which included images that felt to her like glamour shots—action-man officers admiring maps, going on parade, all sorts of “very visually disturbing” stuff. Or maybe it was when she clicked through some of the pages about German tank gunners, flying aces, and medal winners. There were hundreds of them, and the men’s impressive kill counts and youthful derring-do always seemed to exist outside the genocidal Nazi cause. What was going on here? Wikipedia was supposed to be all about consensus. Wasn’t there consensus on, you know, Hitler?

So she sat down and got to work, and started pointing out the lack of skepticism in so many Wiki articles.

Not for the first time, Coffman has been removing material from the article about the tank division. She thinks it’s full of unsourced fancruft, the Wikipedia word for fawning, excessively detailed descriptions that appeal to a tiny niche of readers—in this case, those thrilled by accounts of battle. The article tells how “the division acquitted itself well” even against “stiffening resistance,” how it “held the line” and earned the “grudging respect” of skeptical commanders. One contributor has used the eyebrow-raising phrase “baptism of fire.” It’s as if the editors don’t see the part lower down the page where a soldier uses the phrase “and then we cleaned a Jew hole.”

The glorifying language, Coffman thinks, is a clear sign that this is historical fan fiction. It elides the horrors of war. If editors want such details to stay on the page, at a minimum they should use a better source than Axis History, a blog whose motto is “Information not shared is lost.”

Turn on the History Channel sometime: it’s the same thing. There’s a reason it’s called the Hitler channel, and it’s because it’s cheap and easy to grab WWII footage — often nothing but propaganda films which launder and present credulous versions of the story — and splice it into a story. Aren’t those Nazi uniforms stylish? Wow, those soldiers had to be brave and stalwart to stand up to a Russian winter. Gosh, so many tanks! Cool! Let’s not think about what those soldiers were trying to do.

You can also see it on YouTube and in video games and the newspapers, always focusing on drama and spectacle without questioning what the hell those assholes were hoping to accomplish. It just takes a little effort to peel away the gosh-wow veneer to expose the rot beneath, but someone has to make the effort.

Another example in real life, with modern Nazis: Richard Spencer is on trial, and is trying desperately to present himself as “the erudite founder of a thinktank who represented a version of white nationalism that took pains to avoid racial slurs and glorification of violence”. He’s not. The lawyers showed everyone what he says when he’s not putting on a show for the gullible.

The plaintiffs played audio for the jury of Spencer launching into a tirade in the presence of co-defendants Jason Kessler, Nathan Damigo and Elliott Kline after learning about Heyer’s death following the Aug. 12, 2017 rally. (The leaked audio was previously published by alt-right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos in 2019.)

“Little fucking k*kes,” Spencer said. “They get ruled by me. Little f*cking octoroons… I f*cking… my ancestors f*cking enslaved those pieces of f*cking sh*t. I rule the f*cking world. Those pieces of f*cking sh*t get ruled by people like me. They look up and see a face like mine looking down at them. That’s how the f*cking world works. We are going to destroy this f*cking town.”

So hooray for Ksenia Coffman. Hooray for Michael Bloch, the lawyer out to expose Spencer. We need more warriors like that.

When you put it that way, who wouldn’t want to be Pocahantas?

There have been multiple instances of white people posing as Indians — after all, you can suddenly acquire the illusion of authority and wisdom by calling yourself Grey Owl and claiming to have been taught the sacred ways by a native American elder. You don’t actually need to be wise, just attaching an animal to your name and sticking some feathers in your hair does all the work.

Oh boy, here comes another example: Carrie Bourassa has been an advocate for indigenous rights in Canada (that’s good), but the way she has done it is to appropriate indigenous identity. She wears a costume and claims to be a member of a growing list of native tribes, expanding from Métis at first, to now claiming Anishinaabe and Tlingit origins.

Caroline Tait, a Métis professor and medical anthropologist at the U of S, has worked with Bourassa for more than a decade.

She said early on in Bourassa’s career, she only identified as Métis. But more recently, Tait said, Bourassa began claiming to also be Anishinaabe and Tlingit. Tait said she also began dressing in more stereotypically Indigenous ways, saying the TEDx Talk was a perfect example.

“Everybody cheers and claps, and it’s beautiful,” said Tait. “It is the performance that we all want from Indigenous people — this performance of being the stoic, spiritual, culturally attached person [with] which we can identify because we’ve seen them in Disney movies.”

Right. It’s reducing identity to a performance. It’s all a sham, though — she isn’t the slightest bit Métis, Anishinaabe, or Tlingit. She’s of Eastern European descent.

Tait said Bourassa’s shifting ancestry claims made her and other colleagues suspicious. They also recently learned that Bourassa’s sister had stopped claiming to be Métis after she examined her genealogy. So Tait, Wheeler, Smylie and others decided to review that genealogy for themselves.

“We start to see that no, as a matter of fact, [Bourassa’s ancestors] are farmers,” Tait said. “These are people who are Eastern European people. They come to Canada, they settle.”

Tait said genealogical records show that Bourassa’s supposed Indigenous ancestors were of Russian, Polish and Czechoslovakian descent.

“There was nowhere in that family tree where there was any Indigenous person,” said Wheeler.

She also claims cultural affinity, being brought up in the ways of the native by her grandfather (who was the child of Czech-speaking farmers), and that she was raised in a poor neighborhood, subject to discrimination and oppression (her parents owned a Saskatchewan real estate development, and her father owned Ron’s Car Cleaning, the “No. 1 detail shop in the province”). That would be contrary to her indigenous stereotype, though!

Wheeler says she’s offended by the way that Bourassa has described her childhood, “feeding into stereotypes” of poverty, violence and substance abuse.

“Maybe she did have a dysfunctional childhood and it was full of pain. But to bring that into a discussion about her identity and under this flimsy umbrella of her Indigeneity, I think, was really manipulative, because it suggests that she is Indigenous, that she experienced Indigenous poverty.”

Wheeler said Bourassa’s claims of Indigeneity are offensive.

“It’s theft. It is colonialism in its worst form and it’s a gross form of white privilege.”

Be who you really are, it’s always better. I try to pretend I’m actually a raging Viking berserker, and no one is fooled — my ancestors were all unglamorous peasant farmers. Maybe if I called myself Paul the Bloody Handed and wore a horned helmet to class, and demanded that all student essays be written in futhark? Yeah, that would add authenticity.

How to commit violence using only your words

Remarkable. Judge Bruce Schroeder is doing a fine job demonstrating the power of systemic bias.

That trial is going to be a real shitshow, isn’t it?

You can’t say that

Those fervent conservative Free Speech Warriors have hit on a new strategy to protect our sacred right to say anything we want to anyone we want to: banning the bad words. Wisconsin Republicans have proposed sweeping censorship of words and concepts from the public schools there.

Curiously, they forgot to ban “irony”. Maybe they didn’t know the word exists.

Fortunately, the bill is just posturing by sanctimonious Republicans, and has virtually no chance of passing. If it did, I suppose I’d have to gallop across the border to rescue my granddaughter once she hit school age.

It’s such a strangely blatant defiance of the principles these people usually hide behind, but there’s a reason for it. We can’t make our white children conscious of racism.

The Wisconsin Assembly passed legislation on a party-line vote Tuesday that would bar public schools from teaching critical race theory, the latest Republican-controlled legislative chamber to take action on a culture war issue that erupted in school board meetings around the country this summer.

The measure mirrors efforts in other states to block teachers from instructing students on concepts of racial injustice or inherent bias.

But in testimony before a Wisconsin Assembly committee considering the bill in August, one of the measure’s lead authors went farther than in other states, spelling out specific words that would be barred from the classroom.

“It has come to our attention, and to some of the people who traveled here to Madison today, that a growing number of school districts are teaching material that attempts to redress the injustice of racism and sexism by employing racism and sexism, as well as promoting psychological distress in students based on these immutable characteristics,” state Rep. Chuck Wichgers (R) said of his bill. “No one should have to undergo the humiliation of being told that they are inferior to someone else. We are all members of the human race.”

Nothing in Critical Race Theory is about telling anyone they are inferior — quite the opposite. You can tell what really concerns him, though: the idea that white people might be told they’re inferior. When it was just discrimination against brown people, then it was OK to talk about their imaginary inferiority.

Wichgers, who represents Muskego in the legislature, attached an addendum to his legislation that included a list of “terms and concepts” that would violate the bill if it became law.

Among those words: “Woke,” “whiteness,” “White supremacy,” “structural bias,” “structural racism,” “systemic bias” and “systemic racism.” The bill would also bar “abolitionist teaching,” in a state that sent more than 91,000 soldiers to fight with the Union Army in the Civil War.

The list of barred words or concepts includes “equity,” “inclusivity education,” “multiculturalism” and “patriarchy,” as well as “social justice” and “cultural awareness.”

Whoops, there goes social studies and history.

I get Christopher Rufo spam

I’ll lead with the happy news: I survived another grueling Thursday coupled to my continuing Achilles tendon agony. But I did get through the whole day without puking (the pain is intense enough that when I have to hobble for any length of time, I get nauseous) and actually, the throbbing stabbing pain is starting to ease up, thanks to a heavy drug dose from my doctor yesterday. Hooray for not losing my stomach contents! Hooray for some easing of the pain!! Hooray for lots of good drugs!!! Gosh, I sure hope my lecture this morning was comprehensible.

But now I’m home, and I find spam from some crappy conservative liars, and my gorge begins to rise again.

Dear Friend,

You are not, and never will be, my friend.

Are you ready to become even more effective in the fight against radical curriculum in your schools?

Yes. Always have been. You know that the “radical curriculum” is the conservative/capitalist propaganda promoted by billionaires, right? I am so totally against that.

Since we started Breakthrough Ideas, this fight has been one of our main areas of focus.

No, I don’t think so. The founder of this organization is a failed Republican candidate for the US House from Illinois, whose campaign in 2020 was built around the idea of put[ting] in place the infrastructure to begin the pushback operation against the socialism that invaded the US House in 2018. She also ran, and failed, for governor of Illinois. I think her only idea is to build up Wingnuttia.

She seems to have founded this half-assed think-tank in 2020/2021, after she flopped everything else, in order to continue her grift. I have no idea who is funding it.

Now we are teaming up with nationally-renowned education and critical race theory expert Christopher Rufo to give you the information you need to influence your local school boards and push back on toxic ideologies.

Wait wait wait. nationally-renowned education and critical race theory expert? Hold your horses, lady. Rufo has zero qualifications in education. He doesn’t understand or is lying about CRT; he has none of the training or experience in law, philosophy, race relations, or history to have earned the title of “expert”. He’s a fraud through and through. Here’s his background from Wikipedia.

Rufo was previously a visiting fellow for domestic policy studies at the Heritage Foundation and a Lincoln Fellow at the Claremont Institute.[12][11] Later, he was a research fellow at the Discovery Institute, a Christian think tank known for its opposition to the theory of evolution and advocacy for intelligent design to be taught in public schools.[11][13][14] In 2017, Rufo was a plaintiff in a lawsuit to prevent Seattle from imposing a 2.25% income tax on sums above $250,000 a year for individuals and over $500,000 for couples.[15] In 2018, he unsuccessfully ran for the Seattle City Council.[16] Rufo voted for Donald Trump in the 2020 United States presidential election.[5]

Yeah, he’s just another right-wing grifter oozing out of the woodwork of a series of think-tanks. Not an expert in anything but profitable parasitism.

Oh, the best part: the bill.

Check out Christopher Rufo’s video invitation here!

You can listen to Rufo on Zoom for an hour for the low, low price of $25, which is a bit over-priced. Or you can listen to him in person if you’re willing to fork over $50 and travel to some random wedding venue in Illinois (there is a McDonald’s next door), and for a lousy $250 you can attend the VIP Q&A session for a half hour.

Jesus. Unqualified hack gets those kinds of ticket prices for just lying out of his ass. I’m such a failure, I should have made up more shit to get on the right-wing rubber chicken circuit and the no doubt substantial speaking fees. On the plus side, I won’t get publicly disemboweled for my ignorance on national TV.

“Help, help, I’m being silenced!” says professor in opinion piece in Newsweek and MIT guest lecture

Healthy young white person who is quite convinced that the world is conspiring against him

I am really disgusted with these privileged POS’s who complain about diversity. Here’s another one, Dorian Abbot of the University of Chicago.

Dorian S. Abbot, an associate professor of geophysics at the University of Chicago, is speaking out against the cancellation of a lecture he was scheduled to give later this month at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He says he’s being punished for his views on higher education’s diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, which he’s referred to as a top-down “regime.”

“I view this episode as an example as well as a striking illustration of the threat woke ideology poses to our culture, our institutions and to our freedoms,” Abbot wrote in a guest post for former New York Times writer Bari Weiss’s Substack newsletter, which is becoming a go-to venue for professors who feel they’ve been wronged by the academic left. “I have consistently maintained that woke ideology is essentially totalitarian in nature: it attempts to corral the entirety of human existence into one narrow ideological viewpoint and to silence anyone who disagrees.”

He’s a tenured professor of geophysics at a prestigious university. I have a little exam for him.

  • Define “woke ideology” and explain how it is totalitarian. For that matter, define “totalitarian”.
  • If I accept the claim that it is a “narrow ideological viewpoint”, explain what your ideological viewpoint is that conflicts with it. Saying that you don’t have an ideology is an unacceptable answer.
  • Explain how your invitation to present a public outreach lecture to a diverse audience was not inappropriate, given your recent opinion pieces against diversity published in Newsweek and Bari Weiss’s newsletter. You are aware that those opinions are in conflict with the intent of the lecture, right?
  • You were instead offered an opportunity to present your scientific results to the scientific community at MIT, which is a rather prestigious opportunity right there. Explain how this substitution harms you. Bonus points: demonstrate self-awareness by explaining how peculiar it is that opposition to diversity can be offensive to the general public, but somehow can be acceptable to the faculty at a university.
  • Why would you go crying to Bari Weiss, a known conservative ideologue, about “unfairness”? Do you think that the playing field is not level elsewhere? Why?
  • It is an assumption in your complaints about diversity, equity, and inclusion that women are on a “level playing field” in science, and that therefore efforts to level that field imply that “women can’t excel in science.” Justify your claim that women and minorities do not face discrimination.
  • In your Newsweek piece, you assert that diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives “entails treating people as members of a group rather than as individuals, repeating the mistake that made possible the atrocities of the 20th century” in an attempt to link efforts to offset generations of discrimination and oppression to, for instance, the Holocaust or Stalinist purges. Please try to demonstrate that you have any historical awareness at all, or even a sense of shame.

I don’t think he’d even be able to stumble past the first question without falling into mindless conservative cant, which is good, because I’ve got enough exams to grade this weekend without having to deal with a privileged asshole making up crap to justify his privilege.

Why is it always the progressives framed as the problem?

WTF? She can’t afford shoes? Or a broom?

There’s this new book on behavioral genetics out, The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality, by Kathryn Paige Harden. I am not going to read it. I’ll never read it. If I were sent a free copy, I’d just throw it in the trash.

I know! I sound like I’m pre-judging it! But I can’t help it, everything I’ve read about it makes it clear that Harden has Steve Pinker disease. That’s the habit of creating a false dichotomy and stuffing any hint of leftist ideology into the extreme, just so you can easily dismiss it, and making those damned progressives the enemy of science, no matter what their views. Pinker did that with his terrible “blank slate” nonsense (no, no one believes that human beings are born with a complete absence of predispositions, or that genes don’t influence behavior). Why should I read something that has declared people like me to be bad by stuffing words in our mouths?

For a perfect example of this bullshit, here’s a profile in the New Yorker.

Can Progressives Be Convinced That Genetics Matters?
The behavior geneticist Kathryn Paige Harden is waging a two-front campaign: on her left are those who assume that genes are irrelevant, on her right those who insist that they’re everything.

Well fuck you too, New Yorker. I’m a fairly typical progressive, you don’t have to work at all hard to convince me that genetics matters. It does. But hey, sure, claim that I think genes are irrelevant, so you can claim that sweet centrist middle ground. Who are you arguing with, anyway?

To be fair, I’d also point out that on the far right, even among the most ridiculous bigots, they don’t believe that genes are everything. They’d also tell you that money matters.

Here’s the real difference:

Ask me if genetics matters, and I’d say yes, but that the interactions between genes and environment are so deeply intertwined that you can’t separate them out, and I don’t know precisely how genetics matters, and neither do you.

Ask someone on Harden’s side the same question, and they’ll say yes (Agreement! Consensus!), but that they think they know how, or are at least working on figuring out all the answers, which will show that vague properties like “educational attainment” have a robust genetic component. And I will argue that no, they aren’t even close.

I will roll my eyes especially hard when they try to tell me they’re figuring it out with GWAS (Genome-Wide Association Studies), twin studies, and polygenic scores, and that they affirm long-held assumptions by the privileged white class in our country. Yeah, no. Here’s a good article that, unlike the New Yorker, isn’t fawning over her fuzzy genetic determinism.

Rather than admit that these studies feed fascistic and racist ideas, she attempts to “both-sides” the issues, focusing on leftists, for whom she appears to have some disdain, fancying herself as some kind of sensible centrist, by contrast. Case in point is her interpretation of a study related to bias towards genetic determinists:

“… a scientist who reported genetic influence on intelligence was also perceived as less objective, more motivated to prove a particular hypothesis, and more likely to hold non-egalitarian beliefs that predated their scientific research career…people who described themselves as politically liberal were particularly likely to doubt the scientist’s objectivity when she reported genetic influences on intelligence.”

Her point here is to paint the left as hopelessly biased on this subject, but despite Harden’s dubious effort to paint herself as a leftist, many individuals touting genetic determinist views also harbor racist and classist views that are hardly egalitarian. There are obvious reasons for this and it doesn’t take a leftist to distrust their motives, nor should one expect leftists to embrace a sugar-coated version of genetic determinism.

Isn’t it curious how these gene-crazy people always try to find ways to demonize the people who aren’t racist/fascist/bigots? It would be nice if they were even more fastidious about the racists who do so love their work.

And there’s the science behind their claims. There is a place for GWAS studies. If you’re using them as a tool to trace lineages, fine. If you’re using them to identify candidate genes that you’ll then analyze with experimental work, great. If you instead are using them to label some marker as a potential causal agent for some complex behavioral phenomenon, no thank you very much go away now.

The actual science is far less impressive, and for those not familiar, it essentially relies on establishing genetic “correlations,” without defining what or how these genes might influence a particular trait. The principle behind the studies is not much different than what commercial genealogy sites like Ancestry.com do, but instead of establishing ethnicity or ancestry, they correlate the genetic variants that are more common in one group than another for a particular behavioral trait, or just about anything that can be designated on a questionnaire. Then they score the total number of these correlated variants a person has for a “polygenic score,” the idea being that a higher score makes it more likely you will have the trait. This is based on the hypothesis that traits are “polygenic,” consisting of hundreds or thousands of genetic variants. It is a probabilistic assessment, with no definitive set of genetic variants that would confer a trait or explanation of how any of these variants would contribute to the trait, nor explain why many with high scores do not have the trait and many with low scores do.

In truth, applying a polygenic score for a trait isn’t a whole lot different than commercial genealogy sites assessing whether someone has genetic variation that is more common for, say, Italian or Korean people. The difference is that Ancestry.com is not absurdly claiming that these genetic variations are causing Italians to like pizza or Koreans to use chopsticks. That, however, is essentially what behavioral geneticists are trying to claim, but instead of pizza or chopsticks, Harden is focused largely on so-called “educational attainment.”

Everything is polygenic. The relationships between different genes are also certainly non-linear, so you can’t just add up slight effects to claim the whole of the outcome is predictable or important. You definitely can’t talk about causality (oh, and Harden backs up frantically every time anyone mentions the “causal” word, with good reason.)

Thus, we have the circular argument that keeps the field of behavioral genetics alive: The heritability of a trait seen in twin studies proves there is a genetic basis for that trait, and the fact that we are not able to confirm twin studies via genetic studies shows only that we haven’t found the genes we expected yet, but we know must exist because of twin studies. Such circular assumptions are then presented as established science. For example, Harden claims as fact that behavioral traits are “polygenic”:

“Schizophrenia and autism and depression and obesity and educational attainment are not associated with one gene. They are not associated with even a dozen different SNPs. They are polygenic – associated with thousands upon thousands of SNP’s [genetic variants] scattered all throughout a person’s genome.”

These contradictory assumptions leave us with a “polygenic” model with thousands of genetic variants adding up to a tiny bit of heritability, and unidentified “rare variants,” to be found at a later date, accounting for the remaining huge chunks of missing heritability. This is simply wishful thinking.

Nonetheless, Harden embraces the idea that these genetic studies will someday close the gap on this missing heritability, touting a recent study for educational attainment in which she claims, “You can account for 13% of the variance.” Although this is not anywhere near what one would expect from twin studies, on the surface it is significantly better than the usual 2 to 3% that such studies generally yield. It is a bit of sleight hand, however, for Harden to tout this figure, when she also touts within family studies (comparing the genetics of siblings and their parents and then assessing their educational attainment polygenic score), as a way to strip down to the actual causal genes, and such a study was conducted and brought this figure back down to 2 or 3%. Such decreases are merely a flesh wound for Harden, though, who notes that, “… the heritability of educational attainment is still not zero.”

Here’s the thing, though. I’m going to be hearing about this book for years to come, all from the alt-right and right-wing losers who promote the kind of racial determinism underlying its theme, and what I will see from us horrible lefties is dismissal and rightful recognition that it doesn’t demonstrate what it claims…which will lead to people like Harden or Charles Murray or Steve Sailer claiming that we’re the bad guys, and siding with Harden. Yet Harden will insist that her sympathies are with progressives and social justice, and oh no, she doesn’t see anything wrong with her most ardent supporters finding affirmation of their racist views in her book.

Hey, has she done an interview with Joe Rogan or Jordan Peterson or Bret Weinstein/Heather Heying yet? They’re going to love her.