Oh, Florida — you would be such a lovely state if you weren’t poisonously rich in Republicans. They’re putting together new history teaching standards.

The state’s curriculum standards for the African-American Studies course say students will learn how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.

I would have turned that around and said that slavers exploited the skilled labor of slaves, but hey, that’s the South for you.

Some people find that objectionable.

“Please table this rule and revise it to make sure that my history our history is being told factually and completely, and please do not, for the love of God, tell kids that slavery was beneficial because I guarantee you it most certainly was not,” said Kevin Parker, a community member.

Though the public testimony period lasted over an hour, most of the people objected to the adoption of the standard, with supporters of it waving from their seats. Paul Burns, the chancellor of K-12 public schools, defended the standards, denying that they referred to slavery as beneficial.

Oh no, it does not say that slavery was beneficial, only that there were benefits to being enslaved. That’s some mighty fine parsing of the language. I’m impressed.

OK, what if I suggest that people voting Republican should be automatically seized and sold into slavery? They could learn some beneficial attitudes, like empathy and tolerance. I hear that slavery does have some benefits, you know. They must really believe that or they wouldn’t say it.

If not slavery, how about just denying them the right to vote or run for office? See, I can compromise!

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 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.

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.

One accidental occurrence is meaningless and forgivable, but when you keep hanging out with the same group of racists for over 20 years, and when you are repeatedly informed that these are bad guys, the correlation becomes rather more substantial. All you have to do is look at Steven Pinker’s history of academic friendships to see that maybe there’s a problem here.

• 1999 — Pinker joins the human biodiversity (h-bd) group begun by Steve Sailer, now the editor of VDARE, along with race science researchers like Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending, race science funders like Ron Unz (of the Unz report), J.P. Rushton of the infamous, explicitly eugenic Pioneer Fund, and J. Michael Bailey, who used pseudoscience to stoke transphobia and hate.
• 2004 — As editor of Best American Science Writing, Pinker publishes Steve Sailer’s essay citing inbreeding in Iraq as a rationale for an inevitable failed state, as well as fellow h-bd members Virginia Postrel and Daniel C. Dennett. Also included is writing by Max Tegmark, the MIT professor who recently attempted to fund a neo-nazi media group as part of the Future of Life institute, and two columns by Nicholas Wade of the New York Times, who later wrote a ‘deeply flawed, deceptive’ book on race science and was condemned by 140 population geneticists for misappropriating their work.
• 2005 — Pinker writes a letter “to protest the shocking and disgraceful treatment of professor Helmuth Nyborg”, a fellow h-bd member who speaks at the same conferences as David Duke and researches sex and race differences in IQ. In June of 2006 Nyborg was found to be “grossly negligent”, misrepresenting his own scientific efforts and results. Nyborg is subsequently relieved of duty from Aarhus University as part of a 3 year investigation. In 2009, Pinker sends a second letter in defense of Nyborg without changing a word, addressing it this time to the new president of the university. Many fellow h-bd members join him, including Rosalind Arden, Harpending, and Rushton, as does Linda Gottfredson.
• 2006 — Pinker writes a lengthy article on the the IQ of Ashekenazi Jews by fellow hb-d members Harpending and Cochran (debunked and later proven utterly unfounded by better science and scientists) in which he blithely asserts that “Like intelligence, personality traits are measurable, heritable within a group, and slightly different, on average, between groups.” In 2019, Pinker defends Bret Stephens’ use of the discredited paper, while Stephens goes on say that he regrets not obscuring the source of the data, noting that “I could have cited from any number of other sources not tainted by Harpending’s odious racial views.”
• 2007 — Pinker provides counsel to Alan Dershowitz, with whom he taught a class on Morality and Taboo as described by the Edge.org (full syllabus here), on the interpretation of the interstate commerce law used to prosecute Jeffrey Epstein. The late Epstein was, of course, a prominent funder of the Edge.org, the elite group of scientists and thinkers which included Wilson, Dawkins, Dennett, Cochran, and Pinker (as well as Gould and many others). Pinker is a bit sensitive about this connection.
• 2012 — Pinker helps fellow hb-d member and holocaust denier Ron Unz tailor a critique of self-described “scientific racist” Richard Lynn’s work on IQ, emphasizing his openness to it as a legitimate area of inquiry. (arguments about who is the real racist get ever more surreal in these circles).
• 2013 — Pinker, an advocate for the biological inevitability of war, coordinated with Wilson, Dawkins, and Dennett to urge that book reviewer John Horgan either denounce a book critiquing an ethnographer (Chagnon) and his writing on his subject (the Yanomami of the Amazon) or recuse himself entirely, warning that a positive review might ruin his career. Horgan, in conversation with Chagnon for more than a decade at that point, does not cave to the pressure, later saying “I’m only sorry that my review did not point out the irony that Chagnon — unlike some of his hard-core Darwinian champions and like many of his critics — rejects the view of war as an instinct.”
• 2018 — Pinker shares a Quillette article by fellow hb-d member Rosalind Arden on the disinvitation of fellow Nyborg supporter, Linda Gottfredson, from a conference. In his note, he tuts at the SPLC for labeling her an ‘extremist’ simply because she has spent nearly half a century insisting that racial disparities in IQ are innate, immutable, and ensure unequal outcomes between racial groups. Perhaps he feels this too is a reasonable hypothesis — or perhaps he feels the conference would benefit from the work of Arden and Gottfredson correlating intelligence and semen quality. (Arden discloses their professional relationship if not the subject of their work in her article, saying of intelligence research “How often do we take the time to walk empathetically in the cognitive shoes of others? Millions of people struggle to maintain their health, their jobs, and their finances for the blameless reason that they are a little less adept.”)
• 2022 — Upon the posthumous discovery of E.O. Wilson’s approving correspondence with eugenicist (and h-bd member) Rushton, Pinker does not reflect or contemplate the implications of this discovery for either his field or his close collaboration with Wilson. Instead, he promotes an article by Michael Shermer (another one of the New Atheists that took a hard right) and remembers the battles Wilson, like Pinker, fought in the NYRB on behalf of biological determinism.

I’m also grateful that the article reminded me of the argument between Pinker and Stephen Jay Gould on evolutionary psychology. Gould was brilliant. Man, I miss that guy.

I just discovered an op-ed from 2021 written by Anna Krylov, the crusader against political correctness whose terrible paper I criticized on YouTube. It’s also a terrible opinion piece, but it is evidence that she is trying to launch a career that would appeal to the right wing, and also that she isn’t very thoughtful.

The piece is called The Politicization of Science and it’s the same ol’, same ol’. She starts off by giving her personal history — she grew up in the Soviet Union, in a town that was renamed multiple times in response to the shifting political rule, and she knew people who were denied educational opportunities because they weren’t sufficiently deferential to the powers-that-be. It’s deplorable stuff, and the stupid whims of the political class wrecked many aspects of Russian science. I can see where Krylov is sensitive to the problems.

Unfortunately, after the history lesson, it goes off the rails. She thinks the US is following the same path (and it may, but not for the reasons she cites.)

Fast forward to 2021–another century. The Cold War is a distant memory and the country shown on my birth certificate and school and university diplomas, the USSR, is no longer on the map. But I find myself experiencing its legacy some thousands of miles to the west, as if I am living in an Orwellian twilight zone. I witness ever-increasing attempts to subject science and education to ideological control and censorship. Just as in Soviet times, the censorship is being justified by the greater good. Whereas in 1950, the greater good was advancing the World Revolution (in the USSR; in the USA the greater good meant fighting Communism), in 2021 the greater good is “Social Justice” (the capitalization is important: “Social Justice” is a specific ideology, with goals that have little in common with what lower-case “social justice” means in plain English). As in the USSR, the censorship is enthusiastically imposed also from the bottom, by members of the scientific community, whose motives vary from naive idealism to cynical power-grabbing.

Wait, wait, wait: I had to stop at that claim that “Social Justice” (capitalized) has little in common with “social justice” (lower case.) That’s weird. I followed her citations to see where that’s coming from, and it’s all Helen Pluckrose, James Lindsay, Peter Boghossian, and John McWhorter — sources that despise the idea of social justice, and have, shall we say, a rather uninformed and biased perspective. But now I was eager to learn about Western censorship.

Her examples are underwhelming.

Today’s censorship does not stop at purging the scientific vocabulary of the names of scientists who “crossed the line” or fail the ideological litmus tests of the Elect. In some schools, physics classes no longer teach “Newton’s Laws”, but “the three fundamental laws of physics”. Why was Newton canceled? Because he was white, and the new ideology calls for “decentering whiteness” and “decolonizing” the curriculum. A comment in Nature calls for replacing the accepted technical term “quantum supremacy” by “quantum advantage”. The authors regard the English word “supremacy” as “violent” and equate its usage with promoting racism and colonialism. They also warn us about “damage” inflicted by using such terms as “conquest”. I assume “divide-and-conquer” will have to go too. Remarkably, this Soviet-style ghost-chasing gains traction. In partnership with their Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion taskforce, the Information and Technology Services Department of the University of Michigan set out to purge the language within the university and without (by imposing restrictions on university vendors) from such hurtful and racist terms as “picnic”, “brown bag lunch”, “black-and-white thinking”, “master password”, “dummy variable”, “disabled system”, “grandfathered account”, “strawman argument”, and “long time no see”. “The list is not exhaustive and will continue to grow”, warns the memo. Indeed, new words are canceled every day–I just learned that the word “normal” will no longer be used on Dove soap packaging because “it makes most people feel excluded.”

What does it mean that Newton was “canceled”? How? We still learn about his work, Newton still gets a prominent place in the history of science, and calling the laws he discovered “fundamental” seems more important than calling them “Newton’s.”

She cites a letter published in Nature expressing an opinion — you know, like Krylov is doing in the Journal of Physical Chemistry letters — that suggests some of the terminology used in computing is poor. In the 17 December 2019 issue of Nature, Carmen Palacios-Berraquero, Leonie Mueck & Divya M. Persaud say:

We take issue with the use of ‘supremacy’ when referring to quantum computers that can out-calculate even the fastest supercomputers (F. Arute et al. Nature 574, 505–510; 2019). We consider it irresponsible to override the historical context of this descriptor, which risks sustaining divisions in race, gender and class. We call for the community to use ‘quantum advantage’ instead.

The community claims that quantum supremacy is a technical term with a specified meaning. However, any technical justification for this descriptor could get swamped as it enters the public arena after the intense media coverage of the past few months.

In our view, ‘supremacy’ has overtones of violence, neocolonialism and racism through its association with ‘white supremacy’. Inherently violent language has crept into other branches of science as well — in human and robotic spaceflight, for example, terms such as ‘conquest’, ‘colonization’ and ‘settlement’ evoke the terra nullius arguments of settler colonialism and must be contextualized against ongoing issues of neocolonialism.

Instead, quantum computing should be an open arena and an inspiration for a new generation of scientists.

OK, if I were working in the field of quantum computing I’d take that into account, and I can see their point. All it is, though, is a strong suggestion in a scientific journal, exactly equivalent (although far less wordy) to what Krylov was doing…but she is oblivious to the comparison. It’s terrible that anyone would talk about the uses of language, but only when the interpretations differ from Anna Krylov’s.

Another example she gives is a set of recommendations from the “Words Matter” Task Force at the University of Michigan. I confess, there’s a lot in there that I find silly and pointless, such as discouraging the use of the phrase “brown bag lunch” (yeah, that’s what color paper bags are!), but others are worthwhile, such as avoiding the word “crippled” to refer to broken systems, or let’s call “man-hours” “person-hours”. It’s all very bureaucratic, but it’s not censorship or oppression.

That a capitalist company would not want to alienate potential customers by implying that they might be abnormal is also not censorship. She should be far more concerned that I’ve been trying to avoid the use of the “normal” word in my classes, replacing it with less judgmental words like “typical” or “common”. Is color-blindedness not normal? Should I imply that a few students in my class are abnormal because they’re not trichromatic? Krylov is even sillier than that U. Michigan list.

That’s the real problem here. Some people, mostly conservatives and Republicans, are trying to distract us with trivial, petty nonsense as far more serious problems are taking over this country. Sure, go ahead and complain that you’ll continue to defy the tyranny of the Left trying to rename “brown bag” lunches — but meanwhile, the Right is banning books, firing teachers who dare to mention that they’re not heterosexual, outlawing women’s health procedures, and making life a living hell for trans people. Those concerns don’t get mentioned by Krylov. Instead, she wants to damn anyone who tries to expand education to historically deprived groups by removing biases. All in the name of saving humanity.

The answer is simple: our future is at stake. As a community, we face an important choice. We can succumb to extreme left ideology and spend the rest of our lives ghost-chasing and witch-hunting, rewriting history, politicizing science, redefining elements of language, and turning STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) education into a farce. Or we can uphold a key principle of democratic society–the free and uncensored exchange of ideas–and continue our core mission, the pursuit of truth, focusing attention on solving real, important problems of humankind.

Remember: the Unilever corporation removing the word “normal” from their beauty products is an example of “EXTREME LEFT IDEOLOGY.” Ron Desantis dismantling academic freedom and appointing a Discovery Institute hack to control a liberal arts college…eh, no big deal.

One of the texts that led to Tucker Carlson’s firing has been revealed. It’s surprising.

It’s not surprising because it’s a mild statement — it’s not. It’s deeply, implicitly racist. What’s surprising is that Fox News executives cared. Racism is what Fox News does. It’s just that Carlson plainly spoke out the words of white supremacy, and they knew this was going to be news…even if the Fox News audience would have agreed with the sentiment, and even now are probably looking at each other quizzically, wondering what’s wrong with the comment.

Me, I’m just wondering…how do white men fight? Have I been doing it wrong?

I think the way we’re supposed to do it is take advantage of any good fortune to oppress other people, make them weaker, and then exploit the hell out of them. Then there’s all the lying and cheating and stealing we do to maintain any advantage, all while declaiming that we are obviously superior and meritorious because we’ve got our boot on your neck and aren’t going to let you up. Yeah, that’s how white men fight. Then we live in terror that someone else might manage to do the same thing to us.