“It was an earlier time”

The most recent scandal to emerge out of Virginia is that a number of politicians were hanging around, or were dressed up themselves, with students in blackface or KKK robes.

When asked by CBS 6 to look through old MCV medical school yearbooks, VCU student journalist Caitlin Morris found several racist images from the 1980s showing students in blackface.

“It’s not that surprising that people would be culturally insensitive,” said Morris. “We are still facing racism and systematic racism today.”

On top of those, an image from a 1980 University of Richmond yearbook shows several students in KKK costumes and a black student with a noose around his neck.

Blackface photos and racial slurs were also found in the 1968 VMI yearbook. Senate Majority leader Tommy Norment served as the managing editor of that yearbook.

So now one question is whether they deserve any kind of censure now, 30 or 40 years after the fact. Sure, this was openly racist crap, but hey, 1) it was an earlier time, that was the zeitgeist, you can’t blame the kids for going with the flow, and 2) it was so long ago that they’ve outgrown those attitudes and are now committed to egalitarianism, so don’t hold the person’s past against them, ask what they’re doing now.

I thought I’d address point 1 by looking at my own history of yearbooks. We have our own little collection of ancient yearbooks from the early 1970s at the Kent Junior High Vandals and the Kent-Meridian High School, the Royals. I skimmed through them this morning, reminiscing. Keep in mind that this was the Pacific Northwest, not any place in Dixie.

The results: between 1970 and 1975, there were no yearbook photos of anyone in blackface. No KKK robes. No swastikas. No confederate flags. These were signed yearbooks, and no one scribbled abusive comments anywhere — there were a couple of mentions of Beer Bottle Beach, which was the sandy spot along the Green River where students might hang out of an evening sampling illicit beverages, but that was about it.

I did notice how white the students were — the Pacific Northwest has its own racist problems, which were usually expressed in deeply segregated communities, and this was a suburb of Seattle. I knew very few black students. There were lots of students of Japanese descent, and we had our own unsavory history there. The parents of many of them could tell you about internment camps. None of that was demonstrated in the yearbooks (which is another, subtler problem of the implicit silence of racism).

You know, it was entirely possible for kids in that era to be innocent and completely unaware of the very idea of using racist ideas to disparage others. I don’t know what has been going on in Virginia or other Southern states, but it seems to me that part of the blame has to rest on an openly racist culture that allowed such behavior to flourish. Kids were echoing what their peers and parents were doing, which doesn’t excuse it, but it does say that it isn’t enough to condemn just the individuals — there ought to be some broader soul-searching.

As for point 2, well, you’d think the first line of defense these guys would have is to point to their records. None of them are doing that! Show me that your career has involved opposing racist policies, that you’ve been trying to change the racist culture that encouraged you to fail so hard in your youth. Instead, we’ve got Northam making pathetic excuses for inexcusable behavior, hiring a PR firm, and talking about leaving the Democratic party, and the nominally liberal party of Virginia in shambles.

In summary, we should kill the myth that blackface and other racist behaviors were ubiquitous 30+ years ago. That is not a valid excuse.

Could such behavior be redeemed by a more recent history of change? I think so. All of us did stupid things in our youth, and the first step is to admit that they were wrong, and the second step is to show a record of behavior that belies the impression given by those old photos. It’s troubling that the governor of Virginia hasn’t even tried either of those things, but seems committed to his rationalization that blackface and the KKK costume were simply innocent mistakes.

If he can’t do that, he should resign.

P.S. I also did find my wife-to-be in the books. Here she is in 1970. She’s going to kill me for posting that hair-do. But come on, she was, and is, cute.

And here she is in 1974.

Busy busy busy

I’ve been neglectful of everything! But then, I’m in the midst of a sudden surge of work.

First, on Saturday, 9 February, I’ll be speaking via an electronic connection (like someone from the future!) to the Secular Humanists of Western Lake Erie on Charles Darwin and the Web of Interconnectedness, part of their Darwin Day celebration. Here’s the abstract:

Charles Darwin was a conventional naturalist of his day, and yet he had this great insight that led to a revolution in biology. Where did that come from? I will argue that it was from a shift in perspective, from trying to figure out how a species becomes well suited to its environment, to considering the environment wholistically and seeing how many species of plants and animals, as well as geology, interact to generate forces in biology. What made Darwin’s idea great was that it also interacted with a multitude of other ideas to inspire change across whole fields of science. Evolution led to ecology and genetics, and eventually to molecular biology and genomics, none of which would exist without the seed Darwin planted.

I’ll be doing this live at the West Toledo Branch Library, but I’ll probably also turn it into a video later. Right now the talk is a shambles, but I’ve got a couple of days to whip it into shape. Right?

Second, I’ve got a big messy YouTube video in the works, which is also currently a shambles. Yes, my desktop is in a state of chaos, true wreckage with debris scattered all around. This one is kind of complicated and messy — I’m trying to explain how the concept of human genetic immortality, which leads to horrors as diverse as hereditary royalty and racism, is a toxic lie that poisons society. It’s also biological bullshit that annoys me greatly.

Third…I’m planning a summer research project that might — almost certainly — require IRB approval. I’m proposing to survey various sites around Stevens County for their spider populations, including people’s homes (I’m most interested in synanthropic species), and correlating factors in the environment with spider density by taxon. That involves looking at how cluttered garages are, what pesticides are being used, age of residences, etc. I was working out this stuff and realized that I’ll be generating a database that includes people’s addresses (which will be kept private) and the physical state of their homes, and the operative word there is “people”, not just spiders, dang it.

I’ve never had to do this before. But unlike some twits in Portland, or their apologists in Boston or Oxford, this twit in Small Town, Flyover Country thinks maybe he should make sure everything is kosher before he recruits students and charges off to knock on people’s doors.

So I’ve been trying to read the University of Minnesota protocols for a new study. They are somewhat daunting.

It’s sinking in that I’ve got to have a fairly complete and detailed protocol in hand, and then I’ve got to submit a bunch of stuff to the IRB, so I’m trying to put together a comprehensive preliminary survey, listing everything I might want to ask about a site. I don’t think it’ll have any problem sailing through — I won’t be handing out fun experimental drugs, or performing exciting surgeries on anyone — but The Forms Must Be Followed.

That’s my life for the next week or two, I think.

Alex Acosta might have to answer for his kindness to criminals

Jeffrey Epstein with some random people

Trump’s Secretary of Labor, Alex Acosta, may be in some trouble (but then, the only reason you’d be affiliated with Trump is if you’ve something seedy in your past). The Department of Justice is investigating him for his role in the sweetheart plea deal he gave convicted child molester Jeffrey Epstein in 2008. Epstein, a billionaire, was known for his patronage of scientists and atheists in the early years of the 21st century, although that was later overshadowed by his habit of picking up young adolescent girls and paying them for sex in his mansion, or on flights on his private plane with famous people.

He hobnobbed with all kinds of celebrities.

Jeffrey Epstein with some other random people

He was also known for giving various well-known scientists and atheists free trips around the country, like this flight to a TED talk.

A few random people on board Jeffrey Epstein’s private jet, scene of many scandalous romps

Finally, at least one of his associates, Alex Acosta, may be facing some justice. Although it seems that usually anyone touched by this “person of means” gets away mostly unscathed, so don’t count on it.

Except for the girls, of course. They get scathed and forgotten.

The rifts were widening everywhere

How interesting — Arun reports that the history of atheism in India was pretty much like it was here. A surge of interest sparked by The God Delusion (say what you want about Dawkins, that was an influential book), with an emergent split as one group saw social justice as an essential component of the movement, while another group “expressed abhorrence to the word feminism and propagated the myth that women are inherently irrational”, leading to a current divided movement.

I suspect it’s a reflection of a fault line that was there all along, and not at all unique to atheism. All you have to do is look at the American electorate and see a division that is somewhat independent of religious ideas.

The exception proves the rule, right?

A black scientist writes about James Watson, and it’s insightful. C. Brandon Ogbunu is a computational biologist, so he understands both DNA and statistics, and is in a good position to recognize abuses of both.

Black exceptionalism is a popular and complicated idea. It asserts that a monolithic “average” black identity exists, and that by transcending this average, one is exceptional. While the idea isn’t welded to black achievement, it is related. Successful members of the black community who somehow avoided the regression to the (black) mean are presented as paragons, exceptional ones of their kind. There are backhanded compliments, and then there is black exceptionalism—a racist idea lightly dressed in a pat-on-the-back.

Some of us, in a naïve or perfunctory manner, wear black exceptionalism as a badge of honor, even under the guise of progress: “I will show them what we are capable of.” Good intentions be damned, because to adopt this stance is to walk directly into a pernicious trap. The most effective racist ideas rarely deny the existence of exceptional members of the out-group to which undesirable features are attributed.

On the contrary, the most destructive ideas embrace high-performing members for statistical cover. In order to argue that the mean performance of an out-group is lower for a desirable trait, there should be some high performers. High-performing black people are essential for racism like James Watson’s, and even he might predict a statistical and genetic exceptional negro, because they can’t all be incompetent.

The problem with this argument isn’t only that it avoids critical discussions about the possible sources of group differences, but also that it uses the notion of the exceptional individual to justify racist ideas towards others in the out-group. In general, armchair appeals to statistics often conceal negative feelings that people already have, attitudes forged in the fires of fear and bias, not science.

I’ve seen that routine so often. “I know a Negro with a Ph.D. — in science — therefore I’m not racist.” “I admit that Jews are often academically gifted, therefore I don’t have a bias against them, I just know they’re evil.” “If my statistics don’t convince you that black people are less intelligent, how come they also show that Asians are better at math than white people?” It’s the contrast that is supposed to convince us that they are objectively evaluating real data.

“Intelligence” is an undefinable and complex parameter that changes depending on how you measure it. The only reasonable response to claims that one has characterized the “intelligence” of a large group of people and has some sweeping interpretations is to realize that they are simply expressing their unfounded biases in a pseudoscientific tone, and dismiss them.

Meme War @UMNMorris!

As I was walking through the halls to my lab, I noticed that the students have been waging a little meme war on the corkboards scattered around the building. I haven’t had to work with students much at all this year, so it’s always good to see a reminder of how wonderful they are.

Here’s an example. At the top, just off center, the College Republicans are advertising with the slogan, “Where women are not afraid to be women. While men are not afraid to be men.” That’s an oddly fearful concern — people are not afraid to be who they are in other campus groups. It’s already been defaced, though: someone wrote “bigotry is scarier than human rights” across it. Also they’re surrounded by an “It’s OK to be non-binary” sign and an ad for a discussion in conversational Spanish. Poor babies.

To the right, the College Republicans try again with a sad, limp NPC meme sign. That never worked, people, except in a self-referential way. Your opposition is flamboyantly rainbow-colored, while you’re the boring gray guys.

Meanwhile, in response to the trite & feeble sloganeering of the CR, we’ve got…this awesome bit of over-the-top mockery.

The Gender Binary is an Imperialist Social Construct
Support Trans People of Color

Signed by Queer Devil Worshippers for a Better Future, one of our many progressive groups on campus.

Yes, it’s a real organization. It’s even been written up in the Daily Caller, which seems to be aghast.

“I’m looking to start a Satanist group at Morris to address the budding conservatism on this campus — which I find abhorrent,” student Reed Larsen explained in the email.

“I’m hoping the group will have a social justice platform and further such a platform through good ol’ devilish revelry,” Larsen also said.

Larsen has christened himself as “Vold Mother” of “Queer Devil Worshippers for a Better Future.”

For the group’s logo, Larsen chose a classic, circle-emblazoned satanic pentagram festooned with the rainbow colors of the gay pride flag.

Their response is interesting — it’s an attempt to minimize the influence of the campus conservatives who put up that NPC sign, and also tack up TPUSA crap everywhere.

The “budding conservatism” on the University of Minnesota, Morris campus consists of handful of groups — a gun group, a pro-life club — which boast perhaps two dozen members combined, a source who chose to remain unidentified told Campus Reform.

That’s a generous estimate. I don’t think they take into account that it is the same handful of people signing up for all the conservative clubs, so they may be counting some of them two or three times. Also note how they are cowering fearfully, afraid to be identified…not because there is a serious threat to them, but because someone with blue hair might laugh at them.

Have I ever told you how happy I am to be at this campus? Because I am. It’s a good place. If you’re applying to colleges right now, you should consider applying.

I recommend you choose the side that’s winning the meme war, though.