Notes on: Reilly, W. (2022). The New Definition of
Racism. Can we find a way out of Mr Rogers's
neighbourhood? Commentary.
https://www.commentary.org/articles/wilfred-reilly/racism-ibram-x-kendi/
Definitions matter, for example on whether '"rape"
is a fair description of essentially consensual
sex facilitated by alcohol or drugs, and later
regretted' (28). Debates about human agency often
involve the question that we know that people make
decisions at the conscious level, but that these
are affected by genetics and experiences — so are
we correct to call that free will? Post-modernism
often gains an advantage in these debates —
'speaking less than half jokingly — they have all
the English teachers on their side'. Some of these
fights matter a lot in political and social terms:
one is the fight about the concept of racism.
There's been an attempt by people such as Kendi
and DiAngelo to redefine the concept and their
campaign 'leaps from the semantic into the
substantive' (29).
For Kendi, racism is not just outgroup bias, but a
system that produces 'disparate outcomes between
or across racial and ethnic groups'. He thinks are
only two possible explanations for measurable
differences in performance, say in standardised
testing. First, there must be a form of racism
within the system, 'no matter how hidden or
subtle. Second there must be some actual '(I read
him as meaning genetic)' "inferiority) on the part
of the lower performing group. Disparities are 'de
facto evidence of racist discrimination'. The
logical implication is that anyone who argues
against the first explanation must agree with the
second one. In other words 'simply to argue
against "antiracism" is to identify oneself as a
racist'. For those who agree that either one or
the other might apply, Kendi says we should all
agree to fix our racist system by forming things
like a 'Federal Depatment of Antiracism', to
ensure proper representation across all fields of
American enterprise 'regardless of performance'.
This has become a globally popular argument,
despite being 'easily disprovable'. Claiming that
the only factor that might explain group
differences in performances, genetic inferiority
or hidden racism, 'is simply wrong as a matter of
fact'. If the claim is that temporary cultural
underperformance demonstrates genuine inferiority
across an entire race, that too is wrong.
'Serious social scientists' [he cites Sowell,
Williams, Wilson and Ogbu] have pointed out that
large human groups differ in performance because
of dozens of variables — culture, including hours
of study time per day, but also 'environment,
region of residence and even stochastic chance (or
luck, to state it more plainly)'. Another
important independent variable is age: the most
common modal age of black Americans is 27, but 58
for white Americans. The modal age for Hispanics,
'across all regions and among both males and
females' is 11. These differences 'are certain to
be reflected in measured group outcomes'.
Geography is also important. 'Near majorities of
both American blacks and Hispanics still live in
the south or south-west, but a far smaller
percentage of whites live in the same region'
meanwhile 'test scores for all groups living in
those regions have traditionally been lower than
for those elsewhere in the country'. Any analysis
of group outcomes, whether wealth and income or
crime rates must take obvious factors like these
into account or be 'dishonest or wilfully
ignorant'. If they do, the results seem
'intuitively obvious to most thinking people'
because these variables 'explain group performance
gaps far better than "invisible racism" does'. An
economist [J O'Neill] allows for the effects of
past oppression, but argued decades ago that the
sizeable gap in raw income between blacks and
whites 'shrinks to just 1 to 2% when adjustments
are made for variables such as test scores, median
age, and work experience' [of course these might
be affected by racism]. A business data company
came to similar conclusions when discussing race
and gender pay gaps — '98% of the gaps in question
vanish when we adjust for basic nonraced variables
[but are scores nonraced?] such as "how old people
are" or "what scores on the big test look like
this year"' [American stuff, hard to understand
--the big test is a national aptitude test?]. (30)
On the face of it, this seems to be an airtight
case against theories of systemic racism. The
usual counter is a 'God of the gaps argument'.
This is where the secondary metrics reflects some
'still deeper and more dispersed form of racism',
standardised exams are culturally biased against
blacks and so on. This was argued in the 1970s and
we hear it today — 'they are both wrong'.
Mathematics developed historically in
'multicoloured Mediterranean and North African
regions' we also 'know what predicts test scores:
they track closely with patterns of study time for
members of all racial groups. This has been the
core "culturalist" argument against IQ
hereditarians… For decades' [I don't recall any UK
research on this].
The 'liberal centrist Brookings Institution
produced an article in 2017 showing that 'white
high school students study nearly twice as much as
black high school students with Hispanic students
falling in between the two'. Reasons for this
include 'social class, family stability, the
prioritisation of other activities such as
athletics, and — no doubt — the effects of racism
in the past'. Grades and test scores follow the
same pattern. Asian students outstudy and thus
outperform all white groups. Theories such as
Kendi's cannot explain this, unless he wants to
argue that US society is somehow biased towards
Korean, Indian-American kids or Jews.
There have been some attempts to disguise this
confusing reality. For example, some have
attempted to 'formally reclassify Asian-Americans
as "white" in official documents' [no references].
The simplest explanation is that the same set of
variables, 'influenced by past and current
bias but also by many other things' currently
deliver minority groups who can beat whites and
others who cannot. They also might explain the
distribution of white income in the USA, where
Australian Americans take in 200 to 300% more in
income than poorer Appalachian Americans. The only
'woke response' to these points is to 'move the
causal focus of the original argument back one
step' again, and call 'anyone who still disagrees
with them a racist'
Overall, the new racism lacks a coherent causal
mechanism. For example Alexander argues that black
and Hispanic overrepresentation in the criminal
justice system is down to bigotry, not that group
crime rates explain the gap in incarceration
rates. To explain different group crime rates it
would be possible to argue that 'some form of
subtle racism must explain' those — but how does
that work? If it is a matter of social problems,
those often afflict working-class whites to the
same degree, and why did not the same influences
work on 'genuinely abused black folks in the past'
[if I have understood his statistics, nonwhites
made up 24 to 27% of sentenced prisoners even in
the 1930s, but they make up 52% of non-Hispanic
prisoners today]. The social problems mechanism
seems ineffective for 'virtually all African and
South Asian immigrants in the US today': in 2018,
'all Asian-Americans combined — including dark
skinned South Asians — committed just [!] 127,651
violent crimes in the US versus 2,531,480 for
non-Hispanic whites and 1,087,895 for the smaller
black population' (31). That is a violent crime
annually among Asians for every 153 citizens, one
for every 79 white Americans. It also seems from a
1998 study that nativeborn black Americans are
more likely to be incarcerated than black
immigrants, but nobody seems to know why.
The Kendi argument does not survive logical
analysis. So what does racism mean? For Reilly,
what it has always meant — 'genetically or
ethnically based animus against members of a human
outgroup… The belief that genetic race "accounts
for differences in character or ability" and that
"one race is superior" to one or more other races
and it is almost always combined with dislike,
prejudice or "discrimination" [he takes this from
The Free Dictionary]. This means it is 'a
practical phenomenon can be quantified and
opposed. Significantly, it is 'a vice that members
of all races are capable of, and that is often
expressed at the level of the individual'.
Statistical analysis at the systemic level often
shifts the focus away from 'most actual and
demonstrable manifestations of racism — the slurs,
fistfights, and muggings, and the simple refusals
to promote someone "not quite like us"'. If we
revert to the old definition we can see the range
of individual statements and attitudes stating
inferiority are racist and we can focus on
opposing them.
Performance gaps alone are inadequate and we
should look instead at 'proven discrimination'. We
can measure this in a number of ways. There are
some racist laws or policies that are still
'facial' [referring to complexion?]. Some statutes
still seem to treat people of different races
differently although they are otherwise identical
— '(urban marijuana laws might be an example of
this)'. We might choose to be sceptical of
policies that produce 'large pre-adjustment racial
gaps' without any necessary purpose, and this is
currently being debated in a string of legal cases
referring to aptitude testing as a workplace
qualification.
The fashionable arguments about racism are 'only
detrimental to that fight' [against bias]. These
are arguments that claim that significant racism
exists because they have defined things as
significant racism. It seems to mean that the
United States is some sort of Korean supremacist
country, because Korean Americans seem to enjoy
'outsize success'. We must make words mean
something, ideally what they classically meant in
this case. There is a danger that definitions will
change away from these classical ones — for
example 'Merriam-Webster revised its definition of
"racism" in 2022 include "systemic racism"'.
[A rather nasty personal note to end on] Kendi was
born with the surname Rogers. We ought to leave
his intellectual neighbourhood and get back to
'consensus reality before the real meaning of the
word becomes a cultural artefact'.
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