In yesterday’s blog, “‘Whatever that number is’: Vaccine Hesitancy, Common Sense, and Stigmatizing Christians,” I noted a relationship between watching establishment media and misperception of basic facts, with progressive Democrats most likely to consume and believe establishment media being most misinformed on key issues, which strongly suggests establishment media is a propaganda operation disseminating misinformation and, really, disinformation.
Today, I am sharing a study, “How Informed are Americans about Race and Policing?” carried by the website Skeptic, that shows how misinformed progressive Americans are about the number of unarmed black men killed by police every year. Progressives are so badly misinformed, in fact, that it would be comical if not tragic, since their ignorance feeds popular support for a regressive political movement. The irony appears lost on those who run around telling everybody to “listen to the science.” Progressives actually believe things that, if one knows even a little about policing in America, are impossible.
How many unarmed blacks were killed by the police in 2019? As few as around a dozen (most sources I have seen). Around two dozen at the top end estimate (according to this source, but this is an extreme outside estimate). However, over half (53.5 percent) of those reporting “very liberal” political views (i.e. progressive) estimated that 1,000 or more unarmed Black men were killed in the year. Nearly a quarter said it was about or more than 10,000. That’s translates to more than two dozen unarmed blacks a day. That’s twice as many blacks killed annually than during entire period of lynching!
How off are these perceptions? Police annually kill around 1,000 suspects in total, 96 percent of them armed, and around a quarter of them black. In other words, three quarters of progressives are wildly wrong about all the relevant facts. Liberals aren’t much better at estimating police shootings of unarmed civilians. Who was most accurate in their perceptions on the matter? Conservatives (with very conservative not far behind). But they’re supposedly mouth breathing white supremacists, rubes, and snake handlers.
As I pointed out in yesterday’s blog, this is also the case with estimates of hospitalizations from COVID-19, with 41 percent of progressives Democrats believing half or more of those infected with COVID-19 wind up in the hospital. This is astounding. How is it even possible to be this ignorant? For those of us on Facebook and Instagram, we are daily inundated with posts virtue signaling masks, vaccine cards, and calls for mandatory vaccination. Who makes these posts? We know the answer. And they presume to tell us about science and policy?
There are a lot of folks upset with me because I keep repeating facts, such as: police kill twice as many whites than blacks every year; controlling for crime and circumstances, racial disproportionately in lethal civilian-officer encounters is explicable and therefore does not suggest systemic racism; controlling for crime and circumstances, police are more reluctant to shoot black suspects than white suspects; the number of unarmed suspects killed by the police every year is very small. I keep repeating these facts because I know the establishment media, which knows these facts, too, is misleading their audience. They are lying.
I’m a teacher, and it is my role to not only correct my students’ misunderstandings, but also the public’s misunderstandings. I can’t allow lies and myths to stand. So you’ll have to hate me, progressives. Scientists don’t like to talk in terms of truth, but there are at least three as-close-to-the-truth-as-it-comes-in-science truths: (1) the earth is not flat; (2) the earth is not at the center of the solar system; (3) the police are not systemically racist.
Finally, a note: Being unarmed doesn’t mean a person is not a threat. It just means they were not threatening the police or somebody else with a weapon. Hands and feet are deadly enough without a weapon. People are beaten to death or permanently injured by hands and feet used as weapons. Don’t assume because a person killed by the police was unarmed that he (or she, although this is extremely rare since females are underrepresented in the most serious violent crimes) was not a threat or that he did not cause his own death by decisions he made in interacting with law enforcement.
CNN has an analysis out today by Stephen Collinson that quotes Dr. Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, as saying, “This is a pretty dangerous time to be unvaccinated, but what CDC is signaling is if you are fully vaccinated, freedoms are just becoming safer and safer for people.”
First, it isn’t a particularly dangerous time to be unvaccinated. New cases have fallen to levels last seen nearly a year ago when the Democrats were encouraging people to mass gather and promote the project to depolice America’s most dangerous communities. Moreover, half the population has now received at least one dose of the vaccine. If the vaccines are as efficacious as health officials are asserting, combined with the more than thirty million of those who have already been confirmed to have been or are currently infected, an undercount given an unreckoned but no doubt large number unconfirmed infections, we are at or around typical levels of herd immunity.
But, second, consider the disturbing rhetoric of “freedoms becoming safer.” What a bizarre way of putting the matter. Authoritarian, actually. We can’t have our freedoms until they are safe—as judged by unelected technocrats? Put Jha’s statement alongside what Dr. Jonathan Reiner, a professor at George Washington University, and you see clearly what the thinking is here: “It’s time for the CDC to start embracing this kind of bifurcated strategy [allowing the vaccinated to move about unmasked, while continuing to restrict the freedom of the unvaccinated] and perhaps giving the unvaccinated a hint of what life can be like if they become vaccinated.”
In other words, either you participate in a massive corporate experiment using a novel technology or you will not be allowed to move freely about your own country—a democratic-republic in which you are a citizen with guaranteed constitutional rights. See my blog concerning the ethics of this: The Immorality of Vaccine Passports and the Demands of Nuremberg. In sum, this is a profound violation of basic human rights and personal sovereignty and liberty.
Over the weekend, The New York Times published a lengthy essay “Faith, Freedom, Fear: Rural America’s Covid Vaccine Skeptics” on vaccine hesitancy that represented skepticism of vaccines as backwards mouth breathing politically rightwing Christianity. The name of URL itself is revealing, identifying “white Republicans” as the collective culprit. Check it out: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/30/health/covid-vaccine-hesitancy-white-republican.html.
The story, by Jan Hoffman, makes crucial admissions that the Times nonetheless tries to pin on vaccine skepticism and political and religious ideology. First, widely circulating coronavirus variants are damaging to alleged vaccine efficacy. Second, Hoffman lets slip an effective point made by an interviewee that, if these rubes are, as they are depicted, devoted Trump followers, the fact that the vaccines were developed under and pushed by Trump has had no measurable impact on their willing to receive an experiment vaccine is rather revealing. Disconfirming, actually. Far from slavish followers of the former president, the skeptics are independent minded. Most importantly, which goes to independent-mindedness, Hoffman reveals what really lies at the core of vaccine hesitancy: common sense. Many feel the vaccine was rushed, its long-term effects unknown. They recognize that the vaccine—all of them—enjoy emergency use authorization only.
What explains their skepticism? Consider that the hospitalization rate for COVID-19 is between 1-5% depending on state and region. A study by the Brookings Institute asked representative samples of Democrats and Republicans to estimate COVID-19 hospitalizations. More than quarter (25.6 percent) of Republicans articulated the accurate statistic, whereas fewer than one-in-ten (only 9.8 percent) of Democrats did. Astonishingly, 41 percent of Democrats believed that half or more of those infected with SARS-CoV-2 would be hospitalized. Taken together, well more than two-thirds of Democrats believed hospitalizations per infection were 20 percent or more, a wildly accurate estimate. Given the nonstop fear campaign by mainstream media, with a viewership drastically skewed towards Democrats, the fact that Republicans are more likely than Democrats to be outside the propaganda bubble contributes to a more accurate grasp of the relative risks of this virus, a virus that has killed fewer than two-in-ten of those 65 years of age and younger and fewer than one-in-ten of those 55 and younger.
(Similarly, studies show that Democrats wildly exaggerate the number of underarmed black men shot by the police. Annually, that number if around a dozen. However, large percentages of Democrats believe the number is in the thousands and tens of thousands. Comparatively, Republicans perception is more aligned with the actual facts. Again, this is a measure of propaganda effect. Put another way, the more mainstream media one watches the more ignorant a person is.)
Today, The New York Times ran a story carrying the title “Reaching ‘Herd Immunity’ Is Unlikely in the U.S., Experts Now Believe.” The story cites experts who portray the virus as an ineradicable yet manageable threat, stigmatizing the unvaccinated as disease vectors. Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the Biden administration’s top adviser on Covid-19, after moving the herd immunity goal posts several times (he did the same with masks), and working from an apparently (and conveniently) changed definition of herd immunity that excludes those already infected, told the Times that the shift in rhetoric was due to a “confused” public “thinking you’re never going to get the infections down until you reach this mystical level of herd immunity, whatever that number is.”
Whatever that number is.
* * *
Update (same day):
USA Todayfact checkers. Some wisely pointed out that, according to the CDC, the case fatality rare for the vaccinated who contract COVID-19 is approximately the same as among the unvaccinated who contract COVID-19. “As of April 20, the CDC has indeed reported a total of 7,157 cases of COVID-19 among fully vaccinated people and 88 deaths.” I calculated the rate and, at 1.22 percent, it is indeed roughly the same as the rate for the unvaccinated.
“But public health experts say calculating a death rate from those numbers and comparing it to the general population is misleading.” Really, how so? “To calculate an accurate death rate, the total number of positive COVID-19 cases among vaccinated individuals must be known. But that number isn’t, said Lisa Miller, an epidemiologist and clinical professor at the Colorado School of Public Health.” Oh really? You mean like I have been saying all along on my blog. “We don’t know that [the infection fatality rate] because we’re not out there testing everyone (vaccinated),” she told USA Today. Exactly. Like I have been saying all along.
But—on no—there’s a snag here. USA Today accidentally told the truth. If you apply the same metric, guess what? That’s right, you lower both fatality rates and find that, in the end, vaccination doesn’t provide any greater protection from death. Try it for yourself. Take either case fatality rate and apply any multiple you wish—as long as it’s the same metric. You would have to engage in dishonesty and apply different metrics to show a disparity in infection fatality rates.
Now we understand that the 95+ percent reduction in hospitalizations = 95+ percent of cases do not result in hospitalizations in the first place. You draw the logical conclusion.
One more thing: “It’s important to note that the CDC has said 11 of the 88 deaths among COVID-19 infected, fully vaccinated people were ‘asymptomatic or not related to COVID-19.’” Oh, so not everybody who dies with COVID-19 dies from COVID-19. Where have I heard that before?
I recently shared a meme on Facebook. I remarked that it is a powerful meme. It sums up a lot of what I have been arguing of late on Freedom and Reason. If the point of the meme were taken up and to heart—and it is for most people the operating principle—then there would be a lot less crime in America, especially in those neighborhoods most ravaged by criminal violence, and there would be fewer black men standing in the dock and in prison.
Of course, the meme drew criticisms. The argument that the present situation of an individual is to some significant extent the result of choices made in the past smacks progressives of victim blaming. That charge only works for those groups progressives have determined should not be held to account for the harm they cause. Progressives infantilize blacks, seeing them as incapable of making the choices that explain their plight, but rather as puppets on strings, victims of sociological forces. Those belonging to groups progressives despise (which includes groups to which they themselves belong) are not entitled to blame their behavior on those same abstract forces. Members of those groups are not only responsible for their behavior, but are responsible for the behavior of members of the same imagined communities. So when we hear about how poverty drives blacks to commit crime, poor whites are not excused from their wrongdoings. (The Wages of Victimism: Leftwing Trauma Production for Political Ends.)
One criticism of the meme concerned social class, poverty, and demography, in particular the claims that poverty causes crime and that blacks earn less money than whites despite being in the same occupational classes. Taking up the second claim first, certainly at the moment for cop and lawyer, they exist, at least, in different occupational classes. Does that black cop make less than a white cop in his department at his rank? Not likely. But we don’t know the class location of the defendant. You cannot by looking at a person for whom the social role is unknown know for sure to what class he belongs. At the same time, we do know for certain that humans have agency. A human being makes a decision to break the law (“Society prepares the crime; the criminal commits it.” Progressives need Victims). I have little doubt the defendant is standing in the dock for breaking the law. Despite the occasional mistake, the system doesn’t arbitrarily take civilians into custody. It is unlikely that anybody forced that young man to do whatever it was that brought him in front of a judge (if he was forced, then he has a defense based on an excuse). As I have argued, demographic claims about individuals commit the ecological fallacy.
As for the claim that blacks are poorer than whites and poverty is the main reason for involvement in criminal activities. But if this were true, given that there are twice as many poor whites than poor blacks, one would not expect to see blacks so starkly overrepresented in serious criminal offending, but rather whites representing the greater proportion of serious criminal offenses. But we don’t see that. Blacks are 13 percent of the population, yet they account for more than half of all murders and robberies and a third of aggravated assaults (between 36-38 percent of violent crime overall) and a third of burglaries. This is not because blacks are more likely to be arrested than whites compared to relative involvement in criminal activities. These facts hold across statistical measures. They explain black overrepresentation in prisons and jails. (The FAR Podcast: Explaining the Overrepresentation of Blacks in Crime.)
But humans aren’t puppets on strings. They have agency. These associations only increase the statistical likelihood of crime. The truth remains that most people who live in crime-ridden conditions and around the traditions that promote them do not engage in serious crime. Moreover, blacks are statistically more likely the victims of these types of crime. So however much one might say that the conditions prepare the crime, persons must decide to perpetrate the crime. This makes those persons responsible, which is how society may bring them to account. And should. (“If They Cared.” Confronting the Denial of Crime and Violence in American Cities.)
The young man in the dock in the meme is not there because he is black. There are many young black men who never stand before a judge. That young man is there because he made a choice. He is not a victim. Indeed, why he is standing there suggests somebody else is.
Another criticism took the form of examples of blacks being pulled over by the cops or having their residences searched despite their class location. (See Policy Presuming “White Privilege” Violates Equal Protection Under the Law). One example was the recent shooting of a man who told his mother over the phone that the police pulled him over for an air freshener. But we know the man wasn’t pulled over for an air freshener. He was pulled over for a traffic violation. The police ran his name and there was a warrant for his arrest. He resisted, endangering the lives of police officers, and in the confusion a police officer mistakenly drew her weapon (she believed it was her taser) and shot and killed the man. He’d still be alive if he hadn’t resisted. (An Avoidable Tragedy: The Accidental Shooting of Duante Wright. See also Dealing with the Police.)
I noted that white people are pulled over by the police all the time. I was myself hassled by the police frequently because of my long hair. It was a tax I paid because long haired young men in the 1970s and 1980s were more likely to deal and use drugs and, rightly or wrong, cops work from typifications (mainly because it functions to reduce crime). Cops perform disproportionate number of investigative stops on blacks for the same reason. However we feel about the practice, the facts show that drivers who cooperate with police face no greater danger from cops on account of race.
The practical function of saying that patterns of arrest and imprisonment are because of racism (they’re not) or that crime is caused by the abstract structures and forces supposed by sociological theorists (maybe part of the explanation but no excuse for lawbreaking) is to simultaneously recast perpetrators as victims while portraying human beings as marionettes, robbing them of agency and denying their responsibility. When progressives do this on the basis of critical race theory, they infantilize blacks while, at same time, not only hold whites accountable for their actions, but also for the actions of other whites, and, even more than this, blame the actions of blacks on whites, who are depicted as privileged and powerful. which, for the vast majority of whites, is untrue (just as it is untrue to say that all blacks are disadvantaged and powerless. I have watched this bizarre manner of thinking develop over several decades, shamefully at times participating in its development. I now sit here deeply concerned that there may be no walking it back.
* * *
If you put on your sociology glasses you can see the abstract theoretical structures and forces pulling at the strings that manipulate them into hurting other people.
When prominent and influential figures teach children, through word and deed, that they and the people around them are not responsible for their situation, that they have no obligation to regard those around them with normal human regard, and that violence is a means to an end in settling matters beyond absolutely necessity, then the result will be a failure of impulse control and violent behavior towards others.
The same is true with civilian-officer interactions. Tell people that the police are racists and are only stopping them because of their race, and that, therefore they are right to resist (after all who shouldn’t resist racist aggression?), and you increase the likelihood of injury and death to both civilian, officer, and bystander. This is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Those who defend and rationalize irresponsibility are as responsible for these outcomes as those who encourage them.What we teach our children is central to their ability to regulate their emotions, make wise decisions, and do the right thing.
Family has been the heart of the social order since time immemorial. There’s a reason why family lies at the center of explanations for human behavior. I make that observation for what it’s worth (which is a lot) but also to note the current efforts to disrupt normal family systems. Because there is a reason why we are shamed for suggesting that personal responsibility, family structure, and parenting is a solution to a lot of our problems.
Humans are animals. Under normal conditions, animals regard one another peacefully. Most of the time, animals are cooperative—even across species. To be sure, animals will fight over resources. But, still, conduct is for the most part selected to promote common existence and harmony.
The thing that separates humans from other animals is the development of a conscious moral system. Humans, when properly socialized, have a conscience. They anticipate feelings of regret. This controls impulses. Other animals, when enraged, fly off the handle.
At the same time, most aggression displays do not wind up in serious injury or death of the other member of their species. It is particularly important to teach the human animal to control its impulses and to regard other humans decently. The development of a strong conscience is central to this.
I should confess at the outset that I am a professor who teaches research ethics. I have done so for more than a quarter century. I have organized and chaired human subjects review boards (or institutional review boards) as well as animal use and care committees. What is missing from the discussion about vaccine passports is an understanding of human freedom and medical ethics. I raise Nuremberg in these discussions because of the centrality of that body of international law in governing these affairs. They were developed specifically in response to a totalitarian situation. Vaccine passports contradict international law.
Polish witness J. Bzize shows the scars on her right leg, a result of the experiments of doctors Fritz Fischer and Herta Oberhauser in the Ravensbruck Nazi concentration camp, during their trial on Dec. 22, 1946.
The Code requires that any participants in medical experiments and procedures were willing participants, which means they volunteered to be involved. It is crucial in determining voluntary participation that no person consenting to an experiment does so from any coercive element in her surroundings. That is, the willing consenting participant could not be a person compelled to participate because of some adverse contingent force. Contingency means actions dependent on or conditioned by something else. This does not rule out rewards for those who participate in a medical experiment. The absence of a reward is not an adverse condition. But it does rule out any adverse consequence for failing to participate.
For example, if I offer somebody $100 to participate in a medical experiment or submit to a procedure, they do not lose anything by not participating. But, if I take away their freedom if they don’t participate in a medical experiment or submit to a procedure, then they are losing something for refusing the participate or submit. Loss of freedom is an adverse consequence because humans under normal conditions require and desire freedom. This adverse consequence falls into the category of a punishment. However, there is another adverse consequence that falls into the category of negative reinforcement.
For example, if I take away the freedom of people—let’s say I make it illegal for them to leave their home or to go without a mask over their face—and tell them that unless and until they participate in a medical experiment or submit to a medical procedure, i.e., receive an vaccine, they will not have returned to them their freedom to leave their home or go about without a mask, then I am coercing them to participate or submit. The consequence for failure to participate or submit is continued unfreedom, an adverse condition.
Remember, the difference between punishment and negative reinforcement is not the presence or absence of an adverse stimulus. The adverse stimulus in present in both techniques. The difference is whether the adverse stimulus is applied for noncompliance, or whether it is removed for compliance. It is, in either case, coercive, which is why both are fundamentally different from positive reinforcement (or reward). To stop torturing a person who confesses is not to reward the person for his confession, but to coerce him into a confession by stopping the torture if hand when e complies.
A Virginia teacher says critical race theory hasdamaged community as frustrated parents demand changes, Fox News reports. Monica Gill, an Advanced Placement Government teacher in Loudoun County, Virginia is speaking out about what she calls “Marxist” ideas that have prompted intense infighting among county residents. “We’re told that we’re living in a county that’s suffering from systemic racism and I think that that whole notion has done nothing but damage our community and our school since they began pushing equity.”
Gill is wrong about critical race theory being Marxist. Among other things, CRT is Maoist. Mao, whose ideas and actions are associated with mass death, advocated thirdworldism. To be sure, he called his ideas “Marxist-Leninist,” but they weren’t (Mao Zedong Thought and the New Left Corruption of Emancipatory Politics). Mao’s ideas aped the jargon of historical materialism, but substituted the peasantry for the national proletarian as the revolutionary vanguard. Marx would never have agreed to struggle on the basis of race relations or racial categories. But that is precisely what Mao did, for example, in his support for black radicalism and race riots in the United States in the 1960s. Marx would have found this abhorrent. He understood that racism and ethnicism as forms of alienation (see Marxian Nationalism and the Globalist Threat; also Secularism, Nationalism, and Nativism).
Nonetheless, Monica Gill is correct in the longer quote shared above. The claim that the United States is systemically racist is false and divisive. Antiracism is more religion than anything else, and the US Bill of Rights specifically forbids unwanted religious indoctrination. That falls under both the “government shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion” clause and the “free exercise” clause. If you deny the analogy, you have to contend with the “free speech” clause, as well as the “assembly” clause. Ideological and political indoctrination is compelled speech, and compelled speech is entirely contrary to the right to free speech, thought, and association. Mandatory instruction and reception of critical race theory mythology is a blatant violation of the Constitution.
Understand that they are doing this to change our consciousness concerning justice. They are moving to replace the ethic of individual liberty and equality with group-based rights and an ethic of safetyism. If you are compelled to show up to a meeting in which this ideology is promulgated, and you are a fraud to speak up, then sit quietly. Nobody can force you to talk. Diversity, inclusion, and equity training is ideological—political indoctrination. It is not the role of an organization to compel you to believe a particular ideology or adopt and practice a particular politics.
From Critical Race Theory: An Introduction: “critical race theory questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law.” Critical race theory is not trying to hide its agenda. It strikes at the foundation of western civilization. It is self-admittedly illiberal and authoritarian, rejecting the ethic of individualism and the principle of equality before the law. It literally defines our liberal traditions as the “perpetrator’s perspective.” It declares all white people responsible for the past and present actions of any one white person.
How such an illiberal and authoritarian doctrine found its way into public instruction ought to terrify you. Have you looked at what your kids are learning? Ask your teachers if this is being taught at your school. Don’t stand for this. Don’t let them get your children. If you’re interested in the facts that prove that critical race theory is false and irrational, subscribe to Freedom and Reason @ andrewaustin.blog. Read the essays here. If you need help in identifying the specific essays on this subject, let me know. We need to organize to resist this assault on the United States republic.
“Belief in witchcraft didn’t disappear because science disproved it, but because it ultimately became something people couldn’t take seriously in the world of everyday life. Right now people take race seriously, they think it’s something that nature has bestowed.” —Barbara Fields.
“You have to actually start opposing the categories of race if you want to transcend the hierarchies and caste systems they impose.” —Thomas Chatterton Williams.
In a April 19 letter, “American Humanist Association Board Statement Withdrawing Honor from Richard Dawkins,” the AHA states that “Richard Dawkins has over the past several years accumulated a history of making statements that use the guise of scientific discourse to demean marginalized groups, an approach antithetical to humanist values.” On this basis, the AHA rescinded Dawkins’ 1996 Humanist of the Year Award.
In discussing the controversy, I necessarily delve into the substance of these matters. Your patience and tolerance is greatly appreciated. I should emphasize (even though I shouldn’t have to) the difference between, on the one hand, agreeing with a man’s thesis, and, on the other hand, defending his right to advance his thesis without consequences. I should also remind readers (even though I shouldn’t have to) that, as a left-libertarian, I have no desire to stop persons from identifying as any gender they wish or no gender at all. I write about these things because I am dissatisfied by the answers to the questions such matters raise. In any case, as I hope will become clear, this essay is really about race, not about gender.
Humanism is system of thought emphasizing the practice of apprehending the world through rational and rigorous methods, with attention to empirical evidence and interrogating this apprehension in open dialogue. It is antithetical to humanist values to subordinate free thought and inquiry to ideology. It seems therefore that, in light of its decision to retroactively cancel Dawkins, the American Humanist Association is effectively not a secular humanist organization at all but an organization interested in adhering to a consensus reality authored by the Woke crowd and punishing those who deviate from its political-ideological line.
Attempting to cancel a biologist for addressing an issue about which he is preeminently qualified—sex is a biological matter and gender is only relatively independent of sex—is a clear indicator that the AHA is more concerned about gender ideology than about defending the principle of rational interrogation of claims made about reality. Whether its stand is because these politics have been taken to heart, or it is out of fear of the mob, it is either way an unfortunate development.
In 2015, Rachel Dolezal, a white chapter president of NAACP, was vilified for identifying as Black. Some men choose to identify as women, and some women choose to identify as men. You will be vilified if you deny that they literally are what they identify as.
First, the AHA accuses Dawkins of using scientific discourse as a guise to demean marginalized groups. What evidence is there that Dawkins is being insincere? (I provide his tweet above for your consideration.) Second, the AHA has the matter precisely backwards. Humanism elevates the value of scientific discourse above those derived from other sources. A proper humanist would never prioritize the feelings of a marginalized group over the pursuit of the truth.
Why should the feelings of the marginalized be more sacred than the feelings of the majority? That sounds like religious dogma to me. Why is it okay for a trans person to feel erased by language denying that trans women are women but not okay for women to feel erased by language denying that there is no difference between men and women? Is this sides-taking warranted? On what rational grounds? For another thing, subordinating the pursuit of the truth to subjective feelings is a tactic used by authoritarians to silence debate and discussion.
Yet, without irony, the AHA argues that Dawkins’ “latest statement implies that the identities of transgender individuals are fraudulent, while also simultaneously attacking Black identity as one that can be assumed when convenient.” (Note that “Black” is capitalized. That is not an error. It answers the question of whether wokeness has been taken to heart. The AHA is working from decided conventions and slogans.)
By accusing Dawkins of suggesting that transgender individuals are fraudulent because Rachel Dolezal (aka Nkechi Amare Diallo), arguably the most notorious instantiation of transracialism, has been portrayed by the media and Woke activists as a fraud, the AHA is shirking the hard work of understanding Dolezal’s situation and taking on the problem of transracialism. The AHA is presuming as proved that which requires proving.
It is not difficult to provide a compelling explanation for Dolezal’s racial identification. The fact that Dolezal’s siblings (four of them) were black likely affected her own sense of racial identity. Identity is, after all, learned. Identity is the result of socialization. Dolezal came to identify more with their race than her own.
The Economist, in a June 2015 essay “Blurred Lines,” details Dolezal’s biography—her black husband, her Howard University education, her stint as president of a NAACP chapter—and concludes, “It’s hard to doubt her commitment.” Indeed. She continues to identify as black. Race is a social construct certainly no less than gender (really more so, since sex is a biological matter). Dismissing a complex matter as “fraudulent” is intellectually lazy and, moreover, presumptuous. It uncritically accepts a line of attack by those who advance the cause of race essentialism.
What does it mean to say that race is a social construct? Race is constructed by the ideology and system of racism. The phenomenon operates at two levels. The first is the ideology of racial classification and associated hierarchy. The second is social segmentation based on this ideology—or justified by it. Race does not exist apart from ideology and social system. Since the system of racism has been dismantled, it arguably exists now only as an ideological entity. One thing is for sure, however: in the typographic terms developed by racial science, race is not a natural historical category. It is not a discovered thing. It is an invented thing, a social and cultural imposition. Moreover race is a recent development. Emerging with capitalism, it was designed or at least functioned to control the working class by dividing workers along artificial lines and refocusing their discontent on something other than their common economic position.
Race was consciously created by the capitalist class in a dynamic Barbara and Karen Fields have usefully termed “racecraft.” The Fields argument is that race is a classification created by racism, an ideology that supposes the human species is meaningfully differentiated based on ancestry and phenotype. Colonial powers wrote laws defining and dividing populations and developed an ideological system that rationalized exploitation in terms of innate racial differences. Given this, instead of reifying race by treating it as a fixed and objective things, one should instead ask why those who claim to be moved by the demands of social justice are so keen on maintaining the system of racial caste by mocking, ostracizing, and punishing those who seek either to identify as a different race or as no race at all.
As if this wasn’t obvious (and for many it isn’t), critical race theory and gender ideology are crackpot theories that work at cross-purposes with the Marxist method of historical materialism and those engaged in class analysis and struggle.
Dawkins is pursuing a rather obvious problem prompted by his acceptance of the scientific materialist worldview: Why, if a person can deny her genotype, as in the case of asserting a change in gender or abandonment of gender altogether, and even in some cases the reality of sexual dimorphism, can she not also deny a classification developed on the basis of arbitrary and socially-selected phenotypic traits, namely race? (This is apart from the distinction between identity and identification. There is what one thinks of oneself and then there is what others think of him. And whether he passes. Dolezal passes.)
Whether citing similarities or differences between gender and race, there is a burden to show why switching or abandoning races is disallowed. It will not do to merely note opposition to transracialism by some black people. Some black people do not circumscribe speech or determine truth. Opposition to transgenderism by some women is dismissed as valid grievance. Indeed, women who oppose transgenderism are referred to a TERFs (transexclusionary radical feminists), and they—and anybody else who raises questions—risk a diagnoses of transphobia.
For the woke, Dawkins isn’t even allowed to ask the question.
An article for the feminist philosophy journal Hypatia by chair of philosophy at Rhodes College Rebecca Tuvel could have served as a warning to Dawkins.
In her article, Tuvel argues that “since we should accept transgender individuals’ decisions to change sexes, we should also accept transracial individuals’ decisions to change races.” Finding that there is no objective difference between the categories—that is, neither gender nor race are biological based (an arguable assumption)—it follows that “one’s ‘actual’ race is a matter of social definition.” Tuvel determines that “we treat people wrongly when we block them from assuming the personal identity they wish to assume.” (In her article, she knocks down four arguments uses against transracialism that could be used against transgenderism: whites do not suffer racism, reckoning of ancestry, harm to blacks, and expression of privilege.)
One might have expected that Tuvel would get credit for advancing the transgender cause, but by also advancing the transracial cause, she offended transactivists. She was accused of, to use a mouthful from Nora Berenstain from the University of Tennessee (from where I received my doctorate, by the way), “egregious levels of liberal white ignorance and discursive transmisogynistic violence.” Berenstain wondered where the black transwomen philosophers were in her references (at the time, there were only around a dozen professional black philosophers in a field of more than ten thousand). Berenstain was furthermore upset because Tuvel “deadnamed” Caitlyn Jenner, and her references to male-to-female transition promoted “the harmful transmisogynistic ideology that trans women have (at some point had) male privilege.”
A majority of Hypatia’s editorial board apologized for publishing the article, there were resignations (including the editor-in-chief), and the journal was restructured. Fortunately, Tuvel enjoyed wide support in the academic community. In the end, the attempt to cancel her failed. So will the attempt to cancel Dawkins.
I come back to this question: Why are antiracists so insistent that persons must remain identified by arbitrary classifications assigned at birth? And I have several additional questions: Why do those who act as if they want to radically expand personal freedom insist on attaching to those who wish to jettison an imposed identity that risks oppression? If being white is a privileged status, as the antiracists tell us, then why deny a black person access to a white identity? Will blacks will soon be allowed to identify as white (why would they, given the way in which whiteness is portrayed as the cause of all misery in the world?), with whites not having the option because, you know, the direction of power? If race switching erases race, why would that be a bad thing? Shouldn’t humanists be for the emancipation of individuals from the oppressive system of racial classification—just as they for the emancipation of individuals from the oppressive system of religious classification? Race is, as Fields tells us, an ideology. Why would one make the desire of a white woman to be a black woman a matter of “convenience”? Given that blacks are chief victims of systemic racism, why would people choose to subject themselves to such oppression?
What if Dolezal feels that her desire identify as a black women is her authentic self? I have had it put to me that a white person could not know what it feels like to be black, that worldview is tied to skin color, as if white identity is some substance that squirts out of a person identified as whites—and that substance allows in no blackness. How could we know whether this is true? The answer is circular: because the white person is white. How about because we are our bodies? If we are secular humanists, it is not as if we subscribe to souls.
Why is this not true for gender, then? How can a man know what it feels like to be a woman? If a white person cannot be black because white privilege is inescapable, then how is male privilege escapable? We allow men to escape but not whites? Are those able to detect authentic selves along lines of gender unable to detect authentic selves along the lines of race? Perhaps the science of the authentic self should be specified so we can explore the possibilities.
There is a deep scientific problem here that cannot be skirted by noting that there are some who take offense to starting the problem and, as best I can tell, after weeding out the postmodernist jargon, that is the only objection. I remain open minded, but I need a rational justification. By what authority are we disallowed from asking scientific questions? The Christian church? The Woke Church?
As for the moral question, as I understand it, while struggles remain, the transgender question is largely settled. No less a power than the United States government is behind the movement. If the principle at the core of the movement is that people should be in control of their identity, then who is anybody to tell Dolezal that she is not really a black woman (or a black man) if that’s how she feels?
The attack on Dolezal was vicious. Imagine calling a man “crazy” for thinking he is a woman. But that’s different, we are told. Why is the race lane so fixed? What exactly is the science here? I have yet to hear a compelling reason for why a person must identify as a particular race. Is that why one is not supposed to raise the question? (For more, see Adolph Reed, Jr.’s From Jenner to Dolezal: One Trans Good, the Other Not So Much, in Common Dreams.)
* * *
Update!
Richard Dawkins says JK Rowling and Kathleen Stock have been "bullied" while standing up for themselves over trans issues.
If the public only hears about white men perpetrating mass murder and never hears about black men perpetrating mass murder, it is likely that some portion of the public will come to believe that mass murder is an exclusively white male phenomenon. What they wouldn’t know is that, excluding gang killings, according to data posted by Statista, the racial distribution of mass shootings from 1982 through March 2001 shows that whites are underrepresented in mass murders. Whites are 76 percent of the US population. Excluding Hispanics, the US population is 69 percent white. If we include Hispanics in the white demographic (which artificially enlarges the white population, since not all Hispanics identify as white), and exclude other and unknown race or ethnic identity, whites commit 68 percent of mass murders. If we exclude Hispanics, 59 percent of mass murders are committed by whites.
Mass Murder
A question one might have is why the media manufacture the perception that mass murder is a white male phenomenon. A related question is why gang-related and other high casualty killings in black neighborhoods are excluded from the data of mass murder as typically reported by the media. This last piece is significant, because the data provided by Statista, even though it finds whites are underrepresented in mass murder, distorts the reality of mass murder in a way that is biased towards whites: it exaggerates white representation in mass murder. And not by a little.
Before Black Lives Matter, prominent publications such as The New York Times and The Guardiandiscussed the problem of excluding black victims of mass shootings by not counting mass shootings by black perpetrators in the context of inner-city violence. “Few of the incidents resembled the kinds of planned massacres in schools, churches and movie theaters that have attracted intense media and political attention,” The Guardian reported in 2016, reviewing an analysis conducted by The New York Times (which lies behind a pay wall once you’ve used up your few free articles). “Instead, the analysis, defined purely by the number of victims injured, revealed that many were part of the broader burden of everyday gun violence on economically struggling neighborhoods.”
What The New York Times found is that, counting mass murders defined as four or more people injured or dead, three-quarters of the victims of mass murder whose race could be identified were black. Homicide is for the most part intraracial, which means that it occurs within racial (and ethnic) groups. Simply put, blacks are mostly killed by blacks, while whites are mostly killed by whites, and so on. When interracial homicide does occur, considerably more whites killed by blacks than blacks killed by whites. I emphasize this because I do not want readers to get the impression that blacks are being mass murdered by whites. Blacks are being mass murdered by other blacks. For black victims of violent crime, the Justice Department shows that around 70 percent of those perpetrators are black and less than eleven percent of their offenders were white. In other words, the overwhelming majority of violent crimes against blacks are committed by other blacks.
Champe Barton, writing for The Trace, is one of the few persons speaking about this matter in the context of Black Lives Matter, albeit deceptively. Barton is reporting that high-casualty shootings have nearly doubled during the Pandemic. (We are in the middle of a 30-year high in violent crime thanks for Black Lives Matter.) He notes that “mass shootings only slowed under a commonly used but restrictive definition that leaves out most mass-casualty incidents. When defined as incidents in which four or more people were shot in a public or private space, there were more mass shootings in 2020 than in any of the previous years for which data is kept.” How many mass shootings? “Last year saw more than 600 mass shootings, almost double the average of the previous five years. The trend has continued into 2021, with more than 100 such shootings before the end of March.”
According to The Guardian, statistics show that the vast majority of high-casualty events occur in impoverished, disproportionately black and Hispanic neighborhoods. Roughly a third of the incidents with known circumstances were drive-by shootings or identified by law enforcement as gang-related. Barton reports “that many victims and community activists believe that the dearth of coverage of particular shootings owes, at least partially, to the race of the victims.” Pay attention to the framing. “In 2020, mass shootings disproportionately occurred in majority-Black neighborhoods. But even the highest-casualty incidents received limited national media attention.”
“According to a recent study published in the journal Sociology of Race and Ethnicity about shooting victims in Chicago,” reports Barton, “this pattern [of downplaying high-casualty events where the victims are black] held for local news outlets. It found that Black people killed in predominantly Black neighborhoods in the city in 2016 received roughly half as much news coverage as white people killed in majority-white neighborhoods.”
The first sentence from the article Barton cites, by White, Stuart, and Morrissey’s “Whose Lives Matter? Race, Space, and the Devaluation of Homicide Victims in Minority Communities,” begins with this sentence: “The recurring, horrific deaths of minority residents at the hands of police officers and vigilantes have led social movements and international protests to amplify the charge that whereas the loss of White lives is seen as tragic, the loss of Black and Hispanic lives is treated as normal, acceptable, and even inevitable.” The suggestion that there is systemic racism in lethal officer-civilian encounters, along with the method used, namely, “[b]uilding on and advancing theories of “‘colorblind racism’,” reveal the bias of the authors. Instead of seeing the exclusion of these events on the basis of the race of the perpetrator, they frame the argument in a way that blames white racism for ignoring black victims, while, at the same time, mystifies perpetrator race.
I don’t think it’s the race of the victim that causes reporters to hesitate in reporting these facts. I suggest that it’s the race of the perpetrator that lies behind the near total media silence on the issue. Because they are loathe to report facts that reflect poorly on black and brown communities, perhaps fearful of being branded racist, but also (and more likely) in light of the agenda to portray white males as the personification of the alleged Western pathology of white supremacy (the antiracism project), the corporate media present the data in a way that creates a false perception that whites are more likely to perpetrate mass murder.
The truth is that white men are much less likely to perpetrate mass murder than black and brown men. The narrative of white mass murder is a moral panic functional to the agenda to delegitimize Western civilization, a civilization paired with whiteness by the political left, which dominates American institutions. If academics, progressives, and reporters actually cared about black and brown men, then they must be concerned about this problem, since most of the victims of high-casualty events are black and brown men. But the corporatist agenda is more pressing.
In speeches, lectures, and debate, I have often rehearsed Henry Thomas Buckle’s (in)famous 1857 aphorism: “Society prepares the crime; the criminal commits it.” Karl Marx, impressed by Belgian astronomer Adolphe Quételet’s analysis of crime patterns and its associations, independently made a similar observation, actually just a bit before Buckle, in a 1853 article published in the New York Tribune.
Rejecting the practice of deterrence for its presumptuousness (by what right has the state to intimidate the herd by sacrificing the life and liberty of the one) and its inefficacy (the wrath Yahweh visited upon Cain for murdering his brother Able did not end murder), Marx writes, “From the point of view of abstract right, there is only one theory of punishment which recognizes human dignity in the abstract, and that is the theory of Kant, especially in the more rigid formula given to it by Hegel.”
What was this theory? Marx quotes Georg Hegel from the latter’s Philosophy of Right: “Punishment is the right of the criminal. It is an act of his own will. The violation of right has been proclaimed by the criminal as his own right. His crime is the negation of right. Punishment is the negation of this negation, and consequently an affirmation of right, solicited and forced upon the criminal by himself.”
Never without a sharp critique ready, Marx asks, “Is it not a delusion to substitute for the individual with his real motives, with multifarious social circumstances pressing upon him, the abstraction of ‘free-will’—one among the many qualities of man for man himself!” Ordinary man has not, Marx contends, arrived at that state. He remains alienated from himself (and others).
Marx argues that “punishment is nothing but a means of society to defend itself against the infraction of its vital conditions, whatever may be their character.” To put this another way, the law is an instrument of power; power is asymmetrical and roots in class relations, which differentiate communities; the prevailing character of the law projects the interests of the ruling class. Elsewhere, Marx finds it difficult to accept the notion that those who do not belong to the same community as the bourgeoisie should be judged by bourgeois values. But he also detects in the lawbreaker “real motives.” Moreover, he and Friedrich Engels both recognize the futility of “primitive rebellion.”
Marx and Engels came to this position early on. In an 1844 letter to Marx from Paris, Engels sees in “the rapid increase in crime” among the proletariat, “robbery and murder” as “their way of protesting against the old social organization.” He describes, seemingly, at first, hopefully, “At night the streets are very unsafe, the bourgeoisie is beaten, stabbed and robbed; and, if the proletarians here develop according to the same laws as in England, they will soon realize that this way of protesting as individuals and with violence against the social order is useless, and they will protest, through communism, in their general capacity as human beings. If only one could show these fellows the way!” Then he laments, “But that’s impossible.” He leaves out what is true today and must have been true then, namely that most of those beaten, stabbed, and robbed by the proletariat, were other proletarians.
Must we blame society for the criminal’s actions? I cannot go with Marx and Engels if what they are saying is that individuals are for the most part animated by unseen social forces. This is too positivistic. How can the criminal possess his “own will” when he suffers amid the welter of alienating conditions, a situation described by Engels in his 1845 The Conditions of the Working Class in England? One cannot deny the objectivity of this situation. Deprivation is a hard and brutal truth. Yet, the criminal is responsible for the choices he makes. Unless he suffers from a mental defect, he did make a decision. Mens rea!
Few among us are entirely puppets on strings. We have agency. It’s what makes us human—however much estrangement keeps us from our species-being (Gattungswesen). To deny this agency is to dehumanize and deny the individual and the capacity of humans to collectively overthrow oppressive conditions. We each have a moral obligation to resist the urge and the opportunity to commit crime and other injurious actions whatever their source. Not a bourgeois obligation (to be sure, the force of law lies in wait), but a human obligation.
In a speech at the Republican National Convention Platform Committee Meeting, Miami, Florida July 31, 1968, future US president Ronald Reagan (in)famously said, “We must reject the idea that every time a law is broken, society is guilty rather than the lawbreaker. It is time to restore the American precept that each individual is accountable for his actions.” The quote is perfect for social media memes (and we get to see Reagan’s smiling grandfatherly visage), but it is a whopping expression of naïve idealism.
To the Reaganite conservative who scolds liberals for “blaming society” for crime and poverty, by which—from his standpoint of idealism—he means to commit the offense of rendering accounts for crime and inequality that go beyond the “abstraction of free will,” I have said many times that identifying the social forces that immiserate communities and increase the propensity to commit crime is not blaming society but explaining phenomena. This is what I think Marx means, his excesses in the opposite direction aside. Marx wonders whether there is “a necessity for deeply reflecting upon an alteration of the system that breeds these crimes, instead of glorifying the hangman who executes a lot of criminals to make room only for the supply of new ones?” Agreed! Grasping causes is empowering. It’s why the powerful don’t want the people to know about them.
What are the criminogenic social forces in our time? They are several, but the main ones are these: deprivation, disorganization, subculture, and family structure. They are intersecting forces, each caused by and causing the other. And, while these forces exist across ethnic and racial subcultures and the class structure, they are, for complex social, historical, and policy reasons, most pronounced in impoverished black neighborhoods. Although blacks comprise 13 percent of the US population, they have over the last several years accounted for more than half of all murder and non-negligent manslaughter arrests and more than half of all robbery arrests. Overall, black Americans account for more than a third of all violent crime arrests (which goes a log way in explaining why black American make up approximately a third of prisoners in the state penitentiary system). I n recognizing the significance of this it must be called to mind that the interracial nature of street crime means the majority of victims of crime committed by blacks are other blacks. In light of this, the lack of compassion for the victims of criminal violence in black neighborhoods refracted through the depolicing and prison abolition movements is really quite remarkable.
Confronting the criminogenic forces that encourage the wrongdoing that injures so many people requires human agency, and that means that those who live in crime-ridden communities have need to organize politically and change the conditions of their existence. This project is made difficult when progressives, who represent the interests of the “enlightened” bourgeoisie, control urban neighborhoods, depolice high crime areas, and infantilize black Americans by idling them and making them dependent upon government. A custodial state is not a peaceful state. We have decades of evidence showing that progressive politics and policies don’t work. I don’t think they’re supposed to.
The first steps are these I think: (1) hold individuals accountable for their wrongful and injurious conduct to their communities; (2) overthrow the political culture that disempowers those who live in those communities. For (1) to be effective, (2) needs accomplishing. But the people can wait for neither. They can no longer afford to listen to the paralytics of antiracism, critical race theory, and neo-Marxism. They will tell you my argument is victim blaming. It’s not true. It’s an argument for empowering the proletariat. Progressives want victims. The people want something else. The people want justice.
freedom and reason 