JailBreak

Statistical evidence of racial disparities is automatically taken as evidence of racism. “Racial disparity is caused by racism”. End of story. In this article I’ll suggest a different reason for at least some observed racial disparities.

But first, don’t believe me, look for yourself! I propose a small experiment…use “african american intelligence” as a search string on the top three search engines: Google, Bing, and Yahoo. In the next couple paragraphs I’ll summarize the results I get on July 23, 2023

First, note there are no ads on the results pages! Apparently there are no commercial or marketing opportunities relating to this search string. I laugh!

Next, all three search engines – Google, Bing and Yahoo – pop up a knowledge panel at the top of the page that informs us “minorities, such as the African American minority of the United States, generally perform worse in the educational system and in intelligence tests than the majority groups”. This phrase is a quote from the Wikipedia article titled “Race and intelligence”. I suggest you take a look at the article as a good example of the embarrassed hand-waving the intelligentsia use to obscure the topic of race and intelligence.

Further, all three results pages point to a Brookings Institute article, linked below, as either their second or third-ranked result. Google and Yahoo place it second, Bing puts it in third.

The Black-White Test Score Gap: Why It Persists and What Can Be Done

Bing’s #2 result is an article on black unemployment, followed by the Brookings article at #3.
Google’s #3 result is an NYT article, which looks like it might be a book review, linked below.

The Black-White Test Score Gap

Yahoo’s #3 result is a Wikipedia article on the history of the “race and intelligence controversy”.

There is a common recognition of what the numbers are, accompanied by a lot of discussion about why the numbers might be invalid or not meaningful. My response: it doesn’t matter how you define your terms. Modern intelligence tests are the best available metric for mental ability that correlates with success in life. It seems there is a consensus on what the numbers are. If you accept that, then follow the science. Let’s move on!

A couple of caveats:

* I acknowledge that racism exists today, and is a part of our history.

* The difference in an average score between two populations doesn’t tell us much if anything about individuals. Asians ‘on average’ score higher than Caucasians on intelligence. This doesn’t tell us whether I score higher or lower than any individual Asian I meet on the street or sit next to at work. I can’t make any assumptions about the relative intelligence of any Black person I meet. The studies report average numbers across populations.

God is a Racist

For years we’ve assumed that socioeconomic disparities were the result of racism (the environment). Science tells us that we should consider whether intelligence (inheritance) is a cause of these disparities. Is it 50/50 environment vs inheritance? 60/40? 70/30? Does the impact vary by type of disparity? Do hiring disparities, criminal justice disparities, or educational disparities vary in their response to environment versus inheritance? These questions deserve debate and study.

The role of inheritance is a buried topic in the discussion around race. When presented with outcomes that differ by race – whether in income, educational success, or in arrests, why do we immediately point to racism as the cause? Aren’t racial differences just another arena for the environment versus inheritance discussion? Why not consider inheritance as a factor in racial disparity?

If racial disparities are caused largely by inheritance, what does this tell us of the likely success of the tactics we’re using to combat these differences, like DEI initiatives, affirmative action, and income subsidies? Does it explain why these tactics are unsuccessful at ending disparities?

Sandra Day O’Connor famously wrote in a 2003 court opinion regarding affirmative action, the “Court expects that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary”. She apparently expected that if we tweaked the environment, disparities would disappear. So, why is affirmative action still necessary? Is it because the cause is inheritance rather than the environment?

It is dishonest or ignorant to continually point to racism, when a very likely cause is actually inherited differences in intelligence.

There’s two sides to the story. At least. Always. Feminists spend a lot of time these days attacking the patriarchy. Patriarchy is defined as “a system of society or government in which men hold the power and women are largely excluded from it.”

Well no, I don’t defend that. I’m in favor of equal opportunity. (Achieving equal outcomes is inappropriate as a goal.) Is anyone in favor of patriarchy? When feminists attack patriarchy, might they be attacking a straw man? Evidently.

However, a different definition of patriarchy is offered by Will Knowland in his video ‘The Patriarchy Paradox‘. Knowland says that patriarchy is largely based on biology, and it centers on 3 roles: protect, procreate, and provide. Women are biologically incapable of ‘protecting’; and in order to ‘procreate’, women need men. The fitness of women for the 3rd role – ‘provide’ – is debatable. Using Knowland’s definition of patriarchy, women are in a world of hurt without men – defenceless, unable to reproduce, and starving to boot.

The whole discussion of sex, gender and roles is part of the postmodernist/marxist project of identity politics: dividing us all into groups and setting us against each other. It’s unproductive, exclusionary and dehumanizing.

Some people now say “sex is a social construct “. To the contrary, the American Psychological Association’s current definition reads thus (capitalization is in the original): “Sex refers especially to physical and biological traits, whereas GENDER refers especially to social or cultural traits”. We’re clear on this, yes? Gender is cultural, sex is physical.

Are men and women equal?
Does anyone really assert that women and men are equal? Never have been equal, never will be. Exactly what are we talking about? Equal pay for equal work? Equal pay narrowly defined is a number, so that’s easy; but how is equal work defined? Same job title, but disregarding all the other differences that determine pay, like experience, qualifications, and competence?
One problem, not a small one, is that in cases like pay where multiple variables determine the outcome, we try to assign the cause to one variable.
Let’s be careful about understanding exactly what the meaning is of “equal pay for equal work”. Does ‘equal work’ encompass differing levels of competence, experience and potential? Does ‘equal work’ include total value contributed? Note – according to an article in Forbes magazine, men are ten times more likely than women to be killed at work. Equal pay for equal work?

Do we still assume innocent until proven guilty?
Apparently not. How many of us assume today that Deshaun Watson is innocent? How many of us assumed that Bill Cosby was innocent? We should all remember examples like the Duke lacrosse team accusations. There are many others. See my blog post Believe All Women.

I’m reminded of the howling mob chasing poor Frankenstein through the village. Frank had a bad image, but he was innocent. Male activity in general is viewed with far more skepticism than is warranted.

Are there examples of women going too far?
Yes, there are. Mayim Bialik (candidate for the hosting job on Jeopardy!) is seen as an epitome of female probity. However, see her flash Piers Morgan on camera, live at about 90 seconds into this video. Or, have you ever encountered a female sales person with a bare midriff? I have, at the Norco Medical store on Stone Way in Seattle. What are the boundaries of acceptable behavior?

How do WOMEN need to change behaviors?
MeToo and Black Lives Matter share one essential – they both assert that all the changes must come from the other side. The assumption is that women (and black people) are blameless. We all know that isn’t true.
Begin with the issues of mindset and attitude. We live in a society that never claimed to be perfect, with high ideals and aspirations that are always a work in progress. Today there is 1. an evident lack of gratitude or even recognition for what has been achieved; 2. an unearned sense of moral superiority and omniscient knowledge, and 3. the demand that we have to implement whatever it is RIGHT NOW. I find all of that grating.
The project of putting men and women together in the workplace is a change to – I’m guessing – five thousand years of practice. We don’t know exactly how to make it work, THERE ARE NO RULES!

And that’s a problem. One interesting topic is dress and grooming. How much of women’s fashion, today and over the centuries, has focused on establishing and exaggerating sexual attractiveness? Aren’t lipstick and other types of makeup a systematic form of deception? Bare midriffs in the workplace? A women can be sexy, but we’re not allowed to sexualize. Isn’t that a contradiction?

Is sexually-related behavior is permissible at the workplace? Any answers out there? If you’re interested in a good commentary on this issue I recommend the current drama series on Apple TV+, ‘The Morning Show’. A relevant statistic is that 20% of marriages result from relationships that began in the workplace. So it’s against the rules? Or just…dangerous?

The Bottom Line
I absolutely 100% support equal opportunity for women.
It is not true that everything male is bad, and everything female is good.
It is not true that we’re obliged to believe every accusation by a woman against a man.

There are several issues relating to freedom that seem to be misunderstood.

Growth in Scope of Federal Power
I bet you didn’t know that a strict and specific limit on the powers of the Federal government is one of your civil rights. It’s true! The Bill of Rights, the original, most inviolable rights, are described in the first ten amendments to the constitution. The tenth amendment itself is a classic of brevity and clarity, a single sentence: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

So what happened to that? IANAL, but I offer two suggestions. First, there’s an escape clause in the original text. The final ‘delegated power’ is this: “To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof”. Second, one of the delegated powers (the list is in Article 1 Section 8) is regulating interstate commerce. And, interstate commerce eventually leads to the Corps of Engineers and EPA regulating your backyard duck pond.

Racism
Recently the Mayor of Chicago decided, according to a headline on MSN.com: “Chicago Mayor to only give black and brown reporters interviews”. Do you believe it? She later backed down of course, but this will live on forever as a memorial of progressive attitudes on race.

The 14th Amendment requires “equal protection of the laws”. Liberals in the 1960s decided to stretch the meaning of “equal protection” by passing civil rights legislation. There must have been suspicion that the notion of “equal” was changing, because during debate Senator Hubert Humphrey promised “If [anyone] can find in Title VII … any language which provides that an employer will have to hire on the basis of percentage or quota related to color, race, religion, or national origin, I will start eating the pages one after another, because it is not in there.” Apparently there was a concern in the Senate that this might open the door to quotas. (Monty Python and Lenny Bruce, we need you!)

That was 1964. Three examples show the current state of play. 1st, Harvard University was recently in court defending their practice of discriminating against Asian Americans in order to boost the number of African Americans in their student body. 2nd, racial quotas now exist explicitly as a matter of law for corporate boards in California. 3rd, an NFL coach who is ethnically Asian recently reported this dialog from a job interview:

“Chung said. “So I was like, ‘What do you mean I’m not a minority?’ ”

The interviewer responded, “You are not the right minority we’re looking for.”

Regardless of the text of the 14th Amendment, today we deliberately use racial discrimination and quotas – supposedly to end discrimination.

Free Speech
The first amendment specifies “The people shall not be deprived or abridged of their right to speak, to write, or to publish their sentiments”.

Two examples. First: The Evergreen State College, which is a public institution in Washington State. According to an article by historian Allen Guelzo published by the web site City Journal:

“campus authorities at Evergreen State College refused to protect biology professor Bret Weinstein from physical threat by angry student activists after Weinstein, a self-avowed progressive in politics, questioned the wisdom of a day of racial “absence” that excluded white students from the Evergreen campus.”

Second, students at Middlebury College used violence to block an appearance by sociologist Charles Murray. The incident is given a pithy description in the title and subtitle of an article published by The Atlantic: “A Violent Attack on Free Speech at Middlebury – Liberals must defend the right of conservative students to invite speakers of their choice, even if they find their views abhorrent.”

Regardless of what the Constitution says, leftists violently oppose speech they disagree with.

Freedom of the Press
As noted earlier, the 1st amendment guarantees the peoples’ “right to … write, or to publish their sentiments”.

Two examples. First, the New York Times fired their editorial page editor after he published an editorial by US Senator Tom Cotton. Second, the uproar over Simon & Schuster announcing they will publish the biography of former Vice President Mike Pence.

Leftists feel free to vehemently oppose publication of ideas they disagree with.

Free Exercise of Religion
The very first clause in the very first amendment to the Constitution says “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof”.

But…forcing the devout to act in violation of their beliefs? Is that not a violation of “free exercise”? Little Sisters of the Poor is a Catholic order devoted to caring for elderly poor. They objected to being forced to offer health care plans that paid for contraceptives. They were forced into court over this issue. They recently won a Supreme Court case supporting their position.

What about forcing the devout to engage in speech that violates their beliefs? A Christian baker won his case over a request to bake a cake to celebrating a gay wedding. The same baker is now involved in a case involving a request for a cake to celebrate the anniversary of a gender transition.

What about unequal application of pandemic restrictions? Nevada restricted church services to a headcount of 50, while allowing casinos to operate at 50% capacity. California closed churches, while allowing strip clubs to open. New York limited attendance in churches to ten, while not applying the same limit to businesses. ABC News reported as follows: “Three Rockland County Jewish congregations are suing New York state and Gov. Andrew Cuomo, saying he engaged in a “streak of anti-Semitic discrimination” with a recent crackdown on religious gatherings”.

The import of free exercise of religion to the founders is symbolized by its position in the Bill of Rights – right up front: 1st clause in the 1st amendment.

Bottom Line
How do progressives feel about the United States? Perhaps, if they really feel so out of tune with our heritage and freedoms, there’s some other place they’d feel more comfortable?

But of course, that’s not happening. Where would they go? I’m laughing. No better place to live! Look at the emigration/immigration numbers. So please, stop trying to restrict our rights to practice religion, to freedom of speech and the press, and our right to equal treatment under the law.