May 6, 2014

Wise Latina turns out as "Who? Whom?" as expected

From the NYT:
Sotomayor Finds Her Voice Among Justices 
By ADAM LIPTAK MAY 6, 2014
“I am a lawyer’s judge,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor said last year. “I write very technically.” 
That was true at the time. But something has changed in the current Supreme Court term. In opinions concerning human rights abuses, the death penalty and, most notably, affirmative action, Justice Sotomayor has found her voice. 
Cristina Rodriguez, Yale
“She’s setting a public agenda,” said Cristina Rodriguez, a law professor at Yale. “She’s looking for her moments. And her willingness to talk about how biography informs judgments challenges a lot of people’s notions about what the law is supposed to do.” 
Justice Sotomayor, 59, is approaching her fifth anniversary on the Supreme Court, where she has emerged as an increasingly confident figure. In the last term, she asked more questions than any other justice. In the current one, she has staked out positions that have led to testy exchanges with colleagues across the ideological spectrum. 
She is a kind of folk hero to the adoring crowds who attend her public appearances by the thousands. Her memoir, which told the story of her ascent from a housing project in the Bronx, was a best seller. Some call her “the people’s justice.” 
Others attacked her in unusually personal terms after she became the first beneficiary of affirmative action to defend the practice from the Supreme Court bench, summarizing in emphatic and impassioned tones her 58-page dissent from a ruling upholding Michigan’s ban on using race in admissions decisions at the state’s public universities.

Let's be clear about the hilariously unprincipled appeals court ruling that the Supremes, including even the Democrat Stephen Breyer, overturned. Ward Connerly and Jennifer Gratz organized a 2006 initiative campaign to ban racial preferences by the state of Michigan that triumphed over the uniform opposition of Establishment groups in the state with 58% of the vote, the black radical group with the intentionally intimidatory name By Any Means Necessary (i.e., including violence). The appeals court ruled on a party line 8-7 vote just after Obama's re-election that this successful initiative unfairly burdened minorities in the political process, even though they were completely at liberty to change the state constitution back in the same way Ward had changed it: by getting a majority of voters to vote for an initiative of their own.
“Race matters,” she wrote, “because of the slights, the snickers, the silent judgments that reinforce that most crippling of thoughts: ‘I do not belong here.’ ” 
... “I would hope,” she said, “that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experience would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.” At her 2009 confirmation hearings, Justice Sotomayor disavowed the remark, saying it was a “rhetorical flourish that fell flat.” 
Last month’s dissent, in Schuette v. BAMN, was a mix of legal analysis, historical overview and policy arguments. ... But what stood out was a fairly brief reflection about what it was like to grow up Puerto Rican in New York City. 
“Race matters to a young woman’s sense of self when she states her hometown, and then is pressed, ‘No, where are you really from?’ regardless of how many generations her family has been in the country,” she wrote. “Race matters to a young person addressed by a stranger in a foreign language, which he does not understand because only English was spoken at home.” ...
In her Supreme Court opinions, Justice Sotomayor has introduced a new vocabulary. She was the first to use the term “undocumented immigrant.” 
In her recent dissent, she proposed another change. “Although the term ‘affirmative action’ is commonly used to describe colleges’ and universities’ use of race in crafting admissions policies,” she wrote, “I instead use the term ‘race-sensitive admissions policies.’ ” 
      

Slate: "Donald Sterling's Model Minority"

Two Chinese junior English Lit faculty members explain how Donald T. Sterling victimized Koreans in Slate:
Donald Sterling’s Model Minority

What the Clippers owner’s love of Koreans reveals about racism in America. 
By Hua Hsu and Richard Jean So 
Donald Sterling's affection for Koreans is the flip side of a deeply held, racist worldview: Alongside the "undesirable" minority groups, there is another that does everything right. 
... But there’s another piece to Sterling’s warped worldview, one that illustrates the bizarre and incoherent ways in which racism works. As Sterling allegedly schemed to rid his properties of certain racial minorities, he sought to fill his development with Koreans, an ethnic group he valorized as hardworking and reliable. 
Sterling did not take a passive approach to attracting Korean tenants. He changed the name of one of his buildings to “Korean World Towers,” adorned his buildings with Korean flags, and explicitly stated a preference for “Koreans” in his housing ads. A group of tenants, who saw this as a thinly disguised attempt to discriminate against black and Latino housing applicants, filed a discrimination case against Sterling in 2002. In 2003, a U.S. district judge issued an injunction barring him from using the word “Korean” in his building names and advertisements. 
Why did Donald Sterling love Koreans? At a basic level, he was buying into the myth of the “model minority”: the perception that Asian-Americans, compared with other nonwhite minorities, are innately intelligent and well-behaved.

Sterling has made a billion dollars in the Los Angeles real estate business over the last 50 years. Perhaps he's learned more about racial reality in diverse modern American than have two junior English Lit professors?
To Sterling, this made them ideal tenants: “[Koreans] will live in whatever conditions [I give] them and still pay the rent without complaint,” he allegedly remarked. His respect for the Asian immigrant’s quiet diligence extended to his own business. According to ESPN’s Peter Keating, in 2003 Sterling’s real estate business “had 74 white employees, four Latinos, zero blacks, and 30 Asians.” 
Lest you think Sterling’s prejudices begin and end with race, note that 26 of his 30 Asian employees were women, and that he wanted them to fulfill an Orientalist fantasy. One former employee claimed that Sterling would “tell me that I needed to learn the ‘Asian way’ from his younger girls because they knew how to please him.” 
Legions of social scientists and historians have debunked the myth of the Asian-American’s “natural” orientation toward economic achievement. They point out that it is more a function of immigration trends in the 1960s, which favored East Asian professionals who often arrived with significant educational and wealth advantages. In the mythical retelling, the minority’s model behavior speaks to an inborn superiority, an almost genetic predisposition to success. This is the flip side of a deeply held, racist worldview: Alongside the “undesirable,” vermin-attracting minority groups, there is another group that does everything right. 
Why did Donald Sterling idealize Koreans? Because, in his view, they did whatever Donald Sterling wanted them to do, and they did it without complaint.

Like pay their rent on time, not deal drugs out of his properties, attract other good tenants, raise the property values in the neighborhood, etc. Pure exploitation!
This will all sound very familiar to Asian-Americans, cast as the put-upon overachievers, whose head-down, by-the-bootstraps stoicism has resulted in remarkable educational and financial attainment. The “model minority” myth persists in part because it is cited as evidence that the system works. It makes for a great story—the plucky, determined Asian-American succeeding where others have failed. But the ultimate beneficiaries of this racial typecasting are the people who invoke the model as a bludgeon against others. Sterling’s admiration for his Korean tenants is actually a kind of scorn. After all, he still subjected Korean tenants to the same degrading treatment as everyone else

Huh? The man clearly had a policy of trying to attract more Korean tenants by making them feel comfortable, in part by trying to drive away the ethnic groups that attacked Korean shops during the Rodney King riots (see video). How is that degrading to Korean tenants?
—the only difference is that the Koreans seemed willing to take it.

I happen to know a certain amount about the Los Angeles Korean real estate business. The notion that Koreans in America are passive, lacking in all agency, putty in the hands of White Plantation Owners like Donald T. Sterling is pretty funny.
Love and hate, praise and condescension —they are all engines of exploitation. 
For Asian-Americans who eagerly stand with other minorities in denouncing Sterling, this is all very awkward—even more so because Sterling’s history of housing discrimination is filled with small moments of Asian-American complicity. The housing case brought against Sterling in 2003 includes black, Latino, and white plaintiffs but no Korean-Americans. We have not been able to find prominent public complaints against Sterling by any Asian-American individuals or groups. There are also troubling stories of Sterling at one point replacing his security team with “Korean-born guards who were hostile to non-Koreans.” 
Of course, focusing exclusively on one minority’s gain when pitted against another risks obscuring the bigger picture. These moments when Korean-Americans enter the Sterling narrative are a reminder of how, on the rare occasions when Asians are invited in to a public conversation about racism, it is to play the role of the middleman. This is how California’s debates around affirmative action, for example, have become framed, with Asian-Americans as the purported victims of policies that benefit their fellow minorities.

Of course, that is how the Asian Democratic caucus in the state legislature, such as Leland Yee, frames the debate in which they recently stopped the Latino Caucus's attempt to reimpose affirmative action at UC. State Senator Yee is another one of those submissive Asians exploited by The Man, except for the part about him getting arrested just after his triumph over the Latino Caucus by the FBI for gun-running shoulder-launched missiles.
We don’t have a good way to talk about any of this publicly. More often than not, observers frame America’s racial dramas according to a black-white binary, one that abides by familiar tropes of hateful bigotry and righteous condemnation. 
This dynamic is central to American history, yet it feels inadequate in moments like these. While it’s not quite on par with degrading other minorities as lazy or filthy, Sterling’s praise for his hardworking Korean tenants and the “Asian way” reveals how racism can be a collection of contradictory impulses. Love and hate, praise and condescension—they are all engines of exploitation. 
Above all, Sterling saw the world in terms of winners and losers (“I like people who are achievers,” he once noted), and he used this logic to categorize racial groups along a sliding scale of desirability. For Sterling, Koreans never merited the decency of being looked upon as individual human beings. Rather, they were a faceless bloc, a group of indistinguishable “achievers” that did nothing more than provide the contrast that enabled his contempt for blacks. This is the lesson of Donald Sterling’s racism: A hierarchy that flatters those at the top and demeans those at the bottom can only serve to distract us from noticing the one shuffling the rankings.

Hua Hsu teaches in the English department at Vassar College and is completing his first book, A Floating Chinaman. 
Richard Jean So is an assistant professor of English at the University of Chicago.

When you stop and think about it, the Koreans are the real victims. How we should make up for it? Good question .... I know! By giving tenure to more Chinese low-level professors.

Problem solved.
      

The Race FAQ

With the question of how to think scientifically about race back in the news with the publication of the New York Times' veteran genetics reporter Nicholas Wade's A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race, and Human History, I'm reposting my old Frequently Asked Questions List about Race. Wade and I reach fairly similar empirical conclusions, but our frameworks for thinking about race actually start from different places. Wade follows the traditional top down Linnaean structure in which races are conceived of more or less as subspecies, while I've advocated a bottom-up approach of thinking of racial groups as extended families that are partly inbred.

This is a better-formatted version of my 2007 Race FAQ in VDARE. It’s a non-technical introduction to this topic that so confuses Americans.

Q. Why do you talk about race so much?

A. Most human beings talk about race a fair amount. I write about it.

Q. Why do people care about race?

A. Why do people care about who their relatives are? Maybe they should care, maybe they shouldn’t. I’m not here to preach morality. But people do care, so it’s important to understand the implications.

Q. What’s race all about?

A. Relatedness.

Race is about who is related to whom.

Q. Do you mean a race is a family?

A. Yes, an extended family. (To be precise, a particular type of extended family, one that’s more coherent over time than the norm, a distinction I’ll explain below.)

Q. Race means family? I’ve never heard of such a thing!

A. It’s remarkable how seldom this concept essential to understanding how the world works is mentioned in the press. Yet, in my Random House Webster’s College Dictionary, the first definition of "race" is:

"1. A group of persons related by common descent or heredity."

Q. If races exist, then, pray tell, precisely how many there are?

A. How many neighborhoods are there in the place where you live?

For some purposes, an extremely simple breakdown into, say, City vs. Suburbs is most useful. For other uses, an extremely detailed set of neighborhood names is helpful: e.g., "The proposed apartment complex will aggravate the parking shortage in Northeastern West Hills."

Similarly, racial groups can be lumped into vast continental-scale agglomerations or split as finely as you like.

For instance, should New World Indians be considered a separate race—or merely a subset of East Asians?

Every system of categorization runs into disputes between "lumpers" and "splitters." Whether lumping or splitting is more appropriate depends upon the situation.

Q. Isn’t race just about skin color?

A. That’s a simplistic verbal shorthand Americans use to refer to ancestry. Nobody really acts as if they believe race is synonymous with skin color.
Q. What do you mean?

A. Consider golfer Vijay Singh who during 2004-2005 became the only man in this decade besides Tiger Woods to be the number one ranked player in the world. Singh, who was born in the Fiji Islands of Asian Indian descent, is much darker in skin color than Woods.

Singh is at least as dark as the average African-American. Yet, nobody in America ever thinks of Singh as black or African-American. There’s an enormous industry that celebrates the triumphs of blacks in nontraditional venues such as golf. But Singh’s accomplishments elicited minimal interest in the U.S.

A 2007 article, for example, asked where are all the black golf champions who were expected to emerge in the wake of Tiger Woods’s first Masters championship in 1997. It never mentions the blackest-skinned player on tour, Singh … because we’re not actually talking about skin color when we use the word "black," we’re talking about sub-Saharan African ancestry.

Q. Aren’t we all related to each other?

A. Yes, that’s why we’re "the human race."

Q. If we’re all related to each other, how can one person be more related to some people than to other people?

A. How can you be more related to your mother than you are to your aunt? Or to my mother?

Q. If races exist, how can somebody belong to more than one race?

A. If extended families exist, how can you belong to your mother’s extended family and to your father’s extended family?

Q. How many races can you belong to?

A. How many extended families can you belong to?

Consider Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s children. Clearly, they are part of the Schwarzenegger clan via their father and grandfather. But they are also part of the Jadrny extended family through their father’s mother. Yet, they also belong to the well-known liberal Catholic Shriver tribe through their mother, Maria Shriver, daughter of Sargent Shriver, the 1972 Democratic Vice-Presidential candidate. And, they are, famously, Kennedys, because their maternal grandmother is Eunice Kennedy Shriver, the sister of the late President.

Q. So, everybody belongs to four extended families?

A. You could keep going beyond the four grandparents. The Schwarzenegger kids, for instance, are also Fitzgeralds, because they are the great-great-grandchildren of John F. "Honey Fitz" Fitzgerald, the mayor of Boston.

Q. So, your family tree just goes on out to infinity?

A. No, it eventually turns increasingly in on itself, as you can see it must from the basic arithmetic of genealogy. This tendency to turn back in on itself is the reason that racial identity exists.

Q. How does the math work?

Assume 25 years per each generation in your family tree. Go back 10 generations to the 1750s, and you have 1024 ancestors.

Go back another 250 years to the 1500s and you have 1024 times 1024 slots in your family tree; call it a million. Back to the 1250s and you have a billion openings. (Were there even a billion people alive then?)

And back in the 1000s, 40 generations ago, you have a trillion ancestors. Yet there definitely weren’t a trillion people alive then.

Q. So, where did all my ancestors come from?

A. They did double duty, to put it mildly.

Q. So my family tree doesn’t extend outward forever?

A. At some point in the past, the number of unique individuals in your family tree (as opposed to slots) would start to get fewer in number, ultimately forming a diamond-shaped rather than fan-shaped family tree. Genealogists label this "pedigree collapse."

Demographer K.W. Wachtel estimated that an Englishman born in 1947 would have had two million unique ancestors living at the maximum point around 1200 AD, 750 years before. There’d be a billion open slots in the family tree in 1200, so each real individual would fill an average of 500 places. Pedigree collapse would set in further into the past than 1200.

Q. Wait a minute! Are you saying my ancestors married among themselves? So I’m inbred???

A. Yes. It’s mathematically certain. There just weren’t enough unique individuals alive.

Q. Ooh, yuck!

A. I suspect that the American distaste for thinking about inbreeding, even when it’s so distant and genetically benign as in this English example, is one reason why our understanding of relatedness and race is so deficient.

Q. What does this have to do with race?

A. Pedigree collapse reveals how the biology of race is rooted in the biology of family. We can deduce from the necessary existence of pedigree collapse that while everybody is related to everybody else in some fashion, it’s more genealogically significant to note that every person is much more related to some people than to other people. Even a Tiger Woods can identify himself as being of Thai, black, Chinese, white, and American Indian descent, but not of, say, Polynesian, South Asian, or Australian aborigine origin.

Pedigree collapse is how extended families become racial groups. A race is a particular kind of extended family—one that is partly inbred. Thus it’s socially identifiable for longer than a simple extended family, which, without inbreeding, disperses itself exponentially.

Q. Can racial groups merge?

A. Over time, yes. Think of the term "Anglo-Saxon." The Angles, Saxons, and Jutes intermarried until they lost their separate identities. (The Jutes even lost their name.)

Similarly, the official ideology of Mexico is that whites and Indians have merged seamlessly into La Raza Cosmica, "The Cosmic Race." (African Mexicans play the role of the forgotten Jutes.) The reality is different, but the mestizaje propaganda isn’t wholly false.

Q. But race is just identity politics!

A. Well, there’s a reason that identity politics are a big deal. However you feel about all the various kinds of identity politics, you need to understand them.

People tend to organize politically around some aspects of shared identity, but not around others. For example, language and religion tend to be politically salient, but not handedness. No politician fears the Lefthanders Lobby, because left-handedness is distributed too randomly throughout the population.

Sex can be politically relevant, but it frequently turns out to be less important than feminist activists hope. As Henry Kissinger supposedly said, "No one will ever win the battle of the sexes; there’s too much fraternizing with the enemy."

Relatedness or race is typically the single most common dimension along which people align themselves politically.

Sharing relatives gives people more reason to trust each other—for instance, Jared Diamond notes that when two strangers meet on a lonely and lawless jungle path in New Guinea, they immediately start a far-reaching discussion of who all their relatives are, looking for overlap so they can be more confident the other person won’t kill them. Similarly, organized crime families typically have real extended families as their nuclei because relatives can trust each other more when outside the law.

Further, blood relatives are more likely to share other potent "ethnic" identity markers, such as language and religion.

Q. But, if we’re all part of the human race, then why don’t we always act that way?

A. Because we’re not, currently, under alien attack. Throughout his Presidency, Ronald Reagan, to the alarm of his less-imaginatively insightful aides such as Colin Powell, repeatedly pointed out that the differences between the Superpowers would seem insignificant if Earth was under assault by hostile flying saucers. Reagan, for instance, told the UN in 1987:

"I occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world." [Address to the 42d Session of the United Nations General Assembly in New York, New York]

But little green men are not threatening us at present, so we compete against each other in the meantime.

And relatedness (i.e., race) is the most common dimension along which people cooperate in order to more effectively compete against other groups politically.

Q. Isn’t race just a social construct?

A. Relatedness is the most real thing in the world: mother, father, baby.

Q. But, don’t different societies have different rules about who is considered to be related to whom?

A. Yes. Indeed, every culture comes up with a way to deal with the exponential unwieldiness of family trees.

For many purposes of daily life, you have too many relatives. The sheer numbers of ancestors, distant cousins, and potential descendents you have expand out beyond any manageable boundaries. The amount of relatives you’ll send a Christmas card to might be larger than the number you’ll volunteer to cook Thanksgiving dinner for, but, still, there’s got to be an end to everything.

Many cultures have devised rules to limit who counts as a relative for the purposes of, say, inheritance. English aristocratic families didn’t want their land holdings divided up into unimpressive and inefficient parcels, so they followed the rule of primogeniture, passing the claim to be of noble blood down through the first-born son, with latter-borns falling out of the aristocracy within two generations. For instance, Mr. Winston Churchill was the first-born son of Lord Randolph Churchill, who was the second-born son of the Duke of Marlborough. That seems awfully aristocratic to us plebian Americans, but by English law, he wasn’t a peer because his father wasn’t first-born. And thus, to Winston’s political benefit, his parliamentary career was spent in the House of Commons rather than the House of Lords.

The Chinese treated sons more equitably, but almost completely ignored daughters.

In contrast to these attempts to nominally define down the putative number of relations, many Middle Eastern cultures have come up with an actual biological solution (of sorts) to reduce the number of relatives: cousin marriage. In Iraq, half of all married couples are first or second cousins.

Q. Why?

A. One reason is this: If you marry your daughter off to your brother’s son, then your grandchildren/heirs will also be your brother’s grandchildren/heirs. So, there is less cause for strife among brothers. Cousin marriage helps make family loyalties especially strong in Iraq, to the detriment of national loyalties.

Q. Do you ever want more relatives?

A. For many political struggles, the more the merrier.

Ibn Saud, who founded Saudi Arabia in the 1920s, consolidated his victory over other desert chieftains by marrying 22 women, typically the daughters of his former rivals. Thus, today’s vast Saudi ruling family represents the intermixing of the tribes, which has helped it survive in power for 80 years.

On the other hand, the wealthy Syrian Jews of Brooklyn, with few political threats hanging over them here in America, don’t need blood relations with other power centers, so the community fiercely ostracizes anyone who marries outside it.

Or, political entrepreneurs can attempt to widen or narrow their followers’ working definition of who their relatives are by rhetorical means. For example, in the 1960s, black leaders encouraged African-Americans to call each other "brother" and "sister" to build solidarity.

Q. In America, wasn’t there a "one-drop rule" for determining if one is a minority?

A. For blacks, yes: for American Indians, no. Herbert Hoover’s VP, Charles Curtis, was famous for being part Kaw Indian. Being somewhat Indian added glamour to his image.

Indian nations have the right to set ancestry minimums (generally, at least 1/4th) required for legal membership in the tribe, and they often police membership with a vengeance.

Q. Isn’t all this outdated?

A. Both blacks and Indians are standing by the traditional definitions, because it’s in their interests.

Ever since Congress allowed Indian nations to each own one casino in the late 1980s, many tribes have been expelling racially marginal members to increase the slice of the pie for the more pure-blooded remainder. That’s because the main benefit of belonging to a tribe—the rake-off from a single casino—is finite.

In contrast, black and Hispanic organizations have backed broad, inclusive definitions of who is black or Hispanic because the rake-off from being black or Hispanic—affirmative action quotas—is indefinite in magnitude. The larger the percentage of the population, the larger the quota, and the larger the number of voters who are beneficiaries and thus supporters.

Q. So cultures change their definitions of who deserves to be a relative?

A. Not just cultures, but individuals change their definitions to fit their needs at the moment.

For example, right before the Battle of Agincourt, King Henry V needed all the loyal relatives, real or exaggerated, he could get, so Shakespeare has him address the English army:

"We few, we happy few, we band of brothers
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother".

On the other hand, once the bloodshed was over, King Henry probably wasn’t inclined to let his old yeomen archers come over and hang around the palace whenever they liked as if they were his actual brothers.

Q. So, leaders can persuade their followers to see themselves as more or less closely related?

A. Yes, but the more they follow existing genealogical fault lines, the more likely they are to succeed. 

Q. What’s an ethnic group?

A. The Census Bureau draws a sharp distinction between race and ethnicity, stating that individuals of Hispanic ethnicity can be of any race. The way the federal government uses the terms can be formalized like this:

A racial group is a partly inbred extended biological family.

An ethnic group is one defined by shared traits that are often passed down within biological families—e.g., language, surname, religion, cuisine, accent, self-identification, historical or mythological heroes, musical styles, etc.—but that don’t require genetic relatedness.

Q. Can you give an example?

A. The difference is perhaps easiest to see with adopted children. For example, if, say, an Armenian baby is adopted by Icelanders, his ethnicity would be Icelandic, at least until he became a teen and decided to rebel against his parents by searching out and espousing his Armenian heritage. But racially, he’d always have been Armenian.

Q. If races exist, doesn’t that mean one race has to be the supreme Master Race? And that would be awful!

A. Indeed it would, but no race is going to be best at everything – any more than one region could be the supreme master region for all human purposes.

For example, a mountaintop is a stirring place to put a Presidential Library. But if you want to break the land speed record in your rocket car, it’s definitely inferior to the Bonneville Salt Flats. 

Q. Okay, what does it all mean?

A. It means it’s time for our intellectuals to grow up. The world is what it is. Making up fantasies about it, and demonizing scientists such as James Watson, just makes reality harder to deal with.

Hazing at Harvard

An interesting comment on the latest Dalrymplean exercise in institutionalized humiliation at Harvard:
Chief Seattle said... 
Hazing by another name. Lots of frats require prospects to undergo painful or humiliating treatment before they can join. The army has basic training, Hollywood has the casting couch. Years ago, Kennedy would have humiliated fresh recruits about how to hold the salad fork and speak French. Now it's groveling at the diversity altar. Not quite as productive, but just as effective for that esprit de corps that will take them from their first internship to their final revolving door payday.

If true, then the chief beneficiaries of political correctness would be straight white men, since they are the only ones allowed to be bullied. That would be ironic. 

And if you look at who makes the Forbes 400, it's hard to falsify it.

But, I don't know. Here's Tom Wolfe on lemon sessions at Yale's Skull & Bones society. The flavor of humiliation seems different, more impersonal, less effective. 
   

May 5, 2014

Harvard students find each other obnoxious: straight white male privilege to blame

Harvard U. is full of people who clawed their way into Harvard, so it's not surprising that they often can't stand each other. Fortunately, 21st Century Harvard students have a vocabulary of whom to blame for any and all frustrations they feel. From the Harvard Crimson:
Kennedy School Students Call for Training To Combat Privilege in Classroom 
By TYLER S. OLKOWSKI, CRIMSON STAFF WRITER 2 days ago

Students at the Kennedy School of Government gathered in the school’s courtyard on Friday for a “moment of solidarity” in support of a movement lobbying the school’s administration to create a mandatory orientation program to help incoming students and faculty better recognize and address race and gender in the classroom. 
The movement, called HKS Speaks Out, began in October after students expressed having “really negative classroom experiences,” according to Reetu D. Mody, a first year Master in Public Policy student and an organizer of the movement. She said the group has amassed about 300 student signatures, or about a fourth of the school’s student population, on a petition that calls for mandatory privilege and power training. 
At Friday’s event, about 80 students participated in an exercise to visualize the differences in privilege created by race and gender. The students began in a single line, but as students were asked to step forward or backward based on questions about the social repercussions of their socioeconomic, racial, ethnic, and sexual identities, the line became disjointed. 
Mody said that she felt the event brought the students together to share their varying backgrounds and, in doing so, demonstrated the need for greater training on the issue. 
In response to the movement, the school’s diversity committee met with the group’s organizers to hear their concerns, Kennedy School spokesman Doug Gavel wrote in an email, adding that these discussions “have been extremely productive and constructive.”
Additionally, Melodie Jackson, senior associate dean for degree programs and student affairs, “has committed to integrating diversity training into student orientation and the school is currently exploring a variety of different training options,” Gavel wrote. 
At the sessions, many students expressed that the power dynamics in the classroom hurt their experience and limited their education, according to Mody.
“To have these discussions where we are not being challenged is very detrimental to our ability to be thoughtful policy makers,” Mody said. “Coming here and not getting an education to support that has been really difficult.” 
Out of these community conversations, the group decided that students and faculty needed to have a better understanding of “race, gender, socioeconomic class, sexual orientation, ability, religion, international status, and power differentials,” prior to entering classroom discussions, according to the movement’s open letter to the Kennedy School community. 
“You can either go to a diversity talk, or you can go play soccer–that was our orientation.” Mody said, of last year’s orientation. 
For Michelle A. Millar, a first year student at the Kennedy School, the status quo limits the amount of unique voices in the classroom. 
“We just can’t learn when we are only hearing from one side,” Millar said. “It’s hard to get that perspective if our professors aren’t trained to…make [classrooms] a safe place.” 
  
Freedom of expression, open debate, and the clash of intellects are all very fine, but they are hardly appropriate values at the John F. Kennedy School of Government.
   

"A Couple of Wild-Eyed Wackos: Me and the NYT"

With genetics reporter Nicholas Wade's book A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race, and Human History being published tomorrow, I dug up from my hard drive my 2003 article on Wade's work for the New York Times. Unfortunately, the version published on VDARE.com 11 years ago somehow got truncated over the years, so for completists, here's the original, which documents that Wade's belief in the reality of race has been hiding in plain sight in the Science section of the NYT for most of this century:

A Couple of Wild-Eyed Wackos: Me and the NYT  
By Steve Sailer, April 6, 2003, VDARE  
While most journalists write about race, I'm widely considered beyond the pale because I frequently write about it from a scientific perspective. My approach is seen as prima facie evidence of my extremism. Last year, both Jonah Goldberg and David Frum announced that they were shocked, shocked that I often "concentrate on genetic questions," as Jonah put it. Neither has taken up my offer to publicly debate the topic, but that's their point: some entire subjects are just so far beyond the boundaries of polite discussion that all a dignified pundit need do is occasionally point and squeal in horror at any violators of public decorum. 
After all, who else besides me reports on the genetics of race? Well, the New York Times is who. For several years now, the newspaper of record's distinguished correspondent Nicholas Wade has been making the case for the biological reality of race. Wade is a veteran science journalist who started out at the most prestigious British science journal, Nature, then moved to the top American scholarly periodical, Science, before going to the Times. He is the author of Life Script: How the Human Genome Discoveries Will Transform Medicine and Enhance Your Health and the editor of a long series of New York Times Books on Genetics, The Brain, Archaeology, Language and Linguistics, Fossils and Evolution, and the like.  
He is clearly the most important genetics reporter in the United States. Below are excerpts from a dozen of his NYT articles about politically incorrect subjects. I hope calling attention to this major aspect of Mr. Wade's work doesn't get him fired, but his position seems secure since he definitely has the science on his side. 
Much of his work is clearly driven by a concern for improving humanity's health. Wade fears that the "Race Does Not Exist" crowd will needlessly condemn sick people to death by keeping doctors from learning what treatments are appropriate for their genes. (Last year, the New York Times Magazine printed a fascinating article by Sally Satel called "I Am a Racially Profiling Doctor" that made a similar point.) 
Here is one of Wade's earlier efforts on this theme:
Race Is Seen as Real Guide to Track Roots of Disease  
"Challenging the widely held view that race is a "biologically meaningless" concept, a leading population geneticist says that race is helpful for understanding ethnic differences in disease and response to drugs. The geneticist, Dr. Neil Risch of Stanford University, says that genetic differences have arisen among people living on different continents and that race, referring to geographically based ancestry, is a valid way of categorizing these differences."
Wade expanded on Dr. Risch's views last month: 
 2 Scholarly Articles Diverge on Role of Race in Medicine   
"A view widespread among many social scientists, endorsed in official statements by the American Sociological Association and the American Anthropological Association, is that race is not a valid biological concept. But biologists, particularly the population geneticists who study genetic variation, have found that there is a structure in the human population. The structure is a family tree showing separate branches for Africans, Caucasians (Europe, the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent), East Asians, Pacific Islanders and American Indians.  
"Biologists, too, have often been reluctant to use the term "race." But this taboo was broken last year by Dr. Neil Risch, a leading population geneticist at Stanford University. Vexed by an editorial in The New England Journal that declared that race was "biologically meaningless," Dr. Risch argued in the electronic journal Genome Biology that self-identified race was useful in understanding ethnic differences in disease and in the response to drugs.  
"Race corresponded broadly to continental ancestry and hence to the branches on the human family tree described by geneticists, he said. Expanding this argument today, Dr. Risch and nine co-authors say that ignoring race will "retard progress in biomedical research." Racial differences have arisen, they say, because after the ancestral human population in Africa spread throughout the world 40,000 years ago, geographical barriers prevented interbreeding. On each continent, under the influence of natural selection and the random change between generations known as genetic drift, people would have diverged away from the common ancestral population, creating the major races. Within each race, religious, cultural and geographical barriers fostered other endogamous, or inbreeding, populations that led to the ethnic groups."
Wade wrote two articles last Christmas reporting on a recent population genetics study:
The Palette of Humankind  
"Humankind falls into five continental groups - broadly equivalent to the common conception of races - when a computer is asked to sort DNA data from people from around the world into clusters.
Gene Study Identifies 5 Main Human Populations  
"Scientists studying the DNA of 52 human groups from around the world have concluded that people belong to five principal groups corresponding to the major geographical regions of the world: Africa, Europe, Asia, Melanesia and the Americas. The study, based on scans of the whole human genome, is the most thorough to look for patterns corresponding to major geographical regions. These regions broadly correspond with popular notions of race, the researchers said in interviews."
Personally, I'm not that enthusiastic about these kind of top-down attempts to lump humanity into a small number of continental-scale races. Clearly, there are lots of hybrid and intermediate groups. Plus, it's fairly arbitrary when to lump and when to split. For example, should New World Indians be considered a separate race or merely a subset of East Asians? 
I prefer a more scaleable, bottom-up approach to thinking about race that starts with the simple but enormously useful definition: "A racial group is a partly inbred extended family." (See my VDARE article "It's All Relative: Putting Race in Its Proper Perspective.") 
Still, this kind of simplified model is valuable for medical care in the U.S., even if it has its weaknesses on the global scale. Are East Asians and American Indians different enough genetically that they should be treated as separate major races? I don't know. I suspect that if you are a doctor in, say, Morocco, the differences between East Asians and Amerindians aren't worth learning about. You'll treat either one so rarely that it's just not worth your time to study.  
On the other hand, here in the U.S., there are millions of East Asians and millions of American Indians, so our doctors should learn how they differ. Doctors, for example, often advise their patients to have a glass of red wine every day for the good of their hearts. They must, however, learn not to tell an American Indian to do that. His risk of becoming alcoholic is too great.  
Here are some other important articles by Wade: 
Genome Mappers Navigate the Tricky Terrain of Race  
"Scientists planning the next phase of the human genome project are being forced to confront a treacherous issue: the genetic differences between human races."
For Sale: A DNA Test to Measure Racial Mix 
"A company in Sarasota, Fla., is offering a DNA test that it says will measure customers' racial ancestry and their ancestral proportions if they are of mixed race."
Study Breaks New Ground on Variations in Genome  
"A large-scale study of the variability in the human genome has shown that each human gene may come in 12 different versions on average. The authors also say their findings cast doubt on the way that a large government and industry program is mining the genome for the genetic basis of common human diseases."
Here is Wade's review of the bestseller The Blank Slate by my friend Steven Pinker. (By the way, congratulations to Steve and Harvard U. President Larry Summers for his move from MIT to Harvard last week. Pinker, a linguist who is evolving into his generation's leading generalist, told the Boston Globe, ''For verbs, MIT is the best place; but for human nature and its implications, Harvard is the most important place.'')

In Nature vs. Nurture, a Voice for Nature 
"Who should define human nature? When the biologist Edward O. Wilson set out to do so in his 1975 book "Sociobiology," he was assailed by left-wing colleagues who portrayed his description of genetically shaped human behaviors as a threat to the political principles of equal rights and a just society.  
"Since then, a storm has threatened anyone who prominently asserts that politically sensitive aspects of human nature might be molded by the genes. So biologists, despite their increasing knowledge from the decoding of the human genome and other advances, are still distinctly reluctant to challenge the notion that human behavior is largely shaped by environment and culture. The role of genes in shaping differences between individuals or sexes or races has become a matter of touchiness, even taboo.  
"A determined effort to break this silence and make it safer for biologists to discuss what they know about the genetics of human nature has now been begun by Dr. Steven Pinker, a psychologist of language at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology."

One of the politically touchiest subjects in all genetics is DNA similarities and differences among Jews. Wade has not shied away from this delicate but captivating topic: 
In DNA, New Clues to Jewish Roots 
"A new thread is being woven into the complex tapestry of Jewish history, a thread fashioned from a double twist of DNA."

Y Chromosome Bears Witness to Story of the Jewish Diaspora 
"With a new technique based on the male or Y chromosome, biologists have traced the diaspora of Jewish populations from the dispersals that began in 586 B.C. to the modern communities of Europe and the Middle East. The analysis provides genetic witness that these communities have, to a remarkable extent, retained their biological identity separate from their host populations, evidence of relatively little intermarriage or conversion into Judaism over the centuries."

Another subject that less courageous reporters have avoided is the confluence of head and brain size and shape, intelligence, and race: 
Study Finds Genetic Link Between Intelligence and Size of Some Regions of the Brain 
"Lunging into the roiled waters of human intelligence and its heritability, brain scientists say they have found that the size of certain regions of the brain is under tight genetic control and that the larger these regions are the higher is intelligence."

A New Look at Old Data May Discredit a Theory on Race 
"Two physical anthropologists have reanalyzed data gathered by Franz Boas, a founder of American anthropology, and report that he erred in saying environment influenced human head shape. Boas's data, the two scientists say, show almost no such effect. The reanalysis bears on whether craniometrics, the measurement of skull shape, can validly identify ethnic origin… 
""I have used Boas's study to fight what I guess could be considered racist approaches to anthropology," said Dr. David Thomas, curator of anthropology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. "I have to say I am shocked at the findings."  
"Forensic anthropologists believe that by taking some 90 measurements of a skull they can correctly assign its owner's continent of origin - broadly speaking, its race, though many anthropologists prefer not to use that term - with 80 percent accuracy.  
"Opponents of the technique, who cite Boas's data, say the technique is useless, in part because environmental influences, like nutrition or the chewiness of food, would overwhelm genetic effects.  Boas measured the heads of 13,000 European-born immigrants and their American-born children in 1909 and 1910 and reported striking effects on cranial form, depending on the length of exposure to the American environment.  
"But in re-examining his published data, Dr. Corey S. Sparks of Pennsylvania State University and Dr. Richard L. Jantz of the University of Tennessee find that the effects of the new environment were "insignificant" and that the differences between parents and children and between European- and American-born children were "negligible in comparison to the differentiation between ethnic groups," they are reporting today in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences."

In summary, let us praise Nicholas Wade and the New York Times for their contribution to public understanding of this hugely important area.
   

Hispanics not working out for Catholic Church

It's Cinco de Mayo at the NYT:
Hispanic Growth Is Strength but Also Challenge for U.S. Catholic Church
MAY 5, 2014
Michael Paulson

The Roman Catholic Church has known for years that its future in the United States depends heavily on Hispanics. The church, which is the largest religious denomination in the country, is already about 40 percent Hispanic, and the demographic change is inexorable: Within the next few decades, Hispanics are expected to make up a majority of American Catholics. 
Hispanic parents have been much less likely to send their children to Catholic schools, and their sons have been less likely to pursue the priesthood. 
... A researcher at Boston College, Hosffman Ospino, has undertaken a new effort to understand the behavior of Hispanic American Catholics, and the implications for the larger church. In a study released Monday, Mr. Ospino finds a relatively high level of participation in church sacraments, but a low level of participation in other aspects of parish life, and a concerning lack of personnel and financial resources in parishes with high numbers of Hispanics. 
“There is a bleak picture in terms of resources,” Mr. Ospino said. “And it is noticeable that at higher levels of leadership, the number of Hispanics are lower.” 
There are positive findings: Mass attendance in parishes with Hispanic ministries is 22 percent higher than in the average parish, a promising sign in a church that has seen attendance at Masses dropping over the last few decades. Rates of baptism and first communions are also higher. 
But attendance rates at weekday Mass are quite low, participation in non-sacramental activities like youth groups is low, and contributions to collection are also low, often reflecting economic hardship. Parishes serving Hispanics often have fewer staffers per parishioner than other parishes, according to the study; parishes with high numbers of Hispanic parishioners are also less likely to have a parish school. 
Previous research has suggested that only 3 percent of Hispanic Catholic children go to Catholic schools in the United States, an issue that the leadership of the Catholic Church has been working on for some time. 

This low level of participation in social organizations outside the extended family  is a defining feature of Mexican-Americans. As I pointed out in 2007, Harvard researcher Robert D. Putnam was so stunned by his findings of low social capital and low trust in diverse cities in America that he hushed up his research for half a decade while he worked on his spin.

The Catholic Church in America was built into a powerhouse in the first half of the 20th Century by the organizational and political talents of Irish-Americans. Much of the appeal of massive immigration of Mexicans to current American elites is that their social capital fecklessness makes them less of a personal challenge for elite jobs. If you are Bishop O'Flaherty in a diocese that's now statistically dominated by Hispanics, you still might be able to pull enough strings for your nephew to succeed you. Your uncle faced down the Italians and Poles, so you'd be a poor reflection on the O'Flahertys if you can't do the same to the Mexicans.
        

Pym Fortuyn's assassin freed after only 12 years

The Dutch leftist legal professional who murdered in cold blood Pym Fortuyn, the candidate for prime minister on an immigration restriction platform, is out of prison after only 12 years. The assassin is usually identified as an "animal rights activist" to imply he was some kind of fringe wacko, but his testimony at his trial put him squarely in the mainstream of elite opinion on immigration in seeing Fortuyn's desire to stop Muslim immigration as beyond the pale. Indeed, the initial response of European Establishment figures in May 2002 was largely that Fortuyn had it coming.
   

More racialization in the NYT

Latina Bears Hopes of Her Party and People 
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG
Amanda Renteria is a Democrat running for Congress in California. Latinos — the nation’s most rapidly growing minority — are greatly underrepresented in public office.

For a long time, I've been pointing out how the New York Times has been egging on racial bloc voting among ethnic Hispanics, who frustrate Democrats by being much less racialist than blacks.
      

DMX has smallest vocabulary of any rapper

A new study of rappers' vocabulary sizes finds that DMX has, by far, the smallest, most repetitious vocabulary, which doesn't surprise me, having reviewed his 2003 movie:
LOS ANGELES, Feb. 27 (UPI) -- I had originally guessed that "Cradle 2 the Grave" would be a Masterpiece Theatre-style historical drama about the British Labor Party's creation of an all-encompassing "cradle to grave" welfare state. That assumption turned out rather wrong, however. 
"Cradle 2 the Grave," which stars rapper DMX and martial arts legend Jet Li, is actually a black-Asian hop-fuey action flick in the tradition of 2000's "Romeo Must Die." ...
Action movie producer Joel Silver (who, I was somewhat surprised to discover, is a different person than action movie producer Jerry Bruckheimer) has been trying to develop product to serve both markets simultaneously.

That reminds me of my friend Pat's story about Joel Silver (or maybe Jerry Bruckheimer, but probably not Joel Schumacher). A friend down the hall is a pool guy named, say, Tim Jones. Pat's drinking beer with Tim the Pool Guy when Tim's phone rings. He answers, "This is Tim."

Pat then hears a tiny screaming voice coming out of the phone. Tim puts his hand over the microphone and whispers to Pat, "It's Joel Silver, and he's got me confused with a different Tim. This happens a couple of times per year."

Tim turns on the speakerphone and Pat listens, fascinated, to the famous producer scream for five minutes at Tim for what he let slip to Channing Tatum's agent when he was supposed to only tell Ryan Gosling's agent, or something. 

Finally, Tim breaks in and say, "But, Mr. Silver, is there something unsatisfactory with the cleanliness of your swimming pool? This is Tim Jones, your pool service man."

"Oh ... Tim Jones? ... Oh, no ... My assistant alphabetized my contacts by first name! I thought I was talking to a different Tim. No, no, the pool is great. It's ... pristine. Fantastic job you're doing. In fact, next month there'll be a little extra in your envelope."

"Thank you very much, Mr. Silver." And Tim hangs up and tells Pat, "You know, I've done pretty well off him making that same mistake over the years."
           

May 4, 2014

From World War G to World War T

Ed West writes for The Telegraph:
But Kristian’s theory [political correctness as a positional good] also explains one aspect of political correctness: the speed at which the accepted and acceptable view moves, heading in an ever-more extreme direction. 
He uses the analogy of the music fan who, once the band he’s into has been discovered by everyone else, must find some other obscure outfit as a positional good. Once a wacky idea becomes accepted, the high-status politically correct brigadier must stand out with some new area of concern; this he or she does with one of those articles or blogs in which it is argued that, while progress has been made in one particular battle against prejudice or bigotry, the real war is now against racism in food labeling or the lack of transgender dolls for my children. It doesn’t matter if the issue at hand is inconsequential or, more likely, impossible to overcome; in fact the more so, the better. 
Unlike with music, however, the trend is always in one direction and there is no re-centering; it would be as if the mainstream of elite taste in music went from Led Zeppelin to Black Sabbath to Metallica to Slayer and onto Napalm Death.

I like Napalm Death's instrumentals, but the shouting vocals don't do anything for me.

Recentering in musical taste is a valuable corrective. For example, the Clash went to the Ramones' famous July 4, 1976 show in London and decided that they would play even faster than the Ramones, which they did on White Riot. But then what? Play even faster than White Riot? Instead, by 1979 they were doing Motown and by 1982 they were doing the Chopsticks-like Straight to Hell, which became popular a quarter century later as MIA's Paper Planes.
Politically that’s what much of the commentary in places like Slate sounds like to me – just some guy atonally screaming in my ear about some micro-injustice. 
Another aspect of this mindset is the desire to punish people who have insufficiently correct views on doctrine, even if the beliefs they hold were orthodoxy ten or five years ago. I’d really like to conduct a Stanford Prison-style experiment in which people were rewarded (perhaps with a dopamine hit) for punishing those with heretical views, and to see where it led.

Heck, do the experiment without any rewards: inflicting pain on the heretical would be a reward in and of itself for a lot of people.
To make it more interesting, only people with unorthodox views on only one side of the political spectrum would be punished, to see how extreme a group would become towards the other direction in a short space of time. Soon they’d be sacking people for disagreeing with an idea that didn’t exist anywhere in the world before 2001 – oh whoops, sorry, that was real life. 
My problem with the liberal-Left is not that its ideas are all bad – on a lot of things they’re right and I don’t consider myself that Right-wing [cue sarcastic laughter]. It’s just that in Britain and America the liberal-Left has had a moral monopoly for so many years that this has pushed it to some extreme positions, encouraged intolerance of other opinions, and created a large moral gulf between the rulers and the ruled. Most people would rather just listen to some Led Zeppelin.
 
On the other hand, there are meta-trends in music taste, such as music moving away from the exalted toward the narrowly functional. Dance music, for example, has evolved from this to this. That's going to take a lot of recentering.
    

"Senator Charged with Humor Harassment"

In the news:
Senator Charged with Humor Harassment

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- "Practically every evening for a month in 1978, the Senator would come into my office and close the door," tearfully recounts a former campaign worker. "He'd look me over slyly, then ask, 'What's green and skates?' I'd answer, 'I don't know, Senator.' And he'd chortle, 'Peggy Phlegm!'"  
"I was sitting on the men's room toilet," recalls another one-time staffer. "Finding me trapped there, Senator Noland stood outside my stall for 20 minutes telling me jokes like, 'What did the snail say when it climbed on the back of the tortoise? "YA-HOO!"'"  
Washington has been rocked by accusations by two dozen former employees and acquaintances that Senator Edmund Noland, (D-Alaska), who was reelected in 1998 under the slogan "Serious Times Require a Serious Senator," made unwanted humor attempts. Although Congress exempted itself from the Humor Harassment Act of 1997, the revelations have already led to demands for public hearings on the scandal involving the man previously admired as the dean of the New Earnestness.  
"It's not about humor, it's about power," explains humor harassment expert Dr. Malachi Bismarck, "The power to inflict your personality on your helpless, cringing underlings."  
One victim of the Senator's unwanted humor attempts admits, "Sure, sometimes he told good jokes. But, who can remember the funny ones? It's the painfully embarrassing stinkers that haunt you to the grave."  
A former aide reveals how his hero-worship had turned to horror. "I went to work for him because of his thought-provoking speeches against racism, the deficit, nuclear winter, global warming, and the coming ice age." But a shrouded side of his idol emerged during a routine 1994 hearing on an Air Force training program for pilots from Spain, when Senator Noland leaned over and whispered to his aide, "I hear the handbook is called 'How to Make the Spanish Fly.' . . . Get it? Spanish fly! Hnnh? Hnnh? Get it?" and heartily elbowed his aghast assistant.  
When asked about the incident, the Senator would only comment, "Some people, they just don't get it."  
"The Senator would tell me how Jesus and St. Peter are playing golf and Jesus keeps trying to hit just a 5-wedge like Arnold Palmer does on this long 240 foot par 7, but he can't hit it far enough, so he walks on the water to get his ball out of the lake, and so this golfer behind asks, 'Who does he think he is, Jesus Christ?'" recalls one time aide Nick Hill. "Sure, I laughed then, but Dr. Bismarck's Humor Victims Support Group has helped me see how degrading it was. Why is it supposed to be funny when St. Peter says, 'No, He is Jesus Christ, He just thinks He's Arnold Palmer?' I mean, who is Arnold Palmer person?"  
"The Senator relished fake dog-doo and squirting boutonnieres," recollects a Greenpeace lobbyist, a longtime political ally. "We Beltway oldtimers had to warn the younger ones not to meet with him alone on April 1st. Then, there were his dialect jokes: he'd start off with the appropriate Scottish or French accent or whatever, but would inevitably slide back to his all purpose Irish brogue, complete with 'Faith and begorrah,' by the punchline. That is, when he could remember the punchline. I don't know how many times he told me about the dyslexic agnostic who lies awake at night wondering, 'Is there a God?'"  
The Senator's friend, Washington lawyer Jack Kravits, contends, "It's not like he's the only closet cornball in Washington: there's a Supreme Court Justice, for instance, who annually tells his clerks:
Knock knock.
Who's there?
Roe v. Wade.
Roe v. Wade who?
Roe v. Wade? Who cares? As long as we cross this river somehow! 
"Which is, now that I think about it, probably the most cogent defense possible of the logic of the Court's compromise abortion decision in Reproductive Services v. Casey."  
Senator Noland's chief of staff, Mardi Ames, defends her boss: "He's only being singled out because he outreached to the humor-resistant community years before the humorless won recognition as a legally protected minority. If he had hired only humorful people, they'd have just razzed him back instead of brooding upon it for decades." Ms. Ames asks, "Is it fair to depict a man's life as if all his jokes were duds?" When asked for an example of the Senator's wanted humor attempts, she offers, "Well, let's see . . . oh, yes, there was the one about the three strings who walk into a bar and the first string says . . . Uh, well, maybe not that one . . . Look, can I get back to you on this?"  
A sense of betrayal is growing among Noland's longtime supporters. Pulitzer Prize winning columnist Nina Lindblad laments, "Repeatedly, my friends and I have celebrated some seemingly serious politician, only to be cruelly disillusioned. Are we utter fools? Do we know nothing of human nature? Well, of course not, so it must be society's fault, or maybe the media's."  
Humorism activist Bismarck sums up, "We are not against humor. Everybody wants wanted humor, but nobody wants unwanted humor. It's that simple."  
Just before presstime, Senator Noland issued a statement that he had been diagnosed as a victim of Humor Addiction Malady (HAM), and was checking himself into a clinic in order "To learn if my alleged behavior (which I deny completely but personally apologize for if it offended anyone) stems from my history of childhood sports abuse. After 50 years of repression, I have only now recovered my buried memory of how my father made me play Little League. The experts are finally realizing the terrible toll taken by 'Right Field Syndrome.' I hope my accusers can somehow find it in their hearts to forgive my Dad." 
By Steve Sailer 
Enter Stage Right, February 1993 
Reprinted in National Review, 2/23/98
      

Gary Becker, RIP

Gary Becker, the U. of Chicago economist, has died at 83. Becker's 1957 dissertation for Milton Friedman on the economics of discrimination helped inspire my 1996 cover story in National Review on How Jackie Robinson Desegregated America:
... Yet, beyond the obvious platitudes, baseball's long struggle over race can yield some surprising perspectives on our national predicament. The Robinson epic is generally lumped in with the 1954 Brown decision against segregated public schools and the 1964 Civil Rights Act outlawing job discrimination. Yet two crucial differences stand out. 1) The integration of organized baseball preceded the civil-rights revolution, and in reality baseball helped make later reforms politically feasible by giving white Americans black heroes with whom to identify. 2) Government had almost nothing to do with this triumph of the competitive market. Baseball owners finally realized that the more they cared about the color of people's money, the less they could afford to care about the color of their skin. 
It's ironic that the hallowed civil-rights revolution owed so much to something as seemingly trivial as pro sports. Yet, without this business of producing heroes for public consumption, whites might never have cared enough about blacks to be bothered by racial injustice. It's not the most noble trait of human nature, but we tend to be more outraged by minor slights to winners (note the endlessly recounted tales of the indignities Robinson endured) than by mass atrocities against downtrodden losers. 
That competitive markets make irrational bigotry expensive -- not impossible, but costly -- was first formally demonstrated in 1957 by University of Chicago economist Gary Becker (the 1992 Nobel Laureate), and in the four decades since has barely gained a toehold in conventional thinking. Let me be clear: this idea does not pollyannaishly presume that white people (or any other people) are motivated by disinterested good will. It merely assumes that if forced to by competition, people will hire whoever makes them the most money. Don't forget, though, that we humans are always conniving to exempt ourselves from competition. The more we can insulate ourselves from the open market, the more painlessly we can then discriminate for kin and countrymen and against people we don't like. Baseball's often ugly history shows this clearly.
   

SWPL favorite Junot Diaz on the Unbearable Lightness of his wallet

Dominican Person of Color
From The New Yorker:
APRIL 30, 2014 
MFA VS. POC 
POSTED BY JUNOT DIAZ

This is a condensed version of the introduction to “Dismantle: An Anthology of Writing from the VONA/Voices Writing Workshop,” which will be published this week. 
1
When I was in my mid-twenties I decided to apply for an MFA in creative writing. ... 
2
I didn’t have a great workshop experience. Not at all. In fact by the start of my second year I was like: get me the f*** out of here. 
So what was the problem? 
Oh just the standard problem of MFA programs. 
That s*** was too white. 
3
Some of you understand completely. And some of you ask: Too white … how? 
... Too white as in the MFA had no faculty of color in the fiction program—like none—and neither the faculty nor the administration saw that lack of color as a big problem. (At least the students are diverse, they told us.) Too white as in my workshop reproduced exactly the dominant culture’s blind spots and assumptions around race and racism (and sexism and heteronormativity, etc). In my workshop there was an almost lunatical belief that race was no longer a major social force (it’s class!). In my workshop we never explored our racial identities or how they impacted our writing—at all. Never got any kind of instruction in that area—at all....
From what I saw the plurality of students and faculty had been educated exclusively in the tradition of writers like William Gaddis, Francine Prose, or Alice Munro—and not at all in the traditions of Toni Morrison, Cherrie Moraga, Maxine Hong-Kingston, Arundhati Roy, Edwidge Danticat, Alice Walker, or Jamaica Kincaid. In my workshop the default subject position of reading and writing—of Literature with a capital L—was white, straight and male. ...

100% percent white, straight and male like Francine Prose or Alice Munro? Did Diaz even reread his first draft before publishing it in The New Yorker?

Also, notice that "Toni Morrison, Cherrie Moraga, Maxine Hong-Kingston, Arundhati Roy, Edwidge Danticat, Alice Walker, or Jamaica Kincaid" are all female. Perhaps Diaz is protecting his franchise as the male POC MFA writer from potential competitors?
Oh, yes: too white indeed. I could write pages on the unbearable too-whiteness of my workshop—I could write folio, octavo and duodecimo on its terrible whiteness—but you get the idea. ...

"Unbearable too-whiteness?"

And he goes on in that vein for some time. Shouldn't Mr. Diaz boycott writing in The New Yorker until its editors adopt new standards that will attract a subscriber base of less Unbearable Whiteness? They could send John McPhee to write 30,000 words on Kim Kardashian's wedding to Kanye, that kind of thing.

In the meantime, however, Diaz is making a killing off of white people's love of off-white people complaining about white people.

Another Dominican, before/after
I realize that Dominican baseball stars aren't representative of everybody born in the Dominican Republic, but it's worth comparing the looks of Diaz to other celebrities born in the Dominican Republic, like slugger Sammy Sosa (before and after his unfortunate experience with skin-whitening creams).

Back home in the DR, Diaz would be more or less of a Person of Pallor, but playing at anti-white rage has been very, very good to him in America as the go-to Hispanic guy for receiving literary prizes, including the $500k MacArthur "genius" fellowship. From his Wikipedia page:
Awards and nominations[edit] 
2002 PEN/Malamud Award
2008 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
2007 Salon Book Award for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
2007 National Book Critics Circle Award for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
2007 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao[57]
2007 Los Angeles Times Book Prize (Fiction) finalist for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao[58]
2008 Fellow of the American Academy Rome Prize
2008 Dayton Literary Peace Prize (Fiction) for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao[59]
2008 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award (Fiction) for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao[60]
2009 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award shortlist for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
2012 MacArthur Fellowship
2012 National Book Award, finalist, This is How You Lose Her [61]
2012 Publishers Weekly Best Books, This is How You Lose Her[62]
2012 Kansas City Star Top 100 Books, This is How You Lose Her
2012 New York Times 100 Notable Books, This is How You Lose Her
2012 Goodreads Choice Awards, Best Fiction, finalist, This is How You Lose Her[63]
2012 Story Prize, finalist[64][65][66]
2013 Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award, winner, "Miss Lora" from This is How You Lose Her[67]
2013 Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award longlist for This is How You Lose Her
2013 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction finalist (Fiction) for This is How You Lose Her[68][69]
2013 Honorary Doctorate (Doctor of Letters), Brown University[70]
2013 Norman Mailer Prize (Distinguished Writing)[71]
        

Donald T. Sterling's Korean Konnection

A reader made a clever suggestion in the comments a few days ago that maybe what Donald T. Sterling was talking to V. Stiviano about in the taped excerpts was how his compensated companion shouldn't post Instagram photos of her being with black men because it makes the two of them look bad to a constituency that Sterling cares very much about: Los Angeles's Koreans. 

Sterling had to pay a fine to the feds for naming his Koreatown properties with the word "Korean" in them to let blacks and Mexicans know they aren't welcome there. In one lawsuit, an employee testified that Sterling had said, "I like Korean employees and I like Korean tenants." Sportswriter Bill Simmons, a long-time Clippers season ticket holder, wrote in 2009 that from watching whom Sterling brings to games as courtside companions, one thing he knows about Sterling is that he "loves Koreans."

As the commenter pointed out, Stiviano started out as Maria Perez in the barrio in San Antonio (the Daily Mail has the details and a high school yearbook photo). Other Mexicans gave her trouble for being part black African. She moved to L.A. and started getting plastic surgery and maybe skin bleaching treatment. By now, after multiple name changes (the latest consensus seems to be she's age 31), she looks like a cross between a Subic Bay bar girl and a cat.

From the Korean point of view, a rich old man having a young mistress is unexceptionable. If the woman by Sterling's side looks vaguely Asian, maybe a Filipino, that's maybe a plus. That she seems to get around on the side is a little embarrassing for him, but Koreans don't have a full-blown harem culture. But if his kept woman is flaunting herself on social media with famous black swordsmen like Magic Johnson and Matt Kemp, well that's beyond the pale. In Koreatown, anything black brings back memories of the black pogrom against Korean shopkeepers and the subsequent Korean v. black firefights during the Rodney King riots. And her taste in men might also lend credence to those rumors that Sterling's mistress is part-black herself, which, from the Korean point-of-view, reflects very badly on the big man.

So, maybe this story is less about the ancient prejudices of the Bad Old Days of Southern Plantations and more about the new prejudices of America's Diverse Future being test-driven in Los Angeles?
            

Seattle Times: Study finds sexism in weed industry

From the Seattle Times in 2013:
Pot legalization is changing image of women and weed
Originally published Saturday, September 28, 2013 at 8:04 PM  
The marijuana industry and movement have long been a boys’ club. But a vanguard of women in Washington are breaking out of pot’s “pink collar ghetto,” the medical side. It’s important, advocates say, not only because women are key to reform and legalization, but also to* 
By Bob Young / 
Seattle Times staff reporter 
Aimée “Ah” Warner, CEO and founder of Cannabis Basics, cooks up a batch of topical medications for pain relief, all legal. She has convened a group called Women of Weed because the marijuana industry and movement have long been male dominated.
The female marijuana plant, sold for its sticky psychoactive chemicals, is where the value lies in the pot industry. 
But the industry has long been dominated by men and can be crassly sexist, particularly in underground pot commerce. Women are relegated to supporting roles and sometimes blatantly viewed as sex objects, according to a study published this year.
One Craigslist ad for pot trimmers posted by a grower in California sought a “good looking girl” willing to have sex. Another advertised that he’d pay extra for topless workers.
Legalization in Washington, though, should give women recourse for sexual harassment and withheld wages, and make the industry safer for women in general, said Lydia Ensley, a Seattle dispensary-operations manager.
She’s among a vanguard of women assuming prominent business and advocacy roles in what has long been a guys’ club. ...
Making women feel more comfortable about marijuana is key to ending prohibition, according to Wendy Chapkis, a University of Southern Maine sociology professor. Women vote more than men, and the gap is growing among younger voters. “While smoking may culturally be a ‘guy thing,’ voting is increasingly a ‘girl thing,’ ” Chapkis wrote in an academic article titled “The Trouble with Mary Jane’s Gender.”
The more that women influence pot culture, the more they make other women at ease with it. That was crucial, according to Chapkis, to last year’s voter-approved initiatives legalizing weed in Colorado and Washington.
Initiative 502 in Washington sought to close the gender gap at the polls by having women appeal to women in campaign ads. “Women are the secret weapon in this business,” said Neill Franklin, executive director of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition. “Now that women are really starting to become involved in marijuana reform, you see people listening.”
Men are more likely than women to use pot, according to surveys and polls.
That disparity has shaped the pot industry and reform movement.
The industry is “heavily testosterone-driven, no question about it,” said Carter, who owns a Seattle medical-marijuana clinic and plans to seek a state license to grow and process recreational pot. “Men are risk-takers,” she explained.
Few women have wanted to venture into the outlaw world of illegal dealing, with its guns and aggressive competition, said Carter, a grandmother, retired from a career in banking.
Instead, women with a passion for the plant tended to gravitate to medical marijuana. In turn, medical marijuana has become “something of a pink-collar ghetto,” as Chapkis put it.
As Washington state creates a legal recreational-marijuana industry, aspiring entrepreneurs appear to be overwhelmingly male, said Hilary Bricken, an attorney whose firm specializes in advising pot businesses.
“Almost everyone coming to see us are young white men,” Bricken said. And that gender imbalance is more pronounced, she said, than in other industries, such as entertainment, that her firm Harris & Moure specializes in.
That male dominance is also found in the advocacy movement, where the top three national groups — National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML), the Marijuana Policy Project, and the Drug Policy Alliance — are headed by men, and their boards of directors have a masculine tilt....
Steph Sherer, head of a national medical-marijuana group, Americans for Safe Access, was stunned by the movement’s gender imbalance when she got involved over a decade ago.
Sherer recalled going to her first NORML conference in San Francisco, where almost half of the registrants were women but not a single one was a speaker. “I had never seen anything like that,” she said. “In San Francisco you have to try to not be diverse.”
With her background in criminal-justice activism, Sherer gathered a group of women in her hotel room. “They said, ‘Oh, it’s always like this,’ ” she recalled.
Sherer is still the only woman leading a national advocacy group. “I feel like I’ve been in ‘Mad Men’ a few times,” she said. “I literally had a donor at a meeting comment on my cleavage.”

From the Seattle Times' comments, FG writes:
I, for one, am appalled that the drug dealing industry could be so sexist. What a horrible glass ceiling. I thought this was a nice family-friendly and socially important industry for our state. This is what all the press has led me to believe.  I'm beginning to think that this whole marijuana thing is actually kind of shady. 

* "But also to" what? you may be asking. Don't ask. It's a dope article.