How Cancel Culture Works: The Lived Experience of Biologist Colin Wright

Many on the political left are increasingly proclaiming that cancel culture is not really a thing. Their most common tactic is to show that their best efforts are not successfully destroying the careers of prominent personalities such as J.K. Rowling and Steven Pinker. They ignore that many less-prominent people are successfully being chilled and cowed. These far more numerous lesser-known scientists and intellectuals are not sufficiently established in their careers to withstand repeated false broadside accusations that their (factually true) scientific observations are allegedly bigoted.  Thus, a deep intellectual chill has settled over the United States this summer.

At Quillette, biologist Colin Wright offers a detailed schematic of how cancel culture played out in his life. Like many others who have found that their jobs and reputations are under attack, Wright put the target on his own back by asserting scientifically true statements. In Wright's case, he asserted both that that there are only two sexes and that some people cannot be neatly categorized as male or female. These undeniably true statements appeared in an article titled "The Dangerous Denial of Sex," co-written by Wright and Emma N. Hilton, appearing in the Wall Street Journal on Feb 13, 2020. Here are the words of Wright and Hilton:

In humans, as in most animals or plants, an organism’s biological sex corresponds to one of two distinct types of reproductive anatomy that develop for the production of small or large sex cells—sperm and eggs, respectively—and associated biological functions in sexual reproduction. In humans, reproductive anatomy is unambiguously male or female at birth more than 99.98% of the time. The evolutionary function of these two anatomies is to aid in reproduction via the fusion of sperm and ova. No third type of sex cell exists in humans, and therefore there is no sex “spectrum” or additional sexes beyond male and female. Sex is binary.

There is a difference, however, between the statements that there are only two sexes (true) and that everyone can be neatly categorized as either male or female (false). The existence of only two sexes does not mean sex is never ambiguous. But intersex individuals are extremely rare, and they are neither a third sex nor proof that sex is a “spectrum” or a “social construct.” Not everyone needs to be discretely assignable to one or the other sex in order for biological sex to be functionally binary. To assume otherwise—to confuse secondary sexual traits with biological sex itself—is a category error. Denying the reality of biological sex and supplanting it with subjective “gender identity” is not merely an eccentric academic theory. It raises serious human-rights concerns for vulnerable groups including women, homosexuals and children.

Here, from Wright's article at Quillette, is the kind of thing that happens when people speak up, compelled by a sense of integrity and a burning desire to keep members of the public from being misled or harmed:

I was contacted by a biology-department chair at a private liberal arts college in the Midwest. He commended me for my writings, and told me that he’d even used my New Evolution Deniers essay as a basis for discussion in his own classes. But while he and his fellow biology-department faculty would likely support my hiring, he said, the school’s own human-resources department would almost certainly block me as “too risky.” These experiences remind me that when Blow extols “the masses” who are canceling people like me, the people he’s praising are actually just a small coalition of professional trolls such as Bird, working in effective concert with the risk-averse, upper-middle corporate bureaucrats who now have taken over decision-making on many college and university campuses.

I too have been seeing an increasing denial of cancel culture on social media, along with a denial of science, a hostility to the use of statistics to analyze complex social phenomena and even a disparagement of the intellectual tools we have inherited from The Enlightenment. See here, here and here. This is distressing for many of us to see this bullying of individuals and institutions and the consequent chilling of the many intellectuals who remain silent because they don't have the stomachs for unfair fights like these.

Continue ReadingHow Cancel Culture Works: The Lived Experience of Biologist Colin Wright

Hear No Facts, See No Facts.

At the Wall Street Journal, Ayaan Hirsi Ali writes that many of the most vocal players in our re-energized race debates are incentivized to maintain conflict rather than seeking solutions. I have seen what Ali has seen about the the resistance to facts and statistics when these things are inconvenient to the narrative of choice by those supporting the Black Lives Matter political agenda (which is separate and distinct from the idea that Black lives do, of course, matter). Whenever there is such a disconnect between narrative and evidence, that is a big red ultra-suspicious flag.

Here are a few dozen other issues and facts courtesy of Sam Harris (Making Sense Podcast Transcript: "Can We Pull Back From the Brink") that the reform movement not only ignores, but intensely refuses to consider. Why doesn't BLM's website take a careful look at available statistics regarding policing on its website?  If it did, BLM would find significant support for the claim that police harass Blacks more often than non-Blacks, but they would not find evidence that police use lethal force against Blacks disproportionately.

If the people insisting on reform refuse to first discuss the facts on the ground--a vigorous exploration the facts, pro and con--why should the rest of us--the country at large--trust that movement?

Here is an excerpt from Ali's WSJ article:

Although I am a black African—an immigrant who came to the U.S. freely—I am keenly aware of the hardships and miseries African-Americans have endured for centuries. Slavery, Reconstruction, segregation: I know the history. I know that there is still racial prejudice in America, and that it manifests itself in the aggressive way some police officers handle African-Americans. I know that by measures of wealth, health and education, African-Americans remain on average closer to the bottom of society than to the top. I know, too, that African-American communities have been disproportionately hurt by both Covid-19 and the economic disruption of lockdowns.

Yet when I hear it said that the U.S. is defined above all by racism, when I see books such as Robin DiAngelo’s “White Fragility” top the bestseller list, when I read of educators and journalists being fired for daring to question the orthodoxies of Black Lives Matter—then I feel obliged to speak up.

The problem is that there are people among us who don’t want to figure it out and who have an interest in avoiding workable solutions. They have an obvious political incentive not to solve social problems, because social problems are the basis of their power. That is why, whenever a scholar like Roland Fryer brings new data to the table—showing it’s simply not true that the police disproportionately shoot black people dead—the response is not to read the paper but to try to discredit its author.

I have no objection to the statement “black lives matter.” But the movement that uses that name has a sinister hostility to serious, fact-driven discussion of the problem it purports to care about. Even more sinister is the haste with which academic, media and business leaders abase themselves before it. There will be no resolution of America’s many social problems if free thought and free speech are no longer upheld in our public sphere. Without them, honest deliberation, mutual learning and the American problem-solving ethic are dead.

Continue ReadingHear No Facts, See No Facts.

A Giant Leap Backwards for Humankind: What the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History & Culture Thinks About White People

What would you think if a Fortune 500 Corporation Human Resources Director walked up to a podium and announced the following to a big crowd: "Whiteness and white racialized identity refer to the way that white people, their customs, culture, and beliefs operate as the standard by which all other groups of are compared.”

Say what?

Assume further that this HR Director then announced that the following are the “common characteristics of most U.S. White people most of the time”:

  • White people are self-reliant;
  • White people are independent and they highly value autonomy;
  • White people use the Scientific Method, with objective rational linear thinking, cause-and-effect relationship and quantitative emphasis;
  • White people delay gratification and follow rigid time schedules.
  • White people believe the ideal social unit is the nuclear family of father, mother and 2.3 children;
  • The children of white people have their own rooms and they are independent;
  • White people believe hard work is the key to their success and they believe “work before play”;
  • White people plan for the future by delaying gratification and they follow rigid time schedules.

Upon hearing this list, you would strongly suspect that you were listening to a white supremacist or that you had unwittingly stepped into a time warp that threw you back 200 years. Upon reminding yourself that this is actually the year 2020, you would conclude that this big corporation should be sued out of existence based on civil rights violations for creating a hostile work environment for its Black employees.

Unfortunately the source of these words and ideas is a webpage of the National Museum of African American History & Culture, a Smithsonian museum supported by U.S. taxpayers. Here is separate image of the “Whiteness” infographic. 

How does one even begin to articulate the many problems with these ideas?  How should concerned people respond when false information is being used to divide us. What is the solution when a public museum dedicated to African American history mocks the words of Martin Luther King?

I write this article fully acknowledges that racist conduct can still be found in many places in 2020 and that this bigotry should be dealt with aggressively through civil rights laws and social condemnation. We must condemn all real instances of racism, but we must simultaneously question the foundational concept of "race" from which the possibility or racism sprouts.  In short, anyone who wants to eviscerate racism needs to fight a two-front war. NMAAHC's "Whiteness" page doubly fails to fight this two-front war on racism.

Advocating that we should treat people differently based on skin color (as NMAAHC is enthusiastically doing) is throwing gasoline on our racial fires. The "Whiteness" page is stunningly divisive and it is factually unhinged. I would no more expect NMAAHC to be teaching us to be racist than I would expect the American Museum of Natural History to be teaching us that the earth was created 6,000 years ago and that modern humans co-habited our planet with the dinosaurs.

It is demonstrably false that people are born color-coded such that others can determine their personalities, habits and skills by noticing their skin color. That's because immutable traits of individuals, such as skin color, do not determine personality, resilience, aesthetics, capacity for empathy, intelligence, aspirations, parenting skills or any of the other human traits discussed on the NMAAHC "Whiteness" webpage. Skin color doesn't  dictate content of character any more than the many other things over which we have no control, things such as eye color, hair color, whether we have six toes, our birth date or the types of bumps we have on our heads. Constricting the way we evaluate people by using an Overton Window of black versus white  uses the exact same flawed approach used by astrology and phrenology, which also proclaim content of character by reference to equally irrelevant observations.

Many of the human traits listed on the museum’s website ("work before play" and "rational thinking") are demonstrably not true of many “white” people. Many of these same traits are compellingly true of (and embraced as valuable by) many successful Blacks.

NMAAHC's suggestion that we bifurcate people into "white" and "black" is based on an enormous falsehood. There is no meaningful way to distinguish who is white and who is black, because we are all varying degrees of brown, we are all from Africa (and see here) and we are all interrelated.Trying to determine who is more closely related to whom by physical appearance is often counter-intuitive:

By analyzing the genes of present-day Africans, researchers have concluded that the Khoe-San, who now live in southern Africa, represent one of the oldest branches of the human family tree. The Pygmies of central Africa also have a very long history as a distinct group. What this means is that the deepest splits in the human family aren’t between what are usually thought of as different races—whites, say, or blacks or Asians or Native Americans. They’re between African populations such as the Khoe-San and the Pygmies, who spent tens of thousands of years separated from one another even before humans left Africa.

Nor is there any meaningful basis for declaring that there is any unified "white culture" or a unified "Black culture." No people of any color all think the same. Not even close. No person has been authorized by all whites or all Blacks to speak on their behalf.  Not even close. "Race" is a stunningly unscientific concept.

There is more genetic diversity within a “race” than between "races.". Further, "there is no homogeneous African race" and "there is more diversity in Africa than on all the other continents combined" (see graphic under this title here) . As reported by National Geographic in an article titled, "There’s No Scientific Basis for Race—It's a Made-Up Label,"

[W]hen scientists set out to assemble the first complete human genome, which was a composite of several individuals, they deliberately gathered samples from people who self-identified as members of different races. In June 2000, when the results were announced at a White House ceremony, Craig Venter, a pioneer of DNA sequencing, observed, “The concept of race has no genetic or scientific basis.”

Continue ReadingA Giant Leap Backwards for Humankind: What the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History & Culture Thinks About White People

Biologists Heather Heying and Brett Weinstein Dissect Robin DiAngelo’s Personal “White Fragility”

In this 15-minute video, evolutionary biologists Heather Heying and Brett Weinstein dissect Robin DiAngelo’s revealing book, “White Fragility.” Their discussion directly engages with DiAngelo’s central arguments. Heying and Weinstein conclude that DiAngelo’s book is revealing in the sense that DiAngelo (who is white) reveals herself to be an unrepentant racist who is attempting to impose her distorted view of reality on everyone else, especially her core belief that “race” is the single most defining features of our complex human histories and experiences.

Heying states the following at min 5:00: “This book is a hot mess of sloppy scholarship and cherry-picked data, but that’s not actually its biggest flaw.” Heying then reads several passages from “White Fragility.” I almost fell out of my chair as I heard DiAngelo’s words. Listen in at min 5:30 to hear DiAngelo’s words for yourself. Normal people don’t think these thoughts.

I bought a copy of “White Fragility” to make sure that Heying and Weinstein were giving DiAngelo a fair reading. I also base my opinions on my own readings of other work by DiAngelo. Since viewing the above video, I’ve read other passages from “White Fragility” that are similar to those discussed by Heying and Weinstein. Consider this one:

For example, I was invited to the retirement party of a white friend. The party was a pot-luck picnic held in a public park. As I walked down the slope toward the picnic shelters, I noticed two parties going on side by side. One gathering was primarily composed of white people, and the other appeared to be all black people. I experienced a sense of disequilibrium as I approached and had to choose which party was my friend’s. I felt a mild sense of anxiety as I considered that I might have to enter the all-black group, then mild relief as I realized that my friend was in the other group. This relief was amplified as I thought that I might have mistakenly walked over to the black party!
[DiAngelo, Robin J.. White Fragility (p. 53). Beacon Press. Kindle Edition.]

Here’s another:

Indeed, throughout my life, I have been warned that I should avoid situations in which I might be a racial minority. These situations are often presented as scary, dangerous, or “sketchy.”
[DiAngelo, Robin J.. White Fragility (p. 53). Beacon Press. Kindle Edition.]

It seems that DiAngelo needs to spend more time getting comfortable around Black people. That has been an early and recurring thought in my mind.

Continue ReadingBiologists Heather Heying and Brett Weinstein Dissect Robin DiAngelo’s Personal “White Fragility”

Harper’s Letter on Justice and Open Debate

We are now beginning to hear the other side of a much-needed debate advocating for the need for robust and open debate. Too many careers have already been threatened or ended by a misstep or two on an invisible ever-changing minefield containing far too many untethered and unsustainable ideas. And whatever happened to do unto others? Here is the final paragraph of the Harper's Letter signed by numerous artists, thinkers and writers who fear for the future. The document is titled: "A Letter on Justice and Open Debate":

This stifling atmosphere will ultimately harm the most vital causes of our time. The restriction of debate, whether by a repressive government or an intolerant society, invariably hurts those who lack power and makes everyone less capable of democratic participation. The way to defeat bad ideas is by exposure, argument, and persuasion, not by trying to silence or wish them away. We refuse any false choice between justice and freedom, which cannot exist without each other. As writers we need a culture that leaves us room for experimentation, risk taking, and even mistakes. We need to preserve the possibility of good-faith disagreement without dire professional consequences. If we won’t defend the very thing on which our work depends, we shouldn’t expect the public or the state to defend it for us.

Continue ReadingHarper’s Letter on Justice and Open Debate