Circular Thinking 101: Ibram Kendi’s Definition of Racism

Ibram X. Kendi is exulted as an intellectual leader by most people who peddle in Critical Race Theory. The movement is purportedly concerned with "racism." What is racism? Click the image of John McWhorter's Tweet below to watch a one-minute video:

Here is Kendi's definition of "racism" in writing: "A collection of racist policies that lead to racial inequity that are substantiated by racist ideas"

Now ask yourself whether Kendi answered the question or whether he completely evaded answering the question. It should be clear that "racism" is a key term. If his definition wobbles, his entire thought process wobbles. I should also note that I've read other passages by Kendi in which he is similarly (and I suspect, coyly and consciously) circular. 

Consider the definition of circular reasoning:

Circular reasoning (Latin: circulus in probando, "circle in proving"; also known as circular logic) is a logical fallacy in which the reasoner begins with what they are trying to end with.. . . Begging the question is closely related to circular reasoning, and in modern usage the two generally refer to the same thing.

Let us substitute to illustrate.  What is Communism? "A collection of communist policies that lead to communist inequity that are substantiated by communist ideas"

What is activism? "A collection of activist policies that lead to activist inequity that are substantiated by activist ideas"

As McWhorter suggests above and elsewhere, Ibram Kendi is not a serious thinker (and see here). McWhorter's point in the Tweet is to the extent that people don't hold Kendi to high standards for rigorous thinking, to the extent that they avert their eyes when Kendi embraces circular reasoning of a foundational term of his expansive theory, this is the "soft racism" of assuming that Kendi can't cut it because he is "black." Kendi is thus widely celebrated among the Woke and he commonly gives highly-compensated lectures discussing something he cannot define. Again, Kendi is vigorously embracing circular logic to underpin a term upon which he constructs his entire system. What other highly celebrated "thinker" would be given a pass for such an abject failure?

Notice that Kendi's "definition" or "race," he doesn't mention the common understanding of racism: treating someone badly because they are of another "race." What is "race"? According to Merriam-Webster, "race" refers to "any one of the groups that humans are often divided into based on physical traits regarded as common among people of shared ancestry." In short, "racism" is treating someone badly because they are seen as part of a group of people who look different than other groups of people. You will not hear Kendi ever basing his theory on this common understanding of "racism" because there is so little of it remaining in American society.

IIn many articles at this website, I've attacked the concept of "race.  Dividing people by "race" is as irrational as dividing them on the basis of astrology or phrenology. That is why I use so many scare quotes when I discuss "race." That said, "racism" is a real thing in our society, a disgusting and festering attitude with a long history. I've consistently held that even though I do not recognize "race" to be a legitimate way to characterize the personality, history or skills of any person, those who engage in "racism" should be socially ridiculed and sued for any harm they cause.  My approach is thus grounded.  I'm aware that there are some people who still treat each other badly based purely on personal appearance (e.g, skin tone, hair texture or facial features). This is a bad thing because is impairs human flourishing and harms people, including financially. I have presented a problem that was formerly prevalent, much less so in modern times. I personally know this because I lived through the 50's and 60's. I see how American culture has increasingly and exuberantly embraced "black" people, setting many incentives for hiring minorities and recruiting them as students. 61.2% of "blacks" are now economically categorized as middle class.  Kendi rejects every empirical approach to "racism," however, because he wants lawmakers to assume (in the absence of evidence) that all "racial" disparities are the result of racial attitudes.  Multivariate analyses are an anathema to Kendi. To a person with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

For these reasons, Kendi has constructed his entire "anti-racism" theory on his circular definition of "racism" and he doesn't care that he is peddling such slop. And in a stunning display of the soft bigotry of low expectations, Kendi is not called out on this blatant circularity, arguably among the lowest hanging fruit on the tree of logical fallacies.  Another key part of Kendi's theory is "structural racism" or "systemic racism." Those terms are equally problematic, as John McWhorter points out in his article, "CAN WE PLEASE DITCH THE TERM "SYSTEMIC RACISM"?" Here is an excerpt from McWhorter's article:

First let’s review what systemic racism means. There are inequities between whites and blacks. The reason is not that blacks are inherently less capable than whites. This presumably means that the discrepancies are traceable to devaluation of black people of some kind at some point in the pathway. This devaluation, even if not conscious, is a kind of racism, and this means that the society “is racist.” Thus the way to get rid of this kind of discrepancy is to undo the racism in the system.

But note that if we take this as a succession of logical statements rather than as a musical sequence valuable primarily because the term racism is intoned within it, then we hit a snag. Just what do we do to undo “racism” that is bound up in a complex system, and especially given that the system has a past that is unreachable to us now, as well as a present?

Here, The Elect burn to insist that, well, systemic racism exists anyway! And you the reader may want to reiterate that systemic racism exists. It does. There are indeed such discrepancies. The question is not whether they exist, but what one does about them.

“Undoing the racism in the system,” in this light, is word magic, not an intelligent prescription for change in the real world. Grouchy? Not really – just grounded.

In Ibram Kendi's world, ubiquitous "systemic racism" is the Holy Spirit.

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The Bedrock of Classic Liberalism

Andrew Sullivan, summarizing some of the core concepts of the new book by Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge.:

[J]onathan Rauch lays out some core principles that liberal societies rely upon. These are not optional if liberal society is to survive. And they are not easy, which is why we have created many institutions and practices to keep them alive. Rauch lists some of them: fallibilism, the belief that anyone, especially you, can always be wrong; objectivity, a rejection of any theory that cannot be proven or disproven by reality; accountability, the openness to conceding and correcting error; and pluralism, the maintenance of intellectual diversity so we maximize our chances of finding the truth.

The only human civilization that has ever depended on these principles is the modern West since the Enlightenment. That’s a few hundred years as opposed to 200,000 or so of Homo sapiens’ history, when tribalism, creedalism, warfare, theocracy or totalitarianism reigned.

The genius of liberalism in unleashing human freedom and the human mind changed us more in centuries than we had changed in hundreds of millennia. And at its core, there is the model of the single, interchangeable, equal citizen, using reason to deliberate the common good with fellow citizens. No ultimate authority; just inquiry and provisional truth. No final answer: an endless conversation. No single power, but many in competition.

In this open-ended conversation, all can participate, conservatives and liberals, and will have successes and failures in their turn. What matters, both conservatives and liberals agree, is not the end result, but the liberal democratic, open-ended means. That shift — from specifying a single end to insisting only on playing by the rules — is the key origin of modern freedom.

My central problem with critical theory is that it takes precise aim at these very core principles and rejects them. By rejecting them, in the otherwise noble cause of helping the marginalized, it is a very seductive and potent threat to liberal civilization.

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USA Today Unilaterally Removes “Hurtful Language” from a Female College Athlete’s Op-Ed

Chelsea Mitchell runs track at the college level. On May 22, USA Today published her Op-Ed in which she complained that runners who had "male bodies" are repeatedly and unfairly winning championships in women's college track meets. Three days after the publication of the Op-Ed, USA Today retroactively edited Chelsea Mitchell's Op-Ed, offering the following reasons as an editor's note:

Editor's note: This column has been updated to reflect USA TODAY’s standards and style guidelines. We regret that hurtful language was used.

I took the liberty of running a "compare" of the edited part of the original article (published in its original form by Alliance Defending Freedom) to the new version of the USA Today article, the one from which the "hurtful language" has been removed. The red corrections were the changes made by USA Today.

I don't understand what is factually inappropriate about saying that the MTF (male to female) transgender runners to some degree, retained "male bodies" if that is what Chelsea Mitchell (an accomplished athlete) observed. These are facts that are also strongly borne out by the stunning success of these runners when they are competing against the runners who are biologically female.  That is, in fact, the entire point of Chelsea Mitchell's Op-Ed. Apparently, she will not be allowed to make her argument in her own words.

Mitchell's article did not even once mention the vague-to-the-point-of-meaningless word, "gender." Her article was about the two sexes, male and female. Perhaps USA Today also finds basic biology principles hurtful, including this finding, which goes back for thousands of years: Mammals, including human animals, come in two and only two sexes, male (small gametes) and female (larger gametes) (and see this peer reviewed article.  There is not a third type of gamete.  Mitchell should be allowed to freely discuss and compare the competitive advantages of those with biologically male bodies versus those with biologically female bodies.  That said, this is 2021, and we are in the deep throes of Wokeness. 

Continue ReadingUSA Today Unilaterally Removes “Hurtful Language” from a Female College Athlete’s Op-Ed

The Many Problems with the Concept of “Microagressions”

If you would like to explore the many ways that the modern usage of the term "microagressions" has fallen off the tracks at the hands of modern "anti-racists," consider reading a soon-to-be published law review article by an attorney and a psychologist, Edward Cantu & Lee Jussim, Ph.D. Their article is titled: MICROAGGRESSIONS, QUESTIONABLE SCIENCE, AND FREE SPEECH.

I'll begin with their conclusions:

When scientists speak, people listen, even if the science is unscientific. If scientists are going to declare a broad and indeterminate number of acts inherently subtly racist, and a critical mass of those in positions of power and influence are ideologically inclined to believe them, it is imperative that the claims not be grossly exaggerated and that they be grounded in solid scientific methodology. The [current micro aggression construct- "CMC"] fails in this regard. After critical analysis, the CMC appears to be a project in attempting to retroactively validate initial ideological hunches; or, at best, to give voice to POC by substituting the scientific method for the perceptions of some of them. Whichever it may be, it is clear that, at this point, nobody—neither diversity administers, academics, or journalists—should take currently propagated lists of microaggressions as representative of anything meaningful. We assert this not to be gratuitously insulting to CMC researchers, but to forestall the harms that the CMC we fear may cause.

The authors acknowledge that the concept of "microagressions" is a worthy subject of study (beginning with the research by psychologist Chester Pierce in the 1970s), but they find  that the list of words and phrases that might have some legitimacy as racial slights have now been coupled, through concept creep, with numerous expressions that are innocent or even complimentary (see their Appendix for many examples). In step with this concept creep, the Overton Window has been slammed down to forbid numerous verbal expressions that are A) not problematic to the great majority of those who are purported to be victims of these slights and/or B) depend for their meaning almost entirely upon the intent of the speaker and the context in which the words are spoken.

The authors warn that current "anti-racist" ideology refuses to take into account the intent of the speaker. This tactical use of microaggressions, combined with sloppy "science" is harming society socially, by shutting down needed conversation:

Yet, we fear that microaggression researchers via their alleged insights are increasingly teaching POC that they are under constant assault; that they are being conditioned to be constructively offended—that is, offended because they’re taught that they’re supposed to be—in situations that do not implicate racism.

The research regarding microagressions has increasingly been motivated to find something invisible to attempt to explain (often simplistically) observable racial disparities:

Although the civil rights legislation of the 1960s ended legal racial discrimination, inequality still persists almost 60 years later. Why? Many have concluded it must be because of something secret, subtle, hidden, and underground. But what? By the 1970s, the social sciences were on a quest to find these supposedly hidden, camouflaged, or unconscious forms of racism. Those efforts generated a slew of concepts, such as “modern”  or “symbolic racism,” “implicit bias,” and “stereotype threat.” Interestingly, just as is the case with microaggressions, each of these areas have been characterized by a wave of initial enthusiasm including many publications, followed by critical reviews highlighting weaknesses, flaws, confounds and alternative explanations that consistently indicated that the initial enthusiasm was largely unwarranted.

The term "microaggressions" has been given an ideologically-laced strategic labeling to dramatically increase the perceived threat-level, creating an inverse-Trojan-horse: The term "microaggressions" puts us all on edge, even in the absence of a rigorous scientific foundation for the commonly-made claims regarding microaggressions. In recent years, the number of words and phrases allegedly encompassed by "microaggressions" has exploded (again, see the Appendix of the article) to the extent that ordinary conversation is increasingly feared as a social minefield:

Interestingly, just as is the case with microaggressions, each of these areas have been characterized by a wave of initial enthusiasm including many publications, followed by critical reviews highlighting weaknesses, flaws, confounds and alternative explanations that consistently indicated that the initial enthusiasm was largely unwarranted. intentionality, and less directly but atmospherically, oppression and domination. Rarely if ever would the lay person label an act committed with benign conscious intent a form of “aggression.” But consistent with tactical concept creep, this is the term chosen, even with the knowledge that use of the term means imputing to well-meaning actors a state of mind normally associated with culpability.

Psychologist Jonathan Haidt has written about the phenomenon of concept creep specifically in the context of microaggressions. In lamenting that psychology is “becoming a tribal moral community bound together by moral commitments to social justice and progressive ideals,” 95 Haidt noted that psychologists are incentivized “to find new ways in which members of allegedly victimized groups are harmed by current practices”; 96 hence the creeping expansion of the concept of harm. Particularly on point, Haidt also described as a “central innovation[] of microaggression theory” the disposal of a mens rea predicate for concepts such as “abuse” and “discrimination” “in ways that make it ever harder for anyone to defend themselves against ugly moral charges.”

Cantu and Lee Jussim have written a long, carefully researched, balanced and important article that will provide many of us the the confidence to raise our hands when we are next compelled to attend "anti-racist" training where the concept of "microaggressions" is blithely bandied about (as it often is). The authors were at least somewhat motivated to do this research because they were witnessing good-hearted people being chewed up in the current ideological juggernaut of "anti-racism."  Their article will help all of us to speak up whenever we are told to assume that "microaggressions" A) are ubiquitous and B) that labeling dozens of taboo expressions as taboo obviates the need to do real work to determine the mindset of those who speak.

The modern use of the concept of "microaggressions" is the equivalent of doing surgery with a chainsaw. All good and decent people know that we can't off-load human complexity to a simplistic list of taboo phrases assembled ad hoc by (often well-intentioned) ideologues.  Human beings are much more complex than that. Good-hearted people earnestly and make charitable case-by-case holistic determinations about whether people who are engaged in speech are being ignorant and rude or whether they are well-intentioned and kind-hearted (or something in between). I applaud the work done by Cantu and Lee because it will allow us to have more meaningful conversations going forward.

Continue ReadingThe Many Problems with the Concept of “Microagressions”