About “Race”

Writing at Journal of Free Black Thought, Amir Zaki is more than ready to dispense with the destructive idea of "race."

In 2023, It appears painfully evident that the concept of different and distinct races is a myth. From a biological perspective, this is nearly indisputable. Yet, legends die hard. In the United States, perhaps more pathologically than most other places on earth, people seem to hold onto this race myth as if their lives depended on it, as both oppressors and victims. The topic takes up an incredible amount of bandwidth in the media. Statistics show this trend has, ironically, been increasing despite the world's ethnic populations and cultures rapidly mixing with one another. This can be partially explained by America’s unique and tarnished past, exceptionalism, and isolation/provincialism. It can also be partially explained simply by habit. We made this bed. And we’ve been sleeping restlessly in it for centuries now.

Participation in race-based language may have some utility because it’s easy to go along with social conventions, but it is ultimately short-sighted, and I argue that we have to rip off the bandaid sooner or later, and I prefer yesterday. The reification and constant reinvention of the concept of race is deeply regressive and keeps everyone in an endless, discriminatory, divisive loop. As Carlos Hoyt, Jr. beautifully puts it, “For some of us, this false logic justifies discrimination and violence. For some of us, it leads us to try the best we can to bring about some sort of state of separate but equal state of racial equality. But we can’t. Race is predicated on separation. Separations that aren’t equal. Separate and unequal is the essential logic of race.”

The concept of separate and distinct races, as we currently understand it, is somewhere around 400 years old, which counts for roughly 0.1% of our human history on Earth. For comparison, the belief in witches lasted roughly 300 years and seems utterly absurd to almost everyone now . . .

My view is that all parties trafficking in race are serving to maintain the status quo, which will always be inequitable, divisive, and exclusionary, especially toward those who don’t fit into any racial categories. Proof that these strategies are failing can be observed easily by looking at the toxic relationships between racialized groups as expressed by the loudest and most powerful voices on social media. We have a billion-dollar anti-racist movement with an invisible enemy. This is a recipe for an endless battle.

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Judging the Judging of Modern High School Debates

Why have real debates when the judges can prejudge the debaters on the basis of ideology or identity politics? James Fishback writes at The Free Press: "At High School Debates, Debate Is No Longer AllowedAt national tournaments, judges are making their stances clear: students who argue ‘capitalism can reduce poverty’ or ‘Israel has a right to defend itself’ will lose—no questions asked." An Excerpt:

"Once students have been exposed to enough of these partisan paradigms, they internalize that point of view and adjust their arguments going forward. That’s why you rarely see students present arguments in favor of capitalism, defending Israel, or challenging affirmative action. Most students choose not to fight this coercion. They see it as a necessary evil that’s required to win debates and secure the accolades, scholarships, and college acceptance letters that can come with winning."

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DEI as the Antithesis of Free Speech

Randy Wayne, a biology professor at Cornell University has written an op-ed at the New York Post: "Cornell wants to ‘express itself’ but ‘diversity, equity, inclusion’ are in the way."

The goal of DEI activism, however, is the antithesis of free expression. Activists tend to believe they already know what is true and demonstrate little need for discussions that can change hearts and minds. They readily say so themselves.

Ibram X. Kendi, the most prominent leader in the DEI movement, for instance, concedes in his seminal book “How to be an Antiracist” — “An activist produces power and policy change, not mental change . . . [and the] Educational and moral suasion is not only a failed strategy. It is a suicidal strategy.”

Unlike the civil- and gay-rights movements, which required free speech to change legislation, the DEI movement requires the cancellation of free speech to influence power and policy. This is because the DEI bureaucrats are activists-in-disguise, at once unable and unwilling to defend their ideology with reasoned arguments based on truth.

This was demonstrated last month in a debate at MIT on a resolution that academic DEI programs should be abolished. None of the approximately 90 people in DEI positions at MIT chose to defend their ideology by participating in the debate.

Wayne's concerns remind me that the gurus of antiracism (Robin DiAngelo, Ibram Kendi) refuse to debate their ideas in public. You won't find them fielding questions and objections to their ideas on the Internet. They are preachers, not teachers. For years, I have used this as my rule of thumb: If someone refuses to debate their ideas, it is because they are afraid of scrutiny because they know don't have good ideas. Apparently, this is also the case at Cornell, where none of the 90 DEI administrators was willing to show up to discuss the merits of DEI.

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About the “M” Word: “Merit”

Pamela Paul writes in the NYT:

Is a gay Republican Latino more capable of conducting a physics experiment than a white progressive heterosexual woman? Would they come to different conclusions based on the same data because of their different backgrounds?

For most people, the suggestion isn’t just ludicrous; it’s offensive.

Yet this belief — that science is somehow subjective and should be practiced and judged accordingly — has recently taken hold in academic, governmental and medical settings. A paper published last week, “In Defense of Merit in Science,” documents the disquieting ways in which research is increasingly informed by a politicized agenda, one that often characterizes science as fundamentally racist and in need of “decolonizing.” The authors argue that science should instead be independent, evidence-based and focused on advancing knowledge.

This sounds entirely reasonable.

Yet the paper was rejected by several prominent mainstream journals, including The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Another publication that passed on the paper, the authors report, described some of its conclusions as “downright hurtful.” The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences took issue with the word “merit” in the title, writing that “the problem is that this concept of merit, as the authors surely know, has been widely and legitimately attacked as hollow as currently implemented.”

Instead, the paper has been published in a new journal called — you can’t make this up — The Journal of Controversial Ideas.

Here is the abstract to the excellent article to which Paul was referring, co-authored by 29 scientists, "In Defense of Merit in Science":

Merit is a central pillar of liberal epistemology, humanism, and democracy. The scientific enterprise, built on merit, has proven effective in generating scientific and technological advances, reducing suffering, narrowing social gaps, and improving the quality of life globally. This perspective documents the ongoing attempts to undermine the core principles of liberal epistemology and to replace merit with non-scientific, politically motivated criteria. We explain the philosophical origins of this conflict, document the intrusion of ideology into our scientific institutions, discuss the perils of abandoning merit, and offer an alternative, human-centered approach to address existing social inequalities.

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Scientific Journals Mass-Reject Article Promoting Merit in Science

Jerry Coyne and Anna Krylov, writing at the WSJ, "The ‘Hurtful’ Idea of Scientific Merit Ideology now dominates research in the U.S. more pervasively than it did at the Soviet Union’s height." They note: "Merit isn’t much in vogue anywhere these days." This was amply demonstrated in this video narrated by Lawrence Krauss, criticizing woke science and the damage being done to science by DEI departments.

Here is an excerpt from the article by Coyne and Krylov:

Yet a wholesale and unhealthy incursion of ideology into science is occurring again—this time in the West. We see it in progressives’ claim that scientific truths are malleable and subjective, similar to Lysenko’s insistence that genetics was Western “pseudoscience” with no place in progressive Soviet agriculture. We see it when scientific truths—say, the binary nature of sex—are either denied or distorted because they’re politically repugnant.

We see it as well in activists’ calls to “decolonize” scientific fields, to reduce the influence of what’s called “Western science” and adopt indigenous “ways of knowing.” No doubt different cultures have different ways of interpreting natural processes—sometimes invoking myth and legend—and this variation should be valued as an important aspect of sociology and anthropology. But these “ways of knowing” aren’t coequal to modern science, and it would be foolish to pretend otherwise.

In some ways this new species of Lysenkoism is more pernicious than the old, because it affects all science—chemistry, physics, life sciences, medicine and math—not merely biology and agriculture. The government isn’t the only entity pushing it, either. “Progressive” scientists promote it, too, along with professional societies, funding agencies like the National Institutes of Health and Energy Department, scientific journals and university administrators. When applying for openings as a university scientist today, job candidates may well be evaluated more by their record of supporting “social justice” than by their scientific achievements.

But scientific research can’t and shouldn’t be conducted via a process that gives a low priority to science itself. This is why we wrote our paper, which was co-authored by 27 others, making for a group as diverse as you can imagine. We had men and women of various ages, ethnicities, countries of origin, political affiliations and career stages, including faculty from community colleges and top research universities, as well as two Nobel laureates. We provided an in-depth analysis of the clash between liberal epistemology and postmodernist philosophies. We documented the continuing efforts to elevate social justice over scientific rigor, and warned of the consequences of taking an ideological approach to research. Finally, we suggested an alternative humanistic approach to alleviating social inequalities and injustices.

But this was too much, even “downright hurtful,” as one editor wrote to us. Another informed us that “the concept of merit . . . has been widely and legitimately attacked as hollow.” Legitimately?

In the end, we’re grateful that our paper will be published. But how sad it is that the simple and fundamental principle undergirding all of science—that the best ideas and technologies should be the ones we adopt—is seen these days as “controversial.”

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