boohabian
slamdance

Men talk of the Negro problem. There is no Negro problem. The problem is whether the American people have honesty enough, loyalty enough, honor enough, patriotism enough to live up to their own Constitution

-- Frederick Douglass, August 1893

boo what?
interview with the boohab

test your racism
black hell
cyberspace my black ass
race man's home companion

operating theories
why are you white?
what is racist?
affirmative action
race man's debunker
technical references
case law

Links

I posted the following at Discrminations a few weeks ago, and then the site died. Since that time, a large number of significant institutions have showed support for the University of Michigan in the Bollinger case, and our friends at Discrminations have been scrambling frantically. It wasn't me, of course

my parents were sociologists, but i learned to program computers when i was 13 years old in 1974. i could explain nuclear fusion and fission in the 7th grade and independently figured out negative numbers when i was 9.

as a national achievement finalist (and national merit semifinalist) i was invited to the mite program. i regularly scored in the high 80th percentiles on all standardized tests.
but i was a junior in highschool before i ever even *heard* of MIT.

the mite program had an extension at georgia tech (which i also never heard of) which was handled through the atlanta university center, and it was into that specific program i was invited.

my college advisor had essentially no advice.

i declined the program. i never met any engineers or scientists. my jesuit prep school had a lousy math program, and my math education essentially stopped. although i applied and was accepted to usc on early decision for their electrical engineering program, my interest was solely in computing, and software at that (i took early classes, the full curriculum and directed study in computers). there were only 5 kids in the student body of 1200 who understood anything about computers.

at the age of 17 i took a summer job after highschool graduation running all the scientific computing programs for a chemical reprocessing facility. evidently, i had a knack for thermodynamics programming. my boss said that i had great potential to be a chemical engineer. but by this time it was obviously too late in my highschool career (i had already graduated) to take honors chemistry, which this practicing chemical engineer said i would have passed with flying colors.

if i would have taken the mite invitation, i would have learned from real engineers at the university level which way my talent could have taken me. instead i muddled through highschool, uninspired and told in no uncertain terms that there are no such things as black engineers (or partners in accounting firms). since there were no computer engineers that i could have contact with, the entire area was a complete mystery.

i have no doubt that such a program would have shown me exactly what i needed to know, as i have subsequently met many mite graduates, including one of my best friends who is now a research professor at georgia tech. despite the fact that by any standard, i have landed on my feet and have a rewarding career, there is no question that i could have done better had i taken advantage of that opportunity.

most people who don't make it their business have little idea of what it takes to discover and nurture the talent and hunger of kids who have racist and other presumptions against their undernourished ambitions. i've been that kid, and i've helped others who are that kid.

the broad net cast by programs like the mite program is appropriate, and yet there are many fish, like me, that still get away.

i can assure you that there is institutional patronage in programs like mite and that many black and latino folks who have come up through the system the hard way will continue to fight for it.

i can also assure you that organizations like nsbe (of which i was a national officer) will continue their unique missions, and i can further assure you that despite the complete lack of racial restrictions or preferences in membership, whitefolks will continue to ignore them.

i could argue for years that there is something very different about being black or latino and persuing arguably the most difficult of all undergraduate programs. it is a story that doesn't translate well, especially in light of the tabula rasa of context-free colorblindness. what doesn't go away, however is the sense of duty and purpose of those deeply involved in such programs.

the fact remains that america wants engineers, scientists and technologists. furthermore it is undeniable that programs like mite and groups like nsbe and shpe have been very successful in their missions to recruit, retain and graduate black and latino engineers.

i say more power to them.

11:13:58 PM    comment []

If you don't understand a word, look to the dictionary. If you don't understand blackfolks, look to science.

This is evidently the regime in place as folks tiptoe through the minefield of heritable intelligence. I'm not going into a long expository thing here because this kind of thing is best worked through interactively, like a game of 20 questions. There is entirely too much ground to cover.

Since this matter involves The Bell Curve, I suppose it doesn't help in my distinction that I'm against it. But my primary argument against the Bell Curve is that it was a shoddy attempt to undermine the political process with weak science. In any case what I'm going to suggest is that there is a philosophical framework we should keep in mind which reigns in our scientific inquiry and directs it. Racism has no place in our republic, whether or not there are ultimately scientific findings which support certain axioms of racial supremacy. Free inquiry isn't automatically valuable.

To the subject at hand, I have no problem with the idea of heritable intelligence. It makes perfect sense that some brains are physically more well adopted to performing certain computational tasks, just as some eyes see better than others. But as you map such things onto race, it's like saying categorically that blue eyes see better than brown eyes. The external morphology we can recognize has nothing to do with the qualities of the eye's ability to see. In a society such as ours, which is predisposed to seeing things in racial terms (which have no consistent correlation to genetics) it's not surprising that things get twisted.

The question arises as to what social significance we attribute to scientific discoveries. What I cannot seem to fathom is how seemingly intelligent people have completely lost their understanding of the lessons of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. If the lessons of the corruption of a eugenically enhanced society were not made plain enough in that book, there are surely other examples. But I think this is a matter we can solve with a tiny bit of reasoning and common sense.

The reason racism is odious is because to controverts the premises of civil equality, the entire point of the French and American revolutions. But to understand this we must go a bit deeper than the common understanding of racism. I'll use the following terms. Racialism, Extrinsic Racism, Intrinsic Racism.

racialism:
The belief that there are differences between human beings which are inherited such that they can be ordered into separate races in such a way that each race shares traits and tendencies which are not shared by members of any other race. Each race has an 'essence'.

All forms of racism build from the premise of racialism. Notice that racialism is not saying anything 'good' or 'bad' about races just that mutually exclusive races absolutely exist and divide the species. The racialist would argue that you could trace the bloodlines of jews throughout history and that you can definitely determine the 'jewness' of any human being according to his racial 'essence'.

A racialist does not necessarily believe that the races, as we understand them in America are complete. He may say that there are, in actuality, 37 races. We just don't know what they are yet. The racialist's point however is that race, whatever it turns out to be, is deterministic of human behavior and that we need to know.

 
extrinsic racism:
The extrinsic racist says that there is a moral component to the 'essence' of a race which warrants differential treatment. These differences are, to the extrinsic racist, not particularly controversial. The extrinsic racist, while maintaining the belief for example that Jews are greedy, might not feel anything wrong with befriending a Jew. The extrinsic racist might very well applaud the Jew who proves himself not greedy and call him a credit to his race.
 
intrinsic racism:
The intrinsic racist says that the moral 'essence' of a race establishes an incontrovertible status for the race. no matter what an individual member of a race does he should be treated just like the rest of his race. the extrinsic racist would argue that the Jew is so greedy that he would hide his greed in order to gain other's confidence or that this generous person is simply not a Jew.

(I specifically use jews in this definition because I understand that jews are not a racial group per se)

If one can quantify a particular type of intelligence which is inheritable then one is clearly saying that it is distinct and mutually exclusive. If it weren't, why bother with genetic research? As far as I know, nobody has figured out which brain shape helps one multiply numbers without the use of paper, or which gene governs the ability to speak multiple languages but that's the aim of the science. Find the definitive link. In short, the logic of genetic inheritance of intelligence works exactly as racialism does. There are genes, intelligence is expressed through the genes. You either have the gene or you don't. It's a hardware question. Ultimately the science will map the various intelligences into mutually exclusive genetic groups. These will be the races of intelligence.

I'm not going to get bogged down in questions of how much difference environment makes because it doesn't mitigate the intent of the genetic science. Analagously speaking, it doesn't matter that eyesight can be corrected, the search goes on for the gene for perfect eyesight.

In America, we are infatuated with the idea that we are a meritocratic society. That's hardly as well-wrapped a concept in reality as in theory, ask any investment counselor who deals with heirs. Nevertheless much of America operates in persuit of that principle. It is this infatuation with meritocracy which pushes the morally neutral racialism of those I'll call 'genetic expressionists' into questionable territory, into racism, and this is exactly where the Bell Curve begins.

If intelligence is meritorious, then those who are intelligent *should* have enhanced standing in our society if our society *should* be meritocratic. This is the morally provocative statement. Any way you assert it, either as a plan for a future elitism or as an apology for the present inequality, it is an express appeal for that singular value to have weight in an individual's standing. What's particularly galling about this is that of all human attributes, intelligence is probably the most amoral. Rewarding people for being smarter than their neighbor is a quick road to hell. Should the energy traders who outsmarted the State of California deserve those profits? Should the terrorists who outsmarted the entire American intelligence community be commended? Of course not. There are other things that are clearly more important to the well being of our nation than the collective intelligence of its population, or the standing of its more intelligent people within it. To suggest otherwise is to present an America which stands outside of the fold of human history.

Let's look at some practical scenarios in a future of gene mapped races of intelligences. Say that 10 years from today we have a scientifically vetted equivalent of four intelligence types. These work rather like Meyers-Briggs, and people know that they are ESTJ as well as they know their SAT scores. If the American Bar Association polls its membership and finds that it is objectively lacking in genetic intellectual diversity, should it give affirmative action points for INST intelligence types? If the Southern Pacific Railway hired an ERFX should they be indemnified at a lower rate for train collisions? If my wife divorces me when she finds out that I'm an RDES, can I sue the lab that tested me for alimony damages?

Speculation is fun. That doesn't change the fact that this country is ripe for overselling intellectual determinism, and has centuries of experience in segregating its people into neat, false, destructive higherarchies. If some genetic science makes a new class of hierarchies true, is that progress?

Swinging back around to the top. Blackfolks provide a neat if poorly understood example in all of this wishful thinking about brains and meritocracy. So the supposed gap between average black intelligence and average white intelligence bears more weight than it deserves. People seem genuinely surprised to find that whites own on average 8 times as much property than blacks. If I could, by increasing my IQ score by 15 points, gain 800% value of my assets, then I'd focus on this debate as if it really mattered. But I know it's just dancing around the same primitive fire.

10:39:18 PM    comment []

(from the archives april 2001)

white supremacy defines what white is, just like black consciousness defines what black is. if you give people a choice to question the underpinning philosophies of their racial/cultural identities, then they will be willing to improve. it's just human nature that people want to be on the right and winning side of things. and as mlk said, the arc of history bends towards justice.

so in a post-racist society, black changes AND white changes. to what, i don't know, but i am willing to let everyone who wants to move forward do so. i am working towards getting whitefolks (average americans with an average amount of white racial consciousness) to walk away from the same white as white supremacy. i believe most of them are willing to do so. while i know that most of them benefit from white supremacy, i also know that few of them are consciously invested in it. most whitefolks are very offended and disturbed to find that they might be racist and they want a way out. most hard afrocentrists refuse to let them out. (hell, even that dead white male shakespeare knew enough to see iago was conniving racist asshole who deserved a serious beatdown for his schemes on a righteous black man)

i say let them out. liberate whitefolks from whiteness. it's easier to do today than it was just 5 years ago, witness the tim wise memo on columbine and the stupidity of mcveigh apologists. the census is letting them out. and young people today don't want to be a part of their parents' hypocrisy.

i'm saying the Struggle can now be open source. its never going to take away from the greatness of malcolm x, or cinque or sojourner truth or stephen biko or subhas bose or cesar chavez or chief seattle. but it has the potential of kicking down some doors that have always been in white control. i submit that if you wait for every colin powell, then you are waiting too long.

i don't have the patience to wait for 10 million blackfolks to get up the power to make america righteous. and i'm not stupid nor prideful enough to forgo the opportunity to make 10 million whitefolks my partners in the struggle. i don't expect a huge majority of whitefolks to take up the struggle. frankly a lot of them ain't up to it, mentally, spiritually or otherwise.

but i do believe that 10 million whitefolks under a new banner would be willing, on any given day to do better than what we know 'white liberals' have been perpetrating for the past 30 years. and it's time we all step up and move towards that end.

7:21:54 PM    comment []