In my review of How to be an Antiracist, I used #ShutdownSTEM as an example of someone applying antiracism to an area that has nothing to do with racism. I was trying to show an example of well-intentioned activism obstructing innovation and technological progress that will actually improve quality of life for all races.
Two things have changed my mind. First this Twitter thread about motion sensor faucets not working on black skin. Then, an update I made to that same post about facial recognition software producing more false positives on black and brown faces. These things should have been caught before the products made it to the market.
In "Diversity Training has a Rationality Problem" I suggested that the best way to fight implicit bias is not with diversity training but with empirical tactics to combat bias at the subconscious level (eg reordering a stack of resumes in a way that preference is given to Black candidates). In that vein, it turns out that using a rubric can completely eliminate racial bias in grading. Much cheaper and more effective than a $20,000 session with Robin DiAngelo. More science, less racism.
More evidence to support my belief that two parent families are an underrated privilege:
"Children residing in households with unrelated adults were nearly 50 times as likely to die of inflicted injuries than children residing with 2 biological parents" https://t.co/icG891KFZm pic.twitter.com/ZCHjDWbAbG
— Rob Henderson (@robkhenderson) March 13, 2021
Two-parent privilege even overcomes racial disparities:
"simply waiting until marriage to have children is a positive predictor of multiple “success variables,” including income. When Prager wrote in 2016, the poverty rate was nearly 25 percent for white children born into single-mother families, but only 7 percent for black children born into two-parent families.”
In my blog post "Through the Lens of Salience" I wrote about how, when intersectionality is used in diversity training, it usually stops at race and gender, which is really unfortunate since more context is always needed. In the example above, the Black child in a two-parent family is more privileged than the White child with a single mom.
As Conor Friedersdorf shows, controlling for only race and gender will lead to the conclusion:
"that to be Black and female is to be “the most unprotected person in America,” many students might come away with the impression that Black women are the demographic group most likely to be killed by police in America.
According to a 2019 paper published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the lifetime risk ... for ... white men [is] 39 per 100,000. For Black women, the authors find, the lifetime risk of being killed by police is 2.4 to 5.4 per 100,000."
Being white and male is a privilege, except when it isn't. Privilege still matters, but it is also context-dependent. So let's choose messaging that doesn't demonize our fellow citizens and actually makes everyone feel included.
In my post "Everyone is Wrong About Robin DiAngelo" I suggested ways to increase support for Black Lives Matter by thinking of how messages can push or pull "fencers", people who said they "somewhat support" BLM.
This whole idea of coalition building and gaining the support of fencers comes up a lot in my writing. It turns out that someone already said this much better than me. Here are my favorite quotes from that post:
"Social norms are the only way to achieve cooperation without coercion ...This means that the social norms that promote cooperation are the most valuable thing we have....
And this means that nothing is more harmful than the norms that promote polarization and hamper cooperation.”
He then uses an image as a way to picture the spectrum of racist voters.
He then writes:
"If half the country voted for Trump, the median Trump voter is at the 75th percentile of racism. That’s 0.67 standard deviations more racist than the median American, and 1.33 SDs more racist than the median Clinton voter (and people like the New York Times). On the other hand, there are 6,000 registered KKK members out of 242 million American adults, that more than 4 SDs out on the racism axis."
Which is a math-y way of saying that there is a whole contingent of Trump voters (fencers!) that are much closer to what we consider normal than they are to actual Nazis. Stop calling them names and start working on gaining their trust because, as he writes, we'll need them.
"Trump is especially worrying in regards to racism .... To combat that, we need to build an overwhelming anti-racist coalition. We can’t risk having just 51% of people on our side, we need at least three-quarters of the country. That means we need the “orange quarter” on my chart, the 25% of Americans who voted for Trump but are less racist than the median Trump voter."
Anyway, the whole blog post is fantastic and speaks to everything I care about.
In my blog post "Kill the Demon, Destroy the Wall" I wrote about how the racial makeup in a school can make things better or worse for African-American students, but we didn't have enough research into the right ratio. I found some new research that looked at "acting white," something I am very uncomfortable writing about and I feel like a need a disclaimer before continuing.
Disclaimer: the authors of the report are testing the thesis of whether "acting white" is real and find that it mostly is not. However, they find certain instances in which data suggests it could be happening. So when I write "acting white" I'm just using their words to describe the data points they are referencing, I am not making any claims about whether or not it exists. I'm only interested in the data as it relates to my idea of Maxwell's Demon in the classroom.
They find that "acting white" is most prominent in schools that are less than 20 percent black, and tends to disappear in schools that are more than 80 percent black. They say it increases with "interracial contact." This aligns with Judith Harris' work--the more interracial contact a student has, the more race becomes a salient category, the more likely students will adopt opposing stereotypes to distinguish themselves from their peers.
The researchers also say "acting white" is more salient in public schools and low-income families, this makes sense as Harris suggested that in a predominantly White school, a Black student would be assimilated into the culture.
Also of note, the report mentions the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) experiment, which assigned housing vouchers via random lottery to public housing residents in five large cities. They found that females exhibit lower arrest rates, improvements in education and mental health, and are less likely to engage in risky behaviors. Males, on the other hand, were more likely to engage in risky behaviors, had no decrease in arrest rates, and experienced more physical health problems (e.g., injuries or accidents).
This accords with the New York Times study which showed that controlling for class eliminated the wealth gap between black and white girls, while a gap persisted when looking at black and white boys.
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