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TRANSCRIPT OF CARTOON
Panel 1
A close shot of a white woman in a striped dress. She is talking, although it seems a bit like lecturing. Let’s call her “Stripes.”
STRIPES: To have a real conversation about race, we have to consider all ideas in a neutral and calm manner.
Panel 2
STRIPES: For example, what if Black culture has made Black people lazy? We can’t refuse to even consider that!
Panel 3
WOMAN: Or… what if Blacks are born with lower IQs than whites? We should at least consider that, right?
Panel 4
The “camera” has backed up, and we now see that Stripes has been talking to a Black woman wearing a floral dress, who I’ll call “Flowers.”
FLOWERS: What if people who say Blacks are lazy and stupid are racist as hell? Shouldn’t we consider that?
STRIPES (yelling) ABSOLUTELY NOT! DON’T MAKE THINGS PERSONAL!
Panel 5 (a tiny “kicker” panel at the bottom of panel 4)
FLOWERS: Calling Blacks stupid isn’t personal?
STRIPES: It isn’t to me.
In the context of race, “conversation” means “You listen to me with an attitude of humility and openness and then we both agree that I’m right about everything.”
OK, now make a similar cartoon, but replace black with male and lazy with violent.
Remember that ‘your side’ does the exact same crap*.
* generally true for whatever side and whatever crap you pick.
The cartoon seems to assume that there are only two groups of people in the world: People who follow “the narrative” (all racial issues due to white oppression, absolutely no differences between races) and vile racists.
The former are the good people and should all pat each other on the back, the latter are the bad people who only have one motivation – every last one of them – vile racism.
I would think there is at least a third group, people who wonder what is the true reality in all of these issues, but keep their mouth firmly shut in any discussions of racial issues in real life (not necessarily on-line). I DO think that any white person who doesn’t follow “the narrative” is stupid for saying anything in any discussion about race. It is only going to cause the stupid white person problems.
I find it really strange that there are a lot of people who could care less what the real truth is, they have no interest in examining it or thinking about it in a rational, objective way – even if they do have to keep their mouth shut – but they instead want the praise and self-righteousness that goes along with “the narrative”.
Can you link the post where Amp expressed this attitude, because I can’t recall it.
I think that Amp is mixing two different types of argument here, which sort of muddies the waters. I think comparing them to sexist comments (as Aapje, I think disingenuously, suggested) might shed more light.
“Black people are lazier than white people.” is analogous to “Men are more violent than women.” Both imply inherent character flaws in a class of people. I reject both. I think most liberals reject both.
“Men commit more violent crimes than women.” Is analogous to “Black people have lower IQ’s than whit people.” Both are measurable facts. But, neither inherently includes judgments about causation (nature vs. environments, such as racism in the U.S. or not allowing men to express many emotions so pain must be channeled into anger leading to more violent behavior).
Liberals are not the ones who see male violence as an inevitable force of nature. We are the ones who recognize that it is culturally constructed and can be changed through education and less sexist ways of raising our sons.
Now, it may be that, all other things being equal, men would continue to be more violent than women to some degree. Male violence might be fueled, in part, by higher levels of testosterone, for example. But, it seems to me, that we should focus on removing the environmental factors that are obviously there before even trying to measure so-called “inherent” factors (eg. stop telling our sons not to cry when they get hurt). After all, the unusually high testosterone levels associated with violent criminals might be triggered by environmental factors, such as the conditions in prisons where studies linking high testosterone with violence are often conducted. We might find that biological factors which seem inherent are, in fact, triggered by sexist environments.
Similarly, IQ’s are not immutable. They are measured in cultural contexts. Better early childhood education raises children’s IQ’s. Poor childhood nutrition lowers childhood IQ’s. African Americans to this day suffer from lack of access to quality early childhood education and higher rates of poor childhood nutrition (among other thing). Our first priority should be addressing these clear environmental disparities. Until that’s been done, the “true reality” (as Helios puts it) is entirely out of our reach.
Kate @5:
Actually, a better analogy might be “Men commit more violent crimes than Women” versus “Blacks commit more violent crimes than Whites.”
The problem is, assuming both of those statements are true, you might be happy to study the first statement to explore what environmental factors could support such a statement, but, if you try to touch the second statement with a ten-foot pole, you will be dismissed as a racist bigot who thinks black people are inferior.
To that extent, I agree with Helios. There are many groups who don’t care what is true; they only care about what propositions will bolster their conclusions.
-Jut
@Helios
Exactly. My views on discrimination are probably different from most people here. IMHO, those views describe reality much better than one-sided narratives based on oppression. My views in no way deny the existence of discrimination or the need to fix that. Yet my views are seen as repugnant by some, primarily due to my unwillingness to draw hard boundaries between groups, ironically enough.
Humans like to think in categories. Abstracting is how we make sense of the world and is necessary to some extent, but it can go too far. Lumping all black people together and attributing negative attributes to them is justly seen as discriminatory. But ‘the narrative’ also lumps black people together and assumes shared attributes/experiences. ‘The narrative’ lumps white people together and assumes shared attributes/experiences. ‘The narrative’ says that individuals can speak for their race. I think that these are all highly problematic.
Finally, the debate also tends to be poisoned by conflating race with culture. There is an enormous difference between the two, but they are often muddled. See this cartoon.
@Kate
You seem to be confused with the meaning of ‘your side.’ It doesn’t mean ‘you.’ I even added the quotes to hammer home that I wasn’t referring to Ampersand’s personal beliefs.
I can’t follow your reasoning here. The cartoon has the white person explicitly wonder if ‘black culture’ makes black people lazy. You misquote the cartoon as saying: “Black people are lazier than white people” and start talking about nature vs nurture. This makes no sense in the context of the cartoon. Your objection to my comment also makes no sense in the context of the cartoon.
I also don’t think we can have a productive debate if you call me disingenuous. I could use the exact same term for your misquote, if I assumed bad faith on your part. Yet I treat you with respect and don’t use slurs, so I’d appreciate the same in return.
Really? Because I hear lots of people (of all races) discussing the fact that black people commit more violent crimes than white people. That’s just a fact; studying the reasons behind it is one of the things that sociologists do, for example–even more than they study the reasons behind male and female differences in violent crime rates, in my experience.
The racist idea is to treat that fact as identical to the interpretation that black people are intrinsically more violent than white people.
One (white) guy’s critique:
Yes, we should study how culture influences propensity to work.
Yes, we should study how genetics influences performance on IQ tests, and other assessments of intelligence.
Yes, we should study how attitudes/predispositions influence conclusions about race. Yes, we should analyze the biases present in those who do studies. (For example, we now expect people doing drug tests to disclose the financial interests they have in the pharmaceutical company.)
Issues of culture, genetics, challenges of assessing intelligence, observer bias, etc., transcend the (personal) attributes of individuals. Yes, these variables have been used as measures of people’s moral failings, and that makes people sensitive about analyzing them. But that does not lead me to conclude we should no longer analyze these variables.
For most purposes, the test for “racist” consists of analyzing people’s behavior that has a racial disparity and excluding all the rational explanations for the disparity. In other words, “racist” is not a variable we measure directly, but a variable we measure as a residual. Before we can rigorously measure racism, we must exclude the rational explanations for bias – including the variables that offend the black woman in the cartoon.
Recall the words of Nobel laureate Richard Feynman in his “The Value of Science” address to the National Academy of Sciences (Autumn 1955):
Now look back to the cartoon. Stripes does not call anyone stupid; she does not call anyone lazy; rather, Stripes conjectures about relationships between (vaguely-defined) variables, speculating about conclusions that conflict with contemporary dogma. And she faces resistance to even posing questions. This has been the story of science from its foundation; I suspect it will ever be so.
@JutGory
It’s a great comparison IMHO, because it exposes the double standard so well. You addressed one side of the coin, but the other side is just as true. When progressives talk about black violence, they often note that the statistics on black violence are padded by differences in how the justice system treats black & white people. This is a very fair comment on how bias can influence crime statistics and how you can get a spiral of race based policies (cops target black people due to prejudice, they catch more black criminals which reinforces prejudice, which makes them target black people more, etc).
However, it is also clear that there is a stereotype that men are violent, so common sense (and scientific research :) ) says the same things happen to men. They are targeted by the judicial system more than women and get into a spiral of prejudice.
So the logical conclusion is that there is institutional discrimination of both men and black people*; and that things that are legitimate to do for one group, should be legitimate for the other. So both men and black people may have their culture analyzed and critiqued. Both men and black people deserve fairer treatment by the justice system.
Equal treatment for all.
* Note that I am not saying that men and black people are equally oppressed or any such nonsense. Just that on this matter there are very strong similarities.
But she poses them without even considering what is the dominant (if not the only) factor. If I were to talk about the Earth’s motion through the solar system, and I talked about the gravitational effects of the planets and the Moon, and I talked about radiation pressure from the sun, and I talked about inertia, but I didn’t talk about the gravity from the sun, I’d get a pretty wrong answer, and you’d think I was pretty silly.
Also, Flowers doesn’t dismiss those possibilities: she (I think understandably) angrily raises another possibility, and Stripes rejects it. It is Flowers, not Stripes, who faces actual resistance to her idea (a refusal to consider it, in addition to an equally angry response).
(Your position also assumes that investigation into these possibilities is suppressed or inadequate due to social pressures against them. I don’t know the field well enough to say one way or another–but they have certainly been studied in the past, and continue to be studied.)
@11, commenting on @9:
Dominant (if not the only) factor of what?
Stripes asks about whether culture influences laziness, and whether innate factors that correlate with race influence IQ. Flowers asks whether racism influences people who say that blacks are lazy and stupid – and, by inference, influences Stripes (although, as I observed, Stripes does not in fact make any such statement).
Now, perhaps Flowers is 100% correct in her speculation about people who say blacks are lazy and stupid, and even in projecting this onto Flowers. Heck, let’s posit that Flowers is a Nazi trying to justify racial extermination.
What bearing does that have on the questions of whether culture influences laziness, and whether innate factors that correlate with race influence IQ?
I’ve read through this thread kind of quickly, so I might have missed something, but it seems to me that no one so far has taken into account that Stripes’ assertion that “all ideas” must be considered in a “calm and neutral manner” is itself an expression of/embedded in power relations when it comes to race and the history of race relations in this country. In other words, part of the point of the cartoon seems to me to be to call into question what it means for someone to assert that we can examine these questions “neutrally” and to suggest that the concept of neutrality itself serves to hide the power relations that are at work when it comes to race.
(Also, as an aside: holding as perfectly parallel to Stripes’ questions about Black culture and its possible detrimental consequences for Black people the question about men and violence ignores the very different relationships Black people as a whole and men as a whole—and I know I am eliding here the fact that there are Black men—have to power in this country and, specifically, to the the social and cultural meaning of violence and to the consequences the answer will have for them as a group.)
A fair point. I either misread that panel or got confused by the ensuing comment thread, not sure which. And to answer your final question: it matters because of where we put emphasis. In my experience, people who raise supposed correlations between intelligence and race (and support it through arguments about IQ and race) generally want to influence policies like affirmative action. And in that realm, what questions we ask and how much we weight the answers are not merely academic questions.
The second paragraph stands, though: Flowers does not shut down any line of inquiry. Stripes does.
1. A reminder to everyone that advocating for “scientific racism” aka “race realism” is banned on this blog. (Which I know may seem unfair given this cartoon, but I’m not going to limit what cartoons I write according to what the rules on “Alas” are.) I’m not saying that anyone has done this so far this thread; I just thought it was a good idea to get that out there.
2. The purpose of this cartoon is not to say anything about the truth or untruth of either the thesis that black culture makes black people lazy, or that black people are inherently violent. I do think both of those theories are false, but that’s not the point of this cartoon.
The point of this cartoon is to criticize the “I’m Just Asking Questions, shouldn’t we be able to ask questions” stance when used by people whose “questions” are obviously intended to encourage racist conclusions, and who will simultaneously hold that discussing racism is too personal and has no place in a civilized discussion.
Your argument seems to implicitly assume that there is never any such thing as a leading question, and that no one “Just Asks Questions” as a way of putting forward an argument without having to take responsibility for making that argument.
I find both of those assumptions extremely naive.
As Harlequin says, there are many academics who do, in fact, write and study about the second statement without being dismissed as racist bigots. Your claim here is obviously not true.
This was my (and I thought the clear and obvious) reading of the cartoon. It was poking fun at the people who talk a good game about how “we must consider all possibilities in the spirit of scientific and intellectual inquiry, because LO, otherwise we are become like the church fathers of old, stamping out Galileo’s research because we find it threatening,” who somehow nonetheless consider discussion of possible racism to be a personal attack not worth considering.
There are a lot of people, in other words, who think it’s a crucial component of intellectual integrity to consider the possibility that there’s something wrong with you, but find it deeply offensive and personally insulting to consider your suggestion that there’s something wrong with them.
You encounter a lot of these people in discussions of racism.
It’s the same way it’s only right and proper to talk about how gay people are abominations before God, but it’s ‘uncivil’ and a personal attack to discuss homophobia. It’s a stupid little game played by assholes and Amp 100% is right to point it out.
Re: IQ – I’d be shocked and amazed if the difference didn’t have nearly everything to do with urban/rural populations and concentration of environmental lead.
—Myca
This is definitely something I agree with, and I agree that these questions are brought up by the cartoon – but they could be brought up better and more directly. I wish I had been consciously thinking along these lines when I had been writing this cartoon; it would be neat to see a cartoon aimed more squarely at this element of it.
@15:
1. I share the view that people who advocate factual inquiry designed to promote racists conclusions, but resist factual inquiries designed to document irrational racist bias, exhibit hypocrisy. I sense this is Amp’s main point.
2. That said, I have skepticism about people who resist factual inquiry on the grounds that they may not like the conclusions. “I’m committed to creationism, so let’s shut down research into evolution!” “I’m opposed to the idea of climate change, so let’s shut down inquiry into that topic!” Thus, I find little relevance between the merits of a person posing a question and the question itself.
@11:
I agree, as I said @9:
That said, here we confront the limitations of the medium of one-shot political cartoons.
We don’t know what prompts the initial discussion between Stripes and Flowers. Perhaps Amp wants us to draw the conclusion that Stripes, a white person raising these sensitive issues so bluntly with a black person, is being antagonistic – or at least insensitive – but I just don’t have enough context.
In contrast, by the fourth panel we do have context for evaluating Flowers’s response. I can’t explain it as a matter of logic since the issue she raises, whatever its merits, has no relevance to the issues Stripes raises. To me, I read the context and body language to suggest that Flowers is raising her issue as an attack on Stripes; this conclusion is reinforced by Stripe’s response which suggests that she perceives Flowers’ remark as an attack.
So I see a situation in which Stripes raises factual questions, but it is unclear that she has done so to attack Flowers, met by Flowers raising factual questions in a manner that seems designed to attack Stripes for posing her questions. Thus I see asymmetry in the situation (though I can see how Amp may have intended me to see Stripes’ questions as intentionally antagonistic.)
This is actually a better description of what I intended than what I wrote about what I intended.
Amp @17:
Perhaps, but how many academics abide by this sort of admonition (@15):
Fine, study all you want, as long as you are not interested in truth.
I hope I am not stepping too close to the line here (not my intent to violate your terms), but The Bell Curve presents a perfect example (I have not read it, so I am not suggesting that I agree or disagree with anything in it; I am just aware of the controversy). Sure, you can study the questions, as long as we like your answers.
That is hardly the groundwork for free inquiry. So, yay for the academics!
And, if only academics are allowed to study the questions fully, I would say that Harlequin’s counterexample to my statement is a tiny, TINY exception to the rule. My point still stands (and your ground rules @15 demonstrates the point perfectly) And that is fine if you don’t want to discuss truth, but you HAD to HAVE understood that your comic spawns those lines of thought.
-Jut
“The Bell Curve presents a perfect example (I have not read it, so I am not suggesting that I agree or disagree with anything in it; I am just aware of the controversy). Sure, you can study the questions, as long as we like your answers.”
You’re right, no one has ever bothered to question or criticize the methodology of The Bell Curve. [/sarcasm]
Jut, this blog is just… this blog. The rules here are not the rules for the world-in-general, and that’s okay.
What’s weird is that you think that the rules here prove… something… about the rules in the world-in-general. They do not.
No one forbade either author of The Bell Curve (which was not published by an academic press, as I recall) from writing that. It was published by a major publisher, sold by all the big chain bookstores, and reviewed by major newspapers and magazines. One of the authors died shortly after completing work on The Bell Curve, but the other author has had a career that any author would envy, including recently writing another best-seller which was published by a major publisher and so forth.
The Bell Curve shows that such views are not, in practice, censored in any general way.
It is true that The Bell Curve was subject to a lot of criticism. What’s wrong with that?
Murray’s employed by the AEI and The Bell Curve was published by Free Press. I get that no one forbade him from writing and the book was published, but it’s not a coincidence that two organisations with free speech missions were backing him up. If censorship wasn’t a problem, these wouldn’t need to exist.
The problem with this cartoon is that it presents Stripes’ argument without any context. In reality, she is making her statement in the context of large numbers of other people telling her that the reason for racial socioeconomic disparities in the United States is because of white racism (overt or institutional), white privilege, white supremacy*, etc. and that any conversation about race ought to be centered around that premise. And these people have most of the government and the media on their side. Perhaps Stripes finds those premises offensive, just as Flowers finds the ideas Stripes proffers as offensive.
What if Stripes were to fire back “What if the people who say that disparities in racial socioeconomic status are due to white privilege and institutional racism hate white people like hell?”
The implication of the last panel (not including the kicker) is that Stripes thinks that the idea she is racist ought not be discussed. I think most real life Stripes rather think that the idea she is racist has already been discussed ad nauseam, and see Flowers’ response more or less as “shouldn’t the only topic of discussion be white people’s responsibility to get rid of their racism?”
*”White supremacy” in the sense of society being designed to maintain white people’s social dominance, not in the sense of white people being superior.
@ nobody.really
Why is that necessary, and what problem would it solve? Which “genetics” are you referring to? Why should anyone continue to use IQ tests to assess the influence of “genetics” on the “performance” of humans on a test, when that test is both demonstrably biased and cannot be said to accurately assess intelligence (however loosely or conveniently we’re defining that)? Where in IQ tests are the “genetics” section located? Are you suggesting that bloodwork and DNA analyses be incorporated into standardized IQ testing?
Could you possibly clarify what you mean here? Are the “variables” you’re referring to “issues of culture” and “genetics” or something else?
Lack of intelligence (or, for that matter, poor performance on an IQ test) is not a “moral failing” and generally hasn’t been framed in precisely that way. The closest analogue I can think of is white supremacists employing scientific racism to buttress paternalistic legislation designed to limit the civil rights of certain people of color based on their purported lack of intelligence (melanin clogging up the brain, or summat equally irrational and hateful), as a means of “protecting” said people and society at large from, presumably, child-like and dangerous impulses.
As far as I am aware, “sensitive” feelings are not the primary basis for objecting to IQ tests; the purpose and origin of IQ tests is no longer a mystery to most people, and champions of IQ testing have yet to prove why and in what contexts IQ assessments are remotely useful as objective analytical tools.
Rage hiding behind a paper mask of high mindedness. Very very hard to cut through to genuine communication. If anyone here has had a conversation with a family member who shares Stripes’s views you know what I mean when I say, good luck EVER having fruitful conversation on this topic. Good cartoon Amp, thanks. I wish I could show it to the relative I’m thinking of, but I don’t think they would think it was funny, alas.