racism
mikethemadbiologist | January 18, 2010Image by Bettmann/CORBIS
With ten percent unemployment, and nearly eighteen percent underemployment--and much of the political establishment unconcerned about this--Martin Luther King's passion for economic justice sadly is still relevant. What is forgotten about Kings--often willfully--is that he was an advocate for racial and economic justice. From a speech he gave to striking sanitation workers in Memphis on March 18, 1968 (italics mine):
My dear friends, my dear friend James Lawson, and all of these dedicated and distinguished ministers of the Gospel assembled here tonight, to all of…
gregladen | January 9, 2010As previously noted, J. Philippe Rushton has made the argument that the brain size of "Blacks" is about 1267 cc's, and for whites it is about 1347 CC's. It has also been noted that Rushton claims that the average IQ of Blacks is 85 and he average IQ of whites is 100. But does Rushton say that there is a link between the two?
Yes, explicitly so. In his widely distributed editions of Race, Evolution, and Behavior : A Life History Perspective (2nd Special Abridged Edition), Rushton makes the claim that the African IQ is 70, and that the reason that "Black" American IQ is 80 is because of the…
gregladen | January 9, 2010Some people say yes, some people say no. Either way, Glen Beck is a Racist Moron.
First, watch this:
Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
(I love the fact that Rachel appreciates "Get Smart" .... but I digress)
Then watch this....
Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
(The book referred to here is: Shades of Citizenship: Race and the Census in Modern Politics)
What do you think should be done about the issue off who gets counted where in relation to prisons? That is a very interesting question. Given that so many…
gregladen | January 7, 2010Philipe Rushton, in his book Race, Evolution and Behavior, reports average brain size for the three races. The following is the graph from Rusthton's book:
I put this post here for reference in a couple of conversations. The data are bogus and any conclusions that might be drawn from it are equally bogus.
gregladen | January 1, 2010Well, yes. But the question raises some interesting points.
Does a person endorse near slavery, horrific working conditions, the purchase of moral "indulgences" by the privileged, and the manipulation of the population with religious woo-woo when appreciating the architecture of a medieval European cathedral? Because that bad stuff is what happened to make that cathedral exist. If you visit the Sistine Chapel or Notre Dame in Paris you endorse all that is connected to the creation of these edifices. You might as well have personally carried out the inquisition! Especially if you pay to…
gregladen | December 29, 2009This is Chart 1 from Race, Evolutoin and Behavior by J. Philippe Rushton, originally published in the Unabridged Edition of same.
gregladen | December 28, 2009Many people assume human brains vary genetically and genetic variation maps to races. But the races are not real and genetic variation can't explain brain differences. Because, dear reader, brains don't work that way.
Let's look just at the brain part of this problem.
There are between 50 and 100 billion neurons in the human brain, and every one is connected to a minimum of one other neuron to produce about 100 trillion connections. So when we are thinking about how the brain is wired up, we have to explain how so many connections can be specified to make the brain work.
There are…
gregladen | December 22, 2009This post started out as a comment that would have gone here (but would have done just as well here). But it became sufficiently long and possibly interesting that I figured it would make a good, if somewhat rough, blog post.
The presumption being examined here is that humans are divisible into different groups (races would be one term for those groups) that are genetically distinct from one another in a way that causes those groups to have group level differences in average intelligence, as measured by IQ. More exactly, this post is about the sequence of arguments that are usually made when…
terrasig | November 11, 2009
A bit off-topic of the blog but a science building on campus is hosting a discussion with Guadeloupe-born footballer, Lilian Thuram. He was considered to be one of the best players in Europe; his best-known accomplishment of his 15-year career playing defender with Monaco, Parma FC, Juventus, FC Barcelona and the French national team, is contributing to France winning the 1998 World Cup.
However, Thuram was forced into retirement in 2008 following a diagnosis of cardiac hypertrophy (ventricular, I assume, and pathological, not typical "athlete's heart"). The same condition claimed Thuram's…
mikethemadbiologist | October 27, 2009Not exactly. Remember back when some idiot posted a video in an open contest comparing Bush to Hitler that was held by MoveOn.org? Never mind that the video was removed within thirty minutes, rightwing political operatives and their lapdogs in the traditional media haven't stopped talking about it. I wonder if this picture posted on the Republican National Committee's Facebook site--which has also been removed only after six days--will also be discussed endlessly for weeks (Warning: This is a really offensive picture, which is why it's below the fold. May not be work safe):
(from here;…
razib | October 15, 2009
In the OkCupid post on response rates and race & sex there are two charts which show how males and females respond to inquiries of the opposite sex by race. So, you can see that black women on OkCupid respond positively to men in general, while women respond positively in particular to white men. In fact for many racial minorities women respond more positively to inquiries from white men than they do co-racialists (the same is not true of men). I suspect some of this has to do with the excess of men on OkCupid, combined with selection effects in terms of who joins OkCupid. OkCupid is…
gregladen | September 15, 2009There is no racism in America. People are not excluded from jobs or not allowed admission to a school because of the color of the skin. The whole racism thing is over, solved, kaput, no longer an issue. You'all can go home now. Especially if you live in Texas and/or are concerned with Social Studies curriculum. ...
Peter Morrison is on a Texas State Board of Education panel set up to help revise state standards in Social Studies And he's trying to do a lot of work in this position. He's trying to edumicate us all on how racism is pretty much passe, and at the same time, he's trying to…
mikethemadbiologist | August 5, 2009Recently, I described polls that described how half of Southerners did not believe that President Obama was born in the U.S. David Weigel examines how many Southern whites believe Obama was born outside of the U.S.:
In the South, like everywhere else, the vast majority of non-white voters said that Obama was born in the United States; 97 percent of black voters, 87 percent of Hispanic voters, and 88 percent of other minorities. The extremely low overall percentage? That's due to white Southerners, who dragged down the average with an extremely high level of doubt about Obama.
So what…
gregladen | July 29, 2009According to the following, the person who made the 911 call did not mention race until asked, and even then did not mention "two black males with backpacks." The two black guys with backpacks seem to have been added in to the police report authored by Police Seargant James Crowley. Specifically, he states that the 911 caller observed these two men. That is not even slightly surprising to me. There is nothing close to a guarantee that police reports will be accurate, and race is often used as a factor when discussing crime. It is most sensible, it would seem, to investigate black men…
emjohnson | July 22, 2009Cambridge authorities are now dropping the disorderly conduct charge against the country's leading African-American scholar, Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (see right), after he was arrested in his own home when police confused him with a burglar. This was after Gates showed both his Harvard ID and Driver's License that gave proof of address.
Probably the best reaction to this story came from Al Sharpton who stated:
I've heard of driving while black, and I've heard of shopping while black. But I've never heard of living in a home while black.
Gates is asking for a formal apology…
mikethemadbiologist | July 9, 2009Granted, picking on Fox News is like taunting the slow kid--it's cheap and makes you feel bad about yourself. On the other hand, this, reported by Alex Koppelman, just cries out for comment:
Kilmeade and two colleagues were discussing a study that, based on research done in Finland and Sweden, showed people who stay married are less likely to suffer from Alzheimer's. Kilmeade questioned the results, though, saying, "We are -- we keep marrying other species and other ethnics and other ..."
At this point, his co-host tried to -- in that jokey morning show way -- tell Kilmeade he needed to shut…
grrlscientist | July 2, 2009Since Flickr is being an ass these days and won't let me share images with you that they don't approve of, which includes just about everything I put on my blog and no doubt includes screen shots of ads that I am using to illustrate my points, you'll just have to accept that I am not misleading you if you can't see the offending ads themselves.
Basically, if you take a peek at the ads in the top and right sidebar of this blog, you'll notice that Seed Media has revised their advertising policies recently. One of the results of that revision has been to run Google ads on both these blog…
mikethemadbiologist | June 14, 2009Oops, there's been another GOP bigot eruption. This time, it's Michelle Obama who has been called an ape:
A state Republican activist has admitted to and apologized for calling a gorilla that escaped from the Riverbanks Zoo Friday an "ancestor" of First Lady Michelle Obama....
Longtime SCGOP activist and former state Senate candidate Rusty DePass responded with the comment, "I'm sure it's just one of Michelle's ancestors - probably harmless."
DePass told WIS News 10 he was talking about First Lady Michelle Obama....
DePass took his apology a bit further. He also said, "The comment was hers.…
gregladen | April 6, 2009In June of 1940, France fell to Germany. Among the troops who were overwhelmed by the German attacks were about 17,000 black West African colonial troops with the French Army. Many of these soldiers were shot do death by the Germans, who considered these Africans to be subhumans, as they stood in surrender. Surely, it would be fair to consider this to have been part of the Holocaust.
Then the Nazis and the Imperial Japanese did a pretty good job of trying to take over the world, millions upon millions died in that war, and the rest of the Holocaust happened.
The Allies banded together…
razib | March 11, 2009In my post below where I show that different groups accept free speech to different extents some asked if the fact that those with better vocabularies supported free speech could just be that they were college educated. To some extent this seems to be true. Here is the chart again of support for a racist being allowed to speak by vocabulary test score (0 out of 10 on the left, 10 out of 10 on the right).
Less than High School:
High School:
Some College:
College:
Graduate School:
There aren't too many with college & graduate educations who have vocab scores below 5 out of 10, ergo,…