A third-year law student sent an email to some dinner friends following up on a conversation they had had at dinner. In it, she suggests that she is open to the idea that African-Americans are genetically predisposed to be less intelligent than whites, at least in such quantifiable ways as standardized testing.
She also indicates that she could be persuaded that cultural and social factors account for the achievement gap, but that so far, she doesn't find the science on either side to be conclusive. That's her big statement: she is unpersuaded by the studies coming from either direction, and she wants to stay open to all the possibilities. (As it happens, she did undergraduate research at Princeton with sociologist Thomas Espanshade, whose research focuses on race and achievement, so I'd wager a guess that she's actually given more serious thought to this topic than her dinner guests.)
The predictable happened. One of her "friends" forwarded the email to the Black Law Students Association, which then forwarded it to what seems like every Black Law Students Association in the country. It made it onto widely-read blogs like Jezebel and Gawker, invariably with headings like "Harvard Law Student's Racist Diatribe." Now various groups are putting pressure on the federal judge she is slated to clerk with to rescind her clerkship, the dean has condemned her statements, and one can safely assume she is persona non grata at HLS these days.
My concern here is not for Stephanie, who I'm sure will come through this just fine. My concern is for the message sent when the dean condemns a dinner conversation amongst bright, inquisitive students who have the gall to question the accepted orthodoxy. It is for the right to question the things that we assume we know, the right to be wrong even, the right to say "I'm just not persuaded."
The truth is, there is nowhere where this kind of debate and discussion should be more welcome than in the academy. We should be the absolute safest place for this kind of boundary-pushing. There should be nothing, absolutely nothing, that is off-limits; there should be nothing sacred, nothing that cannot be reinvestigated and criticized and examined. And it is intellectual death when we stop being that place.
At least Stephanie had the courage to say it out loud. That allows other people to argue back: to rebuke, to criticize, to challenge, to lay out their own position and the evidence supporting it. Because I promise you: for every Stephanie who has the balls to actually verbalize her misgivings, there are a hundred white kids who silently wonder, "But why *is* it that Africa is so underdeveloped and can't seem to get their act together? Why is it that even when you control for income and parents' educational level, there is still a racial gap in SAT scores?" They don't say it out loud; saying it out loud gets you branded a racist and that's the end of any career aspirations you might have had (not to mention any social life you had), as Stephanie's case has so starkly reminded us. But the questions will sit there. And if we're not willing to have those conversations in academia, with the best minds and best resources, we should not be surprised when the questioners find other people with whom to have those conversations. And you won't like who they're talking to. Rumor has it that various white-supremacist groups have already contacted Stephanie to offer their support. "Come to a meeting"--that's not where you want the conversation to be happening.
The tamping down on any line of questioning that violates our social orthodoxies should be chilling to anyone who cares about intellectual rigor and freedom. For one thing, it calls into question any studies and conclusions drawn from them that may emerge down the road: after all, if you were an academic investigating racial inequity and knew that having an undesirable data set would jeopardize both your professional and social standing, wouldn't you at least be tempted to make sure your study comes down on the "right" side of the discussion? And even if you didn't, doesn't the fact that I'm even asking the question throw doubt on the integrity of your research? Because if we can't ask the questions honestly, we can't trust any of the conclusions that follow.
In Stephanie's email, she wrote, "I think it is bad science to disagree with a conclusion in your heart, and then try (unsuccessfully, so far at least) to find data that will confirm what you want to be true." In other words: it's intellectually dangerous to decide what you believe and then manipulate the data to confirm it. We should all be able to agree on that, whether or not we like the particular questions Stephanie is asking. At least by asking, she's giving people the chance to answer. The next bright, questioning kid with an eye on a federal clerkship or a plum job at a firm won't ask the question, after seeing what's happened to Stephanie. He'll just quietly wonder, and draw his own conclusions.
And that's not good for any of us.
14 comments:
"It is for the right to question the things that we assume we know..."
Agreed, but isn't this frequently used as a guise for bigots to further their agenda.
Shannon, the very idea of quantifying "intelligence" is a western concept borne out of the idea of making society more efficient. This is EXACTLY how the caste system originated in India thousands of years ago. The caste system was originally devised to make society function more productively, but instead was hijacked by the few entrusted to be on top of the food-chain - the Brahmin, who resorted to using birthright to retain their status.
After glancing briefly at Stephanie's email, I can only conclude that Stephanie is ill equipped to function in a diverse society.
The statement "I absolutely do not rule out the possibility that African Americans are, on average, genetically predisposed to be less intelligent." is just PLAIN DUMB! If she was truly respectful of other human beings then she could have articulated it better by saying something like "I wonder exactly what part of intelligence is genetic" and then she could proceed to conduct a study on why Asian kids consistently beat Irish American kids at math.
btw. For all the "hundred white kids who silently wonder" about Africa's plight, lets tell them the TRUTH about the rape and pillage of Africa by multi-nationals still going on till today. Lets revamp world history, which is steeped in western bias.
Sorry, there is absolutely no excuse for this kind of insulting behavior from any student in this day and age.
And oh Shannon, I'm in love with that picture!!! ;-)
But Dave, that's my point. The kid who doesn't ask about Africa because he knows race is the thing we're not allowed to talk or ask about is the kid who's never going to get the opportunity to hear the real story. (Yes, the way we teach world history should change, but that's a macro project that's years in the making.)
And at least Stephanie's question--and it was a question; note that she said she was open to being convinced by either side--allows for conversation. It allows for us to raise the question of what exactly is intelligence, and are we defining it in ways that tilt the advantage toward one people group or another, and is it something that can be understood empirically, ad infinitum.
But if people just silently sit with their doubts and questions because of a fear of being labeled if they ask them, we won't have any of those conversations with them.
If IQ or standardized exam scores are a bad way to gauge intelligence, we need to be having that conversation. In the meantime, when they are widely accepted, of course a kid is going to wonder about the disparities. And I'd rather she had that conversation in an academic community than with a white-power group. Because they've got answers--oh, they've got answers--but we won't like them.
And maybe questions like Stephanie's will make researchers think differently about how they research, what questions they ask, their own assumptions, etc, and will lead to better science in the end.
The fact that some people use it as a cover for bigotry should not be an excuse for tamping down on intellectual inquiry of any stripe.
And that picture is with my 3-year-old godson on his first trip to the beach. ;-)
And Dave, think of it this way: for generations people were told African-Americans were inferior, and African-Americans were (with notable exceptions like WEB DuBois) kept in such a condition as to ensure that educationally, politically and socially they *were* inferior. As citizens, they were inferior. And you weren't supposed to question that. Then in only the last two generations, we have flipped that and said "We're all just the same, dear, but don't ask about it and don't talk about it." People seem much better able to talk about race in SA, but here, it is verboten, it is the thing that parents cringe at when their 4-year-old points out that his friend Ryan is brown, however innocuous (and obvious) the observation.
So we've flipped the equation but some of the conditions that produce inequality still persist and there are still achievement gaps even when, as I said, things like parents' income and educational level are controlled for. And it's natural for someone to wonder why that is. And if you say "hush, dear, everyone is the same," a bright kid is going to look around and say "doesn't seem the same to me." And too often parents and other people are ill-equipped to answer such questions and they're uncomfortable talking about race themselves.
I'd rather the girl said it out loud and opened the floor for discussion--although I wish it had been a discussion that hadn't crucified her because it's going to make the next person think twice about wondering aloud, and these are America's next legal powerhouses--than kept her niggling doubts to herself and just quietly assumed blacks were inferior. And went about her life as a lawyer and, very possibly, a judge (since she has a very prestigious federal clerkship that positions her for that) thinking so with never a chance for anyone to correct or challenge her. *That* is the danger of silencing.
The idea of always questioning our fundamental beliefs is vital in free societies. The problem is that when the "brahmin caste" in the US - folk from the Ivy League schools, like your esteemed institution, come up with a "classics" like "The Bell Curve", this simply legitimizes scientific racism. In the past Christianity was used to justify racism. The Afrikaners in SA through the NGK took it to a whole nother level when they used religion to justify apartheid to satiate their naked greed. Similarly, voodoo science is used pervasively by present day modern geneticists to entrench a hierarchical society along racial lines. I'd highly recommend that movie, GATTACA, to understand the deep moral issues that we face when our high priests of science takes genetics to its logical extreme. Fortunately, humans are far more complex than our genes and intelligence is just a small aspect of our human condition. Thank God for that!
I am more sensitive to the treatment of people of African descent since they have borne the brunt of racism perpetuated by colonialism and imperialism for centuries. Its time to cease the constant stoking of racial issues and accept that whenever ideas, even the best ones, when based on racial differences, have ALWAYS ended in tragedy - genocides, holocaust, crusades, apartheid ...that invariably brought out the worst in human beings.
When peoples voices are silenced, it sows the seeds of confrontation and violence. Stephanie is perfectly in her right in asking these questions, however the fallout of asking such questions is hopefully another learning experience for her. Next time maybe she can ask these questions in a less confrontational manner. Seemingly intelligent people can be really dumb in other areas, the university of life unfortunately, is not so forgiving - just look at screwed up personal lives of many brilliant/gifted individuals who are frequently handicapped by Asperger syndrome.
Dang it...might as well say it again - I like that picture! ;-)
First, it really wasn't all that public. It was a private conversation among "friends"--and if I'm being honest, probably part of what bothers me is that her friend forwarded this not out of any deep concern for the communal fabric at HLS, but to discredit a classmate who was an editor of the law review and probably more highly ranked. Harvard Law is notorious for its cutthroat competitiveness--keep your friends close and your enemies closer if you can tell which is which--and this kind of publicizing of a private conversation, in which you do take intellectual risks you don't take publicly, is poisonous to the community. Basically, I think the girl who forwarded it is a bitch.
Second, I think there's a difference between saying "black people are lazy porch monkeys who are stupid and a drain on the state" and saying "I'm not convinced there's not a genetic component to intelligence." The invitation, basically, is: convince me.
The latter, to me, actually opens up fertile ground for some really valuable conversations. How are we defining intelligence? Is it nature, nurture or both? Is it quantifiable? How does genetics come into play when race is a social construct? (Which then lets us have a conversation about what race even *is*.)
Third, there is more and more attention being paid to genetic components to intelligence, and that is a raft of conversations worth having too. I was selected to take college entrance exams when I was 12 because I'd been identified as "gifted." The idea was they would track us, check our college entrance exam scores when we were 17 against our earlier scores, and see if we'd progressed as expected. But earlier this year, fully 20 years after I first participated in this program (hosted by Duke University), they sent me cotton swabs and detailed instructions on how to send back my genetic material. It's for the most comprehensive study to date on the genetic contribution to intelligence. This is not a topic or field that is going away soon, particularly as genetic engineering will soon allow us to choose more than the sex and general health of our children.
Fourth, "The Bell Curve" was more nuanced than it got credit for, and one of its authors died right before it came out, thus hindering a lot of the discussion that would have been held around it. They said, in essence, what Stephanie said: they can't rule out a genetic component but no one knows what it is or to what extent. It got badly caricatured. And as a result its main point got lost: the intellectual elite is separating itself more and more from the mainstream of society, and that's a dangerous trend.
In sum, though, I think we get a lot further engaging the Stephanies of the world in conversation than in shouting them down as idiots and racists and ensuring they never take a chance on saying anything aloud again while not changing their minds.
I say this because I've been a Stephanie. I've been the bright kid who wasn't putting the pieces together in the best way. And I was just really lucky that I had several friends and mentors who pushed back against some of my assumptions without calling me racist, which shuts down all further conversation. They told me when I was wrong without calling me stupid or worthless, and gave me a vocabulary for conversations I didn't know how to have and a safe place to have them. I want the same for other Shannons and Stephanies, because you're right--we're the intellectual and cultural elite, and we will set the cultural tone in the years to come. If simply out of cold-nosed pragmatism, we're worth converting.
And Dave, in case I wasn't clear--I regard our obsession with genetics as highly dangerous and reductionist. As you say, we are so much more than our genetic coding. But we've got to be in the fray on this, we can't sit it out and we can't just shout people down.
Yep, sounds like typical Harvard dog-eat-dog-world. Some of my friends that attended Harvard hated their college experience for that precise reason. I trust your experience has been better though. Anyways, let this be a lesson to your naive friend. Hopefully she will now learn that ANY email one writes should be able to survive the harsh sunlight of public scrutiny. Don't they teach you these things at Harvard?
On your second point, I must respectfully disagree - I see no difference. Once you start down the slippery slope of correlating "intelligence" (whatever that means) to genetics, there is no end. You're guaranteed to slide into a very dark abyss of anger, hurt, humiliation, greed, bigotry....
Remember Shannon, there is a core group of scientists are no different from the fundamental jihadists, especially when you question their science or advance alternate theories that threatens the foundations of their scientific belief system. Try questioning the beliefs of some of your physicists or geneticists and you will get an eye-opening experience. Oh, I recently watched a series of 12 youtube video clips (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6-8-Yxdphsg) on "The Future of God" and was amazed at the ferocity of the personal attacks coming from scientists.
Thanks for sharing your experiences regarding the Duke University program. btw. Did you see that movie Gattacca? I hear that high school students in the US study this book/movie as part of education in bioethics and the impact of genetics on individual rights and freedoms.
I do agree that as we hurtle down the path of reductionist science, we place ourselves again in a precarious position. Just like we had to back off from our nuclear advances since it took us to the brink of Mutually Assured Destruction during the Cold War, in our quest to create a super race (not too far from Hitler's vision of an Aryan Utopia) we are guaranteed extinction.
Genetics can be used effectively and ethically as a force for good - disease prevention, individually customized medicines, longevity, etc. However, mixing genetics with social engineering is a recipe for disaster. Suppose Shannon, that there IS a link between genetics and intelligence, what then? Should we use genetics to rid ourselves of the not-so-bright or not-so-desirable characteristics? Will our social problems then fade away as we all become a homogeneous society like Europe? Think about whats happening demographically in Europe. Now fast-forward a few generations, is that the society you would like your great-grandchildren to grow up in? What does it really mean to be human?
As the intellectual and cultural elite, its your responsibility to think a few steps ahead and speak out against unethical applications of science at our institutions.Just because it can be done, does not mean that we should do it.
Sorry for rambling on, but my intent is not to convince you either way, but to ask you to pause and introspect based on your human values rather than rushing headlong into the next experiment for the sake of science.
Oh, the fundamentalism of (some) scientists is one of my pet peeves, for the same reason I generally refuse to engage in arguments about the existence of God or whether religion is worthwhile on the M&G pages: if you believe that the only valuable kind of knowledge--indeed, the only thing that can be called knowledge--is that which can be empirically proven, then the gulf separating us is already so far apart we'll just be howling into the wind.
And scientists sabotaged a great opportunity to revamp the Harvard curriculum recently. Many on the faculty wanted to add a required course in religion and ethics--there would have been a number of classes that could have been used to fulfill the requirement and the science faculty shot it down. I find it foolish and short-sighted: you cannot consider yourself well-educated in this day and age if you are not well-acquainted with religion and the role it plays in geopolitics; additionally, wrestling with some of the Big Questions should be what good education is all about. And as one of the faculty put it, "Education is about being able to look at something from a different perspective whether or not you agree with it. We ask our religious students to do that every day just by virtue of being here. We do not require the same mental flexibility of our non-religious students."
I have grave concerns about genetic engineering. There's evidence that in the US, 95% of people abort children with Down Syndrome if they know ahead of time the child is impaired, although DS is not life-threatening and there are so many resources available now that they can grow up to be fairly independent adults in most cases. But we are moving into an age in which we think we should be able to customize our kids, and I find that chilling. Obviously it will only be the economically elite that would bother to go that route, but the availability of it at all is chilling.
Look, I'm practically Luddite on the topic of genetic engineering. For what it can yield for medicine, sure. But the idea of using it to terminate "imperfect" pregnancies--who among us is perfect? And no one thinks they can handle a special needs kid until they have to, and then they do. More to the point, I think it should be OK just to be regular. To be average. Average shouldn't be a pejorative. We risk losing the marvelous wacky diversity amongst us when we try to control for every factor (and I can't imagine the pressure on those tailor-made kids).
Nonetheless, I don't think that being curious about what makes up intelligence is necessarily a bad thing or a bad topic of scholarship and research. I would certainly be unwilling to ban it. While it may have a genetic component, it also has a variety of other factors, and figuring it out and learning how to maximize those factors could be a key to helping kids succeed in school and letting families know how to create home environments that maximize chances for realizing full intellectual potential.
There will always be people who misuse good research. We deal with that as it happened, or if we're fortunate enough to foresee it, before it happens. But we don't curtail free inquiry because of it.
I got cut off by the comment section of my own stupid blog. Continued:
But my concern here is more about the right to ask questions and have conversations that are unorthodox because they transgress a social code. The result is that people are awkward when they confront them--yes, it would be nice if Stephanie had worded it more delicately, but no one in the US is taught how to talk about race. So we have this phantasmagoric fears and ideas and beliefs and rarely do we have the chance to trot them out and try them out and talk about them honestly.
Basically my take-away from Stephanie's statement was that she was tilting toward a genetic explanation for performance disparities because *we* have not done a good enough job explaining the myriad social, economic and cultural reasons for it. And we haven't talked about how a color-based understanding of race is basically a fiction, that it didn't exist as a concept until 400 years ago, and that genetic differences within racial groupings have been proven to be greater than differences between them.
I wish we talked about it better and more honestly. But since we don't, we need not to crucify people who ask the questions, however awkwardly they frame them, but rather to engage them in conversation.
One last point: I found it interesting that Stephanie never used the word inferior in her statement. She said she thought there might be a genetic predisposition, on average, to be less intelligent. Every outlet that picked it up translated that as "inferior." Less intelligent=inferior. Tells you a lot about what we value and how we determine human worth.
On another note, have you caught World Cup fever yet? I can't wait! I'll be watching from Houston with my dad who put me in my first league when I was 5.
*Love* that Shannon's post about the episode triggered such a great discussion. Exactly the kind of discussion that's most productive out of the situation.
Hey Spiff! Yeah, too bad conversations like this aren't more prevalent. Dave is a South African with whom I routinely argue on the Mail and Guardian website, but we've developed a mutual respect and visit back and forth on each other's blogs. Ah, the wonder of the interwebs. ;)
Mutual respect? Speak for yourself, don't be fooled, it more like admiration from my side ;-)
And yes, I'm psyched about the WC - can't wait!
I could not help but notice that you've sidestepped my repeated questions on whether you've seen the movie Gattaca that explored some of these issues to a degree.
"but no one in the US is taught how to talk about race"
This, I believe is the underlying issue behind Stephanie's dumb statement. I really admire Obama for mustering the courage and tackling this issue head-on in his famous speech "A More Perfect Union", at a very crucial point in his presidential campaign. Boy, what a gamble!
What I am disappointed with though, is the hijacking of the World Conference on Racism by the "Palestinian" lobby during Durban I and Durban II conferences. What a waste of valuable resources that were assembled to tackle the world wide problems of racism that affects BILLIONS around the world shaking off the yoke of oppression of colonialism and imperialism. I firmly believe that there should be a courses that address racism at every level of of our schooling, even a required course at the university level. This should occur even in racially homogeneous societies like Russia, China and India.
I also agree on your last point. The equating of "Less intelligent=inferior" is the most ludicrous conclusion to jump to but society has done a great job of instilling this false value. It boggles the mind that even in countries like China and India, the lingering effects of colonialism can still be felt through the subtle racism where it is less desirable to be darker skinned since its generally associated with simple folk relegated to performing manual labor in these hierarchical societies. In China, most women are paranoid about exposure to the sun. They claim health reasons, but we all know the real reasoning since most men could care less about sun exposure. In India, certain Bollywood superstars (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zgu96y6o5No) actively promote skin lightening treatments - un-fucking-believable!!!
I haven't seen Gattaca only because I couldn't find it in the video store--I wasn't sidestepping, I promise! I'll have to wait until I get back to Texas in June and can get it on Netflix.
Obama's race speech was brilliant, an absolute high point. He really became my candidate then. (I was split between him and Hillary before--truthfully, there is very little difference between them on policy, which is part of why she's able to be such an effective Sec of State for him, and she's a Wellesley alum, as am I.)
I would love to see courses on racism taught at every level, but we'll have to teach the teachers first. A lot of well-meaning white parents think that if they don't talk about it, they're teaching their kids not to notice or recognize difference; hence their apprehension about even acknowledging that their kid's friends are of different races. They don't think kids can handle conversations about racism until they're in junior high. But there's been some really interesting research lately saying kids absorb social cues by 3 or 4 years old, and that they interpret their parents' refusal to talk about race as somehow meaning black=bad. It totally backfires on the parents.
I had a heated argument with a friend of a friend who just adopted six kids from Ethiopia (the farming out of the children of the developing world to the US and Europe is a whole other topic on which I have loads of opinions). She was upset when her kid's sixth-grade class taught the civil rights movement because, she said, her kids wouldn't know blacks had ever been inferior here if people didn't make such a big deal about it. You're a white person raising Ethiopian kids in Tennessee and you think they're not going to notice they're black and that that has some baggage attached to it here? As you said, un-fucking-believable.
Wow--y'all have quite the discussion going in the comments. I just wanted to pop in and say hello. You posted a response on my comment on the LPM blog regarding my husband graduating from Harvard this week, too. Congrats to you.
And after skimming this post, I must absolutely agree with you that Harvard has a paradoxically anti-intellectual-freedom culture when it comes to certain issues, including social issues as well as religious ones. I feel qualified to say this because I formerly worked in the Dean's Office at one of the schools under two different deans and saw it not only in the school where I worked but also across Harvard as a whole.
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