In journalism as in academia, the most important questions one has to learn are those that one may not ask. For instance, back in April on Bob Costas’ HBO sports show, football announcer Chris Collinsworth, a white, retired Cincinnati Bengals wide receiver, stuttered and stammered as he said that he is so nervous about touching professionally on race in any way, because it could instantly end his announcing career, that he is afraid to ask any race-related questions.
In grad school, I was always struck by how some of my classmates knew exactly what questions not to ask. I wondered if someone was handing out fliers that I wasn’t receiving. One question that nowadays may never be asked in academia is, “Why, if black IQs are on average 15 points lower than white IQs, and the Constitution forbids unequal treatment under the law, would the government routinely hire people based on their being black, rather than based on their being qualified?” It’s a non-question; no one may ask it. Forget that you even read it here.
In that spirit, I have a compiled a series of “non-questions” regarding New Orleans. They only appear to be questions but aren’t, because no one may ask them. I am not asking them; thus, no answer is expected. I am merely listing them as a public service, so that everyone will know what he may not ask.
1. Why were New Orleans residents shooting at rescue workers in helicopters and boats, and firing on the contractors who were trying to fix the levee?
2. Why were so many thugs shooting and looting and raping and murdering (and carjacking) on the streets of New Orleans and at the Superdome when a natural disaster hit town?
3. Is it true that the thugs who were shooting and looting and raping and murdering and carjacking were just doing what they do all time in “the Big Easy”?
4. Why were virtually all of the looters and shooters and murderers and rapists and carjackers black?
5. Since it is a well-known fact that blacks can only be the victims, but never the perpetrators of racism, should we damn as racists the white and Asian foreign tourists who said they were being terrorized in the Superdome and on the streets of New Orleans based on the color of their skin, ignore their complaints, “disappear” alleged black-on-white and black-on-Asian crimes committed in the aftermath of Katrina, and arrest the tourists for racial insensitivity and hate crimes?
Article comments
1 - The Searcher
Firstly, expect to get a huge amount of flack for this post! Just remember that, no matter what the perceived negative or unfair situation is, external forces will always be blamed:
You suffer from _______, which is a disease caused by _______.
1. They're miscreants
2. The ones who weren't trying to obtain food were doing it for the same reasons as ever; when they think no one's looking and/or they won't get caught, they will engage in violent anti-social behavior, whether it be at a parade, a sports event, a power-outage or what have you.
3. It is highly unlikely that all of these people were, in the heat of the moment, suddenly and for the first time, possessed with a desire to do these things -- a sort of temporary insanity defense, if you will.
4. Most of the people that live there are poor blacks, thus based on demographics alone you would see more black looters than white. However, this does not account for the entire picture. I would assert that, for whatever reasons, violence seems to have become an accepted part of black youth culture in America. I leave it to others to justify this violence and find the usual scapegoats, as they surely will.
5. Only whites, especially rich whites, are racists.
I don't know about the rest of your questions...biases exist everywhere but we choose which biases to focus on based on which side of the polarization we fall, and the arguments we're trying to support.
With regard to IQ, you will undoubtedly hear it said that IQ is determined by how rich and white you are. The argument goes thus: if the majority of people with high IQ are rich white folks, then surely richness and whiteness and the social advatanges they entail, such as better nutrition, parenting and education, are CAUSES of high IQ.
If cigarettes were as off-limits as certain other issues, we might hear this argument posed thus: everytime one smokes a cigarette, one lights a match or butane lighter. We find a much higher incidence of lung cancer in people that smoke cigarettes reguarly. Therefore, matches and lighters must be causing the cancer.
2 - Dr. Kurt
Howdy, fellas -
One other interesting phenomenon that has been extensively studied during the past 10 years: stereotype threat. It explains, among other things, why white males do worse on math tests if there are asian males in the same room. Check it out. Humans are very complex, and so are the answers to most of our questions.
As to violence and stupidity? Humans are really violent, aren't we - especially in groups - and, consistently, dumb. Nothing new under the sun there!
It is great to ask tough questions; I would invite everyone to think about the answers deeply and carefully.
3 - The Searcher
Nicholas,
You see the implication: it's not just a matter of richness and whiteness being causes for IQ, it's the further fact that white people might be IN THE ROOM that might explain everything.
Thankfully, this factor could be experimentally controlled to determine its correlative weight. I strongly suspect it is out of the running for causation, but Dr. Kurt has given me another good contender for a thesis.
Even so, expect to see something like this argument put forth:
"Yes, but just THINKING about white people causes test anxiety. There is no escaping the collective inferiority complex that has been ingrained by racial prejudice. This complex in turn results in a self-defeatist attitude, which in turn causes poor performance on the tests."
The wonderful things about this argument are 1) it fulfills the penultimate requirement of displacing responsibility and setting up a sick role and 2) it poses great difficulty to test instruments, after all how can we REALLY MEASURE what goes on in a person's head? Then the matter is placed into the realm of "the unexplained" things beyond the scope of scientific investigation, such as the existence of God, bringing behind it the inevitible caravan of pseudo-scientific "theories" (ala intelligent design) that satisfy the natural human need to TALK ABOUT things which cannot be experimentally examined.
4 - Dr. Kurt
Jeez Louise! I am going to hafta kick this blogcritic habit; everything lately seems to devolve into a pissing match. I said (and implied) nothing of the kind, Searcher; I merely offered another, I think interesting, and yes, well documented, angle on what is obviously a passle of complex questions. I am a huge fan of individual responsibility/accountability, and worked for some years on applications of criminal thinking (see Stanton Samerow); the proximal cause of criminality is, almost always, the criminal's lousy thinking errors. They manage to excuse & rationalize everything they do, no matter how repulsive. No one has found any evidence for a genetic cause of thinking errors yet, have they?
If ya'll don't want to explore, but rather just pontificate, just leave me another rude & dismissive reply; I'll go and quietly eat my lunch somewhere else.
5 - Bill B
Don't waste your incite Doc. It seems searcher has such tunnel vision that your post went over his/her head. He/she couldn't drag himself/herself away from his/her preconceptions long enough to digest your point.
Note: Is that "his/her" thing too pc for this post?
6 - Karnack
A prediction. (I will remain anon. for this one).
With gangbangers in NOLA discovering that DBP (Death by Payback) is a reality, in a no holds barred approach to taking the streets back... the NEW NOLA will suffer a crime reorganization when hired mexicans filter into the jobs rebuilding the city - and bring the black tar heroin traders/dealers/cartel minions with them. The turf wars will really begin.
It's not going to be pretty.
Furthermore the fisheye view you are seeing from the news media at this point in time... is not showing the totality of the devestation in the area. It's a REAL mess on a magnitude unimaginable by those who left their keyboards since the disaster; and one of which I can personnally attest just coming out of a 2 week shift of recovery work.
Warning: Don't go back. Ever. It's going to become the meanest, toughest, most dangerous city in the country.
7 - DrPat
Nicholas: Try "National Guard" or, if needed, "National Guard troops." That obviates the need for the clumsy "Guardspersons" construct you're using.
Companies and agencies don't hire averages, they hire individuals. Average IQ has no bearing on your argument.
Criminals and thugs likewise make individual decisions. Your conclusions are unsupported -- the most you can wring out of the observations you cite is "all of the looters and shooters and murderers and rapists and carjackers" were humans.
Nagin and Blanco are Democrats, Bush is Republican. Gender and sexual choice have no bearing on your observations.
That said, I'll charge in anyway with a question of my own: Why didn't you bring up posse commitatus? If, instead of these red herrings, you were to bring up some real points of argument, your insinuations might have more weight.
As it stands, though, you have erected a house of cards. Don't breathe too hard...
8 - Bushwacker
Okay Okay--another issue of race which has nothing to do with race. It is a class issue. PERIOD! I get so sick and tired of people blaming a situation on race. If that is the case, then white people are the blame for the drug epidemic in this country because we all know that black people are too lazy, stupid and dumb to ship drugs. Hell, if black people trafficked drugs into this country, they would all be gone by the time the plane landed in the field.
9 - RJ
Great post! :)
10 - Nicholas
"Nicholas: Try 'National Guard' or, if needed, 'National Guard troops.' That obviates the need for the clumsy 'Guardspersons' construct you're using."
Aren't we a little dim? The clumsy construct was deliberate. "National Guard troops" do not let a thug hit them over the head, and then run away when the thug shoots their own comrade; 'Guardspersons' do.
"Companies and agencies don't hire averages, they hire individuals. Average IQ has no bearing on your argument."
I didn't mention companies, but as a matter of fact, when companies and agencies engage in affirmative action, they do not hire individuals; they hire racial/ethnic/sexual types. And of course, average IQ bears on my argument. Do you always pee on a person's leg, and tell him it's raining?
"Criminals and thugs likewise make individual decisions. Your conclusions are unsupported -- the most you can wring out of the observations you cite is 'all of the looters and shooters and murderers and rapists and carjackers' were humans."
And so, when someone from a protected group says that whites are racist, you of course reposnd to him at "the most you can wring out of the observations you cite is" 'all of people in question were humans." Not!
"Nagin and Blanco are Democrats, Bush is Republican. Gender and sexual choice have no bearing on your observations."
Man, you couldn't be trusted to give a person the correct time of day.
11 - The Searcher
Dr. Kurt: I was just being intentionally caustic, and half-jokingly exploring how far that very interesting phenomenon could be stretched by some to give people yet another excuse for being stupid, which I know you personally do not favor. I know you weren't implying anything more than that there are no simple answers where complex humans are concerned. And, I do want to explore, contrary to what Mr. Bill might think.
You say:
"The proximal cause of criminality is, almost always, the criminal's lousy thinking errors. They manage to excuse & rationalize everything they do, no matter how repulsive. "
This conclusion is unequivocal that cognitive ability has a CAUSAL (as opposed to simply CORRELATIVE) relationship to criminality. Are such thinking errors encountered consistently across socioeconomic and ethnic "classes"? If so, where does this leave us?
You also say:
"No one has found any evidence for a genetic cause of thinking errors yet, have they?"
I don't know, but it's surely worth investigating. However, I will gladly wager that if I were raised by the same parents as Einstein, pissed in the same pot as him, ate the same sausage as him, went to all the same schools as him, I would still not be as brilliant as he was. That's a hypothetical argument, here's a more concrete one: education cannot create intelligence, not even the sort of Gardnerian multiple intelligences used to excuse deficiencies in other areas. I've taught music for near twenty years to people of all ages and am comfortable saying that there is no teaching system, even with an infinite amount of practicing, that will consistently turn sausage-fingered, dead-eared fumblers into compositional and pedagogical virtuosi such as J.S. Bach. That argument holds as strongly when carried over to any of the "composite" intelligences you wish -- athletics, writing, mathematical. Where does this leave us?
Bushwhacker: I will agree with you that this issue is about class rather than race, in the generic meaning of the word "class" as "a division or rating based on grade or quality".
12 - DrPat
Nicholas: thanks for underscoring my points. I appreciate it.
Did you leave posse commitatus out on purpose?
13 - Bushwacker
Fortunately Searcher, there is more than one definition to that word.
14 - The Searcher
Bushwhacker: Oh, I know exactly which definition you were using, it's that old favorite catch-all measuring stick, SES :)