Trump's Racism As Evidence of Confusion About Progress

Brazil might be the most racially diverse nation in the world. Most people are surprised to learn that it has the largest population of Japanese outside of Japan, for instance. The great Brazilian novelist Jorge Amado has a scene in one novel in which characters are discussing race issues and the blacksmith, who is quietly listening, finally volunteers, “I think the solution is to just have everyone inter-breed until even God can’t tell them apart.”

It's a curious thing to be racist in the age of CRISPR and yet our president - having learned that it is what Republicans want - was standing in Minnesota telling the folks at his rally yesterday, “You have good genes, you know that, right? You have good genes. A lot of it is about the genes, isn’t it, don't you believe? The racehorse theory. You think we’re so different? You have good genes in Minnesota.”

Trump is confused about genes. The most extreme version of racial purity is, of course, in-breeding. That leads to the opposite of racial superiority, leading to deformities and offspring susceptible to illness. The opposite of inbreeding, or racial purity, is finding mates from further away. In 1870 Britain, the mean distance between the birthplace of marriage partners was 10 km; by 2019, it was 250 km. And what studies have shown is that as the distance between the birthplace of parents increases, so does the height and IQ of their child. If there is such a thing as racial superiority, it comes from taking the advice of Amado’s blacksmith and mingling genes from distant lands.

There is something deeper, though. At the heart of racism lies incredible ignorance about how we make progress. Between 1900 and 2000, incomes in the US rose 6 to 8X. Not only that but people in 2000 were able to buy things that simply didn't exist in 1900, from polio vaccines to plane tickets. Did people work harder? Not even close. The average workweek dropped from 60 hours to less than 40 hours.

None of that remarkable progress can be traced back to genetic evolution or more effort. Humans did not become 8X stronger or faster or smarter because of rapid evolution. Their machines and systems, though, improved by even more than 8X. If you want to make progress you don't go for racial purity. You go for innovation and market expansion. Innovation in products and social institutions. It's not enough to invent planes and computers. You should also invent venture capital and public universities. And just as computers are initially available to only 6 huge institutions at first and then become something most people carry in their pocket, venture capital and universities are first accessible to just a tiny fraction and then a growing portion of Americans. (Expanding accessibility and use for more Americans is market expansion, like growing the market for computers from 100 units a year to 100 million.) That is the stuff of progress.

It is true that genes can make you faster, stronger, smarter. If you have millions of years. Or you can do all that with inventions in the space of decades.

A lot of people are appalled at Trump's racism because they find it offensive. That's appropriate but it somehow misses an even larger point: racists are notoriously bad at understanding the importance of focusing on innovation - of both products and institutions - and market expansion. The point is not to create an us vs. them but instead to make our great inventions - from trains and cars to research labs and voting booths - more widely used and accessible. That’s how your community becomes more prosperous.

All of us do better as all of us do better. Add one more smart person to the room and you've just sparked a half dozen new ideas. And if that person was born far away, we've just raised the odds that a spark of romance or desire between that new person and someone already present will result in a baby who is some new genetic blend, perhaps a tad taller or smarter. If it is racial superiority that captures your imagination, you ought to think like Amado’s blacksmith. In any case, a focus on genes is proof that you don’t even know where to look to explain or accelerate progress.

A Big Reason Racism is So Dangerous

The world's fastest man in the 100 meter race is black. Has been for some time. It seems tough to deny that there are differences in populations and it may be that some subset of folks with dark skin have a genetic advantage when it comes to something like quick sprints. It could be. Some Asians might be consistently different from other populations of Asians and some European consistently different from other populations of Europeans and perhaps the population of Asians is consistently different from the population of Europeans or Americans or Africans in some consistent way. I'm a little dubious about this and I don't really think that we have enough data as yet to know. (How could we not have enough data? Even genes get expressed differently in different environments and circumstances. I can easily imagine someone in 100 years laughing at these myopic observations of mine, pointing to all that they'd learned since about how "situational genetics" makes environmental factors seem like genetic factors. We are living in such a tiny slice of the story of human evolution. Plus even within families there are such huge differences that it's hard to imagine any real differences hold within much larger populations.)

Whether or not there are differences in populations in terms of ability, though, completely misses the point. Let me briefly digress to make that point.

Let's say that all you've known of transportation technology is bikes. You see a group of people standing around and you're asked to predict who will get to the next town the soonest. You "know" that men tend to be stronger than women, that young men are stronger than old men, and lean men are faster than fat men. So you spot the youngest, leanest man in the group and point to him. "He'll be fastest," you say. 

What you don't know from your little slice of time in 1880 is that you are now in a time when there are bikes, cars, bullet trains, planes and zip line infrastructure built between towns. As it turns out, an elderly lady with a cane and more money than the rest has hired a helicopter to get her to the next town and arrives there ten to 45 minute faster than anyone else.

Given technology advances, all the usual determinants are made irrelevant for predicting outcomes. The strong young man and the weak old woman move at exactly the same speed on the 767 jet and both are moving much faster than Usain Bolt ever ran. 

Which takes me back to social realities that are most often equated with economics.

At one point in time, physical strength makes the biggest different in one's productivity. At the next stage of development, the ability to quickly calculate numbers is the biggest determinant. At the next it is creativity. And so it goes. As machines and systems at turns obsolete, automate, and enhance our skills, different "natural" skills matter more or less.

I put "natural" skills into quotation marks because as we learn more about genetic engineering and enhance tools like CRISPR that enable genetic engineering, even genetic differences at birth will matter little at determining our "natural" set of skills.

Progress is about creating better systems to enable us to enjoy life. "All men are created equal," is such a brilliant line because it shifts the focus from the question of whether one is an aristocrat or peasant and the argument of how different such people may be to the question of how we engage in social inventions to make everyone happier and more prosperous.

Racists focus on the wrong thing. Genetic evolution hasn't been a determinant of progress for hundreds of thousands of years. Social evolution is what makes Norwegians more affluent than Greeks, not biological evolution. The question of how quickly we get to the next town is a question of technological invention The question of how prosperous, peaceful and long we live is a question of social invention; do we have the right education systems, financial systems, business systems, and healthcare systems to enhance our lives? 

That question matters to progress; the question of race does not.

Why Our Media Will Make it Difficult for Anything Good to Come of Ferguson

Protests flared up around the country and violence and looting resulted in at least one death last night in Ferguson following the Grand Jury's decision not to indict Darren Wilson. So what's the good news? All of this media attention and turmoil is in the wake of the killing of an 18 year old boy rather than a man of Martin Luther King's stature. That, for me, signals hope. But it's a signal that could get lost in our media's noise.

I've become increasingly disillusioned with our for-profit media. A for-profit media is motivated to increase revenue. If that means making a big deal about Kim Kardashian's butt than they'll do that. Real progress is slow and takes some sophistication to cover. It's like writing a novel: you have to be skilled to get it right and it takes a long time. The conversation the media needs to facilitate now is one about causes and cures for the huge cost of being a black American.

The simple fact is that a black man can expect to die in his 60s and a white man in his mid-70s. (White males life expectancy is 75 years and black male's is 6 year less.) Household income for blacks is only 59% of whites' and wealth of black households is 20% of white households.

There are only two explanations for this. The first is that blacks are inferior and this is a natural consequence. We can dismiss the fact that blacks - once excluded from sports and pop culture entertainment because of their supposed inferiority - have proven that they're more than able to compete in their athleticism, comedy, creativity and music ability.  It's possible that they really are as good as whites on a variety of performance measures but just happen to be bad at business. Or it could be that business relationships are one area where it's still common to be unscientific and instead rely on  our judgments that are colored by folklore, gut, instinct, and racism that we scarcely admit even to ourselves. Which brings us to the second explanation for the gap between whites and blacks: racism.

It's obvious that there is still plenty of racism alive today. It's less obvious that when we're talking about issues like wealth and income, racism suffered by your grandparents puts you at a disadvantage.  Privilege and opportunity - for good or for bad - dominoes across generations. Even if we eradicated all racism today, blacks would still take generations to catch up simply because privilege and opportunity provide advantages that take generations to dissipate. Even if the average American's income stopped growing for decades, it would still be higher than that of China's.

Good policy starts with facts and then makes plans to change them. It doesn't ignore facts. It doesn't defend the status quo. And it looks beyond the stories of heroes and villains to systems. It's true that privileged whites screw up their advantage sometime. It's true that disadvantaged blacks rise above obstacles. But it's not the folks who do well or poorly in spite of prevailing norms that should concern policy makers. The focus of good policy is on improving the distribution of the whole population, not putting a spotlight on outliers. And of course, outliers - the violent youth or wealthy businessman - are the focus of our media, which makes it so hard to hope for policy that will change normal rather than spotlight the extremes.

The Race to Racism is Not to the Swift

It would have been fun to watch Hitler come to power under the watch of 24 hour news channels. I wonder if it would have fueled his rise or stifled it. The commentators would have loved the ratings they'd get from defending or attacking such a vile character.

MSNBC's Ed (sounds a lot like, and looks a little like, a leftist Rush Limbaugh) is outraged that Glen Beck (an alarmist from the right) said that Barack Obama is a racist.

It's a topic worth talking about and I think it gets to the difference between race and racism.

If you grow up Latino or Asian in this country, you have a different experience than someone who grows up white or black. If you grow up poor or rich and you have a different experience from someone who grows up middle class. If you grow up in an Italian or Jewish family that clings to its ethnic or religious identity, you have a different experience than someone who grows up Mormon.

Race matters. (As does ethnic group or religion. Without race, religion and ethnicity we'd lose about half our jokes.) Plus, it simply isn't true that a government composed only of Latino Catholic females would be the same as a government composed only of White Protestant males or Asian Baptist transvestites. Race is part of a person's experience and it'd be foolish to discount it.

Racism is the conclusion that members of a particular race (or races) are inferior. Racism settles for less for a swath of humanity.

Pretending that race doesn't matter is a stance only slightly more sophisticated than racism. (Which is like saying that the service at a restaurant is only slightly more sophisticated than waitresses on roller skates).

Believing that race, gender, and ethnic or religious orientation matters and that a community's representatives should roughly match the community is very different from racism. It seems to me that missing this point requires willful ignorance.

What if Race Didn't Matter in November?

Colin Powell was once one of the Republican Party's luminaries, one of the country's most respected men. Was, that is, until he was made to be dubya's good soldier and distort the facts about the threat of Iraq at the UN. This single egregious act basically destroyed his further political prospects.

The Republicans chose McCain as their nominee, obviously wanting a man with military experience. Powell could have done that - and offered the experience of a successful commander instead of the experience of a less than successful pilot.

Had he not been violated by his relationship with Dick and dubya, Powell might be running against Obama in November's general election. And think about how cool that would be - race as both the most notable feature of the campaign and a complete non-issue.

Jorge Amado's Plan to End Racism

Yesterday, I stopped at Subway for a sandwich. The young guy who started my sub then said, "Sir, I ask this only because I care about the quality of your sandwich: are you willing to have this black guy put on your vegetables?" I stared at him. "Please realize sir, he is black." This was obviously his idea of humor and the young man to whom he was referring looked somewhat bemused and mostly resigned. I said to him, "It's an odd country. You can be white and black and black is what you are labeled." "Yeah," he said. "I'm half nigger and half cracker." Oh good, I thought, my sandwich is going to be made by a young man filled with self loathing. Unsurprisingly, it was tasteless. I should have said something witty or acerbic or critical, like "Oh yeah!" but instead, all I said was, "I'll have the cucumbers, alfalfa sprouts, and olives."

In the wake of Geraldine Ferraro's racist remark about Obama, I do wonder about this. How is this that a man who has one white parent and one black is automatically considered a black man? ("I don't know why people are so shocked that she would say this," quips Bernard. "Those Italians are notoriously racist.")

In a great scene from one of Jorge Amado's novels, a group of Brazilians are gathered around discussing race. Brazil has a little of everything and in spite of a reputation for being generally tolerant of one another, race problems emerge. The characters are getting quite philosophical about all this when (I believe it was) the blacksmith breaks his silence. "The answer is to have everyone interbreed until even God can't tell them apart," he announces. At 20, this seemed like a brilliant solution to me but I got very little cooperation in my attempts to put it into action.

Maybe, just maybe, when we finally read that Obama is a white guy whose father was black, we'll be en route to this world of racial confusion. I may have scuttled my personal plans to execute Amado's plan, but I still think that racial confusion might be the final solution to racist confusion.

Woman President? Not Yet

“I think that woman should be equal with men. I just don’t think that they should have positions of power over men.”
- Student in my son’s college class

The experts have begun to eulogize Hillary Clinton’s campaign. And I’m hesitant to make her campaign’s apparent demise mean anything because something had to be proven: either we would conclude that racism or sexism is still alive and well in the US. Someone had to lose. Obama is a great candidate, but he’s not flawless. Clinton is a flawed candidate, but she’s still great. It’s easy to say that she had the bad luck of running up against one of the best speakers in politics in years, but if Obama were running behind Clinton, similarly persuasive points could be made about why a candidacy as promising as his foundered.

Clinton is articulate and her view of the world is sophisticated. She talks like a politician at times, but we’ve had the good old boy approach of plan speech and simple thinking, so nuance ought not to automatically disqualify her. And while I acknowledge that she’s reviled by a wide swath of the polity, if that were enough to keep someone out of office, dubya would be clearing brush in Crawford. (Wait. Let me hold that image for a moment. Sigh. Back on topic.)

It’s hard to imagine that women will have a better shot at the presidency any time soon, and after 200+ years, they apparently still have not come up with a candidate worthy of the job. One wonders how long it’ll be before we join the 40+ countries that have already had female heads of state. (Among them Muslim countries like Indonesia and Pakistan.) It may well be that Clinton is not a good enough candidate and that she is, just coincidentally, one in a string of millions of women who just happen to be “not quite good enough” for the job.

There are many reasons that we have not had a woman president, but among them there seems to be a subtle one that intrigues me.

Women are used to putting the needs of others before their own. Blame (praise?) nurture or nature for this trait, but could it be that the edge to Obama is as simple as that? Women are better able to help others and might they have, once again, deferred their own agenda. Are women simply working to right racism before they deal with sexism?

Ben knew once he had opened the two sweaters that he’d better not wait. If he didn’t quickly put on one of the sweaters, his mother would be offended, assuming that he was unhappy with his Christmas present. As soon as he put on the one sweater, his mother wrung her hands. “Oh, Ben. The other sweater, you don’t like?”

I know that if Clinton wins, very similar arguments will be made about how racism is more deeply entrenched than sexism. But perhaps John Lennon was ahead on this as with so many topics. He and Yoko Ono were visiting some Black Panthers, talking about racism. Lennon was appalled at how casually demanding the men were of the women, ordering them about. This is what prompted him to write, “Women is the Nigger of the World.” Maybe he’s right. Maybe sexism is stronger even than racism. The Democratic primary suggests that this is still true.

In Defense of Joe Biden

Joe Biden recently said this about Barak Obama:
“I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy,” he said. “I mean, that’s a storybook, man.”

It would appear that his candidacy for president is once again over. I hope not. I'd like to step in to defend this man.

We live in a gotcha culture that makes politicians timid and teaches them to focus on avoiding mistakes rather than focusing on doing what is right. If we make such stupid statements the reason to cut off the candidacy of the one guy who has consistently been bold enough to criticize Bush's Iraq policy and informed and thoughtful enough to offer an alternative (usually staying at least one step ahead of his peers and the press) then we're in trouble. If a candidate has to avoid saying stupid things for two years, you can be sure that he’ll say meaningless things instead. Only people who avoid actually saying anything are guaranteed to say nothing offensive or stupid.

Compare what he has said with the list of things said by the man who has most recently been elected president. Then, more importantly, compare what he has thought and the way in which he has candidly shared his thoughts, with what has been thought by our chief explainer.
Put away your notions of getting a pure candidate. It's not going to happen. Focus instead on what a candidate will do in spite of the personal flaws.

Past Data and Your Potential - Martin Luther King & Race

The physical world has some wondrous characteristics. If you have two pens, one white and one black, and believe that the white pen will drop more rapidly than the black one - neither pen cares a whit for your belief. They fall as they fall and your silly belief about the importance of color has no influence over their behavior.

By contrast, the social world doesn't so neatly defy expectations. Most of you will have heard about the teachers who were told about promising and not so promising students at the beginning of the year. They were told that some students had scored very high on a test indicating potential and that they, the teachers, should show more patience with those students, do more to encourage their performance, and, quite simply, expect more. Given that others had scored poorly, the teachers should not expect as much from them. As it turns out, the predictions were accurate. The problem? The students had been divided into the two groups randomly. This kind of predetermination happens outside of the classroom as well.

If a critical mass of the community believes that you are less human, there will be plenty of evidence to support this claim. The pen is not influenced by your beliefs about its performance; the individual within a particular social milieu is greatly influenced by social beliefs. To consider the power of changing beliefs just remember that Christ referred to the adoption of new beliefs as being born again.

This is the dirty little secret that liberals won't admit: the data that supports the racist claims of books like The Bell Curve is factual. There is evidence that blacks have lower IQs, just as there is data to support lower life expectancies, lower incomes, and higher jail rates. These differences may yet prove to be genetic, but such a claim seems highly suspect. The genes that control skin pigmentation are so minimal within the arsenal of human genes that the probability of their influencing intelligence, income, and incarceration seems questionable if not absurd. The problem with past data is that it tells you nothing about future potential.

This was the genius of Martin Luther King. He spoke to latent potential. Rather than dryly citing facts about what the data suggested, King spoke to the human spirit.

I think that Jacques Barzun articulated this difference best:

“[T]he very point of emancipation … is not to give power to those who have earned the right to it, but to lift the helpless to a level where they are free to learn how to use the right.“Those who oppose freedom argue that as illiterates, as slaves, as children, they cannot manage the household, which is true though illiberal. The political history of the West has been a running battle between the ‘realistic’ deniers of one freedom after another and the generous ones who gambled on another truth, that capacity is native to all and depends only on fair conditions for its development.[1]”

Martin Luther King’s appeal came from so many sources. One is the realization that our own potential is not seen in our past, regardless of our race or situation. And that is a reminder that all of us could use. Happy Martin Luther King’s Day!

[1] Jacques Barzun, From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, 1500 to the Present (New York: HarperCollins, 2000) 534.

The Nonsense of Linking Illegal Immigration and National Security

A great deal of noise is made about how illegal immigrants are "illegal" and that should settle the issue. Proponents of this issue as one that matters continue to say that this is also a security issue, although they never offer a single statistic to substantiate this claim as any thing other than speculation.

To illustrate the absurdity of this, imagine taking an issue that also cracks down on "illegal" behavior and actually has statistics to show that it is a national security issue - something that kills about 20,000 Americans a year. Imagine trying to win an election on the basis of "cracking down" on speeding.

Illegal immigration as a political issue is not about legality or about security. It is about xenophobia, which I am pretty sure is Greek for fear of Hispanics.

Race and Performance

Watch baseball this week and note how varied are the races of the players on the two teams vying to become World Series champs. The engineers and programmers working on the technology development project inside of companies represent far more racial diversity than the administrative side of the house. Watch a great musical group like Pat Methany's or Bela Fleck's, and you'll be struck by the racial diversity.

When performance standards are clear and the playing field is level (that is, kids from any culture are free to enter), racial divides begin to melt.

So, what is one reason that race continues to be a factor in so many arenas of American life? Because in the domains of business (as opposed to technology) and politics, performance measures are so arbitrary and so "colored" by perception that race becomes a factor.

Racism should not just be attacked directly, but where racism is present, it should be a signal that performance metrics need to be better developed, understood, and used.