Ta-Nehisi Coates

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I don't think Mosquito, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs' latest studio album, is their best, but I love it anyway. I'm partial right now to "Wedding Song." I think it's because while there's always been something violent about the YYY's music, they somehow pull off these really syrupy ballads with great skill. (I don't know who else but Karen O can croon "You suddenly complete me" and get away with it. But "Hysterical" is a great, great song.)

The album doesn't feel like a complete thought, but I'm pumping it nonetheless. Right now, the YYYs are to me what Public Enemy was to me as a child, and Outkast was to me as a college kid. They are the only band I really sit around waiting on.

One cool thing about saying something bigoted is you can always deny it was your intention, and thus perserve some amount of face—at least in your own mind. Fuzzy Zoeller said of Tiger Woods:

 "The little boy is driving it well, he's putting well," Zoeller told reporters, adding, "You pat him on the back and say congratulations and enjoy it and tell him not to serve fried chicken next year." He then walked away, but turned back and said, "Got it? Or collard greens or whatever the hell they serve."

When confronted, Zoeller—despite the "Whatever the hell they serve" tell—was shocked to find people suspecting that he might have said something racist, lamenting that "something I said in jest was turned into something it's not."

Some years later we find Sergio Garcia making another fried-chicken joke about Woods and surprised to find himself accused of racism:

I answered a question that was clearly made towards me as a joke with a silly remark, but in no way was the comment meant in a racist manner.

Garcia has since gone on an apology tour, all the while declining to say that he made a racist joke. Ian Crouch has a good piece up on how bigoted remarks follow people and why:

On Wednesday, Garcia held a news conference, during which he offered another apology, and attempted to explain himself: "As soon as I left the dinner, I started getting a sick feeling in my body. I didn't really sleep at all. I felt like my heart was going to come out of my body. I've had this sick feeling all day."

Part of Garcia's "sick feeling" must surely, if we are to take him at his word, stem from his regret at offending people—though his claim that he felt swiftly guilty does undercut the argument that he was unaware of the racial connotations of the reference.

That visceral, sudden sinking feeling also suggests something else: that Garcia, a veteran global sports celebrity, knew almost instantly that his offensive words were something that would very likely remain with him for the rest of his career and beyond, regardless of the passing of time and the force or number of subsequent apologies.

One reason the comment will dog Garcia is because he will never cop to what he actually did. In certain eyes (mine) Ron Paul will always be the dude who would countenance white supremacy as long as it advanced him politically, and (much worse) lacked the courage to confront this fact.

Crouch contrasts Garcia with Tim Hardaway, who did exactly that:

Many of the stories (mine included) that noted Collins's bravery pointed to the negative things that former player Tim Hardaway had said in 2007 about the prospect of gay players in professional basketball. Hardaway later apologized. But unlike some athletes who do only what they have to in order to save what they can of their careers, his was not just the compulsory apology. He went on to work with gay-rights groups, to learn why what he said was wrong and to make a real effort to atone for it.

He had undergone, as he said in 2011, a true "change of heart." Recently, he told the Palm Beach Post, "What I did say was terrible, and it was bad and I live with it every day. It was like a bully going to beat up people every day." And in April, he reached out to Collins and offered him his support. Now, when gay athletes come out of the closet, there will be a sentence about Hardaway and what he said—but below that, there will be another, about what he has done, and said, since. His cruel statements cannot, and should not, be erased, but they mean something different today than they did then.

One reason people do not want to cop to bigotry is simply because of the shame. We consider bigotry through the lens of morality. I think this approach is unhelpful as it declines to confront that fact that bigotry exists for actual reasons beyond being "you are a meanie." But be that as it may, no one wants to be shamed. And worse, they don't want to have to do, as Tim Hardaway did, any actual work. Admission is actually only the first step. Its the having to actually do something about it that hurts.

The New York Times has a story up outlining the effects of the Supreme Court ruling on the Affordable Care Act in general, and the Medicaid expansion in particular:

Starting next month, the administration and its allies will conduct a nationwide campaign encouraging Americans to take advantage of new high-quality affordable insurance options. But those options will be unavailable to some of the neediest people in states like Texas, Florida, Kansas, Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi and Georgia, which are refusing to expand Medicaid. 

More than half of all people without health insurance live in states that are not planning to expand Medicaid. People in those states who have incomes from the poverty level up to four times that amount ($11,490 to $45,960 a year for an individual) can get federal tax credits to subsidize the purchase of private health insurance. But many people below the poverty line will be unable to get tax credits, Medicaid or other help with health insurance.

Last week there was some debate across the blogosphere about race and IQ (again), much of it springing from the controversy of Jason Richwine's dissertation, "IQ and Immigration Policy." You can read my thoughts here, here, and here. One helpful critique made of these posts by Razib Khan held that they could use more science. Razib added some of that in his own post which was rooted in this paper:"Characterizing the Admixed African Ancestry of African Americans."

I read the paper, understood most of it, but was basically lost trying to understand the graphs. (It's true that my math and science foundation is fairly weak.) So I read it again. Still not quite getting it, I reached out to one of the authors -- geneticist Neil Risch, who directs the Institute for Human Genetics at University of California San Francisco. Professor Risch agreed to chat with me via e-mail. He also sent me these two papers ("The Importance of Race and Ethnic Background in Biomedical Research" and "Assessing Genetic Contributions to Phenotypic Differences Among 'Racial' and 'Ethnic' Groups"), which I found enlightening and would urge everyone to read.

I want to thank Professor Risch for his time. Our conversation is below.

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Thanks for agreeing to talk with me, Professor Risch. I've been involved in a good number of conversation around race lately -- specifically regarding race and IQ. I was referred to a paper you wrote with some co-authors on the African ancestry of African Americans. My science background is not particularly strong, and I'd like to bring more science (and less humanities) to my readers on this topic.

Let's start with the dumb and simple questions first. In your paper "Characterizing the admixed African ancestry of African Americans," we see a chart (Figure 1) depicting a "Principal components analysis of Africans, U.S. Caucasians and African Americans." For the less mathematically literate among us, can you explain what we're seeing?

In reference to Figure 1, there are primarily 2 different types of analysis we used.  Both are based on genetic information.  As you have probably read, everyone has 23 pairs of chromosomes, 22 of which are autosomes and one pair is the sex chromosomes (X and Y).  Most of that sequence (about 3 billion nucleotides) is identical among individuals, but there are millions of locations where people can differ.  In our analysis, we focused on about 450,000 of them.  Modern technology now allows us to get a pretty good look at DNA sequence variation among individuals.

The two analyses we used were admixture analysis  and principal components analysis (PCA).  The first figure shows results of both.  What we attempted to do in the bar chart (the admixture analysis) was to estimate for each African American in our study, what proportion of their genome derived from different population groups.  In this case, we were focusing on potentially different African subgroups, but did not focus on possible European subgroups.  In theory, we possibly could also have done the latter, but because the proportion of ancestry in this sample that was from Europe was not large, that would be more challenging.  Our ability to do this analysis depends on how much genetic differentiation there has been between the possible ancestral groups included in the analysis (e.g. the Mandenka, Yoruba, San, Mbuti and Biaka, as well as Europeans).  I should be clear that these represent current day populations, and are only possible surrogates for the actual ancestral groups.

That differentiation is depicted in the rest of that figure (the dots with population labels) - which was the result of the PCA.  In PCA, you define a few variables that explain the most variation in the data (in this case it is the genetic information).  It is a data reduction procedure - in other words, to reduce the information in 450,000 genetic markers to just a few variables.  Here we present the first two such reduced variables that explain most of the variation.  As you can see, the Europeans and Africans are very well separated on the X axis while the African subgroups are well separated on the Y axis.  This separation is what allows us to estimate the proportion of ancestry in the African Americans from each of these groups.  You will notice that the African Americans (purple triangles) fall on a line between the Yoruba/Mandenka and the Europeans.  This indicates that they have mixed ancestry that is both African and European.  The broad spread of the purple triangles along the X axis indicates that individual African Americans in this study vary quite a bit in terms of how much of their ancestry is African and how much is European. You can also see that the majority of the African ancestry is Central-West African because of the approach on the X axis towards the Yoruba/Mandenka.  If there were a substantial amount of ancestry from the other groups, you would see the line going more horizontally and less to the upper right.   

The actual proportions of ancestry are then given in the bar chart.  Here again, you can see the varying amount of European ancestry.  It is also confirmed in the bar chart that most of the African ancestry is Central-West African.

You can also see in the bar chart that compared to the European ancestry component, there is much less variation in the different African subgroup components of ancestry -- in other words, there aren't some individuals who have much more Yoruban ancestry and others that have much more Bantu ancestry.  This is why we concluded that it is likely that mating patterns in African Americans probably did not strongly reflect actual origins in Africa.  And that is also the reason we concluded that because most African Americans appear to have admixed African ancestry, looking only at a single genetic location (e.g. the Y chromosome or mtDNA, as often done by ancestry companies) gives only a  narrow picture of the entire ancestry.

Subsequent figures in the paper pretty much reinforce these conclusions.

OK, so that helps. A lot. Here is another question. I want to know what someone with your background thinks about the notion of "race." As a writer, I approach this through the lens of history. I imagine, because of that, I might be missing some things. I want to know, as a geneticist, whether you think of African Americans as a "race?"

I believe it is inaccurate to refer to African Americans as a race or racial group (much as it is similarly inappropriate to refer to Latinos that way) -- unless you move away from the more classical definitions of race. We try to use the term race/ethnicity. There has been a lot of debate about whether genetic variation in the human population is continuous or discrete.  From my view, it is both. This is what makes it challenging to create categories.

One question pops out at me. You indicate some suspicion to referring to African-Americans as a "race" but (in some of your research) you support using "race" in terms of collecting med data and disease studies. Is this a case of a definition -- though it may be imperfect, clunky and at times even misleading -- still telling us something? From what I gathered from those articles "race" can be a proxy not just for genetic stuff, but for social phenomenon too (such as access to health care.) Am I seeing that right? Is it correct to say, for instance, "Yes, race is a social construct, but this does not make it meaningless." It still useful to look at "race," for instance, when studying sickle-cell. Perhaps some day, when we have more refined technique, it won't be. 

Definitions can indeed be "clunky." I would use the phrase race/ethnicity rather than just race because in common parlance it is a better description.   I tend to think that race has been used more in terms of continental origins (Africa, East Asia, Europe, Americas).  On that basis, one would not characterize African Americans as a racial group, but rather as an ethnic group.  We sort of implied this in the Genome Biology paper.  The reason is that African Americans typically have European as well as African ancestry (and possibly other ancestries as well) and are also culturally distinct from Africans.  Sort of similar to Latinos - who from a genetic ancestry standpoint can be nearly anything.  Hence our use of race/ethnicity.

Just to opine a bit, I think part of the problem is the notion of a causal relationship -- i.e. "dark-skin" or "blackness" causing sickle-cell -- as opposed to a more geographic definition that might encompass people regardless of skin color.

Yes, exactly. Groups living in isolation from each other for long periods of time have acquired many genetic differences. The large majority of those are due to "genetic drift" -- i.e. random fluctuations in gene frequencies. That also includes many genetic variants that code for traits and diseases.  But then there are some genetic variants that differ in frequency due to differential selection pressure in different environments. The best examples are for genes that confer resistance to malaria. One of those causes sickle cell disease in those who carry two mutations; those who carry one copy have sickle cell trait, which is generally benign but confers greater resistance to severe malaria infection. Mutations for sickle cell disease are found at pretty high frequency in some African populations, but also found in parts of the middle east and India. Beta thalassemia is another disease where carriers are offered greater protection from malaria. This disease is more common around the Mediterranean (e.g. Greeks).  

Then there is G6PD deficiency.  Mutations for that are found at increased frequency in parts of Africa, but also in the Middle East. The mutations underlying these disorders generally differ geographically, which is another indication that while the mutations are different ancestrally, they achieved high frequency in different populations for similar reasons (i.e. resistance to malaria). Another more recent example is a gene called ApoL1. There are a couple of genetic variants found in West Africans (and African Americans); when carrying two of these, there is an increased risk for kidney disease if hypertensive.  It was shown that these variants likely provide some immunity from African Sleeping Sickness (tsetse fly disease) which may have led to them becoming more common where the disease is prevalent. 

Various populations have an increased frequency of genetic diseases, which are often unique.  Probably a lot or most of it is just chance, but perhaps not all of it. Proving historical selective advantages can be pretty challenging. So, as I mentioned above, groups living in isolation developed their own genetic (and cultural) profiles. Generally, there is no cause and effect between the traits that differentiate groups. East Asians have dark hair and eat with chopsticks.  But there is no causal relationship. You can use a whole variety of different traits to place individuals into the same categories, but those traits may have nothing to do with each other etiologically.

I often hear people say that Africa has the highest genetic diversity in the world. What does that practically mean?

If you sequence the genome of an African individual (pretty much from anywhere except North Africa), you will generally find more locations in their DNA that are variable than for any non-African individual. Why is this the case? Population geneticists believe that the world outside of Africa was initially populated by humans who migrated out of Africa. The presumption is that if the number of such individuals migrating was small, then some of the genetic variation was lost in the process. As I described before, genetic drift (fluctuation in allele frequencies) can happen when a population is small. The random fluctuation means that some alleles increase in frequency and others decrease. The ones that decrease may be lost altogether. You tend to find that the amount of genetic variation decreases along the migration routes out of Africa (more or less by distance from Africa, but of course population bottlenecks can also happen anywhere along the way).

What is the impact of this?  As I mentioned before (and above), random fluctuations in allele frequencies can mean that rare alleles that create risk for a disease may increase in frequency, by chance.  So some diseases may become more common.  But the flip side is that some diseases may also become less common.

One last question. Your paper on assessing genetic contributions to phenotype, seemed skeptical that we would ever tease out a group-wide genetic component when looking at things like cognitive skills or personality disposition. Am I reading that right? Are "intelligence" and "disposition" just too complicated?

Joanna Mountain and I tried to explain this in our Nature Genetics paper on group differences.  It is very challenging to assign causes to group differences. As far as genetics goes, if you have identified a particular gene which clearly influences a trait, and the frequency of that gene differs between populations, that would be pretty good evidence. But traits like "intelligence" or other behaviors (at least in the normal range), to the extent they are genetic, are "polygenic." That means no single genes have large effects -- there are many genes involved, each with a very small effect. Such gene effects are difficult if not impossible to find. The problem in assessing group differences is the confounding between genetic and social/cultural factors. If you had individuals who are genetically one thing but socially another, you might be able to tease it apart, but that is generally not the case. 

In our paper, we tried to show that a trait can appear to have high "genetic heritability" in any particular population, but the explanation for a group difference for that trait could be either entirely genetic or entirely environmental or some combination in between.

So, in my view, at this point, any comment about the etiology of group differences, for "intelligence" or anything else, in the absence of specific identified genes (or environmental factors, for that matter), is speculation.

Pardon my French

I have more to say on race and IQ and the president's speech at Morehouse. But my head is swimming right now. You can read Fallows and Andrew on Morehouse here and here. You should also read Jonathan Capehart's piece which points to Obama's inclusion of gay man, at the all male HBCU.

Here is a great video on the effects of the "Crack Baby" hysteria of the early 1980s. One thing I did not know was that pregnant women who used crack were actually being prosecuted in response to the madness. 

The first lady went to Bowie State and addressed the graduating class. Her speech was a mix of black history and a salute to the graduates. There was also this:

But today, more than 150 years after the Emancipation Proclamation, more than 50 years after the end of "separate but equal," when it comes to getting an education, too many of our young people just can't be bothered. Today, instead of walking miles every day to school, they're sitting on couches for hours playing video games, watching TV. Instead of dreaming of being a teacher or a lawyer or a business leader, they're fantasizing about being a baller or a rapper.

And then this:

If the school in your neighborhood isn't any good, don't just accept it. Get in there, fix it. Talk to the parents. Talk to the teachers. Get business and community leaders involved as well, because we all have a stake in building schools worthy of our children's promise. ...

And as my husband has said often, please stand up and reject the slander that says a black child with a book is trying to act white. Reject that.

There's a lot wrong here.

At the most basic level, there's nothing any more wrong with aspiring to be a rapper than there is with aspiring to be a painter, or an actor, or a sculptor. Hip-hop has produced some of the most penetrating art of our time, and inspired much more. My path to this space began with me aspiring to be rapper. Hip-hop taught me to love literature. I am not alone. Perhaps you should not aspire to be a rapper because it generally does not provide a stable income. By that standard you should not aspire to be a writer, either.

At a higher level, there is the time-honored pattern of looking at the rather normal behaviors of black children and pathologizing them. My son wants to play for Bayern Munich. Failing that, he has assured me he will be Kendrick Lamar. When I was kid I wanted to be Tony Dorsett -- or Rakim, whichever came first. Perhaps there is some corner of the world where white kids desire to be Timothy Geithner instead of Tom Brady. But I doubt it. What is specific to black kids is that their dreams often don't extend past entertainment and athletics  That is a direct result of the kind of limited cultural exposure you find in impoverished, segregated neighborhoods. Those neighborhoods are the direst result of American policy.

Enacting and enforcing policy is the job of the Obama White House. When asked about policy for African Americans, the president has said, "I'm not the president of black America. I'm the president of all America." An examination of the Obama administration's policy record toward black people clearly bears this out. An examination of the Obama administration's rhetoric, as directed at black people, tells us something different.

Yesterday, the president addressed Morehouse College's graduating class, and said this:

We know that too many young men in our community continue to make bad choices. Growing up, I made a few myself. And I have to confess, sometimes I wrote off my own failings as just another example of the world trying to keep a black man down. But one of the things you've learned over the last four years is that there's no longer any room for excuses. I understand that there's a common fraternity creed here at Morehouse: "excuses are tools of the incompetent, used to build bridges to nowhere and monuments of nothingness."

We've got no time for excuses -- not because the bitter legacies of slavery and segregation have vanished entirely; they haven't. Not because racism and discrimination no longer exist; that's still out there. It's just that in today's hyper-connected, hyper-competitive world, with a billion young people from China and India and Brazil entering the global workforce alongside you, nobody is going to give you anything you haven't earned. And whatever hardships you may experience because of your race, they pale in comparison to the hardships previous generations endured -- and overcame.

This clearly is a message that only a particular president can offer. Perhaps not the "president of black America," but certainly a president who sees holding African Americans to a standard of individual responsibility as part of his job. This is not a role Barack Obama undertakes with other communities.

Taking the full measure of the Obama presidency thus far, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that this White House has one way of addressing the social ills that afflict black people -- and particularly black youth -- and another way of addressing everyone else. I would have a hard time imagining the president telling the women of Barnard that "there's no longer room for any excuses" -- as though they were in the business of making them. Barack Obama is, indeed, the president of "all America," but he also is singularly the scold of "black America." 

It's worth revisiting the president's comments over the past year in reference to gun violence. Visting his grieving adopted hometown of Chicago, in the wake of the murder of Hadiya Pendleton, the president said this:

For a lot of young boys and young men in particular, they don't see an example of fathers or grandfathers, uncles, who are in a position to support families and be held up in respect. And so that means that this is not just a gun issue; it's also an issue of the kinds of communities that we're building. When a child opens fire on another child, there is a hole in that child's heart that government can't fill. Only community and parents and teachers and clergy can fill that hole.

Two months earlier Obama visited Newtown. The killer, Adam Lanza, was estranged from his father and reportedly devastated by his parents divorce. But Obama did not speak to Newtown about the kind of community they were building, or speculate on the hole in Adam Lanza's heart.

When Barack Obama says that he is "the president of all America," he is exactly right. When he visits black communities, he visits as the American president, bearing with him all our history, all our good works, and all our sins. Among recent sins, the creation of the ghettos of Chicago -- accomplished by 20th-century American social policy -- rank relatively high. Leaving aside the vague connection between fatherhood and the murder of Hadiya Pendleton. Certainly the South Side could use more responsible fathers. Why aren't there more? Do those communities simply lack men of ambition or will? Are the men there genetically inferior?

No president has ever been better read on the intersection of racism and American history than our current one. I strongly suspect that he would point to policy. As the president of "all America," Barack Obama inherited that policy. I would not suggest that it is in his power to singlehandedly repair history. But I would say that, in his role as American president, it is wrong for him to handwave at history, to speak as though the government he represents is somehow only partly to blame. Moreover, I would say that to tout your ties to your community when it is convenient, and downplay them when it isn't, runs counter to any notion of individual responsibility.

I think the stature of the Obama family -- the most visible black family in American history -- is a great blow in the war against racism. I am filled with pride whenever I see them: there is simply no other way to say that. I think Barack Obama, specifically, is a remarkable human being -- wise, self-aware, genuinely curious and patient. It takes a man of particular vision to know, as Obama did, that the country really was ready to send an African American to the White House.

But I also think that some day historians will pore over his many speeches to black audiences. They will see a president who sought to hold black people accountable for their communities, but was disdainful of those who looked at him and sought the same. They will match his rhetoric of individual responsibility, with the aggression the administration showed to bail out the banks, and the timidity they showed  in addressing a foreclosure crisis which devastated black America (again.)They wil weigh the rhetoric against an administration whose efforts against housing segregation have been run of the mill. And they will match the talk of the importance of black fathers with the paradox of a president who smoked marijuana in his youth but continued a drug-war which daily wrecks the lives of black men and their families. In all of this, those historians will see a discomfiting pattern of convenient race-talk.

I think the president owes black people more than this. In the 2012 election, the black community voted at a higher rate than any other ethnic community in the country. Their vote went almost entirely to Barack Obama. They did this despite a concerted effort to keep them from voting, and they deserve more than a sermon. Perhaps they cannot  practically receive targeted policy. But surely they have earned something more than targeted scorn.

My sense is that there is a need for an open thread today. I don't think I should say much more.

Ta-Nehisi has used an imagine of Walter White, the first African American head of the NAACP, to illustrate the pliability of the black identity. It certainly shows that there are no fixed definitions of race which are particularly useful. But that is a misconception of biological science, which is rife with exceptions and boundary conditions, and characterized by an instrumental perspective. The data above suggests that self-identified African Americans are characterized by some African ancestry, but over 90% are more than 50% African in ancestry. Walter White, who had five black great great great grandparents and 27 white ones, was almost certainly less than 20% African in ancestry. There are such people even today, but they are not typical, and do not disprove the reality that African Americans are predominantly of African ancestry.

As expected, PCA on our entire sample revealed the greatest genetic differentiation between the US Caucasians and the Africans, with the African Americans intermediate between them, reflecting their recent admixture between ancestors from Europe and Africa. Our estimate of European individual admixture (IA) in the African Americans was also roughly consistent with prior studies [3], with an average of 21.9%. We found considerable variation among individuals in terms of European IA, and a number of individuals with particularly high European IA values (eight individuals of 136, or 6% with values greater than 45%). 

Prior studies focusing on mtDNA and Y chromosomes have found a greater African and lesser European representation of mtDNA haplotypes compared with Y chromosome haplotypes in African Americans, suggesting a greater contribution of African matrilineal descent compared with patrilineal descent [6,7]. For example, Kayser and colleagues [6] estimated that 27.5% to 33.6% of Y chromosomes in African Americans are of European origin, compared with 9.0% to 15.4% of mtDNA haplotypes.

"Race" as a term is very nebulous. But human subgroups with similar ancestries can have group differences in DNA -- and intelligence is highly unlikely to have no genetic basis at all (although most now believe its impact is greatly qualified by cultural and developmental differences).

But what I really want TNC to address is the data. Yes, "race" is a social construct when we define it as "white", "black," "Asian" or, even more ludicrously, "Hispanic." But why then does the overwhelming data show IQ as varying in statistically significant amounts between these completely arbitrary racially constructed populations? Is the testing rigged? If the categories are arbitrary, then the IQs should be randomly distributed. But they aren't, even controlling for education, income, etc. 

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Andrew Sullivan and Freddie Deboer have two pieces up worth checking out. I disagree with Andrew's (though I detect some movement in his position.) Freddie's piece is entitled "Precisely How Not to Argue About Race and IQ." He writes:

The problem with people who argue for inherent racial inferiority is not that they lie about the results of IQ tests, but that they are credulous about those tests and others like them when they shouldn't be; that they misunderstand the implications of what those tests would indicate even if they were credible; and that they fail to find the moral, analytic, and political response to questions of race and intelligence.

I think this is a good point, but I want to expand it. Most of the honest writing I've seen on "race and intelligence" focuses on critiquing the idea of "intelligence." So there's lot of good literature on whether it can be measured, its relevance in modern society, whether intelligence changes across generations, whether it changes with environment, and what we mean when we say IQ. As Freddie mentions here, I had a mathematician stop past to tell me I needed to stop studying French, and immediately start studying statistics -- otherwise I can't possibly understand this debate.

It's a fair critique. My response is that he should stop studying math and start studying history.

I am not being flip or coy. If you tell me that you plan to study "race and intelligence" then it is only fair that I ask you, "What do you mean by race?" It's true I don't always do math so well, but I understand the need to define the terms of your study. If you're a math guy, perhaps your instinct is to point out the problems in the interpretation of the data. My instinct is to point out that your entire experiment proceeds from a basic flaw -- no coherent, fixed definition of race actually exists.

The history bears this out. In 1856, Ralph Waldo Emerson delineated the significance of race:

It is race, is it not, that puts the hundred millions of India under the dominion of a remote island in the north of Europe. Race avails much, if that be true, which is alleged, that all Celts are Catholics, and all Saxons are Protestants; that Celts love unity of power, and Saxons the representative principle. Race is a controlling influence in the Jew, who, for two millenniums, under every climate, has preserved the same character and employments. Race in the negro is of appalling importance. The French in Canada, cut off from all intercourse with the parent people, have held their national traits. I chanced to read Tacitus "on the Manners of the Germans," not long since, in Missouri, and the heart of Illinois, and I found abundant points of resemblance between the Germans of the Hercynian forest, and our Hoosiers, Suckers, and Badgers of the American woods.

Indeed, Emerson in 1835, saw race as central to American greatness:

The inhabitants of the United States, especially of the Northern portion, are descended from the people of England and have inherited the trais of their national character...It is common with the Franks to break their faith and laugh at it The race of Franks is faithless.

Emerson was not alone, as historian James McPherson points out, Southerners not only thought of themselves as a race separate from blacks, but as a race apart from Northern whites:

The South's leading writer on political economy, James B. D. De Bow, subscribed to this Norman-Cavalier thesis and helped to popularize it in De Bow's Review. As the lower-South states seceded one after another during the winter of 1860-61, this influential journal carried several long articles justifying secession on the grounds of irreconcilable ethnic differences between Southern and Northern whites. "The Cavaliers, Jacobites, and Huguenots, who settled the South, naturally hate, contemn, and despise the Puritans who settled the North," proclaimed one of these articles. "The former are a master-race; the latter a slave race, the descendants of Saxon serfs." The South was now achieving its "independent destiny" by repudiating the failed experiment of civic nationalism that had foolishly tried in 1789 to "erect one nation out of two irreconcilable peoples."

Similarly, in 1899 William Z. Ripley wrote The Races of Europe, which sought to delineate racial difference through head-type:

The shape of the human head by which we mean the general proportions of length, breadth, and height, irrespective of the " bumps " of the phrenologist is one of the best available tests of race known. Its value is, at the same time, but imperfectly appreciated beyond the inner circle of professional anthropology. Yet it is so simple a phenomenon, both in principle and in practical application, that it may readily be of use to the traveller and the not too superficial observer of men.

To be sure, widespread and constant peculiarities of head form are less noticeable in America, because of the extreme variability of our population, compounded as it is of all the races of Europe; they seem also to be less fundamental among the American aborigines. But in the Old World the observant traveller may with a little attention often detect the racial affinity of a people by this means.

Two years later, Edward A. Ross sought to apprehend "The Causes of Race Superiority." He saw the differences between the Arab "race" and the Jewish "race" as a central illustration:

It is certain that races differ in their attitude toward past and future. M. Lapie has drawn a contrast between the Arab and the Jew. The Arab remembers; he is mindful of past favors and past injuries. He harbors his vengeance and cherishes his gratitude. He accepts everything on the authority of tradition, loves the ways of his ancestors, forms strong local attachments, and migrates little. The Jew, on the other hand, turns his face toward the future. He is thrifty and always ready for a good stroke of business, will, indeed, join with his worst enemy if it pays. He is calculating, enterprising, migrant and ambitious

You can see more of this here.

Our notion of what constitutes "white" and what constitutes "black" is a product of social context. It is utterly impossible to look at the delineation of a "Southern race" and not see the Civil War, the creation of an "Irish race" and not think of Cromwell's ethnic cleansing, the creation of a "Jewish race" and not see anti-Semitism. There is no fixed sense of "whiteness" or "blackness," not even today. It is quite common for whites to point out that Barack Obama isn't really "black" but "half-white." One wonders if they would say this if Barack Obama were a notorious drug-lord.

When the liberal says "race is a social construct," he is not being a soft-headed dolt; he is speaking an historical truth. We do not go around testing the "Irish race" for intelligence or the "Southern race" for "hot-headedness." These reasons are social. It is no more legitimate to ask "Is the black race dumber than then white race?" than it is to ask "Is the Jewish race thriftier than the Arab race?"

The strongest argument for "race" is that people who trace their ancestry back to Europe, and people who trace most of their ancestry back to sub-Saharan Africa, and people who trace most of their ancestry back to Asia, and people who trace their ancestry back to the early Americas, lived isolated from each other for long periods and have evolved different physical traits (curly hair, lighter skin, etc.)

But this theoretical definition (already fuzzy) wilts under human agency, in a real world where Kevin Garnett, Harold Ford, and Halle Berry all check "black" on the census. (Same deal for "Hispanic.") The reasons for that take us right back to fact of race as a social construct. And an American-centered social construct. Are the Ainu of Japan a race? Should we delineate darker South Asians from lighter South Asians on the basis of race? Did the Japanese who invaded China consider the Chinese the same "race?"

Andrew writes that liberals should stop saying "truly stupid things like race has no biological element." I agree. Race clearly has a biological element -- because we have awarded it one. Race is no more dependent on skin color today than it was on "Frankishness" in Emerson's day. Over history of race has taken geography, language, and vague impressions as its basis.

"Race," writes the great historian Nell Irvin Painter, "is an idea, not a fact." Indeed. Race does not need biology. Race only requires some good guys with big guns looking for a reason.

Here's a video of The New Yorker's Richard Brody giving his take on François Truffaut's L'homme Qui Aimait Les Femmes (The Man Who Loved Women). I watched this film recently and it went right over my head.

Here on the homefront, Chris Orr takes on Baz Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby:

His colors are as bright as those in a detergent commercial; his musical choices as intrusive as the exit cues on an awards show. The camera ducks and swerves like O.J. Simpson on his way to a car rental, and the cast all share a slightly vibratory, methamphetamine sheen. Topping off such excesses of cinematic technique, this Gatsby is rendered in 3D, an innovation only moderately less absurd than presenting Moby Dick in Sensurround, or Cannery Row in Smell-O-Vision. In short, although Luhrmann's film mostly adheres to the letter of Fitzgerald's novel, it would be difficult to envision a work less in keeping with its wistful spirit...

Apart from the misappropriation of Fitzgerald's classic text, what is most frustrating about The Great Gatsby is that it offers yet further proof that Luhrmann has a skill-set tailor-made for comedy that he insists on squandering in ill-fated attempts at tragedy. Since his delightful 1992 debut, Strictly Ballroom--recently released on Blu-ray--Luhrmann has taken five straight stabs at the latter tradition, missing the mark every time: Romeo + Juliet, Moulin Rouge!, an underwhelming Broadway production of La boheme, the epic folly Australia, and now Gatsby.

If only Luhrmann could be persuaded to put down his high-school syllabi and start leafing through some old song books instead. (Imagine what he could have done, to cite just one example, with the amateurishly under-directed Mamma Mia!.) But his tragic fixation seems incurable, no matter how many heartbroken narrators he cycles through. Just a few days ago, the director announced his hope to reunite with DiCaprio for an adaptation of, yes, Hamlet. And so the question is posed once again. I can only hope that this time the answer is "not to be."

They are who we thought they were. Everyone (including Chris) says that DiCaprio was quite good. The basic problem here is the same as it ever was. Maybe because of its title, and Fitzgerald's outsized persona, people think that The Great Gatsby has to be a big budget extravaganza. But the book actually reads like a French film or an American indie. It's not so much that Gatsby can't be filmed. It's that it can't be filmed by this Hollywood. 

The cult of Arrested Development is pretty strong in my house, and rivaled only by the cult of Seinfeld (I'm a charter member, but not the boy) the cult of Star Trek: Voyager, (me and the boy are charter members, but not my wife) and the cult of Bob's Burgers (I can't do it.) Arrested Development is the one that unites us all.

Will Leitch writes about the perfect show for the ultra-connected age, founded before such connections had fully flowered:

The world into which the first three seasons of Arrested Development were released is dramatically different from the one we live in now. "I was doing a show that was all about re­watchability before there was technology that really provided that opportunity--before DVRs, etc.," Hurwitz said in an interview with Vulture last year. "In retrospect, it was more than audacious; it was foolish. " 

This is a key point, sort of the insane, futile genius of Arrested Development--a show that demanded the kind of giddy Internet dissections we do regularly now, but before there was any real forum in which to conduct them. The show was full of crazily subtle in-jokes you had to watch every episode over and over to catch, from the out-of-season seasonal clothing the Bluths made their housekeeper wear to Cloudmir Vodka, a brand that shows up in the background of at least a half-dozen scenes. We'd catch those immediately now, and every different Bluth family member's chicken impression would be gif'd within seconds of airing. It was a show made to be looped and recapped and deep-dived into, anticipating the current cultural moment without ever being able to benefit from it. A show for 2013 made in 2005. 

Then, of course, we knew not of GIFs. What we did know was that what Arrested Development was doing was so revolutionary and different it felt like public access, and it was on freaking Fox. (I remember Joe Buck and Troy Aikman plugging Arrested Development during the NFC Championship Game, for crying out loud.) And obsessing over Arrested Develop­ment made us feel better, smarter, cooler than all those dopes busy watching Two and a Half Men. In this way, Arrested Development didn't just foretell the viewing culture of 2013; it might have created it. The television world is so fractured and niche now that the shows we watch have become an important signifier of who we are--who we want to be seen as, anyway. I'm a Louie person but not a Community person. I'm a Breaking Bad person but not a Homeland one. And if I saw on your Facebook wall that you were an Arrested Development fan, well, I could bet you and I were gonna get along just fine.

I actually missed Arrested Development the first time out. I was introduced to it on Hulu, and I've probably rewatched the show's episodes more than any other I can think of. There is something very literary about the show—there are so many deep references and cross-references that you can't really catch until you've watched the entire run five different times.

It's certainly in my top five comedies. Can't wait for it to come back.

Random tangential thought: I stopped watching Community because it felt too self-referentially nerdy. (The D&D episode actually turned me off.) I'm starting to think maybe I was unfair. I should try again.

Finally heard Childish Gambino's Royalty. I think this is the only track on the album without Childish. Once Ghost spits, all you can do is get out the way. "We got skaters that'll ox your face off / Rob you like Madoff." Just beautiful. (The Kilo Kish joint is pretty cool too.)

Dave Weigel is one of my favorite reporters, but I think this piece on Jason Richwine, intelligence research, and "race" deserves a closer look:

Academics aren't so concerned with the politics. But they know all too well the risks that come with research connecting IQ and race. At the start of his dissertation, Richwine thanked his three advisers -- George Borjas, Christopher Jenks, and Richard Zeckhauser -- for being so helpful and so bold. Borjas "helped me navigate the minefield of early graduate school," he wrote. "Richard Zeckhauser, never someone to shy away from controversial ideas, immediately embraced my work. ..."

Anyone who works in Washington and wants to explore the dark arts of race and IQ research is in the right place. The city's a bit like a college campus, where investigating "taboo" topics is rewarded, especially on the right. A liberal squeals "racism," and they hear the political-correctness cops (most often, the Southern Poverty Law Center) reporting a thought crime.

It is almost as though the "dark arts of race and IQ" were an untapped field of potential knowledge, not one of the most discredited fields of study in modern history. We should first be clear that there is nothing mysterious or forbidden about purporting to study race and intelligence. Indeed, despite an inability to define "race" or "intelligence," such studies are one of the dominant intellectual strains in Western history. We forget this because its convient to believe that history begins with the Watts riots. But it's important to remember the particular tradition that Charles Murray and Jason Richwine are working in. A brief reminder seems in order. 

Here is antebellum "race realist" Josiah Clark Nott writing in 1854 to justify slavery:

That Negroes imported into, or born in, the United States become more intelligent and better developed in their physique generally than their native compatriots of Africa, every one admits; but such intelligence is easily explained by their ceaseless contact with the whites, from whom they derive much instruction; and such physical improvement may also be readily accounted for by the increased comforts with which they are supplied. In Africa, owing to their natural improvidence, the Negroes are, more frequently than not, a half-starved, and therefore half-developed race; but when they are regularly and adequately fed, they become healthier, better developed, and more humanized. Wild horses, cattle, asses, and other brutes, are greatly improved in like manner by domestication : but neither climate nor food can transmute an ass into a horse, or a buffalo into an ox. 

Here is an excerpt from Madison Grant's 1916 study The Passing of a Great Race:

These new immigrants were no longer exclusively members of the Nordic race as were the earlier ones who came of their own impulse to improve their social conditions. The transportation lines advertised America as a land flowing with milk and honey and the European governments took the opportunity to unload upon careless, wealthy and hospitable America the sweepings of their jails and asylums. The result was that the new immigration, while it still included many strong elements from the north of Europe, contained a large and increasing number of the weak, the broken and the mentally crippled of all races drawn from the lowest stratum of the Mediterranean basin and the Balkans, together with hordes of the wretched, submerged populations of the Polish Ghettos. 

Our jails, insane asylums and almshouses are filled with this human flotsam and the whole tone of American life, social, moral and political has been lowered and vulgarized by them. With a pathetic and fatuous belief in the efficacy of American institutions and environment to reverse or obliterate immemorial hereditary tendencies, these newcomers were welcomed and given a share in our land and prosperity.... 

The result of unlimited immigration is showing plainly in the rapid decline in the birth rate of native Americans because the poorer classes of Colonial stock, where they still exist, will not bring children into the world to compete in the labor market with the Slovak, the Italian, the Syrian and the Jew. The native American is too proud to mix socially with them and is gradually withdrawing from the scene, abandoning to these aliens the land which he conquered and developed. 

The man of the old stock is being crowded out of many country districts by these foreigners just as he is to-day being literally driven off the streets of New York City by the swarms of Polish Jews. These immigrants adopt the language of the native American, they wear his clothes, they steal his name and they are beginning to take his women, but they seldom adopt his religion or understand his ideals and while he is being elbowed out of his own home the American looks calmly abroad and urges on others the suicidal ethics which are exterminating his own race.

Another from Lothrop Stoddard's 1922 work The Revolt Against Civilization and the Menace of the Underman:

In Massachusetts the birth-rate of foreign-born women is two and one-half times as high as the birth-rate among the native-bom; in New Hampshire two times; in Rhode Island one and one-half times, the most prolific of the alien stocks being Poles, Polish and Russian Jews, South Italians, and French-Canadians. What this may mean after a few generations is indicated by a calculation made by the biologist Davenport, who stated that, at present rates of reproduction, 1,000 Harvard graduates of to-day would have only fifty descendants two centuries hence, whereas 1,000 Rumanians today in Boston, at their present rate of breeding, would have 100,000 descendants in the same space of time. 

To return to the more general aspect of the problem, it is clear that both in Europe and America the quality of the population is deteriorating, the more intelligent and talented strains being relatively or absolutely on the decline. Now this can mean nothing lees than a deadly menace both to civilization and the race.

More from Lothrop Stoddard's 1921 book The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy:

In the United States it has been the same story. Our country, originally settled almost exclusively by Nordics, was toward the close of the nineteenth century invaded by hordes of immigrant Alpines and Mediterraneans, not to mention Asiatic elements like Levantines and Jews. As a result, the Nordic native American has been crowded out with amazing rapidity by these swarming, prolific aliens, and after two short generations he has in many of our urban areas become almost extinct.

The racial displacements induced by a changed economic or social environment are, indeed, almost incalculable. Contrary to the popular belief, nothing is more unstable than the ethnic make-up of a people. Above all, there is no more absurd fallacy than the shibboleth of the "melting-pot." As a matter of fact, the melting-pot may mix but does not melt. Each race-type, formed ages ago, and "set" by millenniums of isolation and inbreeding, is a stubbornly persistent entity. Each type possesses a special set of characters: not merely the physical characters visible to the naked eye, but moral, intellectual, and spiritual characters as well. All these characters are transmitted substantially unchanged from generation to generation. 

To be sure, where members of the same race-stock intermarry (as English and Swedish Nordics, or French and British Mediterraneans), there seems to be genuine amalgamation. In most other cases, however, the result is not a blend but a mechanical mixture. Where the parent stocks are very diverse, as in matings between whites, negroes, and Amerindians, the offspring is a mongrel -- a walking chaos, so consumed by his jarring heredities that he is quite worthless. We have already viewed the mongrel and his works in Latin America.

Here is Karl Pearson in 1925 looking at Jewish immigration into Britain:

What is definitely clear, however, is that our alien Jewish boys do not form from the standpoint of intelligence a group markedly superior to the natives. But that is the sole condition under which we are prepared to admit that immigration should be allowed. Taken on the average, and regarding both sexes, this alien Jewish population is somewhat inferior physically and mentally to the native population. It is not so markedly inferior as some of those who wish to stop all immigration are inclined to assert. But we have to face the facts; we know and admit that some of the children of these alien Jews from the academic standpoint have done brilliantly, whether they have the staying powers of the native race is another question*. No breeder of cattle, however, would purchase an entire herd because he anticipated finding one or two fine specimens included in it; still less would he do it, if his byres and pastures were already full.

Far from being relegated to some musty corner of intellectual life, the Stoddard tradition, the tradition in which Jason Richwine stands, proved to be an influential force in world history. The Stoddard tradition gave us forced sterilization, "euthanasia" programs, miscegenation bans, and, ultimately, the Holocaust.

One might oppose the Stoddard tradition strictly on its tendency to birth suffering, misery, and catastrophe. But one can oppose it for simpler reasons -- its practitioners have a nasty habit of being wrong. Harvard still stands. The Jews of Poland seem to understand American ideas quite well. And it was not the darker races who threatened civilization, but the cannibal Nordics rampaging under the Nazi flag. History has been deeply unkind to Jason Richwine's spiritual ancestors. It's comforting to think that the academics who show no interest in the "dark arts" do so out of fear of the leftist cabal. More likely, they do so to avoid being associated with a specious field of study whose primary contributions to the world include justifying slavery and inspiring genocide. 

Which is not to say these authors should not be read. Pearson is especially instructive. In 1925, he claimed the Jews immigrating to Britain threatened to become a "parasitic race." Under similar thinking, Jews were subsequently subjected to college quotas throughout America. Today, the descendants of Pearson tell us that Jews are the intellectual cream of the genetic crop.

This is what Barbara and Karen Fields mean when they talk about "racecraft." Power must justify itself. When it is proven wrong, it simply recalibrates. Conditions and actions are explained away as the inalterable work of genetics. Yesterday's yellow peril becomes today's model minority. In the 1930s Jews dominated basketball because of their "Oriental background" and "flashy trickiness." Today blacks dominate it through their animal strength and agility.

You see this shifting in Weigel's own article, where we are told that Richwine is looking into "race." But Hispanics are considered an ethnic group, not a race. That is because we have trouble explaining why Matt Yglesias, Sophia Vegara, Carmelo Anthony, Rosario Dawson, and Charlie Rangel can be said to comprise a separate "race." One should also have trouble explaining why Walter White, Whoopi Goldberg, Djimon Hounsou, Jay Smooth, Mordecai Wyatt Johnson, and I are all the same "race." 

These people do share something in common -- their geographic ancestry makes them potential targets of white racism. If there is any fact we are warned away from, this is it. Richwine's theories originate from a long tradition of white racism, the tradition of Grant, Stoddard, and Pearson.  But to say this is to indict an insupportable portion of our own history and traditions. It is to remind us that the differences between us were constructed by men who sought power, and are maintained just the same.

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There's a lot of humor going around about this picture of a Heat fan giving Joakim Noah the middle finger. Behind  it is the notion that athletes are paid to take ill-treatment from the fans. Surely they are paid to take some ill-treatment—trash talk, booing etc. Flipping the bird in a player's face strikes me as taking it too far.

I imagine that had Joakin Noah gave the middle finger to Heat fans on the way out, he would have been fined. And rightly so. Perhaps I'm reacting to the angle or the still picture. But this strikes me as an actual invasion of a person's space, and an invitation for violence. Noah did the right thing and is saying all the right things. But they should strip Filomena Tobias (the fan) of her season tickets.

Jay-Smooth takes on the autotuning of Charles Ramsey and does what only he can do. Aisha Harris brings the science and notes the obvious trend of the "hilarious black neighbor."

Reader Devin Bunten sent me a note expanding on the problems of contract-buying, redlining, and the kind of segregated housing market that characterized America through much of the 20th century:

I wanted to send you a quick note about the thread today, with some added economics. I could/should just post it as a comment, but it's quite late for that thread I'm afraid. You mentioned in the thread that "the vast majority of these guys found themselves buying houses way beyond the appraised value." A house appraisal is only meaningful in the context of the neighborhood, and the switch from an all-white neighborhood to an all-black neighborhood would have changed the appraisal substantially -- which is of course a large part of the point. 

However, that's separate than how economists think about price and value, and I think adding the econ perspective actually makes the situation worse. I'd think about it like this: in Chicago at the time, there were two fundamental housing markets: one for whites, and one for blacks. 

Removing the black population from competition within the white market was a(nother) large transfer of wealth to whites: whites faced less competition for the large supply of houses, which actually kept white house prices lower than they would otherwise be. 

This enabled a large number of whites to move up the ladder into the middle class. On the other hand, the legal framework, enforced by terror, that prevented blacks from moving into these neighborhoods meant two things: a small supply of houses in the "black housing market", and a large and increasing demand. 

This would have kept prices quite high -- much higher than any appraised value. Any black family would be bidding not against the white speculator, but against the large number of other black families looking to get a house. Because the speculators were few and the black families were many, prices were kept quite high in these black neighborhoods. The rules you wrote about obviously kept these high prices from being realized by black sellers, as blacks so rarely came to own the homes they were paying for.

Devin's last point is basically how the the history actually played out. In the overcrowded ghettoes of Chicago, there was a pent-up demand for housing. The money was there. And the money was pilfered.

I understand why academics have spent so much time studying the black poor. But in many ways, if you want to test how true this country has been to its founding creed, the black middle class is a fertile field of study. When you look at the early black home,buyers in mid-20th century Chicago, you are looking at people who did not exhibit the kind of "pathologies" pundits routinely inveigh against. Marriage rates are high. Men are working. In some cases, women are homemakers. In other words, you have the conservative fantasy of what an American family should be.

These American families were swindled by public policy, white terrorism, and private action. This was done to advantage people who happened to look different from them. And we are only talking about housing here. We are not talking about school segregation. We are not talking about job discrimination. We are not talking about business loan discrimination. We are not talking about the shameful implementation of the G.I. Bill. Or the sharecropping system in the South. This is but one front in the long war. 

For young black people growing up in that era, what was the message? America's promise is that everyone who plays by the rules will have a chance to compete. If you are a black boy, or a black girl, and you watch your parents play by the rules while everyone else cheats, what do you conclude? How do you feel when your parents exhibit middle-class values and your country rewards them with pariah-class treatment? How do you then evaluate your own prospects? How do you see your country? Might you then look around, survey all the double standards and hypocrisy, and find yourself not so proud?