Tuesday, February 06, 2018

Evo-psycho bros believe race exists ~ do they believe racism exists?

Koran-Burning Pastor Hangs Obama in Effigy in Church’s Front Yard
do evo-psycho bros believe that ANYTHING is racist?
In Biosocial Criminology: Directions in Theory and Research edited by Anthony Walsh, and Kevin M Beaver, John Paul Wright says:
Moreover evolutionary theory helps explain why race-based patterns of behavior are universal, such as black over-involvement in crime. No other paradigm organizes these patterns better. No other paradigm explains these inconvenient truths.
Wright also states:
...neighborhoods often stand in stark contrast to one another. Those composed of criminals, of large single-parent households, of drug abusers, of the mentally ill, and of individuals of limited intelligence are visibly different than those composed by the educated, the intelligent, and the pro-social. Unfortunately, these factors do tend to cluster on race. Areas afflicted by crime and other social pathologies are more frequently black than white, and even less frequently Oriental. Part of the reason for these visible and dramatic differences may have to do with the differential abilities of races to organize socially.
Although Wright wrote the statements I haven't found any evidence that the other Criminal Justice evo-psycho bros have any problems with his statements. So I think it's safe to assume they all agree that black people have "evolved" to be innately...
  • less intelligent
  • more criminal
  • less able to organize socially
...than other "races."

Wright goes even further on his blog (co-authored with Matt DeLisi, Coordinator of Criminal Justice Studies, Professor in the Department of Sociology, and Faculty Affiliate of the Center for the Study of Violence at Iowa State University) which blurs the line between his professional and his political views since it's called "Conservative Criminology."

Her sons, age 14 and 16, had witnessed a murder and were in fear for their lives.  Instead of leaving town, moving, or, heaven forbid, helping the police, she instead did nothing.  Her kids, she said at one point, “were doing work” and had to “make their names.”  When you hear someone use these phrases, they mean engaging in crime and earning a street rep. 
The boys left home Saturday and did not return.  The police, finding their charred remains, had a sketch drawn up and circulated.  A teacher at the boy’s school recognized the faces and called the police.  Mom, as the cops point out, did nothing.  Immediately afterwards, however, she went on TV to plead her case......as she has done twice now.
Thug life is brutal and despite all the rhetoric of “I’ve got your back” you can never really trust anyone.  You do not find honor on the street.  You find savagery.  Their alleged killer is a man named Brice Rhodes, AKA “Rambo.”  Rhodes is an aspiring rapper, apparent drug dealer, and the likely murderer of 3 people. 
Conclusion:
​Let me be clear:  The social conditions that killed these two young boys was a culture that glorifies crime and violence, that rejects all social conventions and morality, and that embraces thuggery as a lifestyle.  Thugs, like Brice Rhodes, are part of the tapestry of criminal influences that converge to destroy lives--mainly young, black lives.  They attract lost boys, mentor them in the life, use them like bait, and discard them when done.   
And you don’t want to know what they do to girls and women.
Studying people like “Rambo” and the mom tells us a lot about the depths of pathology found in the criminal underclass.  None of it is pretty.  None of it is moral.  None of it vanishes if we ignore it.
 
​I suspect a lot of criminologists know this........especially those who have worked in the field or who have studied crime beyond confines of their office computer.  Few, however, speak honestly or candidly about crime--especially black crime--for reasons that are complex.  Part of me, however, believes they don’t want to know how bad, how vulgar, and how horrible people in the life really are.  Knowing this may shake their assumptions that criminals are victims or it may change their minds about the necessity of incarceration.  They certainly don’t want you to know how bad it is because they fear you more than they fear thugs like “Rambo."
Since we know that Wright believes that blacks are less intelligent, less able to organize socially and more inclined to criminality it's likely that he thinks those factors are responsible for "a culture that glorifies crime and violence, that rejects all social conventions and morality, and that embraces thuggery as a lifestyle."

Wright doesn't just dislike black "thugs" though, he doesn't seem to like many other black people either. This is what he said about Black Lives Matter:
Much of the movement is predicated on the demonstrably false narrative that police officers wantonly and without justification murder blacks.  Unfortunately, this narrative finds a receptive audience within academia because it gels with leftist beliefs that the police are racist barbarians.  In my mind, the rush of academics to embrace BLM and to lend it academic legitimacy is shameful, entirely partisan, and even cowardly.  
In fact, he thinks Black Lives Matter is immoral.

Just as evo-psycho bro Jerry Coyne doesn't trust Muslim women to make choices about their own lives, so apparently John Paul Wright doesn't trust black people to be honest about their lives. Wright seems to believe that black people are just inventing police brutality and then selling it to gullible leftist academics who for some reason just want to hate the police.

The left and blacks have long been targets of conservatives:
One of Richard Nixon's top advisers and a key figure in the Watergate scandal said the war on drugs was created as a political tool to fight blacks and hippies, according to a 22-year-old interview recently published in Harper's Magazine. 
"The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people," former Nixon domestic policy chief John Ehrlichman told Harper's writer Dan Baum for the April cover story published Tuesday."You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities," Ehrlichman said. "We could arrest their leaders. raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."
Wright says this about Barack Obama:
While I did not support the election of President Obama, I did hope that he would move more to the center and would govern from the center.  Instead, he made it clear that “elections have consequences,” that “he won,” and that he “had a mandate for change.”  Time and again, when he had the chance to signal his respect for the other side of the country, he doubled-down and further alienated them.  Even after massive Tea Party protests and losing congress and a large number of states, his administration never wavered in their commitment to ignore, tarnish, or besmirch the other half of the country.   
As I pointed out in our book, for example, the Tea Party movement was well organized and largely civil.  Over 2,000,000 citizens left their homes and marched on Washington DC to peacefully protest their government.  What was the lefts response:  The Tea Party is racist.
Wright doesn't offer any examples of Obama doing things to disrespect and alienate "the other side of the country." I remember Obama as being extraordinarily measured in his actions and responses. In fact as we see in this story, many blacks thought Obama didn't do enough for blacks:
As President Obama's administration draws to a close, observers — and the president himself — are taking stock of his legacy on race in America. In a wide-ranging interview this week with NPR's Steve Inskeep, Obama responded to critics among people of color who say that, despite their overwhelming support at the ballot box, the president hasn't done enough to deliver results for their communities.

John Paul Wright thinks the Tea Party was not racist. But I don't think he's a reliable judge of racism.

Meanwhile the Winegard brothers and Brian Boutwell in their article On the Reality of Race and the Abhorrence of Racism advise their readers:
Therefore, with appropriate care and caution, scientists can and should study racial variation. This argument may appear alarming to people concerned about racial justice. But it doesn’t need to be. Tolerance and cosmopolitanism don’t require the leveling of diversity; they require the celebration of it. Race exists, but racism does not have to.
So what have the studies of "racial variation" from the Criminal Justice evo-psycho bros wrought? Claims of black intellectual, moral and social inferiority and John Paul Wright in particular has a clear animosity towards black people.

So given all this what exactly do the Winegards and Boutwell consider "appropriate care and caution"? Is there anything that an evo-psycho bro can say that qualifies as racist?

In a recent magazine article I found these various descriptions:
The men proposed killing every male member of the rival gang. Then a woman from the clan spoke up. “Kill them all,” she said. “Even the women. Even the kids.” 
*** 
As they grew older, their lives adhered to a prescribed course: marriage quickly followed by motherhood. (She) left school at thirteen. At fourteen she eloped with a twenty-year-old... 
***  
Soon (her husband) was regularly beating her, mostly for speaking out of turn. “He beat me when I said what I thought,” she said later. “He attacked me to get me to shut up.” And it wasn’t long before he was arrested and jailed... 
***  
Within a few years, she had eloped with him, begun to endure his beatings (including one in which he held a gun to her head), and seen him hauled off to jail. She, too, eventually had three children with her husband. 
***  
In time, she learned how the men in the family moved cocaine... the locations around town where her husband had helped bury the family’s arsenal: rifles, pistols, and machine guns, stored in preparation for war.  
***  
(records of surveillance included) descriptions of rituals, evidence of murders, locations of bunkers, and detailed accounts of cocaine smuggling, extortion rackets, money laundering, credit-card fraud, and public corruption. 
***  
Her father and her brother... beat her until they cracked a rib. The men refused to let (her) be treated in the hospital, arranging for a... doctor to visit the house instead. It was three months before she was well enough to step outside. Even then, male cousins followed her wherever she went.
*** 

Where do these thugs live? Some decaying city in the US? 

The article, The Women Who Took on the Mafia, begins:
In Calabria, Lea Garofalo’s disappearance required no explanation. The local Mafia, known as the ’Ndrangheta, had a term for people who simply vanished: lupara bianca, or “white shotgun,” a killing that left no corpse. Residents of Pagliarelle, the mountain village where Garofalo’s family lived, added her name to a list of victims who were never to be mentioned again. In three decades, thirty-five local men and women had been murdered in Mafia vendettas, including Garofalo’s father, her uncle, and her brother.
So it's Calabria, in the Southern tip of the Italian "boot" and these events took place in the 21st century.

We've already seen that John Paul Wright believes:
areas afflicted by crime and other social pathologies are more frequently black than white, and even less frequently Oriental
and
evolutionary theory helps explain why race-based patterns of behavior are universal, such as black over-involvement in crime.

and
No other paradigm explains these inconvenient truths.

Judging by his name, Wright's co-author Matt DeLisi may be of at least partial Italian ancestry. So maybe John Paul Wright should ask Matt DeLisi: are Italians white?

For a comparison of Italian and black criminality in the United States I recommend Malcolm Gladwell's The Crooked Ladder.

In spite of the racist right's extreme hatred of Barack Obama, Obama helped a greater number of white people than black people thanks to the Affordable Care Act if only because there are more white people in the US.

I think this "Tom the Dancing Bug" cartoon is the best parable for the impact that racism has had to degrade the quality of life of whites in the United States.