Evo-psycho bros and the inconvenient truth about slave rape part 3

Evo-psycho bros and the inconvenient truth about slave rape part 2 here.

Razib Khan has been talking about 23andMe since at least 2009. In 2013 he wrote a positive piece about the company in Slate, saying:

This brings us to the fact that 23andMe is just part of a broader movement toward the democratization of health information.

He even promoted a sale they had last July. And on his blog in 2016 he seems to hold out hope that genetic testing was going to provide evidence of race-based intelligence:

Razib Khan says:

January 26, 2016 at 2:32 am GMT

@Curle

honestly i would just sit on my hands for now. in the next < 5 years the genomic components of traits like intelligence will finally be characterized. this is not speculation, but anticipation based on research going on now.

---------

And while we are here, I mentioned in this series the evo-psycho bros like to use the term "Platonic." Khan uses the word Platonic in this article and gives a definition, in response to a commenter's question:

marcel proust says:January 25, 2016 at 1:08 pm GMT • 100 WordsThe problem, if there is one, is that these population genetic differences are not necessarily good fits if one assumes a Platonic model of racial categorization.  

I don’t understand this. It may be that the phrase “Platonic model of racial categorization” is what I don’t understand; but please elaborate the whole sentence.

-------

Khan responds:

Razib Khan says:January 25, 2016 at 3:45 pm GMT@marcel proust 

typologies.

According to Webster's typologies is:

"study of or analysis or classification based on types or categories

In fact that term typology and the term Platonic are not actual synonyms and have a complex non-obvious connection. The same dictionary's definition of Platonic is:

1. capitalized : of, relating to, or characteristic of Plato or Platonism 

2 a : relating to or based on platonic love; also : experiencing or professing platonic love  

b : of, relating to, or being a relationship marked by the absence of romance or sex

3 : nominal, theoretical

Most people of course know only of definition 2. Presumably he's getting at "Platonism" since nominal and theoretical are so vague as to be useless. My assumption has always been that he means races can't be conceptualized like Platonic solids, but really the context never gives any clear indication.

So why does Razib Khan use the term Platonic instead of typologies? I think most likely because he's a terrible writer and won't use a clear term when he can use a more obscure one.

Khan is a big booster of the use of genetics testing. But back in 2014 he didn't seem to like an article by Carl Zimmer that used 23andMe data. Considering the evo-psycho inability to provide racial typologies it has an unexpected title: American Racial Boundaries are Quite Distinct for Now. In it he writes:

So I have to take issue when The New York Times posts articles with headlines such as White? Black? A Murky Distinction Grows Still Murkier. What genetics is showing is that in fact white Americans are shockingly European to an incredibly high degree for a population with roots on this continent for 400 years. If we removed all the history that we take for granted we’d be amazed that the indigenous peoples had so little demographic impact, and, that the larger numbers of people of partial African ancestry did not move into the general “white” population. 

Now Khan bolded the bit in the paragraph above. I highlighted the sentence that follows. I blogged about this curious passage back in March 2015:

History explains everything - so yeah, of course if you removed it you would be "amazed" by the state of whiteness. But why would you do that? 

After all the research I've done in the past few weeks into the work and thought-patterns of the evo-psycho bros I understand now why he said it. The evo-psycho system is so rigidly hereditarian that to Razib Khan it's absolutely no big deal to just remove "all the history that we take for granted."

Khan demonstrates the impulse of the evo-psycho bros to erase history and all other factors and just use "genetics" to explain everything.

Khan then proceeds to say:

It is entirely reasonable to argue that racial categories in the United States are blurred if one holds to a Platonic and essentialist view which resembles that which underpinned white racial supremacy and the law of hypdoescent. But as it is these views have no necessary scientific basis, and a percent or two of African ancestry in someone who is ~98 percent of European ancestry does not make them non-white in any rational sense.

"One" doesn't have to hold Platonic and essentialist views - "one" has to acknowledge that the essentialist view was and is the white supremacist view. The entire point of Zimmer's article is exactly that "these views have no necessary scientific basis." I'm not sure why Khan stuck the word "necessary" in there, but then lack of clarity is his calling card.

So who does Khan think he's arguing against there? He seems confused - even more than you would normally attribute to his lousy literary stylings. This was especially interesting:

a percent or two of African ancestry in someone who is ~98 percent of European ancestry does not make them non-white in any rational sense.

Khan has told us that we can't expect a typology for race. And yet we see here Khan identifying two "races" in this section: white and non-white. And then he tells us that 98% of European ancestry is not sufficient to make an individual non-white.

We can deduce from this that if Khan knows what percent of African ancestry does not make one non-white, he therefore knows what percentage of African ancestry does make one non-white.

But as always his lack of clarity makes it impossible to know what Khan really means. Does he think a genetic-testing-derived ancestry indicator of 98% European make someone exclusively "white" in a genetic sense or in a social construct sense? What about 75% European ancestry? And 50%?

We know ancestry composition and socially perceived "race" are not the same thing. That's what the NYTimes article is saying. Fortunately Zimmer is a much better writer than Khan and it's not a struggle to understand what he's getting at:

“We use these terms — white, black, Indian, Latino — and they don’t really mean what we think they mean,” said Claudio Saunt, a historian at the University of Georgia who was not involved in the study. 

The data for the new study were collected by 23andMe, the consumer DNA-testing company. When customers have their genes analyzed, the company asks them if they’d like to make their results available for study by staff scientists. 

Over time the company has built a database that not only includes DNA, but also such details as a participant’s birthplace and the ethnic group with which he or she identifies. (23andMe strips the data of any information that might breach the privacy of participants.) 

And then this map is displayed:

What this map displays is "white" Americans who have one or more percent African ancestry and we see that in South Carolina and Louisiana the percentage is as high as 12.5%. In other words, "Octoroons."

And as we discussed in the inconvenient truth about slave rape part 2, the average black person in the United States is almost 1/4 white.

But just in case you're still not sure where Khan is coming from, he finishes off the piece with a link to Steve Sailer, who says:

Actually, as the genome data has gotten more precise in the 21st Century, the big surprise has been how white are American whites. 

Except Sailer doesn't say "if we removed all the history." Perhaps because Sailer has even less self-awareness of how much his view of "race" erases history than Khan does. But the only way you could be surprised at "how white are American whites" is because you erased history.

As I wrote in response to this article back in 2015:

Yes, if we removed all the history, the very thing that explains exactly why we shouldn't be "amazed" at the whiteness of the European population. The indigenous people were wiped out first by European diseases for which they had no resistance, and then European land expansion. And of course people of "partial African ancestry" were not considered partially black, they were considered fully black according to the one-drop rule and there were laws against miscegenation right up until 1967 and the case of Loving vs. Virginia. But not only that - since there were social taboos and outright laws against black/white marriage, a goodly portion of those who were "partially black" were the result of slave rape - and of course the children of raped slaves were invariably slaves themselves, and thus not likely to be having much sex with the general white populace. 

Thanks to what I've learned in this ongoing series, the children of raped slaves were not "invariably" slaves themselves but still, pretty often - but it's likely almost all descendants of slaves were considered "black" and thus even as freemen not likely to be marrying whites. We've seen thanks to the two separate endings provided for the popular mid-19th century play The Octoroon, being one-eighth black still made you "black" and the prospect of such an individual marrying a "white" person was considered a "mixed marriage" and unacceptable to white Americans of the time

So the same clear historical point stands: the white population is so "white" thanks to an obvious, well-documented legal and social system.

Both Khan and Sailer in the articles linked here demonstrate they are well aware of the one-drop rule and miscegenation laws. So it's odd they are "surprised" by white ancestral composition in the US.

But considering they were both working for Ron Unz at the time (Sailer still does), this Upton Sinclair phrase springs to mind:

It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it

We've already seen the Winegard bros attempting to erase history in their defense of The Bell Curve in Claire Lehmann's Quillette:

Of course, there are other possible explanations of the Black-White gap, such as parenting styles, stereotype threat, and a legacy of slavery/discrimination among others. However, to date, none of these putative causal variables has been shown to have a significant effect on the IQ gap,

As I noted, they don't actually provide any refutation for non-genetic explanations, they just dismiss them. They clearly believe that the legacy of slavery/discrimination has had no impact on people identified as "black" in our social system. And although they only talk about intelligence in this article, I'm pretty certain they believe the same is true for criminality since they run in the same Criminal Justice gang as John Paul Wright.

In the Summer 2017 issue of the City Journal, a publication of the Koch brothers-funded Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, John Paul Wright also dismissed slavery:

While promoting the report, Travis and Nicholas Turner, president of the Vera Institute of Justice, an advocacy organization, published a New York Times op-ed assailing American prisons and holding up the German penal system as a positive exemplar. “To be sure, there are significant differences between the two countries,” the authors observed. “Most notably, America’s criminal justice system was constructed in slavery’s long shadow and is sustained today by the persistent forces of racism.” Not only does this statement shed light on the authors’ ideological views; it also manages to insult anyone who works in the criminal-justice system and who values public safety and order. 

As is the custom with evo-psycho bros Wright doesn't address the argument about slavery/discrimination, he just apparently dismisses it, and then proceeds to rant and rave about liberals.

Liberal criminologists avoid discussing the lifestyles that criminal offenders typically lead. Almost all serious offenders are men, and they usually come from families with long histories of criminal involvement, often spanning generations. They show temperamental differences early in life, begin offending in childhood or early adolescence, and rack up dozens of arrests. Their lives are chaotic and hedonistic, including the constant pursuit of drugs and sex...

I'm sure the liberal criminologists might take the time to explain how their comment about slavery's long shadow relates to the "lifestyles that criminal offenders typically lead." But Wright will never give them that chance because he already knows the answer and he already stated it publicly in 2009 in Biosocial Criminality New Directions in Theory and Research:

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.

Based on the theories of evo-psycho bros like Wright, you would never guess that members of other "races" besides blacks commit crimes. Evo-psycho bros have this obsession with black crime and black intelligence and they will not be persuaded that non-genetic factors play a significant role in any of it. I will address this next in a post about the belief at the center of the evo-psycho view of African Americans.

And then, because it finally arrived, I will review Steve Sailer's contribution to the Steven Pinker edited The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2004 in which Sailer explains what's wrong with Iraqi society. I promise you, you will never guess what it is. 

In my discussion about Sailer's piece I will reference a fascinating recent New Yorker article on organized crime in southern Italy, which also relates to Wright's rantings about black criminality.

Which will lead us to the question we always seem to get back to in discussions of the history of racial classification: Are Italians White?

Evo-psycho bros and the inconvenient truth about slave-rape part 2

Evo-psycho bros and the inconvenient truth about slave-rape part 1 here.

The historical record is full of stories of slave rape. 

In the first part I pointed out that having "black" ethnicity was considered so polluting by the Southern slave system that men who fathered children via slave-rape would allow their own children to remain in slavery.

Apparently that's not the whole story:

According to Henry Louis Gates, Jr.:

...Ira Berlin writes in his classic text, Slaves Without Masters, “fully 40 percent of the Southern free Negro population were classified as mulattoes, while only one slave in ten had some white ancestry.” The obvious reason: Masters were more likely to free slaves who looked like—and, in many cases, descended from—them. And sometimes—not often enough—these slaves were able to earn enough money working on their own to purchase their freedom and that of their wife and children.

Now Berlin was still dealing with the imprecise social construct of race in his "Slaves Without Masters" but following directly from the above excerpt, Gates makes the connection to contemporary genetic data:

The average African American today, according to Joanna Mountain at the genetics company 23andMe, “is 73.4 percent African, 24.1 percent European, and only 0.7 percent Native American” in their genetic makeup.

Any sexual intercourse between slave and master must be categorized as rape since a slave is hardly free to reject a master's sexual advances without fear of consequences to herself or her loved ones. And it's unlikely many slave masters cared whether a slave was attracted or no.

The case of The State of Missouri v. Celia, a Slave makes clear how little right to bodily integrity slaves possessed.

...between 1850 and 1855, Newsom regularly forced Celia to have sexual intercourse with him, and Celia bore two children over the course of those five years, at least one of which was fathered by Newsom.[9] At some point before 1855, Celia began a romantic relationship with George, one of Newsom’s other slaves. In 1855, Celia was pregnant for a third time with a child that was likely fathered by either George or Newsom.[10] At some point, George gave Celia an ultimatum, telling her “he would have nothing more to do with her if she did not quit the old man."[8] After this, Celia attempted to plead with Newsom’s family members and with Newsom himself. Sometime on or around June 23, 1855, Celia begged Newsom to leave her alone because she was sick and pregnant. Newsom refused, and told her “he was coming down to her cabin that night.”[8] Celia threatened Newsom, telling him that she would hurt him if he tried to rape her again. After her conversation with Newsom, Celia went and found a large stick, which she placed in the corner of her cabin.[8] 

On the night of June 23, 1855, after the rest of his family had gone to bed, Robert Newsom came to Celia’s cabin, as he had told her he would.[8] Celia made an attempt to reject his sexual advances, and when he refused to back down, she clubbed him over the head with the stick that she had brought into her cabin earlier that day. 

Celia was found guilty of murder and hanged for attempting to defend herself against rape.

And as we will see, as in the case of the rapes of Sally Hemmings by Thomas Jefferson, genetic records can confirm historical ones:

In 1998, the scientific journal Nature published the results of DNA tests designed to shed new light on questions first asked some two hundred years earlier: Did Thomas Jefferson have a relationship with a woman who was his slave? Did that relationship produce children? 

Now, the new scientific evidence has been correlated with the existing documentary record, and a consensus of historians and other experts who have examined the issue agree that the question has largely been answered: Thomas Jefferson fathered at least one of Sally Hemings's children, and quite probably all six. The language of "proof" does not translate perfectly from science and the law to the historian's craft, however. And the DNA findings in this case are only one piece of a complicated puzzle that many in previous generations worked hard to make sure we might never solve.

And  white men continued to rape black women without legal consequences right into the mid-20th century as we can see in the case of Recy Taylor:

"The Rape of Recy Taylor," Nancy Buirski's somber and disturbing new documentary, revisits this grave injustice through an evocative weave of testimony, music and film footage of the Jim Crow South. Although the 97-year-old Taylor is seen at strategic moments, her story is largely recounted by her younger siblings, Robert Corbitt and Alma Daniels, who speak with palpable anguish about the horror their sister endured. The longer view is provided by historians and scholars who position the crime within a never-ending cycle of black suffering and resistance that continues to this day. 

The suffering, in this case, is no more detailed than it needs to be. It's revealed that Taylor, who was married and had a 9-month-old daughter at the time of the assault, was violated to a degree that she could no longer bear children afterward. "What they did to her? They didn't need to live," Daniels says matter-of-factly. But live they did. Although Hugo Wilson, the driver of the Chevy, confessed to the rape and named the six other men involved, none of them were arrested — an infuriating if unsurprising reminder of the rarity of justice in the segregated South.

So slave-rape was common and even through the mid-20th century white men could get away with raping black women.

And as we have seen from the testimony of 23andMe, "...the average African American today... “is 73.4 percent African, 24.1 percent European, and only 0.7 percent Native American”

The average African American today is actually more than one-quarter something besides African. Why don't evo-psycho bros consider this at all worth examining when they classify Americans by race? Why do they continue to rely, exclusively, on the social construction of race when making claims about the intelligence and criminality of groups of people?

Well, why should the evo-psycho bros have to engage in so much extra work when nobody cares how sloppy they are? Especially when there are free, convenient half-century old data from white supremacist organizations around for the taking?

And so they accept that simple binary - black & white - and pretend it is not a social construct. 

The binary that, in the United States, was given to us by slavery: any hint of West African ethnic features made you "black." Even if your slaver father was white. Even if your slaver grandfather and your slaver father were white. In other words, even if you were three-quarters white and only one-quarter black. There was even a term for blacks who were only 1/8 black - "Octoroon" and a play The Octoroon was popular in the mid-1800s, although the ending was changed depending on where it was performed:

When the play was performed in England it was given a happy ending, in which the mixed-race couple are united. The tragic ending was used for American audiences, to avoid portraying a mixed marriage.

Considering the social hierarchy, those with West African ethnicity in the United States attempted to "pass" for white whenever there was any hope for success.

Even after slavery ended, blacks continued to be deemed inferior, by both social customs and the law. And people with virtually any West African features were considered "black."

When "blacks" began to conduct organized campaigns against notions of and laws and customs based on the assumption of their inferiority, they began to take pride in their "race"-  but many still accepted the black/white binary, even while there was a color-based hierarchy within the "race."

And even some on the Left enshrine the simple binary as much as White Supremacists do, a subject I've blogged about before and will discuss further in this series.

Thanks to DNA testing we know that people considered "black" in the United States usually have complex heritages. And it turns out, to a lesser but still significant extent, so do people considered "white" - especially in the Southern US.

Especially in the Southern US, where attempts are still made to misrepresent the causes of the Civil War. And where you can still see people denying that the Confederacy was treason for an evil cause, every bit as awful as Germany's Third Reich. There are still many in the South who consider their Confederate history a source of pride, rather than shame. Unlike the German descendants of supporters of the Third Reich.

But that simple black/white binary is so easy and uncomplicated and so inexpensive. The evo-psycho bros would have to work so much harder to include actual genetic data in their explanations of "race" groupings, and also it might not turn out after all that there's a connection between African ancestry and greater criminality and lower intelligence. 

How much nicer for them to take three convenient shortcuts:

• Use social constructions developed in the antebellum South (but pretend they are not social constructions);
• Use existing data from white supremacists and;
• Throw out all inconvenient factors.

If you follow this system your sloppiness will not lead to condemnation - on the contrary, established science figures like Steven Pinker will recommend your work on the one hand, and on the other you will be praised for your "science" by a member of the alt-right, Stefan Molyneux.

 I've already discussed the first two convenient shortcuts taken by the evo-psycho bros. Let's next look at the tactic of throwing out inconvenient factors, as we see Razib Khan doing, blatantly in a blog post from a few years ago.

Evo-psycho bros and the inconvenient truth about slave-rape part 1

John Paul Wright, another member of the evo-psycho bro/alt-right network.

Every time I think I have a small, easily covered topic I end up stepping into a rat's nest of science racialism. And then it takes me much longer to research and write than I anticipated and I don't get my laundry done, again.

So before I discuss Razib Khan's interesting response to the NYTimes article White? Black? A Murky Distinction Grows Murkier I want to talk about a few related issues.

Since the days of The Pioneer Fund and before, claims of racial tendencies have been based on the assumption that all humans could be sorted neatly into one of several racial groups, most especially black/white, based on self-identification. This is a practice that lives on right up to the present time, as demonstrated by this exchange I had with Kevin M. Beaver, the Judith Rich Harris Professor of Criminology and Director, Distance Learning Program at FSU who appears in the videos of alt-right racist/misogynist Stefan Molyneux to discuss the genetics of intelligence and crime.

ME:

When you look at data according to “race” what genetic testing do you use on study participants to determine their “race"? It’s been shown (23andMe) that some self-identified African Americans have a significant percentage of European ancestry and vice-versa.

BEAVER:

In all of my research, I have analyzed secondary data which has only included self-identification of race/ethnicity.  As a result, I was never able to examine ancestry based on genetic testing.

There is no doubt that J. Phillipe Rushton believed there are two "platonic" racial types, black and white:

“Whites have, on average, more neurons and cranial size than blacks… Blacks have an advantage in sport because they have narrower hips — but they have narrower hips because they have smaller brains.”
--J. Philippe Rushton, speaking at the 2000 American Renaissance conference

Like all evo-psycho authors, it seems, Beaver cites the work of J. Phillipe Rushton, who was president of The Pioneer Fund from 2002 until his death in 2012. 

• The Nurture Versus Biosocial Debate in Criminology (coauthors J. C. Barnes and Brian B. Boutwell)
• Biosocial Theories of Crime (edited by Beaver and Anthony Walsh)
• Exposure to Pre- and Perinatal Risk Factors Partially Explains Mean Differences in Self-Regulation between Races (coauthors J. C. Barnes , Brian B. Boutwell, J. Mitchell Miller, Rashaan A. DeShay, Norman White)
• Biosocial Criminology: New Directions in Theory and Research edited by Beaver and Anthony Walsh)
• No evidence of racial discrimination in criminal justice processing: Results from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (coauthors Matt DeLisi , John Paul Wright, Brian B. Boutwell, J.C. Barnes, Michael G. Vaughn )

There are probably more but I think five is sufficient to make the point.

Based on the chapter "Inconvenient Truths" written by John Paul Wright in the Biosocial Criminology: New Directions... book edited by Beaver, it's safe to assume that Beaver believes in the two platonic racial types, black and white:

Page 149:

...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.

Page 150:

From the available data it would seem ludicrous to argue that "race" is a construct devoid of a biological or evolutionary backdrop. That evolutionary forces have produced biological variance across races is now scientifically undeniable. That many of the characteristics that define races appear to be universal and time stable is also undeniable. Evolution can produce many forms of adaptations, but it cannot produce equality. 

The connection between race and criminal behavior is clearly complex and involves a range of historical, social, psychological and individual variables. Evolution however, provides a powerful mechanism to understand the development of human races and the distribution of traits and behaviors within and across races. It helps explain why races would appear and under what conditions races would appear. It helps to explain why certain traits would be beneficial and why these traits such as higher IQ, would be unequally distributed across races. 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.

So we see that the "inconvenient truth" according to John Paul Wright in Biosocial Criminology: New Directions in Theory and Research is that there are (apparently) three races: black, white and Oriental, and that races have different evolved intelligences and criminal tendencies.

By the way, who is John Paul Wright? Well he's an author at Quillette, of course.

John Paul Wright is a Professor of Criminal Justice at the University of Cincinnati.

Here is the web site associated with the book Wright co-authored with Matt DeLisi Conservative Criminology, in case you weren't sure where Wright stood politically.

Turns out there is quite the network in academia, centering on Criminal Justice studies, of white conservative men who consider black people to be by nature more criminal and less intelligent than members of other "races."

Not just conservative of course, in many cases alt-right as demonstrated by Wright's visit to Stefan Molyneux (of course) and his fascinating thoughts on "Why Leftists Are Violent"

I am creating a spreadsheet of them - maybe I'll call it "Shitty University Men" with their academic affiliations and connections to Steven Pinker, the alt-right and Quillette.

Although Quillette and the alt-right is rather redundant since Quillette founder Claire Lehmann is part of the international alt-right.

OK, so how does slave-rape fit into all this? Well it appears that although evo-psycho bros will allow for historical, social, psychological and individual variables as Wright does, what they actually do is ignore the historical record and other data sources.

Thanks to the #MeToo movement, we have seen how often many men with power over women will take full advantage of that power from Harvey Weinstein's complicity machine, to Matt Lauer's "assault button" to Donald Trump's brag that when you're famous you can grab 'em by the pussy.

Now imagine what men like that would do if they owned women.

We don't have to imagine of course, we have historical and genetic records. I will get to that next.