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Alyssa

Lucy Liu On The Role Race Plays On Breaking Into The Entertainment Industry, And Succeeding In It

By Alyssa Rosenberg on May 17, 2013 at 10:37 am

I wanted to thank Kerensa Cardenas of Women In Hollywood for flagging this interview with Lucy Liu in, of all places, Net-A-Porter magazine, which is wonderful in part for Liu’s real talk on race in Hollywood. She brings up two separate issues that I think are equally important to acknowledge in the conversation about how to make Hollywood a place that represents the world more accurately, and that, as a result, tells more kinds of stories.

First, Liu points out from her own experience that there are cultural barriers that discourage people from certain backgrounds from going into the entertainment industry in the first place:

Growing up in the bustling New York borough of Queens, the daughter of Chinese immigrants, she admits to being frustrated by her parents’ initial lack of support. They were highly educated, forced to do menial jobs in their new country. Her parents struggled, she explains, and they didn’t want the same for her. “After their struggle, they just really wanted to see me struggle in a different way, in a more obvious way, maybe something they could understand – she’s at college struggling, but then she will be a banker or a doctor. They understood that.”

It’s easy to talk about getting people access to similar opportunities once they decide they want to go into entertainment, but it’s worth acknowledging that people from different backgrounds, or different economic circumstances, may need different kinds of support if they’re going to make movies in the first place. If you have student loan debt, for example, you may not be able to take free internships. And creating stable opportunities for people at the early stages of work in entertainment may make it easier for people in different family situations to give it a go.

And Liu mentions the obvious truth that Hollywood puts actors into lanes, and that one of the ways the industry determines what those lanes will be is to use race or ethnicity:

Liu is proud of her achievements, but admits she gets annoyed when people can’t – or won’t – think of her outside of that “action” box: “I wish people wouldn’t just see me as the Asian girl who beats everyone up, or the Asian girl with no emotion. People see Julia Roberts or Sandra Bullock in a romantic comedy, but not me. You add race to it, and it became, ‘Well, she’s too Asian’, or, ‘She’s too American’. I kind of got pushed out of both categories. It’s a very strange place to be. You’re not Asian enough and then you’re not American enough, so it gets really frustrating.” Liu’s wary of playing the racism card, but admits that she had to “push a lot just to get in the room”. “I can’t say that there is no racism – there’s definitely something there that’s not easy, which makes [an acting career] much more difficult.”

It’s notable that either Net-A-Porter or Liu referred to this relatively basic observation, one which is factually grounded in Liu’s filmography, as “playing the race card.” It’s a long-standing canard that Hollywood is a liberal place because so many celebrities are affiliated with Democratic candidates and broadly progressive causes, but one of the clearest boundary markers of the limits of that liberalism is the idea that talking about race or racial inequality might be seen as selfish complaining or invite retaliation. It was striking last summer at the Television Critics Association, for example, to see Lance Reddick carefully but clearly acknowledge that being African-American has obviously shaped the parts available to him, even as many actors are quick to suggest that the industry that employs them is color-blind, all empirical evidence to the contrary. For all that Hollywood likes making products about the crippling effects of racial inequality, when those events are historical or based in a different industry or set of institutions, it’s telling that people who work in entertainment still have to worry that talking about race will get them labeled difficult, demanding, or in some way ungrateful.

Election

New Census Projections Confirm That Majority-Minority US Is Inevitable

By Ruy Teixeira, Guest Blogger on May 16, 2013 at 1:51 pm

The Census Bureau has just released new population projections based on alternative scenarios for immigration — high, low and constant.  The Bureau released their main projection, based on a medium immigration scenario, last fall, which showed the US becoming majority-minority in 2043. The new projections take that conclusion even further.

Under all scenarios in the new projections, the US will become majority-minority no later than 2046.  In other words, even if immigration is low or constant, the date we become majority-minority only moves back a few years.  And if the high immigration scenario occurs, we will become majority-minority earlier, in 2041.

The Census release also notes that the population under 18 years is projected to become majority-minority in either 2018 or 2019 in all four series.  That’s only 6-7 years away.  And the working-age population (18-64) is projected to become majority-minority between 2036 (high series) and 2042 (constant series).

These data show that the race-ethnic transformation of the United States is inevitable.  We are hurtling toward a new world that no one can stop and to which everyone will have to adapt.  And that very definitely includes conservatives who think that by opposing immigration reform they can somehow stop this transformation. The new data from the Census suggest just how futile this quest will ultimately be.

Justice

Only One Lawyer Who Argued Before The Supreme Court This Term Was African American

By Nicole Flatow on May 13, 2013 at 3:00 pm

In one of the blockbuster cases of this term, the U.S. Supreme Court seems poised to strike down the mechanism for ensuring diversity at colleges and universities, reasoning that the need for affirmative action has run its course. But if the high court itself is any indication, racial diversity hasn’t changed much at all. Over the course of the court’s 2012-2013 term, just one black lawyer argued before the court. The Associated Press reports:

In roughly 75 hours of arguments at the Supreme Court since October, only one African-American lawyer appeared before the justices, and for just over 11 minutes.

The numbers were marginally better for Hispanic lawyers. Four of them argued for a total of 1 hour, 45 minutes.

Women were better represented, accounting for just over 17 percent of the arguments before the justices.

In an era when three women, a Hispanic and an African-American sit on the court and white men constitute a bare majority of the nine justices, the court is more diverse than the lawyers who argue before it.

The arguments that took place from October to April were presented overwhelmingly by white men. Women and minority lawyers whose clients’ cases were heard by the court were far more likely to represent governments or be part of public-interest law firms than in private practice, where paychecks are much larger.

As the article points out, women and minorities have made very limited headway in climbing the ranks at large private law firms, where recent surveys show that 93 percent of partners remain white, and nearly 80 percent are men. But when it comes to Supreme Court litigators, many of these lawyers come from government jobs at the Department of Justice, whose Supreme Court litigation divisions are also largely dominated by white men. Diversity is also even lower than it has been because the high court is accepting less social justice cases in which minority lawyers are well represented. The one African American who did argue before the high court was Debo Adegbile, a former NAACP Legal Defense lawyer who disputed the challenge to the Voting Rights Act.

Limited diversity at the highest levels of the legal profession is a persistent problem that extends outside the courtroom. But inside the courtroom, diversity plays a separate and important role in representing the experiences of Americans, most of whom will never set foot inside the high court, and thus will never see an argument so long as cameras are prohibited in the courtroom. Like the contributions of diverse justices, who have weighed in on social justice cases with important perspectives on discrimination, a diverse lawyer’s contributions are just as substantive as they are symbolic. As Justice Byron White said in a tribute to the late Thurgood Marshall, he “would tell us things that we knew and would rather forget; and he told us much that we did not know due to limits in our experience.”

 

Justice

Disgraced Former Heritage Employee Says Author Of Racist Book Was His ‘Childhood Hero’

By Ian Millhiser on May 13, 2013 at 1:30 pm

Jason Richwine, the former Heritage Foundation staffer who wrote a PhD dissertation claiming that “new Hispanic immigrants will have low-IQ children and grandchildren,” told the Washington Examiner’s Byron York that such quasi-eugenic ideas have fascinated him for a long time. Indeed, Richwine identified Charles Murray, co-author of the Bell Curve, as a “childhood hero.” Murray’s Bell Curve posits that black people are less intelligent than whites, and that this disparity is due, at least in part, to genetics.

As York’s piece explains, Murray played a crucial role in shaping Richwine’s dissertation:

I began by asking about his interest in the topic of race and IQ. How had that started? He had read Charles Murray’s “The Bell Curve” when he was a student at American University in Washington, Richwine said, and was fascinated by the author’s approach to a complex topic. . . . While Richwine was at Harvard, Murray visited Cambridge and Richwine told him about his research project. The result was a two-year fellowship at the conservative American Enterprise Institute in Washington, where Murray has long been a scholar. The fellowship gave Richwine the opportunity to finish his doctoral work while also getting a start in the world of Washington think tanks. “It was wonderful,” Richwine recalled. “Few grad students get that kind of support and get to work with their childhood hero.” Indeed, Richwine’s dissertation acknowledgements make special note of Murray. “The substance of my work was positively influenced by many people, but no one was more influential than Charles Murray, whose detailed editing and relentless constructive criticism have made the final draft vastly superior to the first,” Richwine wrote. “I could not have asked for a better primary advisor.”

In addition to paving the road Richwine traveled in his scholarship, Murray more recently suggested that “benevolent sexism” may be “healthy” and “grounded in the nature of Homo sapiens.” During the most recent GOP presidential primaries, former Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA) cited Murray’s work to defend Santorum’s views on “the dangers of contraception.” Shortly after news broke that Richwine was no longer employed by Heritage, Murray suggested that Richwine’s former employer did not stick up for him in part because Heritage President Jim DeMint does not possess testicles:


Richwine left Heritage shortly after news of his views on race broke. Charles Murray, by contrast, is still employed by AEI.

Immigration

Top Conservative Publication Defends Linking Hispanics To Low IQ

By Zack Beauchamp on May 13, 2013 at 11:35 am

Jason Richwine. (Credit: Media Matters)

Last week, a coauthor of the Heritage Foundation’s shoddy immigration report, Jason Richwine, resigned after it emerged that his PhD dissertation argued that Latinos and blacks were genetically intellectual inferior to white people. Monday morning, the flagship conservative journal National Review published a piece arguing that Richwine’s work was legitimate academic inquiry and that Heritage should have defended the dissertation rather than distancing itself from it.

The piece, authored by deputy managing editor Robert VerBruggen, argues that Richwine’s dissertation was “most certainly competently executed,” and that Richwine’s research on IQ helps support “much of the actual data” in giving “reason for concern” about “Hispanic assimilation.” That makes it wrong to call Richwine’s dissertation racist, in VerBruggen’s view:

These sorts of debates are resolved by having scholars take different views, conduct research, and make their case, confident that their current and future “educational institutions” will not punish them for doing so. Indeed, today genome research is progressing at a rapid clip, with scientists worldwide making fascinating discoveries almost constantly. (Soon, I hope, this work will render the research Richwine cites, much of which is decades old, obsolete.) The Left would like to cut this process off, expelling from polite society — with the help of a conservative think tank in this case — any researcher who dares to defend the hereditarian view.

The Left’s labeling of Richwine’s argument as “racist” is especially dangerous. In modern America it is axiomatic that “racism,” whatever it is, is wrong — and this is a good thing. It therefore is a mistake to define racism to include falsifiable hypotheses in addition to racial hatred. If Richwine’s view is racist, what are we to do if it turns out to be correct?

VerBruggen’s standard for racism doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. The hypothesis that “rich Jews control the media” is “falsifiable” in VerBruggen’s sense, as it’s a claim about what is true in the world, but it’s unquestionably anti-Semitic to assert it. Ditto with the claim that “black people are on-average lazier” or “Asians are on-average sneakier” — these are racist claims, rooted in centuries of pernicious stereotyping, yet they are legitimate subjects for academic inquiry by VerBruggen’s lights.

Moreover, VerBruggen’s claim that Richwine’s dissertation is good research is disputed by independent experts. “I am stunned by the lack of rigor and intellectual depth evinced by Richwine’s dissertation,” wrote Diego von Vacano, a political scientist who studies race and Hispanic identity. “Such shoddy work should not easily pass at the doctoral level — or any level for that matter.” Dan Drezner, a professor of international relations who reviewed Richwine’s research, wrote that “key terms are poorly defined, auxiliary assumptions abound, and the literature I’m familiar with that is cited as authoritative is, well, not good.”

These criticisms are not hard to substantiate. Richwine’s dissertation fails to sufficiently define “Hispanic” or “black” or explain how either such genetically diverse, socially defined groupings can meaningfully track the genetically-inherited components of IQ. He dismisses the idea that entrenched poverty and racism could stymie Hispanic acheivement by citing the success of Asian immigrants in the United States, skating over the gulf in differences between both different Asian immigrant groups at different times and “Asians” and “Hispanics” in some broader sense. He doesn’t respond to the wealth of academic criticism of current intelligence testing metrics. And Richwine takes much of the data on IQ as face-value reliable, a claim that’s dubious for several reasons.

VerBruggen’s insistence that bad research linking race and IQ is simply the truth plays into a longstanding conservative tradition, wherein conservatives defend race and IQ research that provides support for their policy preferences. In this case, Richwine’s dissertation makes the case for limiting immigration to high IQ individuals, a position that VerBruggen appears compelled by and one that tracks well with the general conservative preference for “high-skill” immigration. Richwine explicitly draws a line between “high IQ immigration” and “high skill immigration” in the dissertation.

National Review‘s editors wrote that “the Heritage analysis [Richwine coauthored] is the best available” analysis of the cost of the immigration bill.

Justice

Seven Outlandish Things The Heritage Foundation’s Remaining Employees Believe

By Ian Millhiser on May 13, 2013 at 9:00 am

(Credit: AP)

Late in the day Friday, the Heritage Foundation announced that Jason Richwine, the co-author of their widely criticized immigration report, was no longer employed by the conservative think tank. Shortly after the immigration report was released, the Washington Post’s Dylan Matthews reported that Richwine’s PhD dissertation claimed that “new Hispanic immigrants will have low-IQ children and grandchildren.”

Heritage’s decision to hire Richwine was not a momentary lapse in judgement that was quickly rectified. To the contrary, Richwine was employed by the Heritage foundation for more than three years before reports of his quasi-eugenic views forced him to leave. As it turns out, this is not an isolated incident. Although evidence has not yet emerged suggesting that Richwine’s racist views are common among Heritage employees, here are seven examples of radical, offensive or just downright weird beliefs held by current Heritage staffers:

  • Children of undocumented immigrants should be allowed to starve. When news of Richwine’s racist dissertation broke, Heritage initially attempted to rehabilitate its immigration report by claiming that Richwine’s co-author, Heritage Senior Research Fellow Robert Rector, took the lead in designing the study’s methodology and Richwine merely “provided quantitative support to lead author Robert Rector.” Rector, however, is hardly a picture of moderation. Among other things, Rector co-authored a 2012 report arguing that we should “prohibit food stamp payments to illegal immigrant families.” Notably, because all nearly all children born in the United States are automatically U.S. citizens under the Fourteenth Amendment, one impact of Rector’s proposal would be starving American children in order to spite their parents.
  • Gay people and sexually active unmarried women should be banned from teaching. In 2010, Heritage President Jim DeMint told a rally at a South Carolina church that “if someone is openly homosexual, they shouldn’t be teaching in the classroom and he holds the same position on an unmarried woman who’s sleeping with her boyfriend — she shouldn’t be in the classroom.”
  • The Voting Rights Act is a “racial entitlement.” Defending Justice Scalia’s statement that a key provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 is a “perpetuation of racial entitlement,” Heritage Senior Legal Fellow Hans von Spakovsky endorses Scalia’s view and writes that “the only thing certain about talking honestly about the current benefits and burdens of Section 5 (or voting against its renewal) is the very type of venomous attacks and false claims of racism and Jim Crow to which Scalia has been subjected.” Spakovsky’s disregard for the Voting Rights Act is not surprising, as he is one of the nation’s top proponents of voter suppression laws. Indeed, a panel of Virginia judges recently refused to reappoint Spakovsky to an election board in Fairfax, Virginia in the wake of allegations that he used his seat on the board to crusade against voting rights.
  • Todd Akin can save America from an “economic abyss.” At a time when former Rep. Todd Akin (R-MO) found himself friendless due to his “legitimate rape” comment, DeMint tried to throw Akin a lifeline in his Senate race against Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO). In a joint statement with former Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA), DeMint said that they “support Todd Akin and hope freedom-loving Americans in Missouri and around the country will join us so we can save our country from fiscal collapse.” As a bonus, Heritage published a column by Akin in 2011 where the former congressman claimed that “the constitutionality of much entitlement spending is debatable.”
  • Poor people aren’t really poor if they own refrigerators. In 2011, Rector and Heritage Policy Analyst Rachel Sheffield published a report arguing that “Congress should reorient the massive welfare state to promote self-sufficient prosperity rather than expanded dependence” in part because most impoverished households own appliances and do not send their kids to bed hungry. Among the report’s claims are that nearly all poor people have “kitchens equipped with an oven, stove, and refrigerator,” that “[n]early three-fourths have a car or truck” and that “70 percent have a VCR.” Of course, as Matt Yglesias points out, many of the common household amenities Rector and Sheffield dismiss as luxuries are actually signs of thrift — “[b]uying food at the grocery store and saving it thanks to the miracles of modern refrigeration is sound household budgeting.” Similarly, poor people in parts of the country without adequate public transportation would find it very difficult to hold a job if they did not have a car or truck. As Melissa Boteach and Donna Cooper explain, a particularly well-equipped poor household could sell all of their household appliances and electronics and still only wind up with two and a half months rent.
  • Accused terrorists shouldn’t have legal representation and their lawyers should be punished. According to at least one former Bush Administration official, the “vast majority” of the 742 original Guantanamo Bay detainees were innocent of terrorism, which only emphasizes the importance of providing these detainees with due process and adequate legal representation. Yet, in a 2007 radio interview, then-Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Charles “Cully” Stimson made a thinly veiled attempt to punish lawyers who represent Gitmo detainees by encouraging their law firms’ corporate clients to drop them. Stimson listed the names of over a dozen firms with attorneys representing detainees, and then said “I think, quite honestly, when corporate C.E.O.’s see that those firms are representing the very terrorists who hit their bottom line back in 2001, those C.E.O.’s are going to make those law firms choose between representing terrorists or representing reputable firms.” Within a month, Stimson resigned from the Bush Administration (he also apologized for his comments and claimed they did not reflect his “core beliefs”). Yet, while Stimson’s comments were too disgraceful for him to remain in Bush’s Defense Department, they were not too disgraceful for the Heritage Foundation. Stimson is now a Senior Legal Fellow at Heritage.
  • A J.J. Abrams TV show should guide America’s defense policy. The plot of J.J. Abrams’ show “Revolution” focuses around a new weapon technology that disables electronic devices and returns the world to the pre-industrial era. Most TV viewers understand that this show is science fiction. Heritage thinks it is a warning about the future. According to Heritage, the future world depicted in this show, “is not as unlikely as it might appear.” Heritage national security Research Fellow Baker Spring warns that America’s enemies could detonate “a nuclear weapon at a high altitude over the earth” triggering an “electromagnetic pulse” (EMP) that would disable American technology. Another Heritage paper calls for a “National EMP Awareness Day.” In reality, of course, the idea of an EMP attack belongs in science fiction. Among other things, if someone who wished us harm possessed both a nuclear warhead and the technology required to detonate such a weapon in US airspace, there are plenty of other much more destructive things they could do — such as setting off the nuke in the middle of Manhattan.

Alyssa

Why ‘NEVER’ Abandoning ‘Redskins’ As His Team’s Name Might Soon Cost Dan Snyder A Lot Of Money

By Travis Waldron on May 10, 2013 at 2:44 pm

The never-ending dispute over whether the National Football League’s Washington Redskins should change their name is heating up again. Early in May, D.C. City Councilman David Grosso introduced a resolution asking the team to change its “racist and derogatory” name, an effort that even drew the attention of the team’s star quarterback, Robert Griffin III, who posted a cryptic tweet about the “tyranny of political correctness” that, it turned out, was in reference to efforts to change the title of the franchise he represents.

But Grosso’s non-binding resolution is the least of the Redskins’ worries. The big threat to the team and its owner, Dan Snyder, is the federal Trademark Trial and Appeal Board, which in February heard a case petitioning it to classify the word “Redskin” as a derogatory slur: as such, it wouldn’t be eligible for trademark protection. But even if it loses that case, the team will “NEVER” change its name, Snyder told the USA Today on Thursday:

“We will never change the name of the team,” Snyder told USA TODAY Sports this week. “As a lifelong Redskins fan, and I think that the Redskins fans understand the great tradition and what it’s all about and what it means, so we feel pretty fortunate to be just working on next season.”

What if his football team loses an ongoing federal trademark lawsuit? Would he consider changing it then?

“We’ll never change the name,” he said. “It’s that simple. NEVER — you can use caps.”

The trademark case won’t be resolved anytime soon — probably not until next year, and it will likely see appeals after that. The board stripped the Redskins of their trademark in 1999, only to have the decision overturned on a technicality (that petitioners waited too long to file their claim) in 2003. But the basic case is pretty strong: “Redskins” is plainly derogatory, a racial marker that various dictionaries define as “offensive” and a “term of disparagement,” and petitioners have this time structured the case in a manner that should avoid the timing technicality. Native Americans and activists have fought its use for years, with one, Clem Iron Wing, reportedly telling a school board in Wichita, Kansas — where a high school uses the nickname — that the “only way ‘redskin’ was ever used towards my people and myself was in a derogatory manner.” Pay close enough attention to the debate, and you’ll notice that no one — not even Snyder — defends the term on the grounds that it isn’t racist or derogatory. Instead, they argue that the team should keep it because it’s “tradition” and because 79 percent of Americans support it.

Losing the trademark wouldn’t force the Redskins to change the name. What it would do, however, is make it impossible to stop other people from using it. In short, Snyder wouldn’t be able to stop anyone else from making merchandise with the team name and undercutting official Redskins gear, or to charge anyone for using the name, changes that would cost Snyder considerable financial damage — “every imaginable loss you can think of,” according to attorneys in the 1999 case — and activists hope that would be enough to change his mind. Snyder, though, is a man of immense pride, and my suspicion is that he would try to eat his losses and keep the name out of spite, at least for the time being.

NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell isn’t likely to feel the same way. Goodell has thus far expressed a startling level of indifference toward the controversy, but if the Redskins lose the trademark — and the NFL’s ability to make money off their licensed and trademarked merchandise — that indifference will assuredly fade. Goodell might “understand the affinity for that name” among fans, but he won’t understand — or tolerate — big financial losses. Ideally, Snyder and Goodell would change the name because it’s plainly derogatory. Getting rid of it because using racist terminology is expensive, though, may have to suffice.

Economy

Conservatives Also Love To Link Inequality And IQ

By Ruy Teixeira, Guest Blogger on May 10, 2013 at 1:15 pm

Zack Beauchamp has started an interesting discussion on TP Ideas on how and why conservatives love to link race and IQ. Allow me to point out that they don’t just stop with linking race and IQ. They also delight in linking economic inequality in general to IQ, for the same reasons: to make conservatives appear to be the reasonable ones not afraid to face the hard truths about a troubling social problem.

It should be no surprise to anyone that Charles Murray, author of The Bell Curve, is once again taking the lead in making this case. In last year’s Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010, he argued that to understand today’s economic inequality you need to go back to the 1960s. Since then, American society has been coming apart. Under the baleful influence of a relativistic, anything goes, 60s morality, America’s work ethic and honesty have been destroyed: the commitment to religion and the institution of marriage has been all but lost. As a result, the less-educated bottom 30 percent of whites have seen their economic and social fates diverge radically from the well-educated top 20 percent of whites. Weirdly, Murray dubs the former group “Fishtown,” in honor of a white working-class Philly neighborhood on the banks of the Delaware River; the latter group is named “Belmont,” after a tony Boston suburb.

A segment of Belmont whites — comprising perhaps 5 percent of the U.S. population — make up what Murray believes is the new upper class. These are the folks who hold the most powerful managerial and professional jobs in our social institutions and really run the country. Unlike in the good old days, they live in a culture that is separate and distinct from the rest of America (think upscale coffeehouses and restaurants, gourmet food stores, “green” consumer goods, highbrow news media, and “serious” movies and TV). They even live together in the same places, huddled together in what Murray calls “SuperZips,” where they can escape the unrefined masses, send their kids to good schools, and marry each other. Oddly, it is this very same new upper class that most fervently embraces the values of the 1960s — and yet they are doing very, very well.

And why are they doing so well? For Murray, it’s simple: they’re smarter! In his view, the sorting mechanisms in our technologically advanced society have become ever more efficient at ferreting out the cognitively gifted among us (elite colleges play a big role) and slotting them into positions where they can reap the market’s increasing return for high-level skills. So the cognitively advanced Belmont whites pull even farther away from the cognitively challenged Fishtown whites, who, you will remember, no longer have even their sturdy values of honesty, hard work, marriage, and traditional religion to rely upon.

As for the problems of blacks and Hispanics, Murray stands by his earlier work in The Bell Curve, where he argued that they’re just not as smart as whites and hence do more poorly in a society that increasingly rewards cognitive ability.  So blacks and Hispanics are dumber than whites and lower class whites are dumber than upper class whites. That’s Murray’s view of the world and his overarching explanation for the ongoing pathologies of racial and class inequality.

None of this makes any sense. On the one hand, Murray laments over and over the depth of the inequality problem we face; some of the economic trends he documents are the sorts of things you’d expect a liberal think tank or academic to lament. Yet that overlap has not led him to pay the slightest attention to the careful work these think tanks and academics have done analyzing the growth in inequality (well-summarized in Timothy Noah’s book, The Great Divergence). Murray dismisses out of hand explanations rooted in structural shifts in the economy, slower growth in educational attainment, changes in labor market institutions (unions, the minimum wage), or really anything other than increasing rewards for smart people and declining morals for dumb people. Thus in his quest for a scientific, hard-headed explanation for inequality, he winds up rejecting all the real science on the issue.

Don’t be surprised if this view, as appalling and absurd as it seems, continues to surface in conservative circles. The temptation to don the mantle of science, even when it is fundamentally fraudulent, will, for some, be too great to resist.

Alyssa

‘Scandal’ Creator Shonda Rhimes On Race In Her Shows—And How White Writers Handle Race

By Alyssa Rosenberg on May 10, 2013 at 12:06 pm

My friend Willa Paskin, Salon’s TV critic, has a very interesting profile of Shonda Rhimes, the creator of Scandal, a show in which “America is run by an African-American spin expert, a scheming first lady and a mercenary gay guy who also happens to be in one of the sexiest homosexual marriages on television,” in this weekend’s New York Times Magazine. There’s a lot to chew over here, including how Rhimes built a hit factor by writing shows about ambitious women, and by embracing soap opera tropes and insisting on diverse casts, or the fact that she wants to make a spy show. But I wanted to pull out this section of the piece on writing race in television, since it’s obviously a subject that’s been on my mind a great deal lately:

While race on Rhimes’s shows is omnipresent, it is not often discussed explicitly. This has led to a second-order critique of her shows: that they are colorblind, diverse in a superficial way, with the characters’ races rarely informing their choices or conversations. Rhimes, obviously, disagrees. “When people who aren’t of color create a show and they have one character of color on their show, that character spends all their time talking about the world as ‘I’m a black man blah, blah, blah,’ ” she says. “That’s not how the world works. I’m a black woman every day, and I’m not confused about that. I’m not worried about that. I don’t need to have a discussion with you about how I feel as a black woman, because I don’t feel disempowered as a black woman.”

This is a framework for handling race on television that sounds absolutely terrible, narratively and otherwise. Any writer, of any color, who writes for a character of color and can only come up with things to say about that characters’ race hasn’t done the work of thinking through who this character is as a full person. Race matters, but gender, class, geography, faith, sexual orientation, and cultural affiliations do too. A well-designed character should have idiosyncrasies because actual humans do, and multiple interests, because ditto, and be precise in their perspectives because we’re not handed talking points at birth but develop them over time and filter them through our personal experiences.

But I’d also have been curious for the story to spend more time on Rhimes’ argument that “I don’t need to have a discussion with you about how I feel as a black woman, because I don’t feel disempowered as a black woman.” Does she mean that being equal means that her race can be treated as a neutral default, much like whiteness? Does she think that the only narratives African-Americans are given on television are drawn from disadvantage, and she doesn’t want to write those? I wouldn’t blame her for that, but it seems like a oddly limited perspective on what people get from their racial or ethnic heritage that can be portrayed on screen, which is why I’d find that interpretation somewhat confusing. Or does she mean that she doesn’t want to have to stand in for black women everywhere, and doesn’t want her characters to have to either? Again, I wouldn’t disagree with her at all for wanting to avoid that fate. But I’m not sure not talking about race in text (her argument that her characters don’t have to talk explicitly about race because “The discussion is right in front of your face,” in their actions is more convincing) is the only writerly solution to the problem she’s putting forward. In any case, I recognize the irritation of wanting to parse a subject Rhimes thinks is overplayed. But I’d be curious what writing lessons she has to offer to those white writers she complains about.

Immigration

Why Conservatives Love To Link Race And IQ

By Zack Beauchamp on May 9, 2013 at 1:58 pm

For whatever reason, conservatives can’t get over their fascination with race and IQ. The recent revelation that a lead author of the Heritage Foundation’s immigration plan study had written his graduate dissertation at Harvard on the intellectual inferiority of Hispanic immigrants is merely the latest in a string of controversies, starting with the publication of The Bell Curve in 1994, prompted by conservative speculation (depressingly common in the immigration debate) about links between race and IQ.

These spats don’t generally endear conservatism to the general public, so it’s not like this is a political move. So why is it that the right-of-center intelligentsia keeps coming back to this topic? I’d suggest two reasons: first, a link between race and IQ moots the moral imperative for public policy aimed at addressing systemic poverty; second, it allows conservatives to take up the mantle of disinterested, dispassionate intellectual they so love.

Jason Richwine, the newly controversial Heritage author, makes the first point explicitly in his dissertation. Richwine argues that the genetically low IQ of Latinos is responsible for the persistent fact of Latino poverty; in his words, the existence of “a larger and increasingly visible Hispanic underclass…cannot be understood without considering IQ.”

One of the reasons this is true, Richwine suggests, is that Latinos are too dumb to realize that remaining on welfare is hurting them. Richwine points to a real hole in the classic conservative theory that welfare is entrenching poverty — that people must be able to realize that they can make more money in the long run by trying to get a job — and plugs it by arguing that Latinos are, like most unintelligent people, incapable of weighing future rewards against short-term costs. “In order to explain the creation of the underclass,” he puts it in typically euphemistic fashion, “the welfare theory requires present-oriented recipients, a common trait in low-IQ populations.”

This vein of argument was pioneered by Richwine’s mentor, Bell Curve author Charles Murray. Murray’s research focused more on the purported unintelligence of African-Americans, but his conclusions about its role in sustaining poverty were similar. Murray has taken this conclusion and used it to argue against everything from affirmative action to essentially all policy interventions aimed at reducing economic inequality. It’s easy to see how this argument works — if some people are less intelligent than others, as a consequence of either genetics or “underclass culture,” then government programs aren’t likely to help equalize society — creating an economically more level playing field will only cause the most talented to rise to the top again. Inequality is thus natural and ineradicable; poverty might be helped at the margins, but helping the unintelligent will be fraught with unintended consequences.

Moreover, this framing allows conservatives to explain the obviously racial character of American poverty without having to concede the continued relevance of racism to American public life. If it’s really the case that people with certain backgrounds simply aren’t as smart as others, then it makes sense that they’d be less successful as a group. What strikes progressives as offensively racial inequality thus becomes naturalized for conservatives in the same way that inequality and poverty writ large do.

Not only does positing a link between race and IQ provide conservatives with an overarching intellectual framework that supports their public policy preferences, it does so while allowing them to claim the mantle of objective scientists persecuted for telling “hard truths.” One of the founding myths of modern conservatism is that conservatives are hard-headed rationalists, while liberals let their soft-minded care for the downtrodden get in the way of rational public policy. Race and IQ theory, despite being based in truly shoddy data, presents itself as neutral social science, allowing conservatives to take refuge in the “it’s not our fault that the truth is what it is” argument when dismissing public policy ideas to take on American racism.

Moreover, positioning race and IQ as a “hard truth” allows conservatives to cast themselves as defenders of free intellectual inquiry in the face of stifling political correctness. After John Derbyshire, a 12 year contributor to National Review and self-described “race realist,” was fired last year for penning a particularly offensive screed, his colleague Mark Steyn defended Derbyshire on the grounds that one should never concede to PC zealotry:

My default position is that I’d rather put up with whatever racist/sexist/homophobic/Islamophobic/whateverphobic excess everybody’s got the vapors about this week than accept ever tighter constraints on “acceptable” opinion….The net result of Derb’s summary execution by NR will be further to shrivel the parameters, and confine debate in this area to ever more unreal fatuities. He knew that mentioning the Great Unmentionables would sooner or later do him in, and, in an age when shrieking “That’s totally racist!” is totally gay, he at least has the rare satisfaction of having earned his colors.

Or, as Andrew Sullivan (who first published a symposium on the Bell Curve whilst editor of The New Republic) puts it, “the study of intelligence [has] been strangled by P.C. egalitarianism.” In a world where conservatives constantly under fire for know-nothingism on topics like climate change and evolution, standing up for the so-called “science” on race and IQ allows them to position liberals and liberal anti-racism as the enemies of reason.

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