Should Color-Blind Thinking Be Taboo? 

2023/10/04 Leave a comment

Of note and the limits of meta-analyses:

A brouhaha broke out recently when it was revealed that TED treated a talk on color blindness by Coleman Hughes (who is black, if that matters), with surprising levels of hostility. Mr. Hughes and TED seem to agree on the broad outlines of what happened. Mr. Hughes argued in favor of color-blind thinking; this offended some staff at TED, resulting in delays, unusual scrutiny, and alleged failure to promote Mr. Hughes’ video. This raised familiar concerns that institutions are throttling free speech and rigorous debate in the name of satiating a few easily offended individuals.

One defense raised by TED for their actions was that Mr. Hughes’ defense of color blindness wasn’t scientifically grounded. They pointed to one particular meta-analysis, which analyzed the impact of color blindness and race consciousness in the form of multiculturalism on several outcomes. TED argued this meta-analysis questions the value of color blindness. Mr. Hughes countered that this meta-analysis actually supports color blindness. So, which is it?

I decided to have a closer look at the study in question. Upfront, it’s worth noting one thing: as I’ve argued before, meta-analyses are poor debate enders. Generally, they tend to artificially smooth over inconsistencies in the data (which the authors of this meta-analysis themselves acknowledge), they tend to overestimate support for hypotheses, and researcher choices can produce divergent meta-analytic conclusions. But, for the moment, we’ll ignore that.

Although the authors purport to compare color-blind to race-conscious approaches, I’m not convinced they actually isolated this. It’s well known that many race-conscious approaches, whether in DEI training, implicit bias training, microaggression awareness, etc., either don’t work or backfire. A thorough discussion of this appeared to be missing from the manuscript. 

Instead, the authors focus on a vaguer concept of multiculturalism which they define as “acknowledging differences by learning about, maintaining, or valuing them.” This seems to be a very soft version of identity consciousness, not nearly as likely to concern people as, say, the white fragility concept or segregating school kids by race for affinity groups. I’m not sure their definition of multiculturalism is even contradictory to color blindness. 

The authors consider four outcomes: prejudice, discrimination, stereotyping, and what they call “policy support,” which they define as “positive attitudes toward policies aimed at increasing diversity by granting resources to non-dominant groups.” This later category, while undoubtedly good in intention, also appears to be explicitly racially discriminatory (as with affirmative action) and could reasonably be expected to be opposed by color blindness in good faith.

Some of the meta-analytic results appeared to be underpowered, particularly for studies of color blindness. Focusing on effect size, and consistent with Mr. Hughes’ read, color blindness tends to be associated with more positive outcomes, some more strongly than others. So was multiculturalism, with the exception that it was associated with more “neutral” stereotyping (a tendency to see groups as culturally different—an outcome I’d argue is actually rather negative for a multiethnic society).

Taken at face value, I think the authors could argue multiculturalism had a stronger impact on some outcomes such as prejudice and discrimination, but we’ll return to that face value in just a moment. Yet the main difference was regarding policy support. Color-blind approaches were associated with less policy support, whereas multiculturalism was associated with more policy support.

Whether that’s good or bad is a subjective evaluation—likely depending on whether the reader likes those policies themselves. I’m concerned that this has been something of a common rhetorical trick by progressive scholars. For instance, some economists claimed that 2016 Trump voters were motivated by “racism,” though the surveys they used for this claim tended to involve disagreement with specifically progressive views of race, such as support of affirmative action or belief that racism is widespread, rather than actually endorsing hateful views of others. 

Of course, there are also reasons not to take the meta-analytic results at face value. As mentioned, the authors used a rather vanilla definition of multiculturalism, and deftly avoided the most controversial areas of race-consciousness. This certainly affected effect sizes. Moreover, from the start (including the chosen quotes by Justices Day-O’Connor and Sotomayor at the beginning of the article), I had the sense that the authors really wanted multiculturalism to win, and this may have influenced their interpretations.

In short, there are reasonable debates about the meaningfulness of the comparisons between multiculturalism and color blindness. But there was nothing in this meta-analysis that should have been used to conclude Mr. Coleman’s TED talk was unscientific or contrary to the (very weak) scientific evidence.

Source: Should Color-Blind Thinking Be Taboo?

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with ,

Do COVID-19 Racial Disparities Matter? Opinion versus evidence

2020/04/15 Leave a comment

The wilful blindness of dissociating race with socioeconomic factors.

Opinion, rather than any hard analysis, compared to more evidence-based work by the CDC CDC Hospital Data Point To Racial Disparity In COVID-19 Cases and the Associated Press Outcry Over Racial Data Grows as Virus Slams Black Americans:

There is now a racial justice angle on the coronavirus pandemic. Ibram X. Kendi, Director of Antiracist Research at American University, led the charge in the Atlantic a week ago, calling for data on COVID-19 deaths broken down by race. Nikole Hannah-Jones (whose work Wilfred Reilly mentioned in this space back in February) followed up with a Twitter thread documenting the disparate impact the virus has had on black Americans. Dr. Anthony Fauci, America’s top immunologist, hit a similar theme in a recent press conference. To sum up the argument: Black people make up roughly 14 percent of the American population, but far more than 14 percent of Americans killed thus far by COVID-19.

According to one view, this racial disparity amounts to evidence of systemic racism. But the argument rests on the false presumption that, in the absence of racism, we would see equal health outcomes by race. The data suggest otherwise.

In fact, blacks are more likely than whites to die of many diseases—not just this one. In other cases, the reverse is true. According to CDC mortality data, whites are more likely than blacks to die of chronic lower respiratory disease, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, liver disease, and eight different types of cancer. The same thinking that attributes the racial disparity in COVID-19 deaths to systemic racism against blacks could be applied equally to argue the existence of systemic racism against whites.

In some cases, there are obvious biological reasons for racial disparities in disease. Melanin content alone might explain the racial disparity in skin cancer, for example. But in other cases, the source of the disparity is mysterious. Why are whites more likely to die of Alzheimer’s? We don’t know. What’s important is that disparities between groups are not abnormal and are not, by themselves, a sign of any deeper societal malady.

A softer version of the above-described argument would concede that racial disparities in COVID-19 don’t prove anything by themselves—but would point to the various risk factors that nevertheless make black Americans more susceptible to COVID-19. Blacks are more likely to work in the service sector, for instance, which means they have more opportunities to contract the virus. Moreover, blacks are more likely to suffer from diabetes, asthma, obesity, and hypertension, all of which make the virus more deadly. Moreover, black Americans are less likely to have access to high-quality health care, and are more likely to live in areas that are served by over-burdened hospitals and emergency-response services.

But if we are going to discuss underlying risk factors, we should discuss them directly rather than immediately using race as a proxy. Focusing on age makes sense, because it has been obvious since early on that the elderly face a far higher COVID-19 case fatality rate. Focusing on people with pre-existing medical risk factors makes sense for the same reason. But absent some hitherto undiscovered genetic factor, focusing on race makes about as much sense as focusing on, say, religion. If anyone bothers to look, there will probably be disparities between Catholics and Protestants. Yet no one will feel the need to mention these at a press conference, and our public health efforts will not suffer as a result.

The fact is that our culture is obsessed with race. Part of this stems from a sincere desire to help the less fortunate, who are disproportionately black. But much of it stems from a deeply felt shame over the sins of history—slavery, Jim Crow, and all that followed. As a result, anything vaguely resembling a concern for black suffering is applauded—and no further questions are asked.

The House Democrats’ proposed coronavirus relief bill included a provision requiring that federal government agencies use as many minority-owned banks as possible, and another provision requiring corporations to maintain staff and budgets dedicated to “diversity and inclusion” for at least five years as a condition of receiving emergency funds. It is hard to see how either policy helps the less fortunate, much less why such non-urgent provisions are appropriate to include in a disaster relief bill.

On the sillier end of the coronavirus race obsession, CNN ran a story about black Americans who won’t wear masks because they fear being mistaken for criminals and killed by the police. A tweet from one black educator—“I want to stay alive, but I also want to stay alive”—received 124,000 likes.

Though the CNN article suggested that the fear was valid, it did not give even one example of a black person actually being harassed in this way, much less killed. Last year, 41 unarmed Americans were shot and killed by the police—nine of them black. Meanwhile, the coronavirus has been killing over 1,000 Americans per day. There is simply no comparison. Given how high the stakes are, the media should be disabusing people of life-threatening racial paranoia, not catering to it.

There are many lessons to take away from this pandemic, but the importance of race is not one of them. Italy, Spain, and France—all heavily white countries—have been among those hardest hit by the pandemic. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who possesses as much race and class privilege as anyone on Earth, has been hospitalized as a result of the virus. If there is a lesson to take away from COVID-19, it’s not that your racial identity matters, it is that ultimately all of humanity shares a common fate.

Source: Do COVID-19 Racial Disparities Matter?

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