THE PSYCHOLOGIST : In defence of racial discrimination?

In defence of racial discrimination?

By Roy Swan, the head of mission investments at the Ford Foundation. He defends "affirmative action" and criticizes opponents of it. He defends his wishes by cataloguing a long list of ways in which blacks are disadvantaged, principally economicaly.

His arguments are a triumph of seeing only what you want to see. He thinks black disadvantage is solely the product of white discrimination against blacks. He ignores the fact that all other minorities in America -- Jews, Chinese, Japanese, Indians -- in fact do better on average than mainstream whites economically. And they suffer from REAL disadvantages -- poor English language skills, religious differences etc.

So why do blacks not follow that pattern? Why are they a different minority? It has to be something in blacks (e.g. high impulsiveness, low IQ, psychopathy) that makes the difference, not what they experience at the hands of white society. Swan is a pathetic appartchik to be so defiant of reality. Only the deliberately blind would agree with him

There is actually something wrong with his head. He criticizes "Race-based discrimination" at the same time as arguing in favour of it

Recently, the activist whose efforts overturned affirmative action [racial preferences at Harvard] eliminating yet another vehicle for marginalized populations’ educational and economic success, filed a lawsuit against a small, Black-owned American venture capital firm over its efforts to support Black women entrepreneurs. Never mind that they receive just 0.06% of all venture capital–less than 1/1000th of their percentage of the American population—or that white men under 35 have 224 times the wealth of Black women under 35.

To this litigant and his ilk, any attempt to acknowledge the roots of this gross inequity, much less adopt a targeted approach to remedy it, is a threat. They so aggressively defend the unequal status quo because they cannot bear the alternative: facing the abominable discrimination and oppression under de facto affirmative action for white people that has created the conditions for Black women’s inability to attract venture capital. Instead, they attack, deflect, deny, and hide historical truth and consequences.

This willful ignorance is geopolitically self-destructive and irresponsible, as today’s world order is determined by the productive and innovative power of a nation’s human capital, which drives national wealth. Keeping players off the field for ideological and racist reasons will only hold America back, while other countries steamroll ahead by tapping the full potential of all the talent at their disposal.

Our allies across the Atlantic have taken an approach worthy of emulation. In acknowledgment of its historical investment in the transatlantic chattel slave trade, the Church of England recently announced a £100 million program of impact investing, grant-making, and research with the target of alleviating the ongoing consequences of its past actions. As a member of the fund’s Oversight Group, I am heartened by the symbolic financial investment but even more moved by the Church Commissioners’ commitment to truth and reconciliation. England has taken a step in the right direction, but America’s inaction and retrenchment is a catapult backward–and a costly one.

Race-based discrimination is estimated to have set America back over $50 trillion since 1990 alone. Other estimates forecast that eliminating race-based discrimination would generate 6 million jobs and $5 trillion in American economic power in just five years.

If Americans care about global economic power, moral authority, and reputation, we must explore the nation’s ugly history of targeted Black oppression, calculate the wealth transferred through exploitation and extraction, and invest in a plan for a better future in the spirit of patriotic capitalism.

It’s time to stop using bad faith claims of reverse discrimination as a polarizing wedge and give everyone opportunities and resources to unleash their potential for the sake of the nation. And everyone has a role to play. In addition to more equitable laws and policies, we need investors to become patriotic capitalists and put market rate-seeking impact investments to work to erase the compounding economic and social damage inflicted on Black people and others oppressed because of their race.

Contrary to the zero-sum claims of history-denying capital hoarders, a more just country is a more prosperous country, too. And we all win when we all win.

https://fortune.com/2024/01/15/bad-faith-reverse-discrimination-claims-hurt-americas-economic-future-and-global-standing-investing-dei-politics/

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Background

The essence of conservatism is caution. The essence of Leftism is anger

This blog is written solely by John Ray, who has a Ph.D. degree in psychology and 200+ papers published in the academic journals of the social sciences. It does occasionally comment on issues in psychology but is mainly aimed at giving a conservative psychologist's view on a broad range of topics. There are very few conservative psychologists.

The blog originated in Australia and many (but not most) posts discuss Australian matters. Australians have an unusually good awareness of events outside their own country. Australian newspapers feature news from Britain and the USA not as an afterthought but as a major part of their coverage. So Australians do tend to have a truly Western heart, which is the reason behind the old name for this blog. So events in Australia, Britain and the USA all feature frequently here, plus occasional coverage of other places, particularly Israel.

A primer in American politics for non-Americans:

SCOTUS is the Supreme Court of the United States, the highest court in the land

The "GOP" stands for "Grand Old Party" and refers to the Republican party. The GOP is at present center/Right, while the Democrats have been undergoing a steady drift Leftwards and now have policies similar to mainstream European Leftist parties.

The ideological identity of both parties has however been very fluid -- almost reversing itself over time. In the mid 19th century, the GOP was the party of big government and concern for minorities while the Democrats advertised themselves as "The party of the white man" -- an orientation that lasted into the mid 20th century in the South. The Democrats are still obsessed with race but have now flipped into support for discrimination AGAINST whites.

Was Pope Urban VIII the first Warmist? Below we see him refusing to look through Galileo's telescope. People tend to refuse to consider evidence— if what they might discover contradicts what they believe.

Global warming

Calibrated in whole degrees. Larger graph here

Climate scientist Lennart Bengtsson said. “The warming we have had the last 100 years is so small that if we didn’t have meteorologists and climatologists to measure it we wouldn’t have noticed it at all.”

The term "Fascism" is mostly used by the Left as a brainless term of abuse. But when they do make a serious attempt to define it, they produce very complex and elaborate definitions -- e.g. here and here. In fact, Fascism is simply extreme socialism plus nationalism. But great gyrations are needed to avoid mentioning the first part of that recipe, of course.

Two examples of Leftist racism below (much more here and here):

Beatrice Webb, a founder of the London School of Economics and the Fabian Society, and married to a Labour MP, mused in 1922 on whether when English children were "dying from lack of milk", one should extend "the charitable impulse" to Russian and Chinese children who, if saved this year, might anyway die next. Besides, she continued, there was "the larger question of whether those races are desirable inhabitants" and "obviously" one wouldn't "spend one's available income" on "a Central African negro".

Hugh Dalton, offered the Colonial Office during Attlee's 1945-51 Labour government, turned it down because "I had a horrid vision of pullulating, poverty stricken, diseased nigger communities, for whom one can do nothing in the short run and who, the more one tries to help them, are querulous and ungrateful."

Defensible and indefensible usages of the term "racism"

The book, The authoritarian personality, authored by T.W. Adorno et al. in 1950, has been massively popular among psychologists. It claims that a set of ideas that were popular in the "Progressive"-dominated America of the prewar era were "authoritarian". Leftist regimes always are authoritarian so that claim was not a big problem. What was quite amazing however is that Adorno et al. identified such ideas as "conservative". They were in fact simply popular ideas of the day but ones that had been most heavily promoted by the Left right up until the then-recent WWII. See here for details of prewar "Progressive" thinking.

R.I.P. Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet deposed a law-defying Marxist President at the express and desperate invitation of the Chilean parliament. He pioneered the free-market reforms which Reagan and Thatcher later unleashed to world-changing effect. That he used far-Leftist methods to suppress far-Leftist violence is reasonable if not ideal. The Leftist view that they should have a monopoly of violence and that others should follow the law is a total absurdity which shows only that their hate overcomes their reason

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a war criminal. Both British and American codebreakers had cracked the Japanese naval code so FDR knew what was coming at Pearl Harbor. But for his own political reasons he warned no-one there. So responsibility for the civilian and military deaths at Pearl Harbor lies with FDR as well as with the Japanese. The huge firepower available at Pearl Harbor, both aboard ship and on land, could have largely neutered the attack. Can you imagine 8 battleships and various lesser craft firing all their AA batteries as the Japanese came in? The Japanese naval airforce would have been annihilated and the war would have been over before it began.

FDR prolonged the Depression. He certainly didn't cure it.

WWII did NOT end the Great Depression. It just concealed it. It in fact made living standards worse

Joe McCarthy was eventually proved right after the fall of the Soviet Union. To accuse anyone of McCarthyism is to accuse them of accuracy!

The KKK was intimately associated with the Democratic party. They ATTACKED Republicans!

People who mention differences in black vs. white IQ are these days almost universally howled down and subjected to the most extreme abuse. I am a psychometrician, however, so I feel obliged to defend the scientific truth of the matter:

The average African adult has about the same IQ as an average white 11-year-old and African Americans (who are partly white in ancestry) average out at a mental age of 14. The American Psychological Association is generally Left-leaning but it is the world's most prestigious body of academic psychologists. And even they have had to concede that sort of gap (one SD) in black vs. white average IQ. 11-year olds can do a lot of things but they also have their limits and there are times when such limits need to be allowed for.

America's uncivil war was caused by trade protectionism. The slavery issue was just camouflage, as Abraham Lincoln himself admitted. See also here

Did William Zantzinger kill poor Hattie Carroll?

Did Bismarck predict where WWI would start or was it just a "free" translation by Churchill?

Leftist psychologists have an amusingly simplistic conception of military organizations and military men. They seem to base it on occasions they have seen troops marching together on parade rather than any real knowledge of military men and the military life. They think that military men are "rigid" -- automatons who are unable to adjust to new challenges or think for themselves. What is incomprehensible to them is that being kadaver gehorsam (to use the extreme Prussian term for following orders) actually requires great flexibility -- enough flexibility to put your own ideas and wishes aside and do something very difficult. Ask any soldier if all commands are easy to obey.

A good article on Leftist hate

The real history of social Darwinism

Some personal memoirs

Memoir highlights

THE PSYCHOLOGIST

In defence of racial discrimination?

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