In the past couple of weeks, racial tension and unrest has raged through United States. As a outsider, I hope to understand better of the problem. So here is me, sharing about some of the things that I have learned in the past couple of week.
To be be able to solve a problem, first step is to understand the problem. So what is racism? According to Wikipedia: Racism is the belief that groups of humans possess different behavioral traits corresponding to physical appearance and can be divided based on the superiority of one race over another. But linking physical appearance and behavioral traits are not always wrong. For example, penguins have small wings in comparison to their body, and therefore can not fly. In this case, to link penguins’ inability to fly with their apparent small wings is justified. I think when we are talking about Racism in the U.S. we are often talking about unjustified belief that links physical appearance and behavioral traits, such as skin color and aggression. But is this belief justified?
Unfortunately, some data, such as income and crime committed seem to suggest that is the case. African Americans constitute some of the lowest income groups in U.S. And even though African Americans forms 13% of the population, about 50% convicted murder are committed by African Americans. Readers who have read my previous blogs would notice that using those data to draw conclusions that skin color cause aggression or low economical position is pseudoscientific reasoning that mistakes correlation with causation. We can argue that African American’s sociological and economical is because of centuries oppression and disenfranchisement. But the income and crime data listed above can be explained both racial superiority theory and social injustice theory. So to show that it is wrong to link skin color to sociological and economical position, we simply need better data.
Before I continue, I recommend to read this post by Vox, as I will use the data presented in this post for the coming part. First, I will try to explain (based on my understanding) what racial superiority theory is. As much as we disagree with the theory, I think it is still crucial to understand this theory as charitable as possible. To show its falsity, we should show the inconsistency within this theory based on evidence. After all, if we do not base our beliefs on reasoning and evidence, then all beliefs are philosophically equal and every belief is right, and therefore no belief is.
So let us trying to understand racial superiority theory is. Racial superiority theory, at least the reincarnation after Darwin’s evolutionary theory are based on the following couple of hypothesis: First, there are two potential factors in deciding every person’s sociological, economical position and behavior trait: nature vs nurture. Nature is what we are born with, even though it is not restricted to, but we mostly associate nature with genetics. Nurture on the other hand is everything else, the family and the society we born into, our experience, etc. This lead to 2nd hypothesis: In United States (I say United States here, because we are discussing the situation in the states), a person’s sociological and economical position is decided mostly by their genetics or nature, while outside force plays very little effect.
The 2nd hypothesis is what most people found issue with. But it is the natural derivation to another belief: that U.S. is the land of equal opportunity. In a land of equal opportunity, success is only determined by one’s talent not any force that is external to that person. Of course, if one’s success is solely determined by their nature, we can certainly conclude that certain race is more successful in the society because they are the superior race. But is one’s success mostly determined by their genetics?
Now to the data presented in this post. This study measures social mobility across generations, that is the income level shifts across generations controlled by race and gender. It brilliantly separated genetics from societal factor, which I will attempt to demonstrate here.
In the study, the following two charts were presented. It compares the income of black and white males and females when controlled on parent household income. The chart top shows that when coming from the same household income rank, black males earns significantly lower than white males. While the bottom shows that such gap was not present between that black females and white females, even though both earns less than white males from the same parent household income rank.
If we think the success (or income) in society is majorly decided by genetics, then we can use the income as the measurement of (lack of better term) the genetic superiority (bear with me here). If it is true, regardless of physical appearance, if two person are about the same income level, they are going to have similar natural talent as well. Given that genetics pass down by generation, in a society with equal opportunity, we would expect to see that if the parents that are at similar income level (regardless of physical appearance), their children should also ends up in similar income level. But that is not the case shown by the data. For the parents at the same income level, the children who are Black males are about 10% lower in the income rank than the White males. But the gap between females are a lot smaller. It is most likely due to the fact that females as a group also suffered discrimination as their incomes are both lower than the income of white males, but I am making conjectures here.
What makes racism difficult to tackle is that race is not a cause of aggression but unfortunately has become a good predictor of crime in current society. Unlike a physical system where measurement and experimental setup can be separated. When come to human behaviors, due to self fulfilling prophecy, by believing and imagine correlations that was untrue, we can actually make it true over time, by treating people as if those correlation were true. Our subjective opinion can become objective facts when dealing with social phenomenons when enough people believe it for long enough a period of time. We should pay attention to how we imagine the world to be, because we do have the power to shape it through our imagination for better and for worse. We should be careful what what we imagine the world into, whether is is story we tell about race, or the story we tell about gender.
I think as a species, we have so much power and influence, but also we can easily fall into flawed reasoning. We would like to think that pseudoscience of Freudian psychoanalysis and social Darwinism are the ideas of the past. But pseudoscientific thinking is still insidiously influencing our values and choices. It is still common in our everyday reasoning to use correlation as evidence for causation, and interpret data to fit our hypotheses. If we believe that the world is profoundly unjust and want to make it for the better, I think a good start is our own beliefs. To think what ideals and values that we hold at the moment can be hurtful to others, and how can we use scientific method to test our values? If reader are interested to learn more about the difference between science and pseudoscience, logic and fallacy, I recommend Karl Popper’s Conjectures and Refutation as a start. Reader can also refer to my earlier posts for more information.
To end this post, I will leave the reader with the quote from Victor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning:
“Freedom, however, is not the last word. Freedom is only part of the story and half of the truth. Freedom is but the negative aspect of the whole phenomenon whose positive aspect is responsibleness. In fact, freedom is in danger of degenerating into mere arbitrariness unless it is lived in terms of responsibleness. That is why I recommend that the Statue of Liberty on the East Coast be supplemented by a Statue of Responsibility on the West Coast.” – Victor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning
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