In a recent hagiography about prominent "race realist" psychologist J. Philippe Rushton (who died in 2012), Linda Gottfredson of the University of Delaware claims that "Rushton is a scholar and gentleman
but it appears that his critics often act like neither" (Gottfredson 2013). She supports this claim by discussing what happened when Rushton's work was criticized in an article published in a respected journal, arguing that the resulting controversy illustrates how "mob science works to ‘‘discredit’’ valid
research and enforce collective ignorance about entire bodies of evidence." Here, I argue that Gottfredson is full of shit, and that, in fact, the issue she is discussing demonstrates academia working as intended: critics noting methodological flaws in an academic's research that lead to inaccurate conclusions.
When I first read the abstract of this article, I was a little surprised, because Gottfredson seemed to be defending someone whose research had been discredited on methodological grounds, rather than ad hominem attacks of being "racist" (for a few of many examples, see Weizmann et al. 1990, 1991; Lynn 1989a, 1989b; Silverman, 1990; Zuckerman 1988, 1990; Cain & Vanderwolf 1990, Anderson 1991). So I kept reading a full copy of the paper, and this is my response to it.
The criticism in question is Lieberman (2001), an article which states the following early on: "[Samuel George] Morton collected
human skulls, measured their cranial vaults, and
concluded that “Caucasoids” had the largest brains and
“Negroids” the smallest, with “Mongoloids” in between
(Morton 1849). A century and a half later this hierarchy
would be altered by J. Philippe Rushton and colleagues,
placing the “Mongoloids” in the alpha position, “Caucasoids”
next, and “Negroids” last. Rushton went on to
correlate brain size with IQ scores, claim a Mongoloid
1 Caucasoid 1 Negroid correlation, and use variation in
IQ scores to “explain” everything from civilization to
barbarism (1997a). Although this view has been invalidated
by a century of anthropological research and theorizing
stimulated by Franz Boas (Gossett 1965, Cravens
1978), Rushton (1996) dismisses this work as no more
than political correctness."
The point being made here is that race science does not conform to scientific objectivity or to the actual conclusions that are best supported by evidence, but instead to a political/social agenda of justifying oppressing a given group of people. Lieberman illustrates this in a later section of his paper, entitled "Changing Hierarchical Worldviews". He subsequently notes that in the 1970s, researchers like Richard Lynn started publishing studies arguing that, contrary to mainstream thinking at the time, Japanese people were smarter than Caucasians, and that "The publication of these
theories of East Asian superiority was preceded by Japan's becoming a “world-class economic power”" (p. 72).
Here is how Gottfredson summarized what you just read (as well as a bunch of other parts of Lieberman's paper I did not discuss above):
"Lieberman opens with a question that itself damns Rushton. A
century of anthropological work has invalidated Rushton’s claims,
so how can he claim to find in it a ‘‘racial hierarchy’’ for intelligence
and brain size? The question is thus not whether Rushton is wrong,
but why and how he persists in being so wrong. The article’s first
section (‘‘Changing Hierarchical Worldviews’’) justifies the premise,
and the second (‘‘Abusing Anthropological Research’’) explains
the ‘‘paradox’’ of how Rushton and other ‘‘scientific
racists’’ could claim to be doing science when they draw evidence
from the very fields that disavow racism and the concept of race (p.
74). To justify his premise, Lieberman describes 19th century research
on cranial size and its social context which, he says, was
the need by Caucasians to justify their domination and exploitation
of other races. He discredits that research and Rushton’s own primarily
by appealing to authority in 20th century anthropology:
Franz Boas’s theorizing (no link between culture and genes), official statements on race from the UN and the American Anthropological
Association (no biological races, no meaningful innate
racial differences), Gould’s critiques of research on intelligence,
brain size, and heritability (none is valid), and anthropology’s ‘‘disavowal’’
of ‘‘hierarchical’’ and ‘‘racist’’ thinking. Lieberman also
draws from stock concerns, long-since resolved, about possible
methodological flaws in twin research, brain research, behavior
genetics, and mental testing. He says nothing about the explosion
of research in the 1990s using the Y chromosome and mtDNA to
trace the evolution of human lineages as they migrated across
the globe. He says nothing about Rushton’s many other 3-way results
on ‘‘reproductive behavior, sex hormones, twinning rate,
speed of physical maturation, personality, family stability, lawabidingness,
and social organization’’ (p. 74), except to summarily
dismiss them as a faulty ‘‘blizzard of data’’ (p. 78)."
So her first main point seems to be that Lieberman is relying on logical fallacies to criticize Rushton, the first of these apparently being appeal to authority by citing the extensive work of Boas, the AAA, and Gould. Well, what Lieberman cited to support this claim on the first page of his paper were two sources: a 1965 book (Gossett 1965) and a 1978 book (Cravens 1978). So he's not just invoking Boas's name as a talisman of some sort to dismiss inconvenient arguments, but instead is citing evidence to support them. It is notable that, in contrast, Gottfredson does not cite any sources to support her claim about how the concerns Lieberman raises are "long-since resolved". I would also like to note that while Lieberman may not have addressed every trait Rushton studied, other researchers have; for instance, Weizmann et al. (1990) concluded that "The predictions that Rushton derives from the r/K model are arbitrary, and these predictions are supported by selective citation and misrepresentation of the research literature and by the use of unreliable sources. Changes in human life-history traits are so rapid that there is no need to posit genetic selection to explain intergroup variation." And with regard to Rushton's results on race differences in reproductive traits, Lynn (1989a) noted the following four problems in a paper Rushton co-authored on the subject in 1987: "First, they did not explain why natural selection would have favored different reproductive strategies for different races.
Second, their data on race differences are of questionable validity because their literature review was selective and their original analyses were based on self-reports.
Third, they provided no evidence that these race differences had significant effects on reproduction or that sexual restraint is a K characteristic.
Finally, they did not adequately rule out environmental explanations for their data."
Back to Gottfredson (p. 4): "Zeroing in on Rushton’s IQ, race, and brain size analyses,
Lieberman details his own list of 6 major ‘‘errors.’’ Briefly, Rushton
‘‘uses ‘race’ despite decades of findings that invalidate it,’’ his conclusions
about racial differences in cranial capacity are ‘‘contradicted
by evolutionary anthropology,’’ he did not account for
environmental factors that surely influence cranial capacity and
intelligence, his measurements tell us nothing because they are
confounded or the differences they reveal are trivial in size, he cannot
claim to ‘‘explain’’ a vast array of human behaviors because
some of his measures and concepts may be faulty, and his ‘‘principle
of aggregation’’ (e.g., grouping diverse populations into ‘‘races,’’
averaging results from different studies) is invalid. ‘"
She then dismisses the first two of these errors as mere appeals to authority. That being said, there is compelling evidence against the biological or genetic existence of race (Templeton, 2013; Long & Kittles, 2009). Moreover, though it may have been phrased as an appeal to authority, the assertion that Rushton's conclusions of race differences in cranial capacity is inconsistent with anthropological evidence is not an appeal to authority, nor is it any other logical fallacy. As Lieberman goes on to note, Rushton took his cranial capacity measurements from a 1984 study without mentioning that this study showed no significant relationship between race and cranial capacity, but did find that "climate variables were strongly correlated
with cranial variation" (Lieberman 2001, p. 76). Other research supports this claim, and also suggests that cranial size varies with the development status of a country, not with race (Cernovsky 1993). Gottfredson is, therefore, being disingenuous in not mentioning the sources on which Lieberman's argument is based.
The next two claims Gottfredson makes are that Lieberman's 3rd and 4th points "disallow drawing conclusions until an infinite regress of alternatives
has been considered" (p. 4). Those points are, respectively, that 3) "[Rushton] did not account for
environmental factors that surely influence cranial capacity and
intelligence" and 4) "his measurements tell us nothing because they are
confounded or the differences they reveal are trivial in size" (Gottfredson, p. 4). In fact, though, these are both valid criticisms of Rushton's work in this area. Environmental factors like climate and development status have been discussed above, but there are other confounders as well that call his findings into doubt. As Lieberman noted, the following factors had been previously identified as affecting brain size, and therefore needing to be controlled for if you want to determine whether there's a real difference between groups: "sex, body size,
age at death, early-life nutrition, early-life environment,
source of sample, occupational group, cause of death,
lapse of time after death, temperature after death, anatomical
level of severance, presence or absence of cerebral
spinal fluid, presence or absence of meninges, and
presence or absence of blood vessels" (p. 77). Also, Rushton's claims about race differences in brain size are contradicted by some of the studies he cites (Cernovsky 1995).
So what about Lieberman's last two points? To recap, they were that "[Rushton] cannot claim to ‘‘explain’’ a vast array of human behaviors because some of his measures and concepts may be faulty, and his ‘‘principle of aggregation’’ (e.g., grouping diverse populations into ‘‘races,’’ averaging results from different studies) is invalid" (Gottfredson, p. 4). Gottfredson claims that "the last two [of Lieberman's arguments] demand uniformly perfect data and measurement before concluding anything from a
body of evidence" (pp. 4-5). Again, not so: All that Lieberman pointed out was that Rushton did not consider yet another confounding factor: nutrition. This is explained in Lieberman's fifth point, which was that "Rushton does not relate environment, nutrition,
cranial size, and IQ" (p. 78). Gottfredson, weirdly, ignores this point while going after his sixth point, namely that "Rushton claims to “explain” a vast array of human
behavior" (p. 79).
What's wrong with him doing this? I'll give you a hint: it's not that his data and measurements aren't perfect. The problems include that he's glossing over differences that contradict his theory by lumping different groups together into racial categories by only using averages. Rushton's doing so also ignores the larger differences in brain size across gender than across "race", and the genders of his skulls were unknown (Cernovsky 1993). Lieberman also notes that "Rushton ranks “races” on a number of variables including
cultural achievements, personality traits, marital
stability, law-abidingness, mental health, and administrative
capacity. These variables are usually not
defined, and each represents reified aggregations of diverse
behaviors that vary in their causation" (p. 79).
Naturally, Gottfredson couldn't resist ending her paper with this gem: "...it is Gould’s work on cranial
capacity, not Rushton’s, that we now learn was fudged and falsified
(Lewis et al., 2011)—just as Rushton said it was." Lewis et al., of course, is a 2011 study of Morton's skulls which concluded that "Morton did not manipulate data to support his preconceptions, contra Gould." Of course, she omits criticism of Lewis et al. from sources like Weisberg & Paul (2016) who wrote that "We take no issue with Lewis et al.’s remeasurements, but argue that these measurements are not and cannot be evidence for their conclusion". Other researchers have argued that Lewis et al.'s defense of Morton is inadequate, and that "Gould was right to reject Morton's analysis as inappropriate and misleading, but wrong to believe that a more appropriate analysis was available" (Kaplan et al. 2015).
Addendum: Rushton's research on international variations in crime, which Gottfredson briefly mentions in her paper, is criticized by Neapolitan (1998) for not controlling for non-race factors.
Sources
The paper this post is about (Gottfredson 2013) is here: http://www1.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/reprints/2012RaceandRushton.pdf
Anderson 1991: http://philipperushton.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/race-r-k-theory-rushton-anderson-canadian-psychology-1-1991.pdf
Cain & Vanderwolf 1990: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/019188699090185T
Cernovsky 1993: http://philipperushton.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/iq-race-brain-size-rushton-cernovsky-j-of-black-psychology-1993.pdf
Cernovsky 1995: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/002193479502500602?journalCode=jbsa
Cravens 1978: The triumph of evolution:
American scientists and the heredity-environment controversy
1900–1941.
Gossett 1965: Race: The history of an idea in
America.
Kaplan et al. 2015: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1369848615000035
Lewis et al. 2011: http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.1001071
Long & Kittles 2009: http://www.bioone.org/doi/abs/10.3378/027.081.0621
Lynn 1989a: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0092656689900299
Lynn 1989b: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0092656689900317
Neapolitan 1998: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1745-9125.1998.tb01243.x/full
Silverman 1990: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/016230959090002N
Templeton 2013: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3737365/
Weisberg & Paul 2016: http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.1002444
Weizmann et al. 1990: http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/cap/31/1/1/
Weizmann et al. 1991: http://psycnet.apa.org/index.cfm?fa=buy.optionToBuy&id=1991-20580-001
Zuckerman 1988: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0191886988901365
Zuckerman 1990: http://psycnet.apa.org/psycinfo/1991-12414-001
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/00957984930193004
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.2466/pms.109.3.733-736?journalCode=pmsb
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF02088001
Sunday, July 16, 2017
Friday, July 7, 2017
Even more ridiculous, risible bullshit slips into the JCJ
The Journal of Criminal Justice has been criticized for allegedly using predatory and unethical citation practices to inflate its impact factor.(1) But it is with a recent paper published in the JCJ(2) that its credibility has clearly and definitively been flushed down the toilet. The paper deals with the issue of race and crime in America, and does so in a blatantly political manner from the very first sentence of the abstract (try to restrain your laughter as you read this if you are in a public place): "This article examines race, poverty, and criminal behavior ignoring criminological orthodoxy adding two features that spoil the politically correct mantra that black crime results from white racism." What is the first of these features? The authors then answer this question as follows: "Adding East Asians, who surpass white Americans in almost every index of prosocial behavior despite experiencing a history of prejudice and discrimination aimed at them, casts serious doubt on that contention. To be consistent with structural arguments for black poverty and crime, proponents would have to attribute Asian successes and low crime rates to pro-Asian bias on the part of whites to their own detriment."
So what we have here is a blatant attempt to legitimize the debunked "model minority" myth underlying so much of white people's resentment toward African Americans in America. Naturally, they would turn to a journal edited by Matt DeLisi, the co-author of the book "Conservative Criminology"(3), to try to give these views a large audience.
But aren't Asian Americans a "model minority"? No, for two reasons:
1) Lumping the income of all Asian Americans together masks the fact that not all Asian Americans are successful, and some groups thereof are in fact significantly poorer than are whites.(4)(5)(6) This is partly because of significantly greater variation among Asian Americans in terms of their economic experiences.(7)
2) Arguing that because Asian Americans can be successful in spite of discrimination, African Americans can too, if they only work hard, ignores the fundamental differences in the type and magnitude of discrimination experienced by the two groups over American history. (8)
Moreover, the fact that Asian Americans' mean income is higher than that of whites and blacks is of little relevance to blacks, given the way Asian Americans generally came to America. To quote the Brookings Institution: "Asian-Americans have in fact been a uniquely hyper-selective migrant group. The share of well-educated Asian immigrants is in fact higher than the American population average. This alone is likely to influence outcomes, since there is a clear connection between parental education and the education achievement of their children."(19)
Anyway, now I'll deal with more bullshit arguments in the paper that is the subject of this post.
Later on in the same paper, the authors state:
"Asian Americans have suffered widespread prejudice and discrimination in the U.S. but not only do they commit far less crime than African Americans and enjoy higher income, they also commit less crime and enjoy higher mean household income than whites. This spoils a good politically correct criminological story."
Of course, numerous studies have shown that most differences in crime between blacks and whites are accounted for by racial differences in structural factors such as family disruption, (9)(10) racial isolation and segregation, (11) exposure to violence, (15) and racial inequality. (12) Segregation is especially important, because it results in blacks being exposed to family and neighborhood factors that increase the odds of violent crime perpetration more than whites are, by creating areas of concentrated poverty. This, in turn, increases rates of unemployment and out-of-wedlock births among blacks in these areas of cities, resulting in higher rates of violence among blacks. (16) While African Americans tend to live in, on average, highly segregated neighborhoods, Asian Americans do not. (21) The stuff about out-of-wedlock births is especially important given what the authors say about blacks having so many births out of wedlock, and how this is the real source of their problems.
But what about Asians? Why do they commit crime at relatively low rates? A recent study looking at delinquency reported that the answer to this question is "a combination of protective factors, including lower levels of strain, strong bonds to school, and less exposure to delinquent peers." (18) Moreover, Southeast Asians in America used to have high rates of welfare receipt, crime, and other social problems, and to a large extent this is still true today. (20)
And a few paragraphs later, the authors try to hand-wave away the point I made by saying,
"It would be naive to suggest that the lingering effects of slavery and racism have not had at least some effect on the behavior of blacks in America, but this does not explain why they would be so affected by their history of victimization when Asians seem not to be affected at all."
The authors also sprinkle bits of superficially plausible and inflammatory bullshit throughout their paper, arguing that perhaps the whole "institutional racism" thing is just made up by academics whose careers depend on the putative existence of widespread racism in modern America, even if it doesn't really exist. Ostensibly, this is because "those with a vested interest in keeping racism alive talk about such things as “symbolic racism” and “laissez-faire racism,” which are supposedly expressed subconsciously." The evidence that discrimination against African Americans, as well as the effects of past discrimination, is still alive and well has been summarized elsewhere, (12) (17) as has the evidence for the existence of subconscious racism. (22) It is hard to believe that absurd conspiratorial bullshit like this, on which conservative BS arguments about climate scientists wanting to profit off the climate change "gravy train" are based, got published in an ostensibly reputable peer-reviewed journal.
Contrary to the authors' statements, black culture does not promote violence; instead, their rates of violence are higher due to family disruption and other factors mentioned above. (13) (14)
In short, the authors attack a weird sort of straw man when they argue that "politically correct" criminology attributes racial differences in crime to differences in poverty. This has always been an oversimplification, when in fact, it is concentrated disadvantage that is at work--which has never been (and certainly is not now) the case for Asian Americans to nearly the extent to which it is for African Americans.
References:
1) http://retractionwatch.com/2015/09/22/self-citation-explains-crime-journals-boost-in-impact-factor-analysis/
2) http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0047235217300880
3) https://www.amazon.com/Conservative-Criminology-Restore-Balance-Sciences/dp/0323357016
4) http://aapidata.com/stats/national/national-poverty-aa-aj/
5) http://www.urban.org/urban-wire/model-minority-myth-hides-economic-realities-many-asian-americans
6) http://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2017/04/19/524571669/model-minority-myth-again-used-as-a-racial-wedge-between-asians-and-blacks "Racism that Asian-Americans have experienced is not what black people have experienced," Kim said. "Sullivan is right that Asians have faced various forms of discrimination, but never the systematic dehumanization that black people have faced during slavery and continue to face today."
7) https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/race/reports/2016/12/20/295359/wealth-inequality-among-asian-americans-greater-than-among-whites/
8) http://www.understandingprejudice.org/readroom/articles/affirm.htm
9) https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=tV6MAQAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PA177
10) https://academic.oup.com/sf/article-abstract/75/2/619/2233487
11) http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1088767997001003004
12) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20689680
13) http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1540-4560.t01-1-00005/full
14) https://www.jstor.org/stable/2779588
15) http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0022427898035002002
16) http://content.healthaffairs.org/content/24/2/325.full
17) http://thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(17)30569-X/fulltext
18) http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/15377938.2013.837854?src=recsys&journalCode=wecj20
19) https://www.brookings.edu/research/asian-american-success-and-the-pitfalls-of-generalization/
20) https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=N2pyIc8VoWcC&oi=fnd&pg=PA224
21) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4193596/ "... levels of segregation are highest for African Americans and lowest for Asians with Hispanics in-between. "
22) http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/019027250807100103
More stuff you can read if you want about structural factors, race, and crime:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1745-9125.2001.tb00934.x/full
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1745-9125.1999.tb00491.x/full
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1745-9125.1999.tb00493.x/full
A great summary of the issue of Asian Americans, crime, and the model minority myth:
http://tamaranopper.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Nopper.Asian-Americans-Deviance-Crime-and-the-Model-Minority-Myth.pdf
Addendum #1: Another blog post also debunking the same paper (this post is by University of Washington professor Callie Burt: https://calliehburt.wordpress.com/2017/08/03/this-again-a-response-to-walsh-yu-2017/)
Addendum #2: I was recently pleased to learn that Rebecca Stone, assistant professor of sociology at Suffolk College (who I had never heard of until just now), has also taken note of the giant pile of BS this paper is. She has posted a Twitter thread (that was posted last summer when this paper was first published, but which I didn't notice until just now) expressing astonishment at the absurd ad hominems and other logical fallacies in this pathetic excuse for a paper. You can read her tweets here.
So what we have here is a blatant attempt to legitimize the debunked "model minority" myth underlying so much of white people's resentment toward African Americans in America. Naturally, they would turn to a journal edited by Matt DeLisi, the co-author of the book "Conservative Criminology"(3), to try to give these views a large audience.
But aren't Asian Americans a "model minority"? No, for two reasons:
1) Lumping the income of all Asian Americans together masks the fact that not all Asian Americans are successful, and some groups thereof are in fact significantly poorer than are whites.(4)(5)(6) This is partly because of significantly greater variation among Asian Americans in terms of their economic experiences.(7)
2) Arguing that because Asian Americans can be successful in spite of discrimination, African Americans can too, if they only work hard, ignores the fundamental differences in the type and magnitude of discrimination experienced by the two groups over American history. (8)
Moreover, the fact that Asian Americans' mean income is higher than that of whites and blacks is of little relevance to blacks, given the way Asian Americans generally came to America. To quote the Brookings Institution: "Asian-Americans have in fact been a uniquely hyper-selective migrant group. The share of well-educated Asian immigrants is in fact higher than the American population average. This alone is likely to influence outcomes, since there is a clear connection between parental education and the education achievement of their children."(19)
Anyway, now I'll deal with more bullshit arguments in the paper that is the subject of this post.
Later on in the same paper, the authors state:
"Asian Americans have suffered widespread prejudice and discrimination in the U.S. but not only do they commit far less crime than African Americans and enjoy higher income, they also commit less crime and enjoy higher mean household income than whites. This spoils a good politically correct criminological story."
Of course, numerous studies have shown that most differences in crime between blacks and whites are accounted for by racial differences in structural factors such as family disruption, (9)(10) racial isolation and segregation, (11) exposure to violence, (15) and racial inequality. (12) Segregation is especially important, because it results in blacks being exposed to family and neighborhood factors that increase the odds of violent crime perpetration more than whites are, by creating areas of concentrated poverty. This, in turn, increases rates of unemployment and out-of-wedlock births among blacks in these areas of cities, resulting in higher rates of violence among blacks. (16) While African Americans tend to live in, on average, highly segregated neighborhoods, Asian Americans do not. (21) The stuff about out-of-wedlock births is especially important given what the authors say about blacks having so many births out of wedlock, and how this is the real source of their problems.
But what about Asians? Why do they commit crime at relatively low rates? A recent study looking at delinquency reported that the answer to this question is "a combination of protective factors, including lower levels of strain, strong bonds to school, and less exposure to delinquent peers." (18) Moreover, Southeast Asians in America used to have high rates of welfare receipt, crime, and other social problems, and to a large extent this is still true today. (20)
And a few paragraphs later, the authors try to hand-wave away the point I made by saying,
"It would be naive to suggest that the lingering effects of slavery and racism have not had at least some effect on the behavior of blacks in America, but this does not explain why they would be so affected by their history of victimization when Asians seem not to be affected at all."
The authors also sprinkle bits of superficially plausible and inflammatory bullshit throughout their paper, arguing that perhaps the whole "institutional racism" thing is just made up by academics whose careers depend on the putative existence of widespread racism in modern America, even if it doesn't really exist. Ostensibly, this is because "those with a vested interest in keeping racism alive talk about such things as “symbolic racism” and “laissez-faire racism,” which are supposedly expressed subconsciously." The evidence that discrimination against African Americans, as well as the effects of past discrimination, is still alive and well has been summarized elsewhere, (12) (17) as has the evidence for the existence of subconscious racism. (22) It is hard to believe that absurd conspiratorial bullshit like this, on which conservative BS arguments about climate scientists wanting to profit off the climate change "gravy train" are based, got published in an ostensibly reputable peer-reviewed journal.
Contrary to the authors' statements, black culture does not promote violence; instead, their rates of violence are higher due to family disruption and other factors mentioned above. (13) (14)
In short, the authors attack a weird sort of straw man when they argue that "politically correct" criminology attributes racial differences in crime to differences in poverty. This has always been an oversimplification, when in fact, it is concentrated disadvantage that is at work--which has never been (and certainly is not now) the case for Asian Americans to nearly the extent to which it is for African Americans.
References:
1) http://retractionwatch.com/2015/09/22/self-citation-explains-crime-journals-boost-in-impact-factor-analysis/
2) http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0047235217300880
3) https://www.amazon.com/Conservative-Criminology-Restore-Balance-Sciences/dp/0323357016
4) http://aapidata.com/stats/national/national-poverty-aa-aj/
5) http://www.urban.org/urban-wire/model-minority-myth-hides-economic-realities-many-asian-americans
6) http://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2017/04/19/524571669/model-minority-myth-again-used-as-a-racial-wedge-between-asians-and-blacks "Racism that Asian-Americans have experienced is not what black people have experienced," Kim said. "Sullivan is right that Asians have faced various forms of discrimination, but never the systematic dehumanization that black people have faced during slavery and continue to face today."
7) https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/race/reports/2016/12/20/295359/wealth-inequality-among-asian-americans-greater-than-among-whites/
8) http://www.understandingprejudice.org/readroom/articles/affirm.htm
9) https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=tV6MAQAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PA177
10) https://academic.oup.com/sf/article-abstract/75/2/619/2233487
11) http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1088767997001003004
12) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20689680
13) http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1540-4560.t01-1-00005/full
14) https://www.jstor.org/stable/2779588
15) http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0022427898035002002
16) http://content.healthaffairs.org/content/24/2/325.full
17) http://thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(17)30569-X/fulltext
18) http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/15377938.2013.837854?src=recsys&journalCode=wecj20
19) https://www.brookings.edu/research/asian-american-success-and-the-pitfalls-of-generalization/
20) https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=N2pyIc8VoWcC&oi=fnd&pg=PA224
21) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4193596/ "... levels of segregation are highest for African Americans and lowest for Asians with Hispanics in-between. "
22) http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/019027250807100103
More stuff you can read if you want about structural factors, race, and crime:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1745-9125.2001.tb00934.x/full
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1745-9125.1999.tb00491.x/full
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1745-9125.1999.tb00493.x/full
A great summary of the issue of Asian Americans, crime, and the model minority myth:
http://tamaranopper.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Nopper.Asian-Americans-Deviance-Crime-and-the-Model-Minority-Myth.pdf
Addendum #1: Another blog post also debunking the same paper (this post is by University of Washington professor Callie Burt: https://calliehburt.wordpress.com/2017/08/03/this-again-a-response-to-walsh-yu-2017/)
Addendum #2: I was recently pleased to learn that Rebecca Stone, assistant professor of sociology at Suffolk College (who I had never heard of until just now), has also taken note of the giant pile of BS this paper is. She has posted a Twitter thread (that was posted last summer when this paper was first published, but which I didn't notice until just now) expressing astonishment at the absurd ad hominems and other logical fallacies in this pathetic excuse for a paper. You can read her tweets here.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)