Stakes Be High, pt. 7

Now that Minister Louis Farrakhan has popped back up in the news, injecting himself into America’s electoral conversation, I am moved to ask a question of my man DeAngelo Starnes.

I’ve heard lots of wild stuff about the Nation of Islam over the years. An old head from Detroit told me that when Elijah Muhammad was running things, if a Fruit of Islam didn’t sell all the Muhammad Speaks newspapers he was assigned to sell, the other FOIs would beat his ass.

In a documentary film about Malcolm, Captain Joseph X – who’d led the Fruit of Islam for the Harlem mosque – recalled that Malcolm’s “complexion” was one reason Elijah Muhammad groomed him for leadership. (Could Farrakhan similarly have been groomed for NOI leadership because he was light-skinned? Because of the white blood in him?)

Journalist Sonsyrea Tate, in her memoir “Little X,” wrote about the indoctrination she received in the Nation’s school for girls. (TEACHER: “Who is the colored man?” CHILD: “The colored man is the Caucasian, white man, or Yacub’s grafted devil, the skunk of the planet Earth!”)

Prof. Vibert White, a member of the Nation of Islam until 1995, wrote a behind-the-scenes book – “Inside the Nation of Islam” – describing the Nation under Farrakhan as “an empire [built] on hatred, anti-Semitism, racism, sexism and homophobia.”

I could go on. But I’ll ask it:

QUESTION #7: What has Louis Farrakhan actually accomplished for the benefit of black people? Isn’t he basically the leader of a mind-control cult, pushing rhetoric that’s 50 years out of date? Isn’t it time for the rest of us to quit taking him seriously?

Stakes Be High, pt. 6

Well, DeAngelo... last time we locked horns, Hillary Clinton was ahead in the delegate count. She was leading Barack Obama 42 percent to 32 percent in national polls. She was the presumptive presidential nominee of the Democratic Party.

What a difference three weeks makes.

Tonight, Obama split the white vote in Virginia nearly 50-50 with Hillary. He has beaten her in contests from Maine to Washington state. Clearly Obama is the choice of a new generation. (Mmm... Pepsi.)

A black man is the Democratic front-runner for president. He is polling ahead of Republican John McCain nationwide. And dude just won a daggone Grammy!

Now, set all that aside. Already a black man holds one of the most powerful positions in American government. I speak of Congressman Charles Rangel, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee.

Given all that, I have a question for you. (As always, readers are invited to weigh in as well.)

QUESTION #6: Given the rise of Barack Obama in our national politics, isn’t it time – finally – to abandon the tired-ass 1960s black-nationalist rhetoric that says the United States of America is an irredeemable racist country, and that the white man will never loosen his grip on power, and that a Negro can’t catch an even break?

America was worth believing in all along, isn’t that right?

Stakes Be High, pt. 5

My man DeAngelo Starnes points out that MLK Day is the perfect time to resume our Stakes Be High dialogues. I couldn’t agree more.

We both intend to keep these debates going until one or the other of us throws in the towel. As always, readers are invited to goad us in the comments section.

DeAngelo says: “I had an experience that was a ‘Crash’ moment. Got rear-ended by this Hispanic cat who did a hit-and-run. As liberal and/or progressive as I’ve tried to be on immigration, I found myself confronted with some real internal prejudices. I mean raw bigotry. So the next question is...”

QUESTION #5: Isn’t there a dark place within all of us that harbors deep-rooted bigotry? If so, isn’t that emblematic of a white supremacy system in that non-white people have taken on similar characteristics of white racists?

Stakes Be High, pt. 4

It’s my turn to pose another question to DeAngelo Starnes. The subject: Reparations for slavery.

In each of the last seven terms of Congress, Rep. John Conyers has introduced a bill – H.R. 40 – to get Congress to study the reparations question. These bills always die in committee. (Thank goodness.)

QUESTION #4: Isn’t it psychologically and culturally damaging for black people to walk around believing that the American society owes them money?

Stakes Be High, pt. 3

Continuing my five-part political discourse with DeAngelo Starnes (pt. 1 is here, pt. 2 is here), Mr. Starnes poses the next question.

It deals with the subject of economics.

As always, readers are encouraged to follow the discussion in the comments section and to weigh in if you are so moved.

QUESTION #3: I remember reading the following quote from Neely Fuller: “In a socio-material system dominated by white supremacists, white people are the greatest producers of money. In a socio-material world dominated by white supremacists, all non-white people are in a weak ‘economic’ condition. None of them can afford to borrow from, or lend to, the other.”

The conclusion that seems to flow from this premise is that worldwide wealth is controlled by white persons, regardless of whether they are racists (it is recognized that not all white persons are racist/white supremacist under a system of white supremacy). Does Mr. Fuller’s premise suggest evidence of a white supremacist system, regardless of whether you agree with it?

Second, do you believe that worldwide wealth is controlled by white persons?

Pragmatic political question of the day...

... addressed to Nulan, Fisher, Submariner, DeAngelo, or anyone else who’s not afraid of uncomfortable questions:

Looks like white folks are getting fed up with the black-on-white mob assaults. What is the proper “black partisan” response?

Duelin’ with Mr. Nulan

Well, it was quite a weekend over here in the House of Love, huh? My thanks to all who chose to get their legs wet in that conversation about race and IQ.

I have one more point to make before recommencing the “Stakes Be High” dialogues with DeAngelo Starnes.

First, though, this all transpired because a blogger named Craig Nulan charged (in a comment thread here) that my notions on the heritability of intelligence are “pseudo-scientific and anti-Black,” and that I cling to them “despite mountains of indisputable evidence to the contrary.”

Nulan literally counted the hours until I posted a fuller articulation of my views. Then he responded on his own blog.

I will leave it to any interested reader to decide which of us spoke plainly and which one argued poorly... which one is ideology-driven and deliberately oblique.

Now, to my additional point. It’s a simple one and should be of interest to those who argue that “intelligence” is hopelessly indefinable (while I think that high intelligence is a quality all of us recognize when we encounter it).

Craig Nulan informed me that he is affiliated with Kansas City’s W.E.B. DuBois Learning Center – a “tutoring program for elementary and secondary students in the areas of reading, mathematics, science, and computer science.” It is a volunteer program that serves about 400 students a year, mostly public-school kids.

On the Learning Center’s website, co-founder Leon Dixon, Jr., describes one of the center’s success stories... a young woman named Lisa:

“Lisa became a Learning Center student while in elementary school and demonstrated superior ability. She was placed in the enrichment program wherein she continued to excel. As a result, The Kansas City, Missouri School District allowed her to take freshman algebra during her seventh grade year. Lisa’s academic performance enabled her to receive a scholarship to Praire View A&M University where she graduated in mechanical engineering.”

Now, what did Mr. Dixon mean when he said Lisa had “demonstrated superior ability”? Did he mean that she worked harder than the other kids?

I think we all know what he meant: Lisa was exceptionally bright. And this was obvious way back in elementary school. And it’s probably no surprise to anyone that Lisa now holds an engineering degree.

If Nulan tutors kids in computer science, he must know that not every kid is destined to attend MIT. Those who might be... well, I bet Nulan can tell.

In my sixth-grade public-school class, I was considered one of the three “smart boys.” Another was Sidney Lowe. Our teacher – the only male teacher I had in elementary school – possessed a sense of humor. He nicknamed the three of us after classroom reference books. One of us was “Webster,” one of us was “Thorndike,” and I forget the third one. (I also forget who was which.)

Sidney Lowe, even in sixth grade, excelled at basketball. So it’s no surprise that he eventually played in the NBA. But due to his intelligence – on display at that early age – it’s also no surprise that he now makes his living as an NCAA Division I head coach.

We shouldn’t ignore our simple, real-world understanding of what “intelligence” is – and what it means – as we navigate this politically and scientifically complex subject.

Speaking of politically and scientifically complex...

While Craig Nulan marches up and down the sidewalk wearing a sandwich board that says “IQ is meaningless!” on the front and “Psychometrics is racist!” on the back... guess what? A subset of the high-IQ population is doing things like mapping the human genome, putting machines on the surface of Mars (and communicating with them), and pondering the nature of subatomic particles.

Hell, it takes a high IQ to even comprehend that stuff, let alone do the actual science.

This in itself renders silly any black-partisan blustering about the unknowability of “intelligence,” or the relativism of different kinds of intelligences. Whitey done sent a spaceship past Saturn, got-dammit! How you sound, talkin’ ’bout “IQ ain’t shit”?

Schoolin’ Mr. Nulan

Craig Nulan put a question to me in a recent comment thread. To wit:

“The main question I’d like answered is how precisely did you get hoodwinked and bamboozled to serve as a host and conduit of racist thought David? What was the intrinsic appeal of IQ heritability pseudo-science that made you buy into it hook, line, and sinker?”

Having traded a few comments with this charmer at BlackProf.com and The Assault on Black Folks’ Sanity, I’m fairly certain that Mr. Nulan isn’t interested in a good-faith dialogue on this wickedly complicated subject.

I say that because –

1) Nulan’s preferred style of disputation seems to be the “ad hominy” attack (i.e., throwing personal insults around like hot grits), and –

2) All of Nulan’s polemical eggs appear to rest in a basket of denialism... denying that intelligence is heritable; denying that intelligence can be measured via testing; denying even the possibility that different human sub-groups might have unequal cognitive aptitudes.

His mind is made up – due to ideological necessity, not scientific evidence – and anyone who dares to disagree “[does] not warrant respectful attention” and is on the side of “EVIL.”

And yet I shall respond to Craig Nulan. In part because I am so intrigued by his own high intelligence. (You can’t sneeze at a computer science degree from MIT.)

In a comment that was destroyed during Nulan’s recent ugly break-up with Michael Fisher at the Assault, Nulan revealed that he’d been tested several times as an elementary-schooler... and he scored off the charts. Is it a random coincidence that psychometricians identified young Nulan as extremely intelligent... and ten years later he matriculated at one of the world’s elite universities?

And so I asked Nulan: Did those childhood tests measure something real... and worth measuring?

He buck-danced around that one like Sandman Sims, refusing to give the simple and obvious answer: YES.

As for Nulan’s current query of me... It may sound funny, but my earliest awareness of the IQ controversy dates to an episode of “Good Times.” I forget the overall plot details, except that the payoff featured the Evanses peppering a doofus white official with multiple-choice questions like “What is an ‘alley apple’?”

When the doofus white official answered wrong, Florida Evans declared triumphantly: “You just failed an IQ test.”

Even as an adolescent, I thought: “That’s not a question of intelligence! That’s a trivial knowledge!” (Besides which, black folk in D.C. didn’t refer to bricks as “alley apples.”)

At the age of 13, unaware of the ideology of liberal egalitarianism, I saw through that framing of the IQ question as silly and dishonest.

Jump to “The Bell Curve.” Like a lot of thoughtful people, I followed that controversy closely. Particularly the many rebuttal essays published in Commentary and The New Republic.

It was the unpersuasiveness of those rebuttals which impacted me. I was like, “Shit... they didn’t knock it down at all.” I was rooting for them to. But they didn’t.

Neither did Stephen Jay Gould’s book-length rebuttal, “The Mismeasure of Man,” republished in 1996 as “The definitive refutation to the argument of The Bell Curve.”

For one thing, as much as Nulan hammers the IQ hereditarians for being politically biased, Stephen Gould wears his own left-wing biases – or, as he puts it, his activist commitment to “social justice” – on his shirt-front.

“I wrote ‘The Mismeasure of Man’ because I have a different political vision” than the authors of the “The Bell Curve,” Gould wrote in his revised edition. But he assured readers that he was well capable of policing his own prejudices.

And still, even Gould (whose resume of the history of psychometrics has been well studied by Nulan)... even Gould doesn’t deny that cognitive abilities are inborn to some degree:

“The hereditarian fallacy is not the simple claim that IQ is to some degree ‘heritable.’ I have no doubt that it is, though the degree has clearly been exaggerated by the most avid hereditarians.” [Emphasis added.]

So, at least in Gould’s case, we’ve narrowed down the area of interest: figuring out just how major or minor is the acknowledged influence of genetics on intelligence.

Craig Nulan won’t grant even that much. (I wonder why?)

In one of the comments destroyed when he split from Fisher’s blog, I mentioned a well-known experiment by psychologists R.M. Cooper and J.P. Zubek in 1958. This animal experiment was cited by social psychologist Thomas F. Pettigrew in his 1964 text “A Profile of the Negro American.”

According to Pettigrew, this experiment demonstrated the key impact of environment on cognitive functioning.

What Cooper and Zubek did was, they tested laboratory rats who had been raised in three different environments: an “enriched” environment, a “natural” environment and a “restricted” environment.

But here’s the key: They tested two different kinds of rat in each environment... a “dull strain” and a “bright strain.”

The purpose of the experiment, after all, was to determine whether “bright” rats would be cognitively impaired by a bad environment and whether “dull” rats would receive a cognitive boost from a good environment.

But how could they get a group of “bright” rats and a group of “dull” rats to test?

Through selective breeding, that’s how.

They put rats through mazes. Those who navigated the mazes quickly were deemed “bright”... and were bred with other “bright” rats to produce the “bright strain.”

Likewise, the rats who navigated the mazes poorly were deemed “dull” and were bred with other “dull” rats to produce the “dull strain.”

In Thomas Pettigrew’s words, the investigators created “two genetically distinct strains of rats, carefully bred for 13 generations as either ‘bright’ or ‘dull.’ ” And then they proceded to raise rats from these two populations in varied environments.

So, you see, even an experiment designed to show the impact of environmental factors on intelligence took for granted that cognitive potential – “brightness” or “dullness” – is heritable. It’s in the genes.

Now isn’t that a daisy?

Is life better for black people under Fidel Castro?

In the course of my ongoing political conversation with DeAngelo Starnes, my man DeAnge gave some love to Comrade Fidel. So I have to ask:

Who is better off? The average black person living in Communist Cuba? Or living here in this bastion of white supremacy, the United States? Who is more free? Who has the better chance of fulfilling his or her human potential?

A fondness for Castro is nothing new among brothers on the Left. But one black radical did more than talk that talk.

Former Black Panther William Lee Brent (pictured) hijacked a plane to Cuba in 1969. He lived in Cuba until his death in 2006.

Amy Goodman of Pacifica Radio interviewed Brent in Havana in 1998. That interview was broadcast on November 22, 2006, on “Democracy Now!”

I’m streaming a 5-minute portion on my Vox blog. Please click here to hear it.

Cuba is no wonderland. Especially if you’ve grown accustomed to your freedom of speech.

“There are no organized dissident groups operating in Cuba,” Bill Brent said. “There is no black liberation movement going on in Cuba. ...

“I miss not being able to stand up on the street corner and say, ‘This is a bunch of shit and I wanna do something about it and you should do something about it, and I don’t agree with this.’ ...

“I can’t do that here,” he said of Cuba. “Because it’s prohibited. You can’t do that.”

Stakes Be High, pt. 2

I enjoyed the first round of this. Now I get to hit my man DeAngelo Starnes with QUESTION #2. Our conversation will proceed in the comments section. Readers are invited to poke and prod us both.

As I’ve mentioned in the past, I like to study white racialists. I have been doing it for years. What strikes me about their thought process is that hardcore white racialists – such as those who gather at Jared Taylor’s American Renaissance site – act like aggrieved minorities. They view themselves as powerless victims of some large, sinister mechanism of social control (liberalism/egalitarianism, international capitalism, Jewish supremacy, whatever).

Why do they feel this way? Because outspoken white racialists are pushed to the outer fringes of America’s political discourse. (Jared Taylor and David Duke are not welcome voices in the mainstream media.)

Because white people can lose their jobs and face huge public humiliation when they insult black folks. (See Don Imus, Michael Richards, Dog the Bounty Hunter, etc.)

Because demographic trends indicate that whites could shrink to a numerical minority in the United States by 2050.

So I ask you, DeAngelo:

QUESTION #2: If there is an effective system of white supremacy shaping our world – especially in the United States – then why are the most race-conscious white partisans marginalized, scorned and punished? Why is it hip to be “anti-racist”? And why is the U.S. non-white population being allowed to grow, thereby reducing the political and economic influence of white people?

Stakes Be High, pt. 1

I’m trying something different this weekend. A blogxperiment, if you will, following through on a suggestion by DeAngelo Starnes in a recent comment. Mr. Starnes is a lawyer, a self-identified “black nationalist” and a friend of mine since the ’90s.

In the coming days (or weeks?), DeAngelo and I will have a semi-structured discourse on five questions, with questions 1, 3 and 5 posed by him, questions 2 and 4 posed by me. These questions will explore racism, white supremacy, black nationalism, etc.

I will break off each question into its own post, with our consequent back-and-forth dialogue running in the comments section.

This is not a “win-or-lose” type formal debate; it’s a conversation. Readers are welcome to comment, but please focus your comments on the arguments of me and DeAngelo, as opposed to your reactions to the original question.

This weekend we will kick around DeAngelo’s QUESTION #1, presented below. I intend to post my QUESTION #2 on Monday.

QUESTION #1: Since we’re in the middle of a writers’ strike... why have there been virtually no hourlong dramas with a predominantly Black cast, utilizing Black characters and written by Black writers? Most television shows that carry a majority Black cast are sitcoms.

Is this a function of white supremacy because the studios are run by white men? Or is it because these studios don’t think a show with Black characters can carry out universal themes of (as you have been quoted) “the human condition”?