Is it possible to have an objective conversation about race?

[IM2]

I am specifically referring to the frequent assertions in this forum that Whites cannot understand Blacks and that they should not express any opinions about racial issues in the U.S. Combined with the latest canard about people having their own "realities," Where does that leave us? Is there any genuine interest in problem resolution, or is it all just a political guilt game designed to influence public opinion?

Of course it's possible to have such a conversation. Just not here in the "Screeching, Irrational, Idiotic, Hateful Racist Forum."


It would be nice if the site had a forum for reasonable conversations.

Only way that can happen is to have a white only forum and a black only forum. Segregation, ya know. Oh. Wait. Thats a bad thing. Oh. Wait. Blacks seem to want to separate from whites. Oh. Wait.

Far too many whites here suffer from the same psychosis this person does. This is what happens when you let stormfront enter your forum.

 

[NewsVine_Mariyam]

Some do, some don't.

Therefor you can't make make a blanket statement on all of society that they all owe money for those sins.

It's the U.S. government who would owe and pay the reparations. They created, maintained and enforced the racist society that resulted in the harm without ever compensating those harmed by their policies, procedures and practices.

The fact that the former slave owners were given consideration for the loss of their "property" (slaves) yet none of the slaves nor their progeny were compensated for the harm commited against them by the government's institution of racial oppression and subjugation is a good indicator of how often things are only terrible when the losses that occur adversely impact members of the white race yet black people are not only expected, but told to take every shitty and unlawful thing done to them in stride, buck up, move on and stop complaining.

I was reviewing some legal notes just last night and when one person is found to have caused unlawful damage to another person even if it's just that they no longer enjoy life as much as they once did, they're entitled to recover monetary damages for that. I realize that reparations are not the exact same thing as a civil lawsuit but we already know that just because something is legal doesn't mean that it's right and our government has paid reparations to others that it has harmed.

 

[NewsVine_Mariyam]

This has come up before, with disbelief I might add so hopefully this one instance will offer at least some clarification
Violence, Genes, and Prejudice | DiscoverMagazine.com
....

"Researchers," the brochure began, "have already begun to study the genetic regulation of violent and impulsive behavior and to search for genetic markers associated with criminal conduct." It went on to point out that genetic research had gained impetus from "the apparent failure of environmental approaches to crime--deterrence, diversion, and rehabilitation--to affect the dramatic increases in crime" and that such research "holds out the prospect of identifying individuals who may be predisposed to certain kinds of criminal conduct, of isolating environmental features which trigger those predispositions, and of treating some predispositions with drugs and unintrusive therapies."

Sullivan, still bailing out a boat quickly sinking from sight, said his Violence Initiative had no connection with Wasserman's conference, even though the conference was funded by the NIH (an agency for which Sullivan, as secretary of health and human services, was ultimately responsible). But some critics immediately put the two together as evidence of a deepening conspiracy, with blacks and Hispanics as the likely targets. Children would be screened for genes that made them prone to crime, they warned, and given sedating drugs.

Among the more enraged critics was Samuel Yette, an author and former Howard University journalism professor. Yette, who is black, told the Chronicle of Higher Education that the conference would encourage the impression that blacks are born criminals. "It is an effort," he said, "to use public money for a genocidal effort against African Americans." White critics also invoked the specter of eugenics. In a letter to the New York Times, Norman Finkelstein of New York University pointed out that earlier this century eugenicists' theories linking criminality to genes--in this case to genes for "feeblemindedness" and "moral degeneracy"--had resulted in up to 30 states adopting forced-sterilization laws. "In 1927," wrote Finkelstein, "the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of sterilization, with Associate Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes declaring 'it is far better for all the world if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime . . . society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind.' " According to Finkelstein, more than 35,000 Americans were sterilized before World War II. "Germany," he noted, "did not pass such a law until 1933, and German eugenicists then stated they owed a great debt to the American precedent."

But the most visible--some would say publicity-seeking--critic of the project was Peter Breggin, a white psychiatrist and activist well known for opposing the use of drugs to treat psychiatric problems. In a story headlined Plot to Sedate Black Youth, which ran in a small black newspaper in Washington, D.C., Breggin and fellow opponents implied that the gene studies slated for discussion at the conference formed the core of a massive social engineering scheme. A plan was afoot, they said, to identify potentially violent inner-city children on the basis of biological and genetic markers--paving the way for psychiatric intervention, including the widespread medication of black children. Breggin later repeated his views on a news show on Black Entertainment Television and led the attack against the conference through his organization, the Center for the Study of Psychiatry. In July 1992 the NIH, which had given Wasserman $78,400 to fund the conference the following October, withdrew its support.

But the fight was far from over. "This is political correctness," blasted Gary Stephenson, an official at the University of Maryland, where the conference was to be held. "Just having such a conference doesn't mean the university endorses racism or sexism," he told the New York Times. "The university provides an open forum for debate on controversial issues."

Writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Wasserman pointed out that the language of the controversial brochure was taken straight from the proposal he'd submitted requesting NIH funds for the meeting, which the NIH had rated "superb." In fact, the proposed meeting was praised for the diversity of its speakers, who ranged from those who believed genes play a role in violence to those worried about the legitimization of a link that was as yet unproved.

Showing a steely will, Wasserman did not shrink in the face of accusations of racism. Scientists doing this work, he said, were interested in understanding individual susceptibility to violence, not in exploiting alleged racial traits. "Several researchers at the conference would have dismissed the claim that one racial group is more predisposed genetically to crime than another as unsupported and inherently implausible," Wasserman wrote in his Chronicle article. "They would have argued that racial differences in crime rates were explained by powerful environmental factors." Though some researchers (not invited to the conference) claim that such racial differences are genetic, he continued, "their research is regarded as flimsy, even by strong proponents of individual genetic predispositions."

Wasserman concluded: "In sponsoring a debate on individual, but not racial, differences in genetic predisposition to criminal behavior, I believe that I have drawn a defensible line." In another publication, Black Issues in Higher Education, he added that the decision to cancel the conference was "not formed out of concern for the black community" but for political reasons. "This is an election year, remember, and the Bush people are very sensitive."

The op-ed tide began to run the other way. Arthur Caplan, director of the Center for Biomedical Ethics at the University of Minnesota, wrote in Baltimore's Evening Sun: "In plain English," NIH director Bernadine Healy "yanked the funds because some people told her the topic of the genetics of crime is politically incorrect." An editorial in the Journal of NIH Research accused health and human services officials of a "lack of political courage . . . at a time when violence and crime dominate American life." The editorial went on: "At the heart of the controversy is a deep-seated fear of discovering that human behaviors, even violent ones, have biological roots. . . .What would we do with such information? The canceled Maryland conference was to address issues such as this." Five months after the NIH pulled its support for the conference, its grant appeals board ruled 7-2 to reinstate it. The conference is now tentatively scheduled for next October.

And what of the Violence Initiative? Though the name itself was dropped as a political embarrassment, the research it embraced essentially continues. In 1992 the federal government spent $53.7 million on NIH-funded violence studies. This year a panel of scientists, ethicists, and attorneys recommended substantially increasing the current $58 million budget. "Violence," the panel wrote in its April report to Harold Varmus, present director of the NIH, "is one of the leading causes of death and disability in our Nation." Its consequences exact "an extraordinarily heavy toll on our Nation's youth and elderly, and . . . disproportionately affect minority populations."

Looking back on the furor, Sullivan expresses no anger but rather a battle-weary sadness. "The thing in the background that really contributed to suspicions was Tuskegee," he reflects, referring to "a horrendous, inappropriate study" that began in rural Alabama in the 1930s. The Tuskegee study was a travesty of American public-health research. For decades 400 black men with syphilis were given what amounted to sham treatment so doctors could track the disease's unchecked progress. The study, which was halted under protest in 1972, left a sour taste in the black community. "Some say that AIDS was a disease developed in the lab to harm black people," notes Sullivan. "There is that lingering fear that somehow the government is plotting against its citizens to do some evil thing, which is unfortunate. It has slowed things tremendously."

Who could disagree? Lots of people, and passionately.

There's good reason to be wary of the way genetic findings are applied to society, says Troy Duster, director of the Institute for the Study of Social Change at the University of California at Berkeley. Duster, who is black, points out that past attempts to link inherited traits to criminal behavior have never held up. Recently, though, molecular biology has revolutionized genetics. "We can screen an individual's genes at the molecular level to see who's at risk for devastating medical disorders like Tay-Sachs, sickle-cell anemia, and cystic fibrosis," says Duster. "And these breakthroughs have created an unjustified halo effect for geneticists trying to explain behavior." The success of medical genetics shouldn't dazzle us into being uncritical about the pitfalls of behavioral genetics, he points out. Unlike, say, Tay-Sachs, which can be blamed on a single aberrant gene, violent behavior is likely to be the result of a fantastically intricate web of interactions among many genes and varying environments.

In his book, Backdoor to Eugenics, Duster argues that there are dangers in the way the public debate about genetics tends to be framed. On the one hand there are "experts (geneticists, medical specialists, researchers, etc.)" and on the other hand there are "critics who have been portrayed as naysayers and know-nothings, Luddites who would put their heads in the sand or try to stop the machinery of progress." As a result, he says, the typical citizen will always go along with the experts, just as "good Germans" went along with Nazi policies because they couldn't believe their leaders would start "selective extermination" of Jews and the mentally ill. In a similar vein, Duster fears that if the public buys the idea of "susceptibility genes" for violence, doesn't think to question their predictive power, and doesn't look out for their potential for abuse, then these genes could be used as a rationalization for political oppression of blacks.

Breggin goes even further. "This so-called scientific focus on violence in America basically means a focus on African Americans," he states. "What people are frightened about is little black children who are seen as having the seeds of destruction in them. Researchers are not looking to see if George Bush and his ne'er-do-well sons have bad genes. White people are looking at the victims of racism and saying something is wrong with them. But as soon as you say something is scientific, people get fooled. The argument used to be that blacks were docile and hence biologically predisposed to slavery. Now, in a few generations, they're supposed to be genetically predisposed to rebellion. This is not science. Evolution can't possibly work that fast. This is the use of psychiatry and science in the interest of racist social policy."

In the summer of 1992 Breggin, who is Jewish, personally appealed to Wasserman, who is also Jewish, to understand the dangers of holding a conference exploring genetics and violence. As Breggin describes it, they met by accident in a Bethesda pizza parlor. Breggin asked Wasserman how he would feel about a conference on "Genetic Factors in Junk Bond Dealing" at a time of public concern over the misdeeds of Michael Milkin and Ivan Boesky, who also happen to be Jewish.

Wasserman now dismisses Breggin as a "zealot." He notes that Breggin was the first to raise the specter of government-condoned, wide- scale medication of minority children. "Peter Breggin has a lot of chutzpah," says Wasserman, referring to Breggin's jump from genetic research on individual susceptibility to the use of drugs in a whole group of kids. "He made the leap, then decried it as racist."

In the past year, taking heed of all the criticism, the NIH has set up panels to review and provide guidance for its research on aggressive and antisocial behavior. Breggin, though, wasn't invited to sit on them. That job has fallen to a growing number of minority academics who are not necessarily opposed to the research but who want to be sure they have some say about the direction of the inquiry and how its results are presented to the public.

"There are few black biomedical scientists doing research, let alone this kind of research," points out Willie Pearson, a black sociologist at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina; like Duster, he serves as an NIH reviewer. "So the first question becomes: Just who is doing the research, and how do you deal with the findings? What policy do you impose--and who is in on that policy? You can't assume that scientists are going to be objective. Science is not above being socialized, and people design research to fit their own paradigm. So I'm supportive of continuing gene research as long as it's reviewed by a more balanced group."

The second question that concerns Pearson is "whether this science is a rationalization for maintaining the status quo. Is it a legitimization for high arrest rates in black people? We don't need science that looks at America and says blacks and Hispanics have a high rate of homicide, so something must be biologically wrong with blacks and Hispanics."

That's a question that also concerns Richard Moran, a criminologist at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts. The idea that violent and criminal people are biologically flawed has a long history, he says. It extends back to Aristotle, "who believed that people came to look like particular animals and had that animal's traits--so sneaky people looked like weasels." In the late 1800s, inspired by Darwin, Italian physician Cesare Lombroso began measuring the heads, ears, feet, and jaws of convicts in an attempt to show that criminals were evolutionarily closer to animals than other humans. And at the turn of the century English physician Charles Goring--on the basis of his own measurements of convicts and university students--concluded that "in every class and occupation of life it is feeble mind and the inferior forms of physique which tend to be selected for a criminal career."

Moran thinks current research exploring genes and violence demonstrates the resilience of our fascination for studying criminals as a distinct biological subspecies. "The definition of the criminal offender has changed from someone who has done bad (morally guilty conduct) to someone who is bad or defective," he wrote in a set of essays called Deviance and Medicalization. His sentiment is shared by Jerry Miller, a leading criminologist who runs the National Center on Institutions and Alternatives in Alexandria, Virginia. "We have given up looking to social and environmental causes; that is passé," claims Miller. "And we have given up trying social and environmental solutions; we have said rehabilitation does not work. So what's left? Flawed people--and many of those people in jail are black." Miller fears that conservatives are looking for a reason to ignore social issues so they can launch a war against a "dehumanized and demonized 'enemy,' who too often these days turns out to have a black face."

Are there any voices of consensus amid this cacophony?

Diana Fishbein, a criminologist at the University of Baltimore, is all too familiar with the fear of urban crime. But she is also, as she puts it, "an integrationist. I believe very much in an interaction between the environment and genetic susceptibilities. That is to say, nobody is predestined to be violent. Nobody is predestined to be a criminal. But given a certain environment and a certain genetic predisposition, then the risk of violence can increase."​

 

[Dont Taz Me Bro]

The best question you needed to ask before you hit post was "what am I saying that is correct?" Your moderator status protects you because no matter how vile the racism you post is nothing gets done about it.

What I said was completely factual and I can't be racist, by your own definition. I'm not white, remember?

 

[Dont Taz Me Bro]

[

What did I say that was incorrect?

Dispense w/the shenanigans, they're not working on me.

You've always been suspect. Thank you for outing yourself in a clear and concise manner.

I provided you the numbers. You can talk to the hand all you want.

 

[Dont Taz Me Bro]

Far too many whites here suffer from the same psychosis this person does. This is what happens when you let stormfront enter your forum.

We let you in, didn't we? You're hardly any different than the Stormfronters. You express just as much as hate and lunacy as they do.

 

[Gracie]

I'm a stormfronter now, eh, IM2? Wow. You never cease to make me laugh.

 

[(((Marc(((]

Do you think the colored will ever think for themselves? Why are they involved with White society?

 

[(((Marc(((]

We would rather not be with non whites Then and now

I know a lot of white women that would disagree with you.

Black men always say that. As if. Not likely.

I know I touched a nerve but not only is it likely....its reality.

Oh, you were including prostitutes like this one?

I thought you meant normal women. No, I guess you might get some white prostitutes to do stuff with you .

She doesnt charge. She gives it away freely like most white women. She is very normal.

The lowest form of white will recognize the negro. About 10%. Those are ostrasized from Caucasian society and will regress to the negro culture. Self cleansing of White society. The mamzer will be scorned by both human and sub human . Hence a wigger is formed.

 

[basquebromance]

its impossible to have a nuanced conversation about race on twitter!

 

[Circe]

This has come up before, with disbelief I might add so hopefully this one instance will offer at least some clarification
Violence, Genes, and Prejudice | DiscoverMagazine.com
....

"Researchers," the brochure began, "have already begun to study the genetic regulation of violent and impulsive behavior and to search for genetic markers associated with criminal conduct." It went on to point out that genetic research had gained impetus from "the apparent failure of environmental approaches to crime--deterrence, diversion, and rehabilitation--to affect the dramatic increases in crime" and that such research "holds out the prospect of identifying individuals who may be predisposed to certain kinds of criminal conduct, of isolating environmental features which trigger those predispositions, and of treating some predispositions with drugs and unintrusive therapies."

Sullivan, still bailing out a boat quickly sinking from sight, said his Violence Initiative had no connection with Wasserman's conference, even though the conference was funded by the NIH (an agency for which Sullivan, as secretary of health and human services, was ultimately responsible). But some critics immediately put the two together as evidence of a deepening conspiracy, with blacks and Hispanics as the likely targets. Children would be screened for genes that made them prone to crime, they warned, and given sedating drugs.

Among the more enraged critics was Samuel Yette, an author and former Howard University journalism professor. Yette, who is black, told the Chronicle of Higher Education that the conference would encourage the impression that blacks are born criminals. "It is an effort," he said, "to use public money for a genocidal effort against African Americans." White critics also invoked the specter of eugenics. In a letter to the New York Times, Norman Finkelstein of New York University pointed out that earlier this century eugenicists' theories linking criminality to genes--in this case to genes for "feeblemindedness" and "moral degeneracy"--had resulted in up to 30 states adopting forced-sterilization laws. "In 1927," wrote Finkelstein, "the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of sterilization, with Associate Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes declaring 'it is far better for all the world if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime . . . society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind.' " According to Finkelstein, more than 35,000 Americans were sterilized before World War II. "Germany," he noted, "did not pass such a law until 1933, and German eugenicists then stated they owed a great debt to the American precedent."

But the most visible--some would say publicity-seeking--critic of the project was Peter Breggin, a white psychiatrist and activist well known for opposing the use of drugs to treat psychiatric problems. In a story headlined Plot to Sedate Black Youth, which ran in a small black newspaper in Washington, D.C., Breggin and fellow opponents implied that the gene studies slated for discussion at the conference formed the core of a massive social engineering scheme. A plan was afoot, they said, to identify potentially violent inner-city children on the basis of biological and genetic markers--paving the way for psychiatric intervention, including the widespread medication of black children. Breggin later repeated his views on a news show on Black Entertainment Television and led the attack against the conference through his organization, the Center for the Study of Psychiatry. In July 1992 the NIH, which had given Wasserman $78,400 to fund the conference the following October, withdrew its support.

But the fight was far from over. "This is political correctness," blasted Gary Stephenson, an official at the University of Maryland, where the conference was to be held. "Just having such a conference doesn't mean the university endorses racism or sexism," he told the New York Times. "The university provides an open forum for debate on controversial issues."

Writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Wasserman pointed out that the language of the controversial brochure was taken straight from the proposal he'd submitted requesting NIH funds for the meeting, which the NIH had rated "superb." In fact, the proposed meeting was praised for the diversity of its speakers, who ranged from those who believed genes play a role in violence to those worried about the legitimization of a link that was as yet unproved.

Showing a steely will, Wasserman did not shrink in the face of accusations of racism. Scientists doing this work, he said, were interested in understanding individual susceptibility to violence, not in exploiting alleged racial traits. "Several researchers at the conference would have dismissed the claim that one racial group is more predisposed genetically to crime than another as unsupported and inherently implausible," Wasserman wrote in his Chronicle article. "They would have argued that racial differences in crime rates were explained by powerful environmental factors." Though some researchers (not invited to the conference) claim that such racial differences are genetic, he continued, "their research is regarded as flimsy, even by strong proponents of individual genetic predispositions."

Wasserman concluded: "In sponsoring a debate on individual, but not racial, differences in genetic predisposition to criminal behavior, I believe that I have drawn a defensible line." In another publication, Black Issues in Higher Education, he added that the decision to cancel the conference was "not formed out of concern for the black community" but for political reasons. "This is an election year, remember, and the Bush people are very sensitive."

The op-ed tide began to run the other way. Arthur Caplan, director of the Center for Biomedical Ethics at the University of Minnesota, wrote in Baltimore's Evening Sun: "In plain English," NIH director Bernadine Healy "yanked the funds because some people told her the topic of the genetics of crime is politically incorrect." An editorial in the Journal of NIH Research accused health and human services officials of a "lack of political courage . . . at a time when violence and crime dominate American life." The editorial went on: "At the heart of the controversy is a deep-seated fear of discovering that human behaviors, even violent ones, have biological roots. . . .What would we do with such information? The canceled Maryland conference was to address issues such as this." Five months after the NIH pulled its support for the conference, its grant appeals board ruled 7-2 to reinstate it. The conference is now tentatively scheduled for next October.

And what of the Violence Initiative? Though the name itself was dropped as a political embarrassment, the research it embraced essentially continues. In 1992 the federal government spent $53.7 million on NIH-funded violence studies. This year a panel of scientists, ethicists, and attorneys recommended substantially increasing the current $58 million budget. "Violence," the panel wrote in its April report to Harold Varmus, present director of the NIH, "is one of the leading causes of death and disability in our Nation." Its consequences exact "an extraordinarily heavy toll on our Nation's youth and elderly, and . . . disproportionately affect minority populations."

Looking back on the furor, Sullivan expresses no anger but rather a battle-weary sadness. "The thing in the background that really contributed to suspicions was Tuskegee," he reflects, referring to "a horrendous, inappropriate study" that began in rural Alabama in the 1930s. The Tuskegee study was a travesty of American public-health research. For decades 400 black men with syphilis were given what amounted to sham treatment so doctors could track the disease's unchecked progress. The study, which was halted under protest in 1972, left a sour taste in the black community. "Some say that AIDS was a disease developed in the lab to harm black people," notes Sullivan. "There is that lingering fear that somehow the government is plotting against its citizens to do some evil thing, which is unfortunate. It has slowed things tremendously."

Who could disagree? Lots of people, and passionately.

There's good reason to be wary of the way genetic findings are applied to society, says Troy Duster, director of the Institute for the Study of Social Change at the University of California at Berkeley. Duster, who is black, points out that past attempts to link inherited traits to criminal behavior have never held up. Recently, though, molecular biology has revolutionized genetics. "We can screen an individual's genes at the molecular level to see who's at risk for devastating medical disorders like Tay-Sachs, sickle-cell anemia, and cystic fibrosis," says Duster. "And these breakthroughs have created an unjustified halo effect for geneticists trying to explain behavior." The success of medical genetics shouldn't dazzle us into being uncritical about the pitfalls of behavioral genetics, he points out. Unlike, say, Tay-Sachs, which can be blamed on a single aberrant gene, violent behavior is likely to be the result of a fantastically intricate web of interactions among many genes and varying environments.

In his book, Backdoor to Eugenics, Duster argues that there are dangers in the way the public debate about genetics tends to be framed. On the one hand there are "experts (geneticists, medical specialists, researchers, etc.)" and on the other hand there are "critics who have been portrayed as naysayers and know-nothings, Luddites who would put their heads in the sand or try to stop the machinery of progress." As a result, he says, the typical citizen will always go along with the experts, just as "good Germans" went along with Nazi policies because they couldn't believe their leaders would start "selective extermination" of Jews and the mentally ill. In a similar vein, Duster fears that if the public buys the idea of "susceptibility genes" for violence, doesn't think to question their predictive power, and doesn't look out for their potential for abuse, then these genes could be used as a rationalization for political oppression of blacks.

Breggin goes even further. "This so-called scientific focus on violence in America basically means a focus on African Americans," he states. "What people are frightened about is little black children who are seen as having the seeds of destruction in them. Researchers are not looking to see if George Bush and his ne'er-do-well sons have bad genes. White people are looking at the victims of racism and saying something is wrong with them. But as soon as you say something is scientific, people get fooled. The argument used to be that blacks were docile and hence biologically predisposed to slavery. Now, in a few generations, they're supposed to be genetically predisposed to rebellion. This is not science. Evolution can't possibly work that fast. This is the use of psychiatry and science in the interest of racist social policy."

In the summer of 1992 Breggin, who is Jewish, personally appealed to Wasserman, who is also Jewish, to understand the dangers of holding a conference exploring genetics and violence. As Breggin describes it, they met by accident in a Bethesda pizza parlor. Breggin asked Wasserman how he would feel about a conference on "Genetic Factors in Junk Bond Dealing" at a time of public concern over the misdeeds of Michael Milkin and Ivan Boesky, who also happen to be Jewish.

Wasserman now dismisses Breggin as a "zealot." He notes that Breggin was the first to raise the specter of government-condoned, wide- scale medication of minority children. "Peter Breggin has a lot of chutzpah," says Wasserman, referring to Breggin's jump from genetic research on individual susceptibility to the use of drugs in a whole group of kids. "He made the leap, then decried it as racist."

In the past year, taking heed of all the criticism, the NIH has set up panels to review and provide guidance for its research on aggressive and antisocial behavior. Breggin, though, wasn't invited to sit on them. That job has fallen to a growing number of minority academics who are not necessarily opposed to the research but who want to be sure they have some say about the direction of the inquiry and how its results are presented to the public.

"There are few black biomedical scientists doing research, let alone this kind of research," points out Willie Pearson, a black sociologist at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina; like Duster, he serves as an NIH reviewer. "So the first question becomes: Just who is doing the research, and how do you deal with the findings? What policy do you impose--and who is in on that policy? You can't assume that scientists are going to be objective. Science is not above being socialized, and people design research to fit their own paradigm. So I'm supportive of continuing gene research as long as it's reviewed by a more balanced group."

The second question that concerns Pearson is "whether this science is a rationalization for maintaining the status quo. Is it a legitimization for high arrest rates in black people? We don't need science that looks at America and says blacks and Hispanics have a high rate of homicide, so something must be biologically wrong with blacks and Hispanics."

That's a question that also concerns Richard Moran, a criminologist at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts. The idea that violent and criminal people are biologically flawed has a long history, he says. It extends back to Aristotle, "who believed that people came to look like particular animals and had that animal's traits--so sneaky people looked like weasels." In the late 1800s, inspired by Darwin, Italian physician Cesare Lombroso began measuring the heads, ears, feet, and jaws of convicts in an attempt to show that criminals were evolutionarily closer to animals than other humans. And at the turn of the century English physician Charles Goring--on the basis of his own measurements of convicts and university students--concluded that "in every class and occupation of life it is feeble mind and the inferior forms of physique which tend to be selected for a criminal career."

Moran thinks current research exploring genes and violence demonstrates the resilience of our fascination for studying criminals as a distinct biological subspecies. "The definition of the criminal offender has changed from someone who has done bad (morally guilty conduct) to someone who is bad or defective," he wrote in a set of essays called Deviance and Medicalization. His sentiment is shared by Jerry Miller, a leading criminologist who runs the National Center on Institutions and Alternatives in Alexandria, Virginia. "We have given up looking to social and environmental causes; that is passé," claims Miller. "And we have given up trying social and environmental solutions; we have said rehabilitation does not work. So what's left? Flawed people--and many of those people in jail are black." Miller fears that conservatives are looking for a reason to ignore social issues so they can launch a war against a "dehumanized and demonized 'enemy,' who too often these days turns out to have a black face."

Are there any voices of consensus amid this cacophony?

Diana Fishbein, a criminologist at the University of Baltimore, is all too familiar with the fear of urban crime. But she is also, as she puts it, "an integrationist. I believe very much in an interaction between the environment and genetic susceptibilities. That is to say, nobody is predestined to be violent. Nobody is predestined to be a criminal. But given a certain environment and a certain genetic predisposition, then the risk of violence can increase."​

tl;dr

People! If I wanted to read long articles, I'd go to the article section of the Internet! Just say what you think.
That's what we're here for.

 

[(((Marc(((]

its impossible to have a nuanced conversation about race on twitter!

True Whites go to GAB

 

[basquebromance]

its impossible to have a nuanced conversation about race on twitter!

True Whites go to GAB

dont know how to use it. if i did, i would definitely use it.

 

[basquebromance]

black women like me are tired of always having to take a backseat.

ok i'm actually a white male but still...

 

[NewsVine_Mariyam]

tl;dr

People! If I wanted to read long articles, I'd go to the article section of the Internet! Just say what you think.
That's what we're here for.

So I guess it's never occured to you that the reason I'm here has nothing to do with why you're here?

 

[Circe]

So I guess it's never occured to you that the reason I'm here has nothing to do with why you're here?

Yeah, I figured you were just a propagandist. Russian, maybe. Heads up: nobody reads long propaganda. Noobie error.

 

[Asclepias]

I know a lot of white women that would disagree with you.

Black men always say that. As if. Not likely.

I know I touched a nerve but not only is it likely....its reality.

Oh, you were including prostitutes like this one?

I thought you meant normal women. No, I guess you might get some white prostitutes to do stuff with you .

She doesnt charge. She gives it away freely like most white women. She is very normal.

The lowest form of white will recognize the negro. About 10%. Those are ostrasized from Caucasian society and will regress to the negro culture. Self cleansing of White society. The mamzer will be scorned by both human and sub human . Hence a wigger is formed.

Its ok little guy.

I know I touched a nerve with the truth.

 

[NewsVine_Mariyam]

Yeah, I figured you were just a propagandist. Russian, maybe. Heads up: nobody reads long propaganda. Noobie error.

Let me guess, you're from the era where the most you have to read in any one sitting is 140 characters? And you're not using the word propaganda correctly.

 

[MisterBeale]

Some do, some don't.

Therefor you can't make make a blanket statement on all of society that they all owe money for those sins.

It's the U.S. government who would owe and pay the reparations. They created, maintained and enforced the racist society that resulted in the harm without ever compensating those harmed by their policies, procedures and practices.

The fact that the former slave owners were given consideration for the loss of their "property" (slaves) yet none of the slaves nor their progeny were compensated for the harm commited against them by the government's institution of racial oppression and subjugation is a good indicator of how often things are only terrible when the losses that occur adversely impact members of the white race yet black people are not only expected, but told to take every shitty and unlawful thing done to them in stride, buck up, move on and stop complaining.

I was reviewing some legal notes just last night and when one person is found to have caused unlawful damage to another person even if it's just that they no longer enjoy life as much as they once did, they're entitled to recover monetary damages for that. I realize that reparations are not the exact same thing as a civil lawsuit but we already know that just because something is legal doesn't mean that it's right and our government has paid reparations to others that it has harmed.

I understand that, I've looked into this and the argument for reparations. There are some very good and sound arguments. Unfortunately, the folks that it would affect are never, ever going to see it that way if they never did anything wrong, and it hits their pocket book. All it will do it cause ill will when it causes them to go into debt in order to send their children to college, or cover that next medical bill. In the long run, how do you think that will affect race relations?

I also would be completely on board as well, if the majority of society was on board. Unfortunately, there is little public support for such a wide ranging policy, b/c understanding who would be the beneficiary of such a policy would be very murky at best, and at worst, it would be a nightmare. What do we do with those people who are of mixed ancestry? What do we do with people who have ancestry that come from Africa, but came here after the civil war, those like Obama, should they benefit from such programs? He is half white and has a political elite father from Africa? He is more privileged than almost any white person in America. Why should someone like that benefit from such programs?

Would someone have to prove that they had a slave as an ancestor to qualify for benefits? Would such a program be taxed on the entire population?

When folks talk about race relations as it is, there has been a general dismissive attitude toward folks that are not of the majority, simply for the fact that many believe they did not earn what they have on their own. They believe they were given an easier time by the establishment, via social programs, handouts, AA, etc. I believe this does more damage to race relations than these programs do, the impression that these programs cause their success, not their hard work. Can you see how such a program will make matters worse?



It is a type of societal blowback. It causes friction among members of different groups. Taking from one, giving to another. It is a divide and conquer plan.

I can only imagine that such a plan would cause more such bad feelings between the in-group and out-group and set race relations back ward, and not help matters.


There some in the native American community that are pushing for the establishment of the Republic of Lakotah;

Natives were the subject of theft and genocide, are their desires any less than the request for reparations?

But again, most natives know this type of talk is not progressive, it is divisive, and balkanizing. It is not what we all have worked together to build a nation since these horrendous crimes were committed.

Such policies will further divide American from American and cause race relations to further deteriorate. Only among the educated classes can we intellectualize the equity of such policies. For the masses that go to school, wake up each morning and go to work, and are for all other purposes the same, it will cause massive amounts of resentment and anger.


However, like I said, if you can show that such policies will do more good than harm, I'm on board. I just don't believe it from what I have seen.

 

[jwoodie]

We would rather not be with non whites Then and now

I know a lot of white women that would disagree with you.

Black men always say that. As if. Not likely.

I know I touched a nerve but not only is it likely....its reality.

Oh, you were including prostitutes like this one?

I thought you meant normal women. No, I guess you might get some white prostitutes to do stuff with you .

She doesnt charge. She gives it away freely like most white women. She is very normal.

Is this what is understood as objective conversation?