Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be An Antiracist has a very amazing section on his youthful view that white people were aliens. When I mentioned it offhand to my daughter she laughed and was incredulous that an adult human would believe such a thing. I’ve decided to excerpt that part of the book so you can see it in context.
I did not knock on Claren’s door that day to discuss Welsing’s “color confrontation theory.” Or Diop’s two-cradle theory. He had snickered at those theories many times before. I came to share another theory, the one that finally figured White people out.
“They are aliens,” I told Clarence, confidently resting on the doorframe, arms crossed. “I just saw this documentary that laid out the evidence. That’s why they are so intent on White supremacy. That’s why they seem to not have a conscience. They are aliens.”
Clarence listened, face expressionless. “You can’t be serious.”
“I’m dead serious. This explains slavery and colonization. This explains why the Bush family is so evil. This explains why Whites don’t give a damn. This explains why they hate us so damn much. They are aliens.” I’d lifted off the doorframe and was in full argumentative mode.
“You really are serious about this,” Clarence said with a chuckle. “If you’re serious, then that has got to be the dumbest thing I ever heard in my life! I mean, seriously, I can’t believe you are that gullible.” That chuckle turned to a grimace
“Why do you spend so much time trying to figure out White people?” he asked after a long pause. Claren had asked this question before. I always answered the same way.
“Because figuring this out is the key! Black people need to figure out what we are dealing with!”
“If you say so. But answer me this: If Whites are aliens, why is it that Whites and Blacks can reproduce? Humans can’t reproduce with animals on this planet, but Black people can reproduce with aliens from another planet? Come on, man, let’s get real.”
“I am being real,” I replied. But I really had no comeback. I stood and turned around awkwardly, walked to my room, plopped down on my bed, and returned to staring at the ceiling. Maybe White people were not aliens. Maybe they became this way on earth…
It’s been a while since I’ve done much GSS blogging. Part of it is that I’ve got only so much attention I can devote to things, and most of my focus has been on the area of science that I’m interested in, and one or two non-scientific topics. The second variable is that I started blogging about GSS data a long time ago (~2008), and there’s only so much interesting stuff you can talk about.
But over the past few years there have been some controversies related to speech in public spaces, and what is and isn’t acceptable. There has also been some chatter that young people today in particular are intolerant of freedom of speech. I’ve wanted to address this, so here I go.
The toleration of racists is in today’s America is like testing a boundary condition. If you are willing to tolerate racist speech if you are not a racist, then you are pretty likely to be a free speech absolutist. I am not interested in rehashing arguments, I support free speech in an absolutist sense personally. Rather, let’s look at some data.
The General Social Survey has a question up from 2014 for the variable RACEMEET that asks:
Should people prejudiced against any racial or ethnic group be allowed to hold public meetings?
The question was asked in 2010 and 2014, and 2,651 individuals answered this. The answer was converted to ordinal, so I decided to probe relationships between variables and the score of toleration through regression. Some independent variables, such as political viewpoint (POLVIEWS), were recoded in an ordinal fashion (so that “extremely liberal” = 1, “liberal” = 2, and so forth, to “extremely conservative” = 7). Others, such as age, do not require any recoding. RACEMEET itself was converted to an ordinal.
The above results suggest that political ideology does not predict your response to this question much once you account for other variables. In fact, I did a query on ideological views first, and the results indicated to me what was really going on.
Let’s go through the variables which were significant predictors above. First, sex.
Male
Female
1: Should definitely be allowed
21
13
2: Should probably be allowed
22
21
3: Should probably not be allowed
20
23
4: Should definitely not be allowed
36
43
These results were expected. On the whole women tend to be more skeptical of absolutist free speech positions which allow offensive material to be promoted (women are more skeptical of allowing Communists to speak too in comparison to men, so it’s not because of the ideology of the speaker or viewpoint).
Then church attendance frequency:
Never attends church
More than once a week
1: Should definitely be allowed
20
23
19
14
21
15
13
14
13
2: Should probably be allowed
21
21
27
24
13
16
26
22
20
3: Should probably not be allowed
21
17
20
18
28
24
18
24
23
4: Should definitely not be allowed
37
39
34
44
37
45
43
40
44
A modest difference.
Next, highest educational attainment:
No HS
HS
Some college
College
Graduate
1: Should definitely be allowed
7
14
11
26
32
2: Should probably be allowed
14
20
23
29
27
3: Should probably not be allowed
20
23
21
19
20
4: Should definitely not be allowed
59
43
45
26
21
The big gap here is between those with college and those without college educations.
Finally, we look at WORDSUM, which is a proxy for intelligence. It’s a ten word vocabulary test. Below in the columns are the number of answers a respondent got correct:
<5
5
6
7
8
9
10
1: Should definitely be allowed
8
10
12
16
24
30
36
2: Should probably be allowed
13
22
18
24
26
34
33
3: Should probably not be allowed
27
20
23
22
21
18
18
4: Should definitely not be allowed
52
48
47
38
29
18
12
I combined those who scored below 5 out of 10 (0-4) into one class. You can see that as score on this vocabulary test goes up, the view that racists should be allowed to meet in public goes up. It’s almost monotonic. The smartest people are more tolerant than the next smartest people who are more tolerant than the next smartest people, with the dumb being the least tolerant.
I made the below chart to illustrate this:
Often when it comes to views associated with “smart” people when you put it into some regression eduction accounts for all of the difference. In other words, the less intelligent educated have the same views as the intelligent educated, and the more intelligent but less educated have the same views as the less intelligent less educated. There are more older people who are intelligent but not educated, so it could be generational too (though in this case age does not seem to matter). A plausible hypothesis is that in many cases it is social milieu. Even if you are not bright, being in college inculcates certain values.
And college is a predictor. But these data show that even if you account for college education the brighter you are, the more likely you favor allowing tolerance for views that most people find intolerable.