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I can't believe I didn't notice this

Earlier today I wrote about a criticism of Shelby Steele made by Diane Abbott in a comment posted underneath my column this week.

I've just had a note from Oliver Kamm (among others). "Diane Abbott says that Shelby Steele:

is a right wing black man who voted for George W Bush in 1980 & 1984.

For what?"

Are only left wing people allowed to have insights?

Diane Abbott - mischievously described by Rod Liddle in The Spectator this week as that "pantomime dame of an MP" - has sent me an "Oh no he isn't" message.

And very revealing it is too.

In my column in The Times on Wednesday I praised the writing of Stanford University academic Shelby Steele.

Ms Abbott had this to say:

Shelby Steele is not "one of America's leading chroniclers of racial politics". He is a right wing black man who voted for George W Bush in 1980 & 1984, supported the war in Iraq and makes a living peddling the kind of inanities about black people that white people like to hear.

Right. So it is impossible to be a leading chronicler of black politics and be right wing is it? If you voted for George Bush you cannot chronicle racial politics. You are disqualified. Only left wing people are allowed to have insights.

Extraordinary. What's the Iraq war got to do with it, Diane? Aren't black people allowed to support the Iraq war if they want? Or does that somehow cancel out their blackness?

Shelby Steele's writing is a revolt against precisely this sort of thinking.

If you want to judge whether or not my claim about Steele is justified, try reading his short, punchy book The Content of Our Characters. You will not regret the investment of time I assure you.

The great IQ and race debate

In the latest issue of The New Yorker Malcolm Gladwell wades into the dispute over the difference in intelligence between blacks and whites.

Actually, he doesn't. He wades into the row over differences in IQ between blacks and whites. The difference is crucial.

The remarks of DNA pioneer James Watson and a series of Slate articles by William Saletan have re-opened a long-standing debate about whether differences in IQ between ethnic groups are genetic or environmental. Saletan and Watson support a largely genetic explanation.

Gladwell does not. And in a book review of James Flynn's What is Intelligence, he explains cogently why. Flynn's work demonstrates that IQ is a complex and changing measurement and that the rapidly increasing IQ of the population suggests strongly that IQ levels are heavily influenced by environment. (You can watch a debate between Flynn and Charles Murray on the Manhattan Institute site).

On his blog Gladwell goes further, linking to other papers making convincing arguments about IQ and genetics.

None of this, however, settles the basic question.

While the critics of Watson, Saletan and Murray manage to show to my satisfaction that IQ measures are heavily influenced by the environment, all that means is that IQ measures are not good measures of innate intelligence.

We don't know whether there are racial inherited difference in innate intelligence (either blacks being more innately intelligent than whites or vice versa) because we haven't a measure that can tell us.

And maybe creating one would be impossible.

For the moment the only thing one can say with confidence is that the Watson camp has failed to make its case.

 

Why Simon Heffer is wrong about Enoch Powell

This morning Simon Heffer defends Enoch Powell's Rivers of Blood speech and says that Powell's memory has been insulted:

The insult to Powell consists in this unsustainable idea that the Birmingham speech was "racist".

There is a long tradition in the party of not reading the speech. Heath, who sacked Powell as defence spokesman, certainly had not. Nor had the two close colleagues who urged him on, his chief whip, Willie Whitelaw, and the hysterical Quintin Hogg.

He invites his readers to study the speech itself. I have taken him up on this invitation.

When Ted Heath sacked Powell he gave this as his reason:

I dismissed Mr. Powell because I believed his speech was inflammatory and liable to damage race relations. I am determined to do everything I can to prevent racial problems developing into civil strife...I don't believe the great majority of the British people share Mr. Powell's way of putting his views in his speech.

In other words, right from the beginning the issue with Powell's speech was the terms he used to make his argument. One can agree with his contention that it is important to control immigration while deprecating the way he put his arguments.

The problem with Powell is very similar to the problem with Nigel Hastilow.

Is it fair to accuse Powell of being inflammatory and using racist language in his speech? Absolutely.

First, he talked in alarmist terms of matches being thrown onto gunpowder and rivers foaming with blood. This was hardly a sober or responsible way of talking of a sensitive issue. It was also wrong. The rivers are not foaming with blood.

Second, he quoted at length extraordinarily offensive, racist comments made to him and never attempts to suggest that these are unpleasant or unacceptable.

Indeed he introduces one part of his speech, the reading of a letter about the experience of a woman with these words:

I am going to allow just one of those hundreds of people to speak for me.

Now read the letter itself, so introduced by Powell. It is noticeable that Heffer does not quote from it:

Eight years ago in a respectable street in Wolverhampton a house was sold to a Negro. Now only one white (a woman old-age pensioner) lives there. This is her story. She lost her husband and both her sons in the war. So she turned her seven-roomed house, her only asset, into a boarding house. She worked hard and did well, paid off her mortgage and began to put something by for her old age. Then the immigrants moved in. With growing fear, she saw one house after another taken over. The quiet street became a place of noise and confusion. Regretfully, her white tenants moved out.

The day after the last one left, she was awakened at 7am by two Negroes who wanted to use her 'phone to contact their employer. When she refused, as she would have refused any stranger at such an hour, she was abused and feared she would have been attacked but for the chain on her door. Immigrant families have tried to rent rooms in her house, but she always refused. Her little store of money went, and after paying rates, she has less than £2 per week.

She went to apply for a rate reduction and was seen by a young girl, who on hearing she had a seven-roomed house, suggested she should let part of it. When she said the only people she could get were Negroes, the girl said, "Racial prejudice won't get you anywhere in this country. So she went home.

The telephone is her lifeline. Her family pay the bill, and help her out as best they can. Immigrants have offered to buy her house - at a price which the prospective landlord would be able to recover from his tenants in weeks, or at most a few months.

She is becoming afraid to go out. Windows are broken. She finds excreta pushed through her letter box. When she goes to the shops, she is followed by children, charming, wide-grinning piccaninnies. They cannot speak English, but one word they know. "Racialist," they chant. When the new Race Relations Bill is passed, this woman is convinced she will go to prison. And is she so wrong? I begin to wonder.

Charming, wide-grinning piccaninnies. From a member of the Shadow Cabinet. Described as speaking for me and delivered without a word of dissent. One simply can't acquit Powell of the charge against him.

Or Nigel Hastilow for speaking fondly of the Rivers of Blood address. 

Are you a half-Jew that wants to join the Ku Klux Klan?

Bang goes my chance of becoming a Grand Dragon.

Real segregation is all in the mind

Last week Nick Johnson, director of policy and public sector at the Commission for Racial Equality, warned that Britain faced US-style racial segregation and growing intercommunal suspicion. His solution was pretty much to bus children around to mix school pupils up so that no school was all black or all Muslim or all white. He said:

Schools are where our children first learn how to get along with people from other cultures and backgrounds

Now consider this about Omar Khyam, the ringleader of the fertiliser bomb plot:

Khyam’s hatred for the West is at odds with his family background. His grandfather was a colonel in the British Army during the Second World War, and many other relatives went on to join the military or intelligence services (ISI). Khyam’s parents deliberately sent him to a predominantly white secondary school, where he became captain of the cricket team

Seems to me that "alienation" and cultural separatism is all in the head of the aggrieved, and is utterly unrelated to whether people are actually segregated or not.

Robbie Millen

Imus: how to judge a racist

What should one make of American shock jock Don Imus? He is in every kind of trouble for describing a predominately black women's basketball team as "nappy-headed hos".

Over here, of course, we had the Ron Atkinson incident. The former football manager's commentary career was over after he called Chelsea defender Marcel Desailly a "lazy nigger" while, unbeknown to him, the mike was still on.

When incidents like this occur, I reach for Malcolm Gladwell's seminal post on racist comments.

Gladwell uses three criteria for judging dubious comments.

First, content:

What is said clearly makes a difference. I think, for example, that hate speech is more hateful the more specific it is. To call someone a nigger is not as a bad as arguing that black people have lower intelligence than whites. To make a targeted claim is worse than calling a name. Similarly, I think it matters how much a stereotype deviates from a legitimate generalisation.  For instance, (and this is, admittedly, not a great example) I think it's worse for someone to say that Jews are money-grubbers than it is to make a joke about how Orthodox Jews have large families.

Atkinson's lazy niggers comment clearly falls at this fence. But Imus? Nappy-headed isn't really the problem, but "hos" is. Depending, of course, whether he was using a silly piece of slang or actually accusing them of being whores. Which brings one on to Gladwell's second point.

Intention:

Was the remark intended to wound, or intended to perpetuate some social wrong? Was it malicious? I remember sitting in church, as a child, while our Presbyterian minister made jokes about how "cheap" Presbyterians were. If non-Presbyterians make that joke, it might be offensive. But a Presbyterian making jokes about Presbyterians with the intention of making Presbyterians laugh is fine, because there is a complete absence of malice in the comment. I think that Richard Pryor or Dave Chappelle's use of the word "nigger," or the Jewish jokes told by Jewish comics fall into the same category.

Atkinson's remark was not intended to be heard at all, but it was certainly meant as an insult. Again it falls.

With Imus it is, once again, a bit more complicated. He clearly intends to shock, but I don't think he wanted to wound. Nevertheless, it was at the very least, monumentally idiotic of him not to realise that a white man picking on black women would offend.

Then there is Gladwell's third criterion - conviction

Does the statement represent the individual's considered opinion? This to me is the trickiest of the three criterion. In Blink, I wrote a great deal about unconscious racism - how powerful and how prevalent it is. All of us, in our unconscious, harbour prejudicial thoughts. (If you don't believe me, I urge you to take the tests at www. i-a-t.org.) What is of greatest concern, I think, are not instances where those kinds of buried feelings leak out, but cases where hate speech appears to have been the product of considered, conscious deliberation.

Unlike Atkinson, Imus knew he was being heard by his public but the remarks were not considered ones. Do they represent the real Imus? Who knows.

Ironically, given the example used by Gladwell earlier, Imus recently referred to a music groups "Jewish management" as "money-grubbing". He is obviously not a paragon of racial awareness. But it does not appear that he has a long record of anti-black remarks.

So, using Gladwell's criteria Imus's comments would seem to come at the milder end of the spectrum. To do nothing would be wrong given his insensitive stupidity. But an inordinate fuss isn't right either.

CBS's two week suspension seems about right.

Malcolm Gladwell on Patrick Mercer

When Michael Richards (Kramer from Seinfeld) was caught on film in a racist tirade, Malcolm Gladwell wrote this superb post on how to judge racially insensitive comments. How can you measure how bad they are?

It is worth reading after Patrick Mercer's resignation. And if he had read it before he made his remarks he might still be on the front bench.

(Hat tip: Chris)

Why Patrick Mercer had to be fired

Patrick Mercer has been forced to resign because of John Townend.

Just before the 2001 General Election, the Tory MP for Yorkshire East made totally unacceptable comments about the way "Commonwealth immigration" was undermining our "homogeneous Anglo-Saxon society". I was in the room when William Hague was informed by his press office of the remarks.

What should we do?

One option was to ignore the remarks altogether. The story had, at that point, only been taken up by one small circulation black community newspaper. If William rebuked him, wouldn't it just publicise the remarks?

I argued successfully that this wasn't an option. William deeply disapproved of the comments and he should say so. You couldn't allow the comments to go unchallenged.

But should the whip be removed from Townend? The danger was that we might turn this minor, unknown figure into a martyr, bringing his friends to support him and making it seem as if his views were held more widely. The story was smallish now, but would be huge if Townend had the whip taken away. Perhaps it would be better to leave it, just rebuke him and try and move on.

We were trying to find the right balance between distancing ourselves from the MP and hyping up the story. It turned out that we made the wrong choice.

For 12 hours or so the line held. But soon (after the intervention of Lord Taylor) the pressure built. In the end, William was forced to threaten the withdrawal of the whip unless Townend withdrew his comments. Townend backed down, but the damage was done.

We made our error because the problem hadn't presented itself before. We weren't to know whether the story would grow or go away. With the benefit of the Townend experience, Cameron knew exactly how the Mercer affair would play out.

Patrick Mercer is respected by Tory MPs. They will be sorry to see him go. Some may be angry that he has been forced out. But Mercer's comments demonstrated a total failure to understand the nature of racism and a gross insensitivity.

If he hadn't gone now, he'd have gone in 48 hours. The support provided for him in those two days would have deeply damaged David Cameron without saving Mercer.

The lesson of the Townend saga is unmistakeable.

Big Brother Breaking News: Has everybody gone nuts?

Has everyone gone mad? Have we totally lost the plot?

Big Brother is just the most boring, stupid, trivial, non-event. It is as interesting as watching CCTV pictures of people buying yoghurt in Tesco.

Yesterday, two women had an argument about a stock cube. This was Breaking News on Sky. The Prime Minister commented. Gordon Brown read out a statement.

Keith Vaz has put down an early day motion. Hasn't he got anything better to do? If he's got time on his hands he could spend it answering the remaining questions about his business affairs put to him by the Parliamentary standards watchdog. It is not surprising that he'd rather talk about light entertainment.

Everyone in Big Brother is being paid to be there. Everyone who goes on it knows the score. There are no victims.

Now get back to work.

Does your race affect your IQ?

Race and IQ is a minefield but Ronald Bailey mulls over a fascinating debate between Charles Murray and James Flynn. This claim grabbed my attention:

The children of professionals hear about 2500 different words in a day whereas the children of welfare mothers hear about 600 different words every day

Robbie Millen

Are the New York police racist?

Well, I can't cast any light on the New York police record yet, but this paper is helpful.

It's entitled The Effects of Suspect Race and Situation Hazard on Police Officer Shooting Behavior and is authored by Andres Inn, Alan C. Wheeler, and Cynthia L. Sparling.

Here's the abstract (if you've got a spare $39 you can read the whole thing):

Shooting incidents involving patrol officers are examined for the effect of suspect race and degree of hazard in the number of shots fired and hits made on suspects. Additional tests examine frequencies of shooting incidents among Blacks and Whites with respect to city population and various measures of police-citizen contact. Finally, fatalities are examined with respect to involvement in shooting and arrest rates. The results suggest an effect for degree of hazard; however, there was no evidence to suggest police bias against Blacks.

The problem with this work? It's now nearly 30 years old. Has the situation changed since then? Are police killings racist now, when they weren't then.

One indicator that things have deteriorated might be the strength of feeling in the African American community. But it is worth noting that at the time (1977), in a separate study, the authors recorded that the view of the police held by African Americans sharply diverged from that held by white Americans. They believed, then, that police actions were racist.
 

Statistics will show whether the New York police are racist

Saturday's shooting by New York police officers of Sean Bell, a soon to be married black man who was unarmed, brings to mind the 1999 death of Amadou Diallo in which an unarmed Haitian immigrant was shot repeatedly by police.

Malcolm Gladwell, in his book Blink, explained that the officers involved had made a number of common errors, each typical of the way we think under stress. I think he was right, but that it is not the whole story. Why? Because he treats the Diallo shooting as an individual incident.

My problem with Gladwell's entire theory in Blink - his idea that snap judgments are often better than detailed work, providing you train yourself to make good ones - is that he uses anecdotes to make a point that only statistics can prove. Snap judgments will sometimes be better than careful examination, but how often? You can train yourself to reduce bias in instant reactions, but by how much?

And this brings me to the New York case. Each shooting is a disaster and cops need to be trained to avoid such things happening. On the other hand, it is difficult to imagine a training scheme that eliminated error altogether. There will always be deviation from best practice, so what is the trade-off between reducing deviation by a few and increasing the training of everyone?

The temptation will be to isolate this incident and investigate it by itself. But this will tell you little. The inquiry into this case needs to look beyond this one incident and ask - how many of these shootings are happening as a proportion of the number of incidents in which armed police are involved? Can the proportion be realistically reduced?

And, incidentally, if the shooting was an example of racist policing, statistical work will show this in a way nothing else will.