Race Matters

Will we ever achieve a post-race world?

Does race still matter in America? Unless you’ve been living on Mars for the past several years you know it most certainly does. But why? A century and a half after the Civil War emancipated millions of slaves and outlawed the practice for good, half a century after the Civil Rights act and corresponding legislation put an end to Jim Crow, and more than a decade after the first Black President was elected to the highest office of the nation, why are we not now in a race-blind society?

To find out, we dedicate the latest issue of Skeptic to Race Matters. (Click on link to order a copy, print or digital.) For this edition I solicited articles on Critical Race Theory (CRT), Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), antiracism, and related subjects from over a dozen scholars and writers on the topics. Even though we offered maximal space, minimal editing, and a modest but respectable (for the size of our magazine) honorarium, most advocates of these ideas either declined or ignored my queries.

(Now in our 30th year of publishing, Skeptic magazine has not only undergone a redesign, we are taking on new and controversial topics to study through the lens of science and rationality. The first issue of the year covered Trans Matters and the second issue Abortion Matters. Our final issue of 2022 will be on Nationalism Matters. Here are the covers of the first two issues of 2022, which you can order by clicking on the links above, as well as subscribe to the magazine. In appreciation to William Bull, the Skeptic Art Director who redesigned the magazine after the founding Art Director Pat Linse passed away in August of 2021.)

I went through my regular trade publishing house, whose imprints have published some works on these subjects, but no luck. I received introductions from the president of Chapman University (where I teach) to a professor there who teaches these subjects, as well as the new Dean of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, but these didn’t pan out. All the usual authorities in the field whose books routinely top the bestseller lists didn’t even respond (even when I went through their book publicists, who are normally eager to get media coverage for their authors).

For my podcast, which reaches over 100,000 people per episode, I was contacted by the publicist for a new book by sociologist Victor Ray, On Critical Race Theory: Why it Matters and Why You Should Care, and we began making arrangements for a recording date and I even offered a full-page ad in the magazine in exchange for an excerpt from the book for this issue. The publicist was initially enthusiastic (our listeners and readers are big book buyers) until, mysteriously, the author’s schedule filled up six weeks before the pub date and I was told that no further coverage was desired (publicists never decline media coverage of the books they are promoting unless there is some mitigating circumstance). I emailed Dr. Ray directly to his university email but heard nothing back. I publicly invited him on Twitter, but he ignored my requests.

Make of this what you will. It could be that Skeptic magazine and The Michael Shermer Show are simply not big enough to attract the leading theorists in these fields, or that everyone is too busy, or Covid, or personal problems, or whatever. Who knows? But I’ve never had such problems in the past soliciting articles for the magazine and booking authors on the podcast—including and especially those whose beliefs, opinions, and positions diverge widely from my own. For example, conservatives, Christians, Intelligent Design Creationists, and the like are all eager to engage with me about their ideas, and they are unfailingly polite about it even when I disagree with them and push back. (See, for example, the long and thoughtful conversation I had with Stephen Meyer on my show, in which we debated/discussed his book on the Return of the God Hypothesis.)

It’s not just me, inasmuch as these same race authorities won’t even engage their fellow Black scholars in these fields who hold dissenting views from them, most notably John McWhorter and Glenn Loury. Further insight into the problem may be gleaned from the writer and regular Skeptic contributor Stephen Beckner, who penned one of the best articles ever written on postmodernism (“Straw Man on a Slippery Slope: The Case Against the Case Against Postmodernism,” Skeptic, Vol. 24, No. 1) who, when I invited him to write an overview of CRT and related topics, replied:

Unfortunately, I don’t think I am the right person to steel man CRT. These days I regard all of this as an altogether too narrow application of the precepts of postmodernist ideas. The aims of CRT proponents and what is more broadly termed wokeism are clearly tactical, not scholarly. The currency of that realm is moral indignation, loyalty testing, virtue policing, scolding, in-group status, preemptive condemnation, and political maneuvering. The only currency I have to offer is logic and rational argument, such as it is. Unfortunately, there is no recognizable exchange rate between these currencies.

We have reached a point where the very definition of CRT has become a political hot potato. You have the sympathizers arguing disingenuously that there is no trace of CRT in our culture outside college level academia, and on the other side the alarmist detractors claiming equally disingenuously that CRT is a cultural poison that destroys the very idea of Americanism. Meanwhile CRT—the original one, not the left or right bugaboo versions—is actually a fairly limited, perhaps anticlimactic call for a type of affirmative action within the justice system. Who doesn’t want that?

All of it feels like a divisive distraction from more thorny and intractable problems. I just don’t see this as much of a culture war among the working classes. They have been racially and socially diverse for a long time out of necessity (most can’t afford to quit a job just because a co-worker has some identity that they don’t like, for example). It’s the elites who are deploying this as a wedge issue in order to draw moral distinctions that enhance their status and justify their economic privilege. 

Finally, after I pursued additional leads we were able to put together an outstanding set of articles for this issue, including: Jason Hill’s soliloquy to America as the land of opportunity to all people, including POC and immigrants like himself, and why he doesn’t think Whites owe anything to Blacks; Stephen Bloom’s assessment of Jane Elliott’s famous “Blue Eyes Brown Eyes experiment” with her third-grade students in which she divided them by eye color to teach them about prejudice, and what it teaches us about prejudice, race-relations, and race sensitivity training programs; Chris Ferguson’s analysis of the role of the news media in declining race relations; Kevin McCaffree’s data-driven look at race and policing; Helen Pluckrose’s and James Lindsay’s politically-neutral historical overview of CRT (albeit mildly critical); Harriet Hall’s column on race and medicine; and an evidence-based article by Mahzarin R. Banaji, Susan T. Fiske, and Douglas S. Massey making the case that even though most Americans today are far less racist in their social attitudes than they were decades ago, many baked-in social, political, and economic policies continue to operate and account for many of the Black-White differences in income, wealth, housing, employment, health outcomes, longevity, and quality of life.

The experience of editing this issue was eye-opening, but it is not my first engagement with this sensitive subject. We have three cover stories on various aspects of race and I.Q., race and sports, and race as a social construct (click on links to order):

Twenty-five years ago, in my book Why People Believe Weird Things, in a chapter on race and racism, I summarized the scientific research to date on the subject, quoting Luca Cavalli-Sforza and his colleagues in their magisterial thousand-page book The History and Geography of Human Genes, that “from a scientific point of view, the concept of race has failed to obtain any consensus; none is likely, given the gradual variation in existence.” But we know races when we see them, don’t we? “It may be objected that the racial stereotypes have a consistency that allows even the layman to classify individuals,” the authors noted, but “the major stereotypes, all based on skin color, hair color and form, and facial traits, reflect superficial differences that are not confirmed by deeper analysis with more reliable genetic traits and whose origin dates from recent evolution mostly under the effect of climate and perhaps sexual selection.”

Australian Aborigines may look more like African blacks than south-east Asians, for example, but in this case genetics overrides our perceptual classificatory schemata—over tens of thousands of years humans migrated out of Africa, then moved through the Middle and Far East, down Southeast Asia and into Australia. Further, Cavalli-Sforza and his colleagues observed that individuals within a group vary more than individuals between groups:

There is great genetic variation in all populations, even in small ones. This individual variation has accumulated over very long periods, because most polymorphisms observed in humans antedate the separation into continents, and perhaps even the origin of the species, less than half a million years ago. … The difference between groups is therefore small when compared with that within the major groups, or even within a single population.

Based on this science—since replicated, corroborated, and confirmed—I concluded that checking a box on a form for race, such as “Caucasian,” “Hispanic,” “African-American,” “Native American,” “Alaska Native,” or “Asian-American”—is untenable because, first, “American” is not a race and, second, if we go back in time far enough all humans descended from Africa. On an evolutionary timescale we are all Africans. Since my maternal grandmother was German and my maternal grandfather was Greek, and my fraternal grandparents were from Sweden and Denmark (confirmed by 23andMe), and since I’m a member of the species Homo sapiens that originated in Africa, I’m either an “other” or, if such an amalgam would ever be allowed on such forms, I’m an “African-Greek-German-Swedish-Dane-American.” And proud of it.

My deeper motive in this exercise was my belief that in my lifetime we could achieve—or at least approach in an asymptotic curve—a post-race society in which such superficial characteristics as “skin color, hair color and form, and facial traits” would be considered the least important thing to know about a person. In my 2015 book The Moral Arc, I suggested that we had made so much moral progress over the centuries that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream that “my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character” was at last coming true and so, I concluded, “we are living in the most moral period in our species’ history.” Why?

More people in more places more of the time have more rights, freedoms, liberties, literacy, education, and prosperity than at any time in the past. We have many social and moral problems left to solve, to be sure, and the direction of the arc will hopefully continue upwards long after our epoch so we are by no means at the apex, but there is much evidence for progress and many good reasons for optimism.

How naïve I was. Government, corporate, and academic collection of data on all matters race has become ubiquitous, driven further along by racial (and gender) online sensitivity training programs, such as those at my university that everyone has to take. (Paraphrasing a sample question: if you overhear someone telling a racially or sexually off-color joke you should: A. Repeat the joke to others. B. Ignore the incident. C. Intervene and explain why telling such jokes is inappropriate. D. Report it to Human Resources. The answer is always D.) Conversations about and coverage of race and race-related incidents are omnipresent in our culture, from social media to mainstream media. When my wife Jennifer moved to the U.S. from Germany a decade ago she was stunned by the amount of race-talk one hears everywhere, as if race is the most pressing of all American issues.

CRT literature is both riding and feeding this cultural momentum, loaded as it is with discussions about racial group differences on everything from income and family wealth to the percentage of Black professors in STEM fields. What percentage of STEM professors have brown eyes, blue eyes, hazel eyes, and green eyes (pace Jane Elliott’s famous experiment)? How many brunettes, blonds, and redheaded professors are there in STEM? Who knows? Who cares? Why are these superficial characteristics considered meaningless (except, perhaps, in Hollywood and on dating sites), whereas equally frivolous features like skin color, hair color and form, and facial traits are proxies for everything from intelligence and personality to moral worth and social value? The answer is obvious. Race and racism as manifested in slavery, segregation, lynchings, Jim Crow, profiling, and police brutality is America’s original sin, whereas we have no history of prejudice and bigotry based on eye or hair color (with the possible exception of blond and ginger jokes).

My race-blind utopianism of the 1990s was set back a bit in 2006 when I first encountered the Implicit Association Test (IAT) that purports to reveal hidden racist attitudes (among other prejudices). The IAT was developed in the 1990s by social psychologists Anthony Greenwald, Mahzarin Banaji, and Brian Nosek, who claim that their instrument reveals that we not only favor white over black, but young over old, thin over fat, straight over gay, able over disabled, and more. I took the test myself, as can you. The race task, for example, first asks you to sort (by pressing keys) black and white faces into one of two categories: European American and African American. Simple. Next you are asked to sort a list of words (Joy, Terrible, Love, Agony, Peace, Horrible, Wonderful, Nasty…) into either Good or Bad. Easy. Then, the words and the black and white faces appear on the screen one at a time for you to sort into either African American/Good or European American/Bad. The word “joy”, for example, would go into the first category, while a white face would go into the second category. This sorting goes noticeably slower. Finally, you are tasked with sorting the words and faces into the categories European American/Good or African American/Bad. Distressingly, I was much quicker to associate words like “joy,” “love,” and “pleasure” with European American/Good than I did with African American/Good. The test’s assessment of me was not heartening:

Your data suggest a strong automatic preference for European American compared to African American. The interpretation is described as “automatic preference for European American” if you responded faster when European American faces and Good words were classified with the same key than when African American faces and Good words were classified with the same key.

Does this mean I’m a closeted racist? And since most people, including African-Americans, score similar to me on the IAT, does this mean we’re all racists? The Project Implicit website suggests that it does:

When we relax our active efforts to be egalitarian, our implicit biases can lead to discriminatory behavior, so it is critical to be mindful of this possibility if we want to avoid prejudice and discrimination.

At the time I accepted the charge. The IAT, however, did not survive the replication crises in psychology, and I summarized the problems with it in my August 2017 column in Scientific American. First, unconscious states of mind are notoriously difficult to discern and require subtle experimental protocols to elicit. Second, associations between words and categories may simply be measuring familiar cultural or linguistic affiliations—associating blue and sky faster than blue and donuts does not mean I unconsciously harbor a pastry prejudice. Third, negative words have more emotional salience than positive words, so the IAT may be tapping into the negativity bias instead of prejudice. Fourth, IAT researchers have been unable to produce any interventions that can reduce the alleged prejudicial associations. A 2016 meta-analysis by Patrick Forscher and his colleagues published on the Open Science Framework examined 426 studies on 72,063 subjects and “found little evidence that changes in implicit bias mediate changes in explicit bias or behavior.” Fifth, the IAT does not predict prejudicial behavior. A 2013 meta-analysis by Frederick Oswald and his colleagues in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology concluded that “the IAT provides little insight into who will discriminate against whom.” Thus, I concluded:

For centuries, the arc of the moral universe has been bending toward justice as a result of changing people’s explicit behaviors and beliefs, not on ferreting out implicit prejudicial witches through the spectral evidence of unconscious associations. Although bias and prejudice still exist, they aren’t remotely as bad as a mere half century ago, much less half a millennium ago. We ought to acknowledge such progress and put our energies into figuring out what we’ve been doing right and do more of it.

This is a similar conclusion drawn by social psychologist Carol Tavris in her assessment of the IAT:

And so we come to the crux of the matter: does the IAT really capture unconscious prejudices? Can the test predict whether people will actually behave in a biased or discriminatory way? The evidence is now pretty clear that the answers to both are no. When people are asked to predict their responses toward different groups on the IAT, they are highly accurate—regardless of whether they were told that implicit attitudes are true prejudices or culturally learned associations. People’s scores aren’t reliable, either; they might score “highly biased” one week and get a different result two weeks later. And as for the IAT’s ability to predict behavior—the ultimate measure of any test’s scientific validity—meta-analyses of hundreds of studies on many thousands of people find that the evidence linking IAT scores with behavior is weak to nonexistent.

In the final analysis, I think what is most problematic about the IAT is that it directs people’s attention to their supposed unconscious feelings, leaving many puzzled and worried that they might be awful racists without knowing it, and without knowing what they are supposed to do about it. It confuses normal cognitive biases with bigotry. And it locates the problem of discrimination in people’s unconscious minds, not in the systemic patterns of racism that deserve our far greater attention and search for remedies.

What if, however, the Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky was right when he observed in his 1864 Notes from Underground:

Every man has reminiscences which he would not tell to everyone but only his friends. He has other matters in his mind which he would not reveal even to his friends, but only to himself, and that in secret. But there are other things which a man is afraid to tell even to himself, and every decent man has a number of such things stored away in his mind.

If true, one possible way to measure it is through Internet searches. According to the data analyst Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, who worked at Google as a data scientist, such searches may act as “a digital truth serum” for deeper and darker thoughts. As he explains in his 2017 book Everybody Lies, “In the pre-digital age, people hid their embarrassing thoughts from other people. In the digital age, they still hide them from other people, but not from the internet and in particular sites such as Google and PornHub, which protect their anonymity.” Employing Big Data research tools “allows us to finally see what people really want and really do, not what they say they want and say they do.”

People may tell pollsters that they’re not racist, for example, and polling data do indicate that bigoted attitudes have been in steady decline for decades on such issues as interracial marriage, women’s rights, and gay marriage, indicating that conservatives today are more socially liberal than liberals were in the 1950s. Using the Google Insights tool in analyzing the 2008 Presidential election, however, Stephens-Davidowitz concluded that Barack Obama received fewer votes than expected in Democrat strongholds because of still latent racism. (Note: In what follows I am printing the N-word as it was in these Internet searches, along with in the books that analyze the Internet searches.)

For example, Stephens-Davidowitz found that 20 percent of searches that included the word “nigger” also included the word “jokes”, and that on Obama’s first election night about one in 100 Google searches with “Obama” in them included “kkk” or “nigger(s).” “In some states, there were more searches for “nigger president” than “first black president,” he reports, and not predominantly from Southern Republican bastions as one might predict, but from upstate New York, western Pennsylvania, eastern Ohio, industrial Michigan, and rural Illinois. This difference between public polls and private thoughts, Stephens-Davidowitz concludes, helps explain Obama’s underperformance in these regions, and partially illuminates the surprise election of Donald Trump. This would seem to support the arguments of Critical Race Theorists about systemic racism.

But before we conclude that the arc of the moral universe is slouching toward Gomorrah, a Google Trends search for “nigger jokes,” “bitch jokes,” and “fag jokes” between 2004 and 2017, conducted by Steven Pinker and reported in his 2018 book Enlightenment Now, show downward plummeting lines of frequency of searches (as a percentage of the peak month indexed to 100 for each search term) from 80 percent to 10 percent for racist jokes, from 60 percent to 18 percent for sexist jokes, and from 51 percent to 3 percent for homophobic jokes. “The curves suggest that Americans are not just more abashed about confessing to prejudice than they used to be; they privately don’t find it as amusing.” Even more optimistically, these declines in prejudice may be an underestimate, given that when Google began keeping records of searches in 2004 most Googlers were urban and young, who are known to be less prejudice and bigoted than rural and older people, who adopted the search technology years later (when the bigoted search lines are in steep decline).

Stephens-Davidowitz confirms that such intolerant searches are clustered in regions with older and less-educated populations, and that compared to national searches, those from retirement neighborhoods are seven times as likely to include “nigger jokes” and 30 times as likely to contain “fag jokes”. Additionally, he found that someone who searches for “nigger” is also likely to search for older generation topics such as “social security” and “Frank Sinatra”.

What these data show is that the moral arc may not be bending toward justice as smoothly upward as we would like, but as members of the Silent Generation (born 1925-1945), Baby Boomers (born 1946-1964), and Gen-Xers (born 1965-1981) are displaced by Millennials (born 1982-1996) and Gen-Zers (born 1997-2012), and as populations continue shifting from rural to urban living, and as post-secondary education levels keep climbing, such prejudices will continue to wane and the moral sphere expand toward ever greater inclusiveness.

Who knows, maybe one day I’ll be able to pen an article titled “Race Doesn’t Matter.”

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Michael Shermer is the Publisher of Skeptic magazine, the host of The Michael Shermer Show, and a Presidential Fellow at Chapman University. He is the author of Why People Believe Weird Things, The Believing Brain, Heavens on Earth, and Giving the Devil His Due. His new book is Conspiracy: Why the Rational Believe the Irrational, out on October 25, 2022. Preorder here.