I know that there are two kinds of physicists roughly divided into geometers and theoreticians. My sympathy lies with the former, if I understand them correctly. Like Tycho Brahe, my idol, they count precisely. IIRC, Brahe didn’t theorize about what made the stars burn brightly, but he sure did count and map them all.
It came to my attention some time ago that just counting by race should reveal something plain and obvious, but this common sense has be obscured by a surfeit of theoretical thinking about race. The simple fact remains that for every one black American, there are about seven white Americans. So on average, who gets to know more of whom? Even if we were all randomly distributed with regard to race, the brownian motion between us would cause the white dots to bump into other white dots more often than they bump into black dots. Whereas the black dots would more likely bump into more white dots than other black dots.
But we know that we are not randomly distributed by race.
Therefore it’s much more likely that white dots bump into white dots a great deal more than they bump into black dots. Similarly where black dots are congregated, they’re going to bump into way more black dots than white dots. Consider the following illustration. In the top figure, is my approximation of a random distribution with a ratio of about 7 white dots for every 1 black dot. In the bottom figure there is a cluster of black dots in the bottom right corner.
So regardless of the amount of freedom available to any particular dot in the two examples, mathematically those in the bottom right corner of the lower square are statistically more likely to have more bumping experience with more black dots than any other in the whole of that square. In that regard, they could be considered more credible on average, than any other. Now there’s a lot of data science I could do on this and quantize this that and the other, but what’s plain is the in the square with the black dot cluster the experience of any of those dots could very easily be privileged. You would not be far off in saying they more accurately represent, on average ‘a black experience’. But you would be quite wrong to say they accurately represent ‘the black experience’. You see those are only 5/12 of the black dots. Not even the majority.
What’s Kendi Got To Do, Got To Do With It?
What’s Kendi but a sweet old-fashioned notion? Who needs a black scholar when a black scholar can be broken? Indeed who needs a black leader? The sweet old-fashioned notion is that black Americans need black leaders and as such the words and wisdom of those individuals can be reliably taken as ‘what you people want’. That’s a racial theory for which many have predicted its demise. But there’s a racial sucker born every minute, and we’ve seemed to have had a boom recently. I say that’s an issue owing more to the dilution of American political leadership which should be obvious to anyone counting political polls. I have a theory about that, but let us just be geometers and count what we can see shall we?
We’ve all heard McWhorter and Loury tell us what weak sauce Kendi has been pandering, and I understand more about Loury’s life (now that I’ve finished his Late Admissions) to recognize why he would naturally argue that case. McWhorter argued similarly about Christine Gay, pointing to his time as her senior at Stanford U, as that university began its crusade to decenter whiteness. Mathematically, as I see things to the extent that I can, I have reasons to believe that Kendi’s takedown was inevitable. And it’s not the slightest bit ironic that Loury puts it out there in his book that he has had difficulty resisting the black role.
In my recent talk, I hope that I was able to communicate to educators that there is this temptation to offer special recognition to black students for bucking stereotypes. That’s because there is an underlying assumption about race which is that black Americans are always self-interested and self-serving when it comes to any subject directly or tangentially related to race. I think that is a fair assumption for the majority of young people, but we grow out of it. Just like you grew out of your crush for Marsha Brady. For me, all of a sudden, I was Jan Brady and I went through my Marsha Marsh Marsha phase.
While a lot of people have reasonable nose pinching complaints about DEI, I was thinking these things in the mid-80s when I literally, as a student leader, wanted to resign my position in a black organization or two because my grades were faltering. I didn’t come to college to be a black leader, but to study computer science. Then again, where were my black scientific people? Where were my black leaders? I was searching for some mythical brotherhood, some of which I found, most of which was imaginary. Without question I came to understand black racial unity was impossible, thus a singular definable constraint on proper black national leadership was also impossible. Blackness was and is a murmuration of birds of a feather. And yet, that’s not all the birds and they’re not migrating to a specific place. They were just grouped in that bottom right corner last time you looked.
Racial Markets
One of the best things Loury has done in his book was to do that collegial thing. He identifies all of the notables in his and adjacent disciplines. This is a new phenomenon I am coming to recognize as I hang out with academics. They see their job as the production of knowledge, rather like those in Hollywood see their job as the production of entertainment. Even amazingly talented artists don’t know how well they will be received - the business of production and marketing etc, is often hit or miss. Ask any adjunct. The business of academic production is as well. Whether or not your performance is world historical, you have to be nice to work with. Nobody likes an asshole genius. So I understand professorial collegiality as the necessary grease to keep the academic train[ing] on track, even and especially when assholes or those perceived as assholes are on board.
So there are idea markets for racial mythology and all have to be collegially accepted because the academic show must go on. You have to keep apostates around even if they must serve as the Blockbuster to the academic Netflix. Tenure is tenure, right? Once a role model, always a role model. Who can resist weighing in? Black people are somebody’s people. Who speaks for the dots? There’s got to be a PhD for every avenue of inquiry about race in America, and by gum we still have a long way to go. Or am I being sarcastic?
I think at some point we are going to find more West Africans representing the next generation of outstanding black American professionals. Hard to say how many it will take, but some are taking notice. Hard to say if they will code switch and reduce the number of syllables in their names. What will we think of our affirmative actions then? I suspect the political investment will remain and criticism of it will be the de facto proxy for racism, rather like criticism of Equity is today. First world problem.
Still, the math remains. We all believe we know exactly what race is supposed to mean. If we can’t make a snap judgement, we’ll ask “But where are you originally from?” and count noses that way. We will either have proximity to black dots or not, and we will privilege our stereotypes. But let me get back to one of the notables Loury identified.
Larry Summers, who was about to finish serving as Bill Clinton’s Treasury Secretary and would soon be named president of Harvard University, suggested to me that in my lecture I had described something like a bank run on black people. That had never occurred to me, but Larry was right! A bank run happens when people come to believe that their bank is going to run out of money. Believing their savings to be at risk, they all, in a totally rational fashion, attempt to withdraw it at the same time. But when everyone tries to withdraw all their funds at the same time, the bank actually does run out of money, which does put the savings of anyone who didn’t make it to the bank in time at risk. A shared belief about some state of affairs, regardless of whether or not it is unavoidably true, brings that state of affairs into being.
Loury, Glenn C. . Late Admissions: Confessions of a Black Conservative (p. 349). W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition.
As the poet said, you don’t have to believe in Santa Claus to see that people get gifts for Christmas. And this is the reality of the market for racial traffic. I know for a fact that there is a different kind of pull in my generation for finding ‘my people’ than there has been for Loury, and certainly Kendi is exceptionally notable and culturally massive - the pull for him has been enormous. But his takedown was inevitable as was Loury’s mishegoss around his own blackness, as is anyone’s about their ineffable racial identity.
No matter what we say, it’s still not all the dots. So maybe we stop connecting them, calling them constellations and giving astrological predictions, eh? A lot has changed in 400 years. A lot has changed in 40. I’m not the same as I was 4 years ago. How about you?
Let’s talk a little more about Loury’s autobiography.
I agree that his relating how the academic sausage is made is interesting and informative. He went back and forth a bunch on black identity politics.
He has re-defined what a candid admission is. Many would have taken many of the things he confesses to the grave.
It’s because of the nature and number of these candid admissions that I will take him at his word on why he went back and forth.
He was right on in his intro. He buys the reader’s belief in all his statements by his many, many statements against his own interest.