In 1995, Claude Steele and Joshua Aronson published some research postulating that one contributing factor in racial achievement gaps was a thing they called stereotype threat. They theorized that performance can be affected by the expectation that you are being evaluated according to a stigmatized category that you belong to (or even that you are believed to belong to) that carries a stereotype of being less capable at the task you are doing. You then underperform, meaning you do worse than you would if the stereotype threat were not present. It is one of the most researched explanations of test score gaps along far more lines than race at this point. Ten years ago a survey article counted more than 300 studies done on the phenomenon. Not all of them have accepted it as a central explanation of achievement gaps, but the overwhelming consensus at this point is that stereotype threat is a real phenomenon, and it certainly can affect performance, In a field like social psychology where increasing attention has been given to problems with replicating results in further studies, stereotype threat is actually one of the most replicated results you will find. I have to say that I initially thought the idea was ridiculous when I first heard it about 20 years ago, but it seems pretty well confirmed at this point. There is no denying that the anxiety about being labeled as bad in some way can affect someone's performance in areas of complete competence. There is a real effect on executive function and cognitive processing that comes from such anxiety. (Incidentally, actual researchers looking into the achievement gap on the left and right have been converging toward accepting each other's explanations as partial explanations of the phenomenon. It's an interesting case of depolarization in academia while society gets more polarized.)

I taught Geoffrey Cohen's excellent book Belonging: The Science of Creating Connections and Bridging Divides this past semester. He gives a really interesting example of stereotype threat that flips all the expected categories. He describes an event in the life of Eminem that sure seems like an example of stereotype threat. Before Eminem was successful, he showed up for a competition of some sort for rappers, completely ready to perform. Some people then told him that because he's white he'll never be a good rapper. That triggered stereotype threat in him, which induced enough anxiety to affect his ability to do the thing that he has proved himself perfectly capable of doing in his subsequent career. He got up on that stage and just couldn't do it. Stereotype threat can occur when the marginalized or stereotyped identity is normally in the majority if in some smaller context that identity is in fact stereotyped and associated with lower performance. This is a really good case of that.

He then gives another example of stereotype threat among white people that blew my mind. He thinks the observations that Robin DiAngelo has made about white people having difficulty engaging with race-conscious people on issues of race, which she calls white fragility, provide an example of stereotype threat among white people. These interactions trigger the stereotype of white people being racists, and they then underperform in their ability to engage in conversation. They fail to see important distinctions. They think they are being accused of being racists when someone is merely pointing to unconscious behavior or systemic forces in society. They can't hear what's actually being said, and then they misrepresent it pretty badly. This is a phenomenon I have witnessed countless times in conversations online, so I was intrigued by the idea.

I just finished teaching through John Inazu's Learning to Disagree: the Surprising Path to Navigating Differences With Empathy and Respect, and John was in town a couple days ago to speak at Syracuse University, so I got to meet him and talk for a bit. I've been thinking a bit about one of the points he makes in the book that has serious implications for how we conceive of each other and how we engage with each other. He distinguishes between being wrong and being evil. It's important to understand how he's using those terms before going on, so let me explain what he means.

Lots of people are wrong about lots of things. No one is infallible, and we make many mistakes in our thinking every day. Sometimes those mistakes are relatively minor, and sometimes they are significant errors with serious moral consequences. But what he means by evil is something else. You can have a position that is incorrect, that we can evaluate as being morally wrong to hold and to carry out, without being evil in the sense he means it here. By evil here, he means holding your view because of absolutely terrible motivations. He intends things like wanting to harm people, ignoring people's interests not because you mistakenly think some good will come of it but because you genuinely don't care about their well-being and merely want to take advantage of them. People's well-being is irrelevant, or else you actually want to harm them.

Now lots of views are very wrong without being evil in that sense. Anyone who favors a policy because they think it will make people's lives better, when it fact it makes their lives worse, is wrong. Anyone who intends to say something complimentary but in fact insults someone is wrong. The person who insults someone because they want them to experience pain is being evil. The person who favors a bad policy because it will harm people is evil. Serial killers are evil. But many misguided people have good intentions for believing things that are very harmful. On Inazu's distinction, that puts them on the side of being wrong, not evil. Yet we label them as evil because we disagree. I saw a reference to a study done in 2016 that showed 40% of Americans believing anyone in the opposite political party was evil. Another study in 2020 showed 15% of Americans believing anyone in the opposite political party counted as engaging in terrorism by supporting the other side.

What that means is people are pretty bad at distinguishing between wrong and evil. Why do we care? Because motives matter, but also someone who is wrong can be reasoned with. Someone who is evil cannot be. That means we can engage in civil discourse and perhaps try to change people's minds if they are wrong. But genuine evil simply needs a red line drawn around it. The polarization we find ourselves in now is untenable, and we will never be able to move forward unless we can engage with people across differences of opinion without seeing the other side as evil.

So I want to think a bit about how to apply this in our current setting, along with some reflections on how this applies to the longstanding discussion about intent and impact.

People are getting energized about the idea of a brown Jesus, it seems. This question is a lot more complicated people expect it to be, for several reasons. Don't expect that all of your assumptions about this discussion are true. They probably are not.

1. There is a long, fact-challenged tradition within European art that presented Jesus as blond-haired and blue-eyed and within film using English actors with a similar look. This tradition is almost certainly incorrect, for two reasons. Even today, people from the Middle-East do not tend to look like that. Furthermore, it was probably even less that way 2000 years ago than it is now, because there has been more genetic mixing between the people of the Middle-East and Europeans since then, not less.

2. There is a long, fact-challenged tradition within liberation theology that called Jesus black for political reasons. It was an attempt to distance Jesus from his historical origins in order to deny whiteness a place in its reframing of Christianity that traditional Christians have long resisted because of its denial of biblical theology. The particular claim of a black Jesus is hardly what's really wrong with liberation theology, in my view. Its theological claims are the real problem. But nevertheless the idea of calling Jesus black is a big part of how liberation theology distanced itself from the theological tradition, and many hear something like that in this.

But even aside from the historical political context, the actual words themselves are not unambiguously or obviously true or false. There are several reasons I say that:

Three episodes into the Lord of the Rings: the Rings of Power, it's very clear that the writers of this show are trying to capture the central theological framework of Tolkien in their story. Tolkien's view of providence and the portrayal of the faithful remnant in Numenor is simply getting him right, at least so far. I was expecting this to be completely insensitive to Tolkien's major themes, perhaps even contradicting them, as Peter Jackson did numerous times in his original trilogy (less so in the Hobbit, ironically, given how much more hate there is from Tolkien fans about that). I could list numerous things:

1. Aragorn as reluctant king rather than biding his time for the right moment to assume his rightful throne while working behind the scenes to meet his kingly responsibilities, as in the books

2. Eowyn as seeking the second-wave feminist goal of trying to make women be like men rather than Tolkien's view of recognizing differences between men and women as something to affirm in women as equally good to any virtues more typical of men

3. Faramir's reduction to being a second-rate Boromir rather than the faithful remnant within Gondor who valued the right things

4. the Ents' motives for helping at Helm's Deep being presented as a hasty decision, completely contrary to their character

5. the presence of any elves besides Legolas at Helm's Deep running contrary to the entire theme in Tolkien of the elves in the Third Age largely hiding and avoiding the evil that was on the rise

I don't see anything as egregiously offensive as that in this show.

Some are upset that this show has been forced into inventing their own details to fill in, because the Tolkien estate refuses to let them use Tolkien's actual second-age materials outside the appendices, but that is the fault of Tolkien's heirs, not the creators of this show. What matters more is whether it is consistent with the world Tolkien gives us, and so far it mostly is. And what matters even more than that is whether the moral and theological framework is compatible with Tolkien's, and it seems from the third episode that they are actually trying hard to get it right.

Now there are a few things they could do to alienate Tolkien fans that I sure hope they do not do. If Meteor Man turns out to be any of the Istari other than Alatar or Pallando (or whichever other names Tolkien used -- I know there are several versions, and one version does have them appearing in the Second Age), then there is reason to be outraged. I think he is more likely to be Sauron than Gandalf, though, but we'll see.

If they don't follow through on the promise they have made that this is a transformation of a very imperfect Galadriel into what we see in the Lord of the Rings story, then that would be bad. But I am taking them at their word on this and thinking the claims of critics are simply premature. This is the Galadriel who becomes that Galadriel, and these experiences will serve to explain why she would know herself well enough to think Frodo's offer of the ring to her would play to all her bad tendencies. They have to had existed sometime in her long life for that whole scene in the Lord of the Rings to make sense.

Some I see are complaining that the show is woke, which of course is a stupid term at this point in its unclarity and lack of precision. I can think of a couple things that the now-orthodox social justice movement in our society wants to see that this show is doing, but they seem hardly concerning to any healthy conservative on social justice issues. There might be some issues on faithfulness to Tolkien's world, but I'm conflicted on that, even.

​This week I got through another round of going through some of the main points of John Locke's political philosophy. One theme I emphasize is how strongly Locke's views condemn slavery and in particular the kind of slavery that was going on in his own day. That's why I was so surprised this semester to encounter the view that Locke was a slavery apologist. It just so obviously did not fit his quite explicit view on the matter. Slavery is, for Locke, an example of the kind of violation of the principle of equality and autonomy that absolute monarchy violates, and absolute monarchy is his main opponent. If I enslave someone, that is by its very definition a contradiction to the principle that government requires the consent of the government. Additionally, Locke explicitly says that no human being can take another human being as property, because we are not really even self-owned, and we are all God's property, and God has not given us the right to own each other. I don't know how someone could be any clearer than Locke is about such things.

But a colleague this semester mentioned in passing something about Locke's defense of slavery, and she didn't mean his allowance for the British legal penalty in a just war where those willing to initiate an unjust war, whose penalty might be death, could be spared the death penalty in exchange for servitude, something Locke does present in his Second Treatise on Government while going on to reject the actual practice of slavery of his own day in the entire rest of that work. No, she seemed to think Locke simply agreed with the practice of slavery of his own day. I couldn't imagine how anyone could read the Second Treatise and think such a thing. He explicitly rejects that practice throughout his work.

I encounter people of all sorts fairly regularly on social media. There is a real debate about how the word "racism" should be used. I have a lot to say about that, but I'm not interested in that debate for the sake of this post. There are those who have tried to rework our categories in such a way that prejudice and discrimination are not racism. Racism is purely a structural or systemic thing. Prejudice and discrimination are bad, but they are not racism. We ought to resist them and avoid them to the extent that we can, but racism is just the institutional, structural, and systemic stuff. In their view, we should reserve the word "racism" to refer to the system itself, not the people who do it or their attitudes or actions. Thus racism can only be in one direction, the direction that society enforces with structural, systemic, and institutionally determined forces that act mostly to the advantage of white people and mostly to the disadvantage of others. I happen to think that approach to how we should use the word "racism" is wrong in a few ways, but as I said I'm not interested in that debate for the sake of this post. I'm interested in a reaction against that view that I think goes too far in the other direction.

A very common response to those who reserve the word "racism" for structural, systemic, and institutional stuff is simply to deny that there is such a thing as systemic racism. That sort of statement has been increasingly common on the right in response to what they (rightly in my view) regard as problems in how people (mostly on the left) are conceiving of racism. But what seems to me to be an overreaction is simply to deny that there is such a thing as systemic racism or to deny that it is our most serious sort of racial problem.

The idea of systemic, institutional, or structural racism goes back before the Civil Rights era. People had been calling attention to these sorts of problems well before the time of MLK. But it began to be more mainstream as people noticed that changes in laws and societal attitudes were not bringing along changes in some of the other forces that advantage or disadvantage people along race lines. MLK began to see this toward the end of his life, and he began to recognize that just getting people having the right attitudes and making changes in laws to prevent explicit and deliberate discrimination would not be sufficient to solve all of our race problems. There are systemic, structural, and institutional forces that lead to disadvantage and advantage in ways that no one intends. No one is deliberately discriminating or explicitly prejudiced. Yet disadvantage and advantage occur. The problem is in institutions, structures, and systems rather than in beliefs, desires, emotions, or actions of individual people. That is the concept of systemic racism.

On one conception of racism, the one I was raised with, the one that feels to me like how the English language actually operates, these systemic problems are simply not racism. I completely understand those who don't like to call it racism. I myself don't like to call it that. Racism is an attitude of the heart or a set of actions of individuals. But that's a linguistic issue. It's not an issue of what the world is actually like. The thing people are in fact calling systemic racism, and in fact the only thing that term has ever referred to, is real. Not only is it real, but it consists of what seem to me to be the more significant and substantial problems that we have in our society at this point. The stuff I'm inclined to call racism is becoming less present, less effective in causing real problems. Why? Because there is such a stigma attached to racism, to even being perceived as racist, that it's diminished to a much greater degree than the systemic problems have. But the systemic problems remain. And the systemic problems do trace back to racism in the classic sense, when you look hard enough and far enough. They wouldn't be present without racism having occurred.

​Here's an non-racial example for anyone having trouble understanding the concept of a systemic problem. Adderall is a controlled substance. People take it when they have no condition requiring it, and people take doses that are much too high. That means it's illegal for a pharmacy to put it on auto-refill, and it's illegal even to prescribe it with refills. You have to call your doctor every month to get them to submit a new prescription. Typically, the people who are taking Adderall are the same people who have executive control issues and are going to have a harder time being organized and remembering to call about that new prescription, which places an additional burden on people who are already worse off when it comes to things like this. That results in days without the medication that helps them be more organized and attentive. No one is trying to make life harder for people with ADHD and autism who rely on this medication. That's not the point. The goal is to prevent abuse by those who don't need the medication to begin with. But because of laws designed to prevent that abuse, the people who need the medication suffer. This is what a systemic or structural problem looks like. 

Are there such problems that occur along race lines? There certainly are. There are institutional, systemic, and structural forces in our society that work against people of color, some of them stronger for certain groups than for others, some of them not because of any present discrimination but just because of the effects of past discrimination (e.g. housing segregation today is not a result of present-day bank practices but because of past discrimination in mortgages and racial contracts of who could live in which neighborhoods), and there remain disparities in infrastructure, housing quality, locations of shopping or other necessities nearby, and so on. School segregation no longer has any laws forcing it, but kids tend to go to school where they live, and the quality of schools reflects the resources of the neighborhood. Together with policies like school choice, which allows enterprising parents and students to get out of the bad schools but also thereby makes the bad schools worse for those without that initiative and drive, our schools get more segregated and more disparate in quality and outcome, and that occurs along race lines. There is many careful studies that identify biases that affect law enforcement and criminal justice, disparities in health care, stigmatizations and stereotypes that affect our behavior even if we think the stereotypes are false, and so on. It should be obvious that many of these things are not racism in the classic sense, but they are the only thing that people  have ever meant by terms like "systemic racism." They are disparate results that occur along race lines in ways that are predictable and systemic. The forces in our society tend to produce those results along certain lines in ways that are consistent and recurring. And these problems are much more serious than a privileged white kid using the N-word or not inviting the one black kid in the mostly white neighborhood over for a birthday party.

Now if you prefer to call these things "systemic advantage" and "systemic disadvantage" or something like that, I have great sympathies for why you might want to do that. But the fact remains that these are the only thing that terms like "structural racism" and "systemic racism" have ever meant. Words mean what they are used to mean. So those terms do in fact refer to these sorts of problems. That is so, whether you want to think of these sorts of issues as racism or not.  I tend to be in the "not" category on that myself. But systemic racism is real, and those who consistently deny it are in effect denying that any of these problems are real. It does not help the cause of the political right in trying to push back against some of the excesses and unhelpful behaviors of the left on race issues if it just looks like you are denying observable facts, and that's what denials of systemic racism look like to the left. If you want to have real conversations where you engage with real people and actually try to convince them of things, to help them see that you have a legitimate point against anything they are saying, it helps to understand their view and get it right first. You are not doing that if you simply deny the reality of systemic racism and say no more. That strategy is doomed to failure. It is no wonder that they will call that strategy "white fragility" or "white supremacy," because it just looks like a desperate attempt to pretend that our most serious problems along race lines simply don't exist. Let's stop doing that, please. If you don't want to be accused of white fragility and white supremacy, then do not set yourself up to be accused of it by behaving in exactly the way the left predicts you will act. And then maybe there will be room for an actual conversation where people seek to understand each other and move forward.

Matthew Franck notes [note: link is now dead, and I haven't been able to find the specific post if it's still up) that on one of Barack Obama's exam questions from when he was teaching law, he asks whether an equal protection challenge can be brought against a law requiring states to be color-blind. Franck says he knows of lots of people who think the equal protection clause requires states to be color-blind, but he hasn't encountered a serious argument anywhere that such laws violate the equal protection clause. I haven't either, but I don't read law reviews. Still, such an argument isn't hard to imagine, and I think it's actually a sound argument.​

The equal protection clause entitles people of all races to equal protection of the laws. The laws therefore need to be able to rely on the distinction between members of one race and members of another if they are to ensure that each race is equally protected by them. Therefore, color-blind laws, which disallow the state from paying attention to race, violate the equal protection clause.

It sounds like a pretty good argument to me. As a policy issue, I don't mind restricting affirmative action in universities to class rather than race, or at least ensuring that the standards aren't lowered as much as they are. There's a significant argument that the way affirmative action is typically practiced in that setting (as opposed to in the workplace, which is a very different matter) seems to me to harm the people it's intended to help, given that admissions officers already go out of their way to promote diversity (so there's no discrimination to combat at that level), and it means accepting people who won't be able to do as well and then will appear less good when they graduate than they would at a lower institution with much higher grades and more time for extracurriculars. There are other negatives too, but that's the one that seems decisive to me. I think it's much better to work at the high school level and below to help kids do better in school, to care more about school, and to think of college as something worth doing.

But I can't see how it could be good to ban affirmative action by not allowing a state to recognize racial distinctions in any way. That sort of law is not just bad policy. It really is unconstitutional because it prevents enforcement of the equal protection clause.

I have now completed my metaphysics of race series, so here is a list of all the posts with links for easier navigation.

1. Metaphysics of Race: Introduction
​2. Classic Biological Racial Realism
​3. Race Anti-Realism
4. Races as Social Kinds
5. Social Constructionist Views of Race
6. The New Biological Race View
7. The Ethics of the Metaphysics of Race
8. Minimalist Race and Whiteness
9. Short-Term Retentionism, Long-Term Revisionism