Science magazine wants us to study systemic racism

once joked to a friend that if math is racist, then Max Tegmark's theory that the universe is composed of math implies that racism is baked into the universe, systemically if you will. Therefore, if we abolished SR, it would destroy the universe. My friend, who works in the government, replied as she does about anything she doesn't like: it is not something to joke about (meaning the R-bomb, not the end of the universe, which is fine).

And knowing the atmosphere at NIH, maybe she's right. Still, in a way I feel sorry for Science magazine after they posted an angry editorial demanding that scientists start studying “systemic racism” to show we're the good guys. It's been there for a week now without a single comment. Perhaps, thinking it was another rant from their resident curmudgeon, no one bothered to read it, or maybe they were just afraid that their local bureaucrats would see it. Or maybe they're just wondering whether there's any point.

The author, one Agustin Fuentes, writes

American higher education is one of the places where racism has been, and still is, well documented again and again and again. Not unexpectedly, six of the nine justices on the US Supreme Court recently chose to disregard these facts and argue for a "race neutral" approach in college admissions. . . . There is little doubt that the data for systemic racism in science are robust.

After citing as evidence a number of publications that talked about the topic, including an entire special issue by Nature magazine, and claiming that academia is virtually crawling with R-stuff, he ends by saying

Some will decry this essay as 'woke' and use it as an example of how the journal Science has fallen off the path of "true" science.

He said it, not me. The point is that affirmative action, and therefore DEI, have been found to be illegal racial discrimination, and that's that. Anyway, before we start doing what he wants, somebody would have to answer three questions:

1. Is SR a real phenomenon or just something that was defined into existence?

2. Assuming there were something to discover about the topic, what journal would publish the results? The Journal of Woke Studies? Or how about the Journal for the Investigation of Archetypal Power Structures Reinforcing White Supremacy? Yeah, that one would be good.

3. If all those journals, including Nature, already wrote about this topic, why do we need more?

Here's the problem: the wokesters, or whatever we're supposed to call them, already know all the answers. They know this R-stuff is everywhere and accounts for everything. They know it comes from evil white males desperate to cling to power. So what's left to study? And what would happen to any article that found something different, say—heaven forbid—that it didn't actually exist?

We know the answer to that. So you might think no scientist would waste their time on this. But in fact there are 162 articles listed in Pubmed with “systemic racism” in the title. Here are two, selected at random.

Article 1: "Impact on underrepresented post-doctoral fellows"

Amazingly, despite the fact that only 6.3% of the subjects in this study were white and 50.4% served on “diversity-related committees,” the authors found that systemic racism was beneficial.

Over half of participants (57%) experienced psychological distress as a result of social unrest due to systemic racism. . . . Twice as many participants felt their mentoring relationships were positively (21%) versus negatively (11%) impacted by social unrest due to systemic racism. ^[1]

There you have it. Headline for the UK Daily Mail: “Scientists SHOW racism IS a good thing.”

Article 2: "Impact on "wildlife genetic diversity"

Here's an even more preposterous one. Schmidt et al., writing in PNAS^[2], hypothesized that there are fewer different kinds of wild animals running around in the inner city than in the burbs, and that this was caused by racism:

The strength of relationships between the racial composition of neighborhoods, genetic diversity, and differentiation tended to be weak relative to other factors affecting genetic diversity, possibly in part due to the recency of environmental pressures on urban wildlife populations. However, the consistency of the direction of effects across disparate taxa suggest that systemic racism alters the demography of urban wildlife populations in ways that generally limit population sizes and negatively affect their chances of persistence.

Our results thus support the idea that limited capacity to support large, well-connected wildlife populations reduces access to nature and builds on existing environmental inequities shouldered by predominantly non-White neighborhoods.^[2]

Notice the standard of proof here: all they had to do was show that there were fewer wild animals in urban areas; proving that racism was the cause was a given. You might think it would be a slam dunk. Amazingly, though, they failed to prove their hypothesis, but conclude it's true anyway, because why not.

‘Proving’ SR is easy. All that's required is to show a difference in demo­graph­ics correlates with something else. That may be why it's not particularly interesting to scientists. It's also dangerous: just mentioning the R-word puts a scientist's job at risk.

This is the kind of research that Science magazine wants us to do? They should count their blessings.

jul 27 2023, 10:26 am. updated jul 28 2023, 3:52 am