https://losalamosreporter.com/2021/09/24/critical-race-theory/
Well this has created another fire storm on the Los Alamos facebook pages. It is the usual where people are saying you should teach critical race theory at LA schools with other saying they do not know what critical race theory is and using the defections of 70s for legal studies and saying it is only taught in "advanced academic settings". Some people saying it is only teaching the truth and to be against is to be racists and so on , so the conversation is pretty low level. This is at the schools but I guess it could be coming to the labs.
Just a few points on CRT, while it is true that it originated from a theory for legal system in the US, the basic concept can be and is widely applied to large sections of the social sciences, and humanities. It is the the hypothesis that literally every thing in the US has racial issues baked in them. The original idea was that the legal system has inherent or as the say "structural: racism built in the foundation. In some was this also leads to the ideal of structural racism where the even though you cannot find a law that is obviously racists the whole thing is still racist you just cannot see it and it must be reason for any type of inequality we see in society. Like all "critical theories" this same idea can then be applied to any field such art, literature, music, games, sports, roads, transpiration, food, and so on. Critical theories in general are so common in humanities/social sciences because they can be very easily applied to your particular field. Suppose you study the history of TV shows, (yes there are professors who study that), than all you have to do is is reexamine your previous work on TV shows in the context of critical race theory to show that TV shows have built in biases and racism that support one group and suppress others you than write some papers and NPR will interview for your great work where you talk about how Gilligan's Island reinforces racism we did not even know it. Heck you could even take a critical race approach to a reading off Intel chip manual. When the general public uses the term "critical race theory", what they really mean is just critical study to any field where the assumption is that race controls everything.
Of course the problem is why should you believe any of this? Even in its original form in terms of looking at law, there is simply no reason to believe that any of it is true, it is only a conjecture of "here is the way the law is" followed by a series of assertions . Sure you can cheery pick some data to make your case and ignore everything else ect. None of these critical theory approaches are actually a "theories" in any scientific sense of the word. This type of work does not follow any scientific approach such as being falsifiability, without that why should any accept what they have to say.
I agree that history as least as accurate as we can make should be talked about, such as slavery, race, right to vote, Jim crow. Along with all the efforts to correct this and the progress that can be made. Applying a critical theory approach bases race in the US is not appropriate for high schools or below because there is no reason to believe the theory itself is correct, which is that structural racism is a massive issues that underlies and explains all current issues of race today. At this point this is open to debate and real evidence with actual numbers strongly argue against CRT interpretations particularly in things like law, crime, and so on.
Math, statistics and actual analysis of data are something you will not find in CR or CRT.
If this comes back to the Sandia, LLNL or LANL it will of course suffer the same issues, namely what is the evidence that CRT is correct, and what is the evidence that it is not correct, what are the alternatives, and what do simply not know.
21 comments:
Some the LANL reporter facebook comments make my very afraid for humanity.
Someone actually pointed to a list of things and said these are "facts" that need to be widely taught in schools:
"Fact: The colonial settlers of the US committed horrific atrocities against the Native Americans. "
Yes but in implies somehow only the US settlers committed to the atrocities, how about all those atrocities in the Caribbean Canada, Central American, South American and Brazil. In fact if you look at atrocities the settles in the US is is less most of the other parts of the New World. Sure it is bad but it needs to put in the proper context of history at the time and region. History of any one nation is
meaningless without its proper context of the world and time period.
"The US government has never honored any of the treaties it entered into with the Native Americans."
This is a trick statement as official treaties with Native Americans ended in 1871 and replaced by other forms agreements. Many of these agreements since 1871 have indeed been kept. There is valid point that many treaties where broken but phrasing it this way without further context is deliberately deceptive. Also technically the claim is not even true because various treaties where kept, where mutually broken, or modified with mutual agreement. I will not go into the details and people in general we just broke many major treaties for land grabs,
"Fact: The US government committed genocide against the Native Americans."
False by definition as to what genocide is . There was no genocide committed against Native Americans, no serious scholar who knows anything about genocide would agree to this. Even the largest cases of mass deaths in Caribbean and CA and SA where due to disease and not considered genocide.
"Black people were bought and sold in this country. They were also tortured and sometimes killed if their owners were unhappy with them.
True and taught in school. This is also true of almost every nation in the New World, Africa, and the Middle east at the time and still goes on today in some of these places.You should teach about US slavery and slavery in general and also the "Fact" that the US fought a Civil war to end it. Of course even the Civil war was fought for more nuanced reasons that just slavery but it did play a role.
"The Civil Rights Era did not fix racial inequality or racial inequity in this country."
Actually the Civil rights era may indeed have fixed racial inequality in terms of laws, polices and so on. It is a fact that it ended reamining racist laws and issues of the Jim crow era. Racial inequity is a different issue and of course is more nuanced, why do so many different Asian groups do better that whites on average, why do certain religious groups do better, why do immigrants from from certain counties including those in Africa do so well. Equal opportunity does not mean equal outcome. The statement is so simplistic it has almost no value.
"The US soldiers who fought in World War II are the OG antifa. That's right, an entire world war was fought against fascism."
Ok now we are in nut land. Who says Antifa is against fascism? A good argument could be made that they are in fact fascists and use the old tactics of fascist. In any case US soldiers also fought Japan in WWII which where Imperialists. In terms of how the US soldiers or even the Allies fought WWII was against Imperial like forces that wanted to conquer allied lands. The US entered when Japan attacked PH, and than Germany/Italy declared war. The UK and Russia fought because they where being invaded or where going to be invaded.
It was clear that the Axis powers wanted to take over the world. The war was fought by the allies to stop that conquest of world not to end Fascism. If that latter was the case why did we not also go to war with Spain which was a fascist state under Franco.
Part 2
" Fact: The Tulsa Race Riots happened. It's a travesty that I was in my 40s before I learned that.
It may be fact that you learned this in your 40s but this has been taught for some time along with other incidents in Florida, California (Watts riots), Pinkteron attacks on so on. You can debate how important these where in the context of other history of those times but
they are taught.
"Fact: On the whole, white people in the US have the privilege of being completely oblivious to the realities of what life is like for any group of people not seen as white."
False there is no evidence for this. There is plenty of evidence against this such as the Civil rights acts, civil war, and enormous varity special programs. It is also meaningless in terms of individuals. This is strictly an opinion not a fact. Again you need to provide actual numbers and statistics for this and when you do this a good case can made for the opposite of this opinion. Also stop missing the word privilege it makes no sense in the context it is uses here. What exactly is "white privilege" and how do you even quantify it or measures it?
"Fact: The US was atrocious in their treatment of the Irish at one point in history. If you paid attention in history class you know the significance of NINA. Despite all of this, not only were the Irish never slaves, they were never bought and sold either"
Wait is this not a argument against the previous statement that all white people are privileged. I cannot even figure out what to make of this point. Does the person not like the Irish or something. I cannot even figure out what it means.
"Which of these facts should be omitted from my kids' education? What will my children gain from having the truth obscured from them?""
Well many these are not facts but opinions, others are meaningless without proper historical context or comparison. Some are just indeed just out and out false. In fact teaching these as facts will most certainly give an observed version of truth. By the way many of these points are not CR or CRT points but rather from Howard Zin books. The problem is Zin is considered controversial and many historians do not agree with his take or think he is very one sided. He ignores major events in some cases and also makes certain minor things as being very major if it helps fit his narrative. To be clear history is itself nuanced since there are many complexities and historians will often concentrate on certain things simply because they have lots of historical information on these but other importance things may have happened. Also one can always just pick the history you like and ignore that which you do not like.
Sure you can find a book by Zin and say "look this books says this", fine but you can also find other scholars that say the opposite.
Zins stuff could be taught in college or grad school as "ongoing research in history" but no this should be taught at the grade/high school level. If it was it should also be taught along with other approaches or they should just stick with well established facts
proper context for these facts and leave the speculation out.
A better thing to teach in school is how any political ideology can go astray and lead to tyranny which is completely consistent with history. Right now you have a bunch of people who think only fascism will lead mass death and since they are not fascist that can never be true of themselves or their ideology. Also simply calling other people fascists does not makes them fascist or more specifically does not make them Nazis.
The issue is that many of the schools are now teaching ideology. An ideology means to adapt reality to the theory you believe religiously, whereas empiricism is the use of reason to analyze reality, and form if not theories at least conceptualization from such observations and their rational deductions, I think a school should simply teach not to be ideological at all, but to be empirical. For that one needs statistics, data, numbers and analysis, all which are to be avoided at all costs by those who preach structural racism, identity politics, and social justice.
You are pissing in the wind with your well-intentioned two-part diatribe. If you want meaningful impact and readership, find a more conventional place to publish it.
9/28/2021 5:40 PM
Perhaps you are right and it is something to consider however I would guess the average reader of this blog is above average intelligence and has also thought about these things. When CRT was introduced in Sandia some workers made very detailed analysis of the issues and problems. So far LLNL and LANL have avoided the more problematic versions of this however there is a reasonable chance that such things could arise at the labs and we need to be on guard for this.
CRT uses the constructs of the scientific method without any of the rigor thus reducing it to the "candy coating" on a ball of contrived manipulation.
Well I told this stuff is coming to science. Speak out, get canceled. This is going to happen to the labs soon enough. MIT had been one the institutions that was holding out.
Dorian Abbot is a geophysicist at the University of Chicago. He was to give MIT's prestigious Carlson Lecture on Oct. 21. The topic was to be climates of extrasolar planets. Shamefully, MIT canceled the lecture under pressure from activists who objected to his political views.
https://twitter.com/mccormickprof/status/1444738353845489664
2/ Those who pressured MIT to cancel Dr. Abbot's lecture oppose his views on "diversity, equity, and inclusion": https://newsweek.com/diversity-problem-campus-opinion-1618419…. As you can see, these have nothing to do with the topic of his Carlson Lecture. The activists cancel anyone who dissents from their dogma
https://twitter.com/mccormickprof/status/1444738353845489664
So, what is it about this speaker that the activists did not like so the canceled his MIT speech.
He wrote this article: https://www.newsweek.com/diversity-problem-campus-opinion-1618419
>The words "diversity, equity and inclusion" sound just, and are often supported by well-intentioned people, but their effects are the opposite of noble sentiments. Most importantly, "equity" does not mean fair and equal treatment. DEI seeks to increase the representation of some groups through discrimination against members of other groups. The underlying premise of DEI is that any statistical difference between group representation on campus and national averages reflects systemic injustice and discrimination by the university itself. The magnitude of the distortions is significant: for some job searches discrimination rises to the level of implicitly or explicitly excluding applicants from certain groups."
I think they are now calling this guy a nazi. Great.
https://legalinsurrection.com/2021/10/mit-cancels-lecture-by-u-chicago-geophysicist-dorian-abbot-over-under-pressure-from-campus-mob/
Prof. Abbot’s big thought crime was expressing disagreement with some aspects of “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” he considers counterproductive (and which may be unlawful). Prof. Abbot didn’t express disagreement with diversity as a goal, or extraordinary outreach to minority hiring prospects to expand the pool, or actions to make sure the hiring process was free from explicit or implicit bias. He supports all those things.
Rather, after all that diversity initiative had been accomplished and a hiring decision had to be made, Prof. Abbot expressed the view that the most qualified remaining candidate should be chosen, which is consistent with U. Chicago policy.
> This is going to happen to the labs soon enough...
The person that led the charge against Abbot is a postdoc at LLNL. So the illiberal types are already here.
10/04/2021 4:08 PM
Some good news Princeton is now hosting the talk by Abbot on the same day that the MIT talk was supposed to happen.
There is a great article by Abbot who explains the situation and how we can fight this toxic cancel culture cult.
https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/mit-abandons-its-mission-and-me
Part 1
Since this is a CRT pos and it seems to be relevant to the lab and the town of Los Alamos I should say a few words. The local paper has a war of comments with different sides on the CRT subject. The more left leaning people claim that no one is teaching CRT at the schools and it is only taught in law school or gradate school. Again CRT was originally proposed by law professors in the 70s to conjecture how laws could somehow be systematically racist even though you cannot seen anything racial about them. Over the years this has expanded to include the larger umbrella of what is known as "critical studies" related to race, in that any system could analyzed as being systemically racist, even though nothing overtly racist can be seen. This the of approach is now very common in universities, colleges, high schools and activists groups. It simply contends that racism is huge issue in the United States, it occurs because of white supremacy and it is systemic in that it is baked into the system so it is everywhere yet you cannot point to any actual example of clear racist policy, action, law, behavior or so on. When the people who are moderates or conservatives refer to CRT they actually just mean critical studies of race. On the left they simply say this is not CRT, which is is only taught in grad school and it is simply teaching and accurate history of the US and addressing the obvious problem of racism. By the way BLM is bases on this critical approach in that it asserts that policing is inherently racist which is obvious because blacks are killed so often by police. BLM and its tenets are then good things to help save black lives. The problem of course is that the numbers show the exact opposite and there is plenty of evidence that BLM has lead to high crime in the black community and more dead black people.
Another is simply the notion that there is some issue of racism in the US and this needs to be taught in school, training in corporations and so on , however the numbers do not support any such conclusion that there is any real issue of racism in the US at the moment.
I found this little gem on the Los Alamos paper
>"There is no “discussion” in this “article.” Just a bunch of denial of the social inequities that exist in the world as a result of the social structures that have enabled certain >demographics to obtain exploitative power in our culture. "
It is only conjecture that social inequities exits due to social structures. There are many other possibilities. Also the implciations is that this is "white" culture but if you buy into that all social inequities exists due social structures than you also have to explain why there are so many groups that do better than whites in the US. Due Asians somehow have control of social structures, and so on. It is odd that it stops at whites, but never considers all the other groups.
>Your fear and anger is a direct result of the proposition that you don’t deserve the advantages (opportunities) that you’ve experienced. The hope of a progressive society is not that people should be denied advantages, but that those advantages should be made available to >all, and that historical disadvantages need to be compensated for.
Advantages are made available to all, can your show me law or policy that disadvantages a group? How far back does one have to go to compensate for disadvantages? Also this does not take into account individual family history, it only takes into account averages. So you are going to compensate someone who may have come from a long family linage of wealth while at the same time individuals from the so called privilege groups who could have extreme hardship. Also which groups do you count, blacks, Hispanics, mixed people, Italians, Middle east, Catholics? How do you decide who gets what?
>Should we employ any specific philosophy in the education of our youth? Yes, the philosophy >of critical thinking and self realization and exploration.
I fully agree but if you actually did this this whole "white privilege" "systemic racism", "unconscious bias", "police brutality", "certain groups have power" falls apart very rapidly, particularly when you actually look at numbers.
>We should not try to persuade children to “believe” what previous generations have accepted as true. We should give children the skills to understand and learn about the world and it’s inhabitants themselves. They should question every idea presented to them and look for >evidence to support any explanation for how the world works.
Well many of the things that previous generations believed where true, not to mention that many issues where not university held. For example even at the nations founding a large portion the population was against slavery and moral and philosophical grounds. Even at the start of the nation there where free blacks that could vote in many states. And yes they should question every idea including CRT.
"The way things were taught in the past is destructive to the evolution of our society. "
The way all things where taught? a subset? This simply makes so sense. I would argue that the way things where taught has been pretty good because it has allowed the evolution of the US society to get rid of slavery in the South, womens rights, getting rid of jim crow and so on.
All this progress could have come about through the traditional teaching
>The only people that would support such destruction are those who aren’t capable of envisioning a better world in which more people live in harmony with each other and with the >natural world we inhabit.
Again I agree the problem is that popular notion bases on CRT, and the various ideas of race controls everything will probably lead to less harmony and more death. There are numerous studies showing race relations are getting worse in the US particularly since 2014 which also coincides with all this language out of CRT, such as white privilege, unconscious bias and so on. If you want a better world that stop trying to blame a single group for all the worlds problems. It is not true, it is not historically accurate and it is very harmful.
10/07/2021 2:07 PM
Well said, if probably ineffectual against the tide of CRT.
It is getting dumber and dumber. The LANL daily post is just going downhill at this point. Hopefully a giant astroid will hit and we can give the squids a chance at being the dominant species and doing better than humans.
"Anna Llobet Megias posted “Nearly all Black Lives Matter protests are peaceful despite Trump narrative, report finds”'
To be clear I have never considered Anna as someone to take seriously, but hell this just beyond bad even by Anna standards. You know there is a huge difference between protest, gathering and riot? This is like saying the 30 elderly people over 70 who gathered in the Taos plaza in June 2020 on a Sunday for hour to hold signs is exactly the same as the many thousands of rioters that destroyed large sections of Los Angles in June 2020, including two different stores that members of my family worked at. This mostly peaceful thing is just bizarre, they count any kind of legal gathering the same as a riot, which is nuts. There is a huge difference in scale, legality and violence. No one is saying legal protests are bad but these are not the same as large scale violent riots the brought about death and destruction. In 2020 you could watch live stream after live steam every night of looting, murder and mayhem in a specific set of cities. It is utterly dishonest to equate small scale legal peaceful 1 hour protests of 10s of people that occurred in thousands of small towns to large scale all day and night riots in 15 cities that had thousands of people. Riots and protests are not the same by size, purpose, duration and outcome. I suspect that many of these people saying "mostly peaceful" know this as they simply cannot be that dumb. 95% of all protests where peaceful but 100% of all large scale riots where violent. Two totally different things that should not be compared.
They also keep going on about how the riots are not connected to the Covid spike in July/Aug 2020 by citing a working paper that never got published but has been revised a few times. This same paper did the same "mistake" by lumping riots with protests, two different things. Ironically Anna may not know that she may have played a role in that paper not getting published..... ;). Strange how the world works sometimes. Perhaps you should not bring attention of things to people that might have some understating of statistics. Just saying.
It is shocking how people in the Los Almaos paper just argue by but just adding a single link to a MSM to prove their point. They seem to either forget all the other studies against this point, or they simply have never read the actual article. You see this all the time by people are educated. One the latest is a Video going around from Project Veritas on some Pfizer employees saying stuff like having Covid is probably offers more protection against Covid than the vaccine. Not a very controverisal opinion. The commentators than just take a wikipedia page entry saying PV is a far right, dishonest organizations that edits its videos. The problem is that every link the WP article are just opinion pieces. Did anyone look up these sources, also why would anyone trust anything in Wikepdia when in comes to politics, even the founders are saying that wikipedia now just left wing propaganda. The dead giveaway is them saying PV is far right, that is out and out false. In fact they keep saying then anything the is moderate or conservative is now far right. You cannot simply claim something is far right, you have to provide obedience. Pointing to opinion pieces is not evidence.
It kind of makes me embarrassed to be at Los Alamos at times. But I have to remember to be not-see, it is also what you do not see who his not posting which is just as important as to what you do see. So far most if the posts on the LANL newspapers have been by people that are not interesting or known as the best and brightest. There has only been a couple posts or letters over that I ever see from people that are worth listening to to. I think there still lots of smart people at LANL they just do use social media much.
10/09/2021 2:43 PM
I understand your point and I think I agree with it, but it would be a lot more clear to me and others if you proofread before you post. Some of your missing or wrong words can be seen to significantly change your intended meaning.
It kind of makes me embarrassed to be at Los Alamos at times.
10/09/2021 2:43 PM
Not nearly as embarrassed as Los Alamos is.
Not nearly as embarrassed as Los Alamos is.
10/11/2021 6:33 PM
The lab? No way. The town, meh, probably not.
They also keep going on about how the riots are not connected to the Covid spike in July/Aug 2020 by citing a working paper that never got published but has been revised a few times. This same paper did the same "mistake" by lumping riots with protests, two different things. Ironically Anna may not know that she may have played a role in that paper not getting published..... ;). Strange how the world works sometimes. Perhaps you should not bring attention of things to people that might have some understating of statistics. Just saying.
10/08/2021 12:26 AM
Here is the actual paper, it was reported widely in the papers but as of Oct 2021 has not been published in a journal even though the first draft came out in June. All I can say is a lot of people had major issues with just about everything in the paper, below is a link.
Black Lives Matter Protests and Risk Avoidance: The Case of Civil Unrest During a Pandemic
https://www.nber.org/papers/w27408
What is funny is how this draft came out in June 2020 but there was spike in Covid in July 2020 in the US in the cities where there where the mass riots. From what I can tell they than modified their data to include a huge amount of towns that had small scale legal protests to dilute the data . If you go with the original data of the cities with riots in June 2020 you get a correlation if you add in 1700 towns you dilute that correlation so much that it becomes "inconclusive". I believed they modified this is Jan 2021. I find this to be borderline scientific misconduct.
Look at the data in
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/us/covid-cases.html
It shows a local min in Covid on Jun 13 followed by a local max on July 22 for the entire nation. You can than put in individual counties like "Los Angeles" (riot) (Santa Cruz) (only protest) and you can see peaks are only present or the peak is always bigger in the counties with riots. This generally holds with all the major cities that had riots, on the site you can pick and choose the counties and states and the trend will become clear. It is kind of uncanny. What these clowns did was count Santa Cruz protest in the park to the LA riot and than said they are exactly the same where one had a peak and the other did not therefore protests had no correlation with Covid spikes. There is no way they could have been than stupid, they must of known what they where doing to try and get the result they wanted. Luckily the referees, and perhaps a few other people (from New Mexico ;) caught this rather rapidly. The problem is this draft report keeps being brought up in the news media. The peak of Covid in mid July 2020 in the US is most certainly related to the riots of June 2020.
This is good.
"These risk-avoiding responses to protests, coupled with mask-wearing by protesters, explain why BLM protests did not reignite community-level COVID-19 growth."
Sure the legal small scale protest the people had on masks but all the large scale riots had large fraction not wearing masks, you can go online and watch the riots from June 2020 or type in the riot 2020 Santa Monica and it clear that a large fraction on not wearing masks.
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