You're the racists. You hate White people, especially rich White Christian men. You're coming after us for Reparations and to enslave us, to destroy our culture, to propagandize our children in the public schools.
On the Right private property rights are held to be among those given by God, and not subject to state interference. Some Libertarians, such as Rand Paul, claim that this includes an absolute right to discriminate on private property, but that they would not patronize a business that did so. (As if there were any under Jim Crow.) Interference with private property rights is thus tyranny, and reverse racism.
Meanwhile, real racists/Real Americans are intent on dismantling the schools with vouchers, charter schools, Creationism, American Exceptionalism, and so on, and demand assorted other privileges to the detriment of the rest of the population. They also insist that they really are better than everyone else.
I'll have to give full explanations of the Reparations and enslavement memes some time. Briefly, if all of the South's wealth was built by slave labor (not quite all, but close), then Reparations means taking it all away and distributing it among descendants of slaves. Then Whites will have nothing, and will have no choice but to work for the newly rich but undeserving Blacks. Hence some of the more vicious hostility to candidate Obama suggesting that we "spread the wealth around." In addition, the Right claims that Progressives are Statists (roughly Communist Nazis), who intend to establish a comprehensive racist tyranny, enslaving Real Americans as Enemies of the State/People in a different way by creating new economic rights for the poor and taxing away all the hard-earned inherited wealth of the rich, capital gains, etc. Because Liberalism = Communism, and slaves were the ultimate proletariat, and Liberals/feminists/minorities/LGBTs are all Marxists together, boo-goo-boo-joob.
Thus, per Orwell,
Freedom is Slavery
because
Liberty = Private property rights
including, according to Rand Paul and others, the right to discriminate, which equally takes us straight to Orwell.
But as I said, those are topics for other times.
It is obvious that prejudice is bad for schoolchildren, but without the ability to measure the harm, we face continuous We're-Not-Racist, You're-The-Racists anti-Affirmative-Action denialism and claims of "special privilege" from the prejudiced, pretty much as during the time of "Separate But Equal" but more often in Dog Whistle Code now. We have known for many years that those discriminated against did less well on tests, but denialists (that is, White supremacists of certain types) claimed that that reflected real differences in ability, not racism.
One of the most important racism denialists was Physics Nobel Prize winner William Shockley, co-inventor of the transistor and author of The Bell Curve, purveyor of pseudo-scientific, lying-with-statistics arguments for White supremacy, [partly based on the research of psychologists Arthur Jensen, Cyril Burt, and H. J. Eysenck. Shockley also proposed that individuals with IQs below 100 be paid to undergo voluntary sterilization.] That makes him a founder of both the Information Age and the Disinformation Age.
Then there is Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas's fury over Affirmative Action. He hates it when people assume that he couldn't have gotten his law degree or his positions in the Bush Administration on his own merits, or that his place on the court is pure tokenism. And he's right on that second count. His place on the Court is in large part a reward for gutting enforcement as head of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC).
But let's put all of that aside. We have science to discuss today, not mere opinion. Researchers at Indiana University have found ways to measure learning as it is happening, not just later performance, and can thus measure the effects of prejudice on learning. The denialists will respond more or less as usual, of course, but the existence of contrary facts always makes it harder to do so, and over time reduces the numbers who believe them.
There are many things we can do about all of this. The simplest and most direct is to require kindergarten children to let anybody in their classes into any game and any other school activity, and then follow that same principle all the way through school. It is explained in detail in the book, You Can't Say You Can't Play, by Vivian Gussin Paley, published in 1993.
But that, as we know, is Tyranny and Cultural Genocide. If you think that desegregation or Global Warming was tough, wait until we try this.
Negative stereotypes shown to affect learning, not just performance
Published: Monday, July 26, 2010 - 14:23 in Psychology & Sociology
Robert J. Rydell of Indiana University.
Excellent school, IU. My wife is a graduate. Notables include WW II correspondent Ernie Pyle; Gödel, Escher, Bach author Douglas Hofstadter; neurologist Jill Bolte Taylor, author of My Stroke of Insight. Sign up here to donate your brain to her research organization NAMI if you have some interesting neurological condition. Mine is a combination of ADHD with professional-level ability in math and Zen Buddhism, amateur skill as a musician, and a flair for languages. They also accept normal brains for comparison. Now if we can get some hardcore Tea Party donations...
Negative stereotypes not only jeopardize how members of stigmatized groups might perform on tests and in other skill-based acts, such as driving and golf putting, but they also can inhibit actual learning, according to a new study by Indiana University researchers. While the effect of negative performance stereotypes on test-taking and in other domains is well documented, the study by social psychologist Robert J. Rydell and his colleagues in IU's Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences is the first to show that the effects might also be seen further upstream than once thought, when the skills are learned, not just performed.
Not that this is any secret. When my mother, Mary Cherlin, was a middle school counselor, she was continually appalled at schoolteachers who were unable to comprehend that hunger, home uproars such as divorces or deaths, or overt hostility from other students could affect student performance. They routinely trotted out two explanations. The affected students were either stupid or lazy, or both. But such attitudes are not universal. There are teachers, counselors, and others everywhere who can see (as the British say) further into a millstone than most.
For example, Scout Finch, in To Kill a Mockingbird, lays it out quite clearly in describing her first day at school. An even more explicit and detailed, but still fictional, case is in Bang the Drum Slowly (novel and movie), where the worst catcher on a baseball team becomes the best, the only difference being that one of the pitchers decides to respect the catcher after finding out that he is dying of cancer. Or the non-fiction Invictus, where Nelson Mandela prods the South African Springbok rugby team captain, François Pienaar, to raise his team far above what they think they can do, to win the first rugby World Cup to be held in South Africa.
Henry Ford put it thus.
Whether you think you can do something, or you think you can't, you're right.
It is an old Zen koan.
Disciple: I have a stone at home that sits up and lies down. Can I carve it as a Buddha?
Master: Yes, you can.
Disciple: Can I not carve it as a Buddha?
Master: No, you cannot.
In Chinese symbolic discourse, the stone is the disciple's own mind, and home is himself. This is the kind of koan where you can actually understand what the Master says, simply reflecting back the disciple's changing state of mind, but the hard part is doing anything about your own mind. Jill Bolte Taylor has a good story on that.
However, popular knowledge and wisdom only counts as conjecture, at best, in science. The question for scientists is how to rule out alternative explanations definitively, raising an idea toward the highest level, a consistent theory. Basically, you need a model with predictive power, and you want to create a number of situations with only one difference each, and measure the differences in the outcomes. These situations ("experiments") have to cover as much of the range of the model as possible.
If the experimental results agree with the model, you get to use the model in an increasing range of practical situations, and you also get to do the whole thing over again more precisely, or with an improved model, and again and again without end.
Einstein's General Relativity is one of the best-established theories ever, but we continue to run ever more stringent tests on it, such as the recent (failed, unfortunately) Gravity Probe B and the various gravity telescopes, which have been able to search increasingly large haystacks for the elusive needles, with no luck yet. You'll hear about it when they do find one.
In learning theory, giving tests doesn't even count as measuring the learning process, only what comes after learning does or does not take place.
"The effect on learning could be cumulative," says Rydell, whose research focuses on stereotype threat involving women and mathematics. "If women do not learn relatively simple skills early on, this could spell trouble for them later on when they need to combine a number of more simple skills in new, complicated ways to solve difficult problems. For example, if a young girl does not learn a relatively simple principle of algebra or how to divide fractions because she is experiencing threat, this may hurt her when she has to use those skills to complete problems on geometry, trigonometry, or calculus tests."
The cases of girls and women are of major importance worldwide, of course. But we need to replicate the result for every invidious distinction made in our society, and in other societies: race, LGBT/whatever sexual differences, ethnicity, national origin, legal status, religion, political party affiliation, income, and many others. Caste in India and in nearby countries and among overseas populations. We need to know whether this effect is universal, or whether it might be more serious in some cases than in others, or take different forms. Similarly, we have to examine every kind of skill, and every other kind of learning. Does the threat that Sinners go to Hell affect children in Christian schools in the same way?
On the other hand, the Right will look at the same research and say, "See? I told you so! This is part of the relentless Liberal racist media conspiracy echo chamber telling White children that they are inferior and only Blacks and other minorities are worthy, in order to keep our children from learning what they should (about our culture and values) and taking their rightful places at the head of society. And to try to turn them Secular Humanist, Darwinist, and Gay while they are at it."
This reduced learning may ultimately hamper efforts to help women enter into careers in science and mathematics, where they are currently underrepresented.
The study, "Stereotype threat prevents perceptual learning," was published on Monday (July 26), in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Early Edition. Co-authors are Richard M. Shiffrin, Kathryn L. Boucher, Katie Van Loo and Michael T. Rydell, all from IU.
The full paper is available only to paid subscribers, or on payment of a $10 fee. Requiring free publication of all National Academy of Sciences and other government-funded research is a topic for another day.
The study was designed to examine "attention and perceptual learning in a visual search," not mathematical learning specifically, because the tasks used in the experiments allowed researchers to easily differentiate between learning effects and performance effects. Through a series of experiments involving Chinese characters and color judgment tasks, the researchers were able to show that actual learning had not occurred in the group of women who had been reminded of the negative stereotypes involving women's math and visual processing ability. Instead of finding it difficult to express learning, which is a typical effect of stereotype threat, they had not learned the same skill that women in the control group, who had not been exposed to the negative stereotypes, had learned.
The women in the study were not threatened or shamed, which would be unethical. Just reminded that negative stereotypes exist. In the terminology of the study, however, these women are called the "stereotype threat group" because they are proxies for those actually threatened in our society.
The women in the stereotype threat group appeared to try too hard to overcome the negative stereotype, ultimately searching for the characters in the experiment in a focused yet unproductive manner rather than letting the figures just "pop out," as they normally would have after some training.
"The results seem to fit with the view that the women under threat try harder to carry out the task, thereby persisting in effortful serial search throughout training, and failing to find and learn an alternative strategy that makes search easier and less effortful," the authors wrote.
This is a fundamental problem in all education involving skill rather than memorization. Learning a skill means letting one's internal neural network do the work, so that the skill becomes as automatic as walking or breathing or riding a bicycle, without conscious effort or conscious knowledge of what is going on. In extreme cases of artificial skills, such as master musicians, the unusually skilled practitioner becomes unaware of fingers and keys on the instrument or other physical connections. The player, the instrument, and the music are one, according to many such musicians.
But we all speak in that way. We think of meanings, and the words come out with no awareness of the complex internal processes involved, and the numerous areas of the brain that handle different kinds of process. Except in cases of aphasia from damage to one or more speech centers in the brain, in which case a wide range of speech and comprehension deficits appear.
"Women who are good at the skill they are performing are more likely to show stereotype threat because they have more invested in disproving the stereotype and are more distracted by the stereotype," Rydell said.
This gets very nasty very quickly, particularly when a member of a disfavored group is breaking into the turf of a previously favored group for the first time. It took not only consummate skill, but a special temperament for Jackie Robinson to integrate baseball, or for the first women lawyer, scientist, doctor, mathematician, computer programmer, what have you in each society, without falling victim to this effect. There are numerous biographies of such women and minorities, such as
and many others.
Similarly for first Black whatever, or first Indian Untouchable whatever, of whom there are many fewer, because India is way behind on these issues. The Fundamentalist Hindus most intent on maintaining invidious caste distinctions are known as the Hindutva movement.
It would be much more difficult, but enormously worthwhile, to find and study those who are largely immune to the effects described here.
Rydell said he and his colleagues have conducted additional research specifically on mathematical learning and the results are forthcoming. They think the effect of stereotype threat on learning warrants more study by scientists and more attention by educators.
From your keyboard to the grant funders' eyes.
"(The present study) points to the importance of creating environments that reduce the impact of stereotype threat during mathematical skill acquisition by women," the authors concluded in their PNAS article. "If creating such an environment is not done, the learning deficits that result could well be cumulative, causing problems that continually worsen as development proceeds."
Could be cumulative?!? Well, these are cautious scientists. I'm not that cautious in my political judgments, as readers of this Translating Code series know.
Racism in America is pervasive, as are a host of other isms. The ists make sure that the noise level is so high that nobody can ever be unaware of the din, and almost nobody can be unaffected. Thus the children of the riff-raff are (the Right hopes) mostly kept in their place for a little longer, and They only have a few of the extreme uppity types to deal with at a time. Like Obama, the hippie Commie Nazi Antichrist Sambo, and all the rest of us tyrannical Yankee Secular Humanist Statist N*****-and-Wetback lovers. And that nasty Imam of the Burlington Coat Factory cultural center cum prayer room, even if he did work for George W. Bush, who was not a Muslim, because IOKIYAR.
There are special cases, loyal Republicans from the various underclass groups who are allowed into the Big Tent as long as they stand over there at the side and cheer on cue, or take an active part in the propaganda. Michael Steele, for example, is mostly allowed, as is Phyllis Schlafly, and, as it may or may not have turned out just recently, Ken Mehlman.
I still have to do that Diary Entry on
Translating Code: School choice
We choose, you decide to agree with us. Real American schools teaching Real American history and values and religion and the rest for all Real Americans, with leftovers, if anything, for the unworthy remaining riff-raff of doubleplusunpersons, just like in the good old Dred Scott days in accordance with the Original Intent of the Slaveowning Founders. None of that nonsense with the Post-Civil War Amendments to the Constitution, such as birthright citizenship, and their tyrannical application of the Bill of Rights to the sovereign States.
Whew! Also the Death Tax and so on.
Dog Whistle Code Words glossary
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