Mon 15 May 2006
EphBlog author David Rodriguez ‘06 graduates next month. What shall we get him for a present? How about a rehash of the Barnard/VISTA controversy of three years ago? Perfect!
You can read my prior commentary (here, here, here, here, here and here). Rodriguez commented here and here, but those discussions did not go on as long as they should have.
Too lazy to read all that? No worries. Allow me to summarize. Barnard said some things about Latinos and baseball on a local radio show that some students found objectionable. The key comments were:
1) “It’s not easy for a Latin player to take 100 walks.”
2) “Saturday Night Live used to do a skit called ¿Quién es más macho? - ‘Who is more macho?’ There is clearly a cultural aspect involved here.”
3) “It’s no secret that Latin American players hate to take pitches so they rarely walk. It’s an ego thing. Machismo. Swing for the fences every time and damn the consequences.”
4) “It’s a cultural thing with Latin players in terms of machismo.”
You can listen to the key portions of Barnard’s interview here. Many thanks to Rodriguez for providing me with this piece of Williams history.
Wait a second! Only two of those quotes are actually from Barnard! The other two are from noted Hispanophobe Sammy Sosa and baseball historian David Marasco.
Now, without looking, which ones of the 4 are most objectionable? If you find them all equal (either all objectionable or all not), then you ought to conclude that, whatever his other faults, Barnard is no less acceptable as a speaker on the topic of the interaction between Latino culture and baseball than, say, Sammy Sosa.
I don’t have anything more to say about this than I already have above. (By the way, Barnard’s quotes are numbers 2 and 4). Read the links if you want more details. The central point is clear:
If it is not acceptable at Williams to discuss the connection between culture and individual behavior, then something is very wrong with the intellectual life of the College.
Who would disagree? In this dispute the claim can be restated as:
If it is not acceptable at Williams to discuss the connection between Latino culture and individual behavior on the baseball field, then something is very wrong with the intellectual life of the College.
Consider a different example. James Webb’s “Born Fighting : How the Scots-Irish Shaped America” argues, among other things, that Scots-Irish culture is more prone to fighting and that some stereotypes, like the “Fighting Irish” of Notre Dame, are accurate. Can a book like this be read and discussed at Williams? What if some students found it offensive?
The correct response is not to doubt those students. They are, in fact, offended. We should empathize with them. But, in the end, the highest value at Williams must be open-minded intellectual enquiry.
By the way, Barnard himself may be Scots-Irish. This raises a delicious question:
¿Quién es más macho? Barnard o Rodriguez?
;-)
Happy Graduation David! And welcome to the world of finance.
UPDATE: Edited slightly. An earlier draft was presented by mistake.
UPDATE 2: Two links that I included in the prior draft caused offense and consternation. (See comments below for details.) I have removed them. To be honest, I had considered not including them at all since I knew that people would be offended, but, at the same time, I like to think that most of our readers are intelligent and open-minded enough to consider unusual points of view. Indeed, one of my personal missions is to bring a broader set of opinions to the Williams conversation. There is a balance to be struck, however, and when a link causes someone like (d)avid to resign as an author, the link is not worth the candle.
May 15th, 2006 at 8:23 am
#1 is the dumbest comment. Only six players in the entire major leagues walked more than 100 times last season, so it’s tough for everybody. Sortable stats below (sorry for long link)
http://boston.redsox.mlb.com/NASApp/mlb/stats/historical/player_stats.jsp?statType=1&teamPosCode=all&timeFrame=1&c_id=mlb&sitSplit=&Submit=Submit&subScope=teamCode&timeSubFrame2=1&baseballScope=mlb&timeSubFrame=2005&&sortByStat=BB
But furthermore, this should be fairly easy to check: What do the MLB stats say? An intitial observation: 3 out of the top ten leaders in walks are latin. Ortiz, Abreu, Pujols. Latin players account for 25% of the player base
People should also mention the categories that latin/carribean players excel in. 7 of the top 12 slugging percentage are latin/carribean. And if you look at On base plus slugging…you’ll see a fair number of latin names in the mix. (Unfortunately you cannot set a minimum number of games played to make comparison easier.)I count more than 12 latin players with a higher OBP than Johnny Damon who’s getting paid 15 mil per year to set up the yanks.
I’m all for open debate, but what do the overall statistics say about latin players and things like BBs and OBPs?! If the stats show more than 25 latin players in the top 100 for things like On base percentage or bases on balls, the above comments might not be part of a serious intellectual debate since it would then appear that their authors did not do their homework.
May 15th, 2006 at 8:54 am
I guess if a corked-bat (and likely steroid) using, barely intelligible (ever here Sosa interviewed?), washed-up baseball player is your measuring stick, a whole lot of dumb things voiced by members of the Williams community suddenly seem pretty intelligent by comparison.
I have no problem with serious discussions of attributes correlated (and of course, correlation does not equal causation) with race, and I am no fan of when PC runs amok to the point where that becomes difficult. Barnard’s comments, however, do not fall remotely within the category of serious academic discussion backed by any kind of evidence. In any event, I think you’ve covered this ground adequately and folks have moved on to the fair/unfair stereotype debate dujour (aka, athletes and property destruction).
As for the links you posted, I see no connection whatsoever to the topic of your post, let alone to Williams, and no apparent reason for their inclusion other than to engender angry responses, hence increasing your readership.
May 15th, 2006 at 9:47 am
David: You’re a glutton for punishment, unearthing this chestnut. As far as being offended is concerned, I don’t usually attempt to offend anyone. However, if a person should be offended by my words or behaviour, let them be offended. I get no profit out of reasoning with, or attempting to mollify, them. I find that many people are way too thin skinned, and I regard that condition as their problem. For instance, during my lifetime (especially in my early years in inner-city Cleveland) I’ve been called a “white motherXXXXXX” (edited for observance of your known sensitivity - dare I say hyper-sensitivity?) with sincerity more times than there are days, and I have taken no offense to it and bear no grudge about it.
May 15th, 2006 at 10:10 am
Kane, why the links to race and crime stats? It is an unnecessary tangent and completely without context, so the reader is left to make assumptions about your motives and implications. They turn a merely annoying post into a ridiculous post.
As for teaching books that might be offensive, I’m sure a profesor could. I’m sure some professors do. Williams is a real college unlike Patrick Henry College, and intellectual engagement is encouraged. Of course, the other side of the coin is that students would also be free to speak out against teaching ideas they deem to be offensive (e.g., racist theorists). I’ve heard many complaints from Williams professors over the years, but never any hint of restrictions on academic freedom (from either the administration or the students).
May 15th, 2006 at 10:42 am
(d)avid asks “why the links to race and crime stats?” A fair question. Recall that Barnard linked being Latino to aggressiveness on the baseball diamond. All the great and good at Williams treated this hypothesis as ipso facto beyond the pale. It is simply unacceptable in their view to believe that culture (much less genetics!) causes observable differences in average behavior across groups.
(Note that Barnard’s speculation was clearly stated as a hypothesis and that, as best I can tell (having e-mailed a relatively well-known sabermetrician), it has never been studied by anyone.)
Imagine that you were actually approaching this claim with an open mind. Alas, you can’t find any data that bears directly on it. (I, at least, can’t find the data.) You would like to know if, for example, Latino players are more likely to be ejected or suspended for on-field behavior than non-Latino players.
(Of course, such a differential, if it existed, would not, in and of itself, prove Barnard right. It could be, for example, that racist baseball officials are more likely to punish Latino players for behavior that they excuse in non-Latino players.)
So, anyway, you can’t find data. But Barnard’s hypothesis has other implications. He claims that machismo might make one more aggressive, not just on the baseball diamond, but elsewhere. Such behavior might show up in crime statistics.
Again, my purpose here is not to get into a discussion about race and crime. My purpose is to demonstrate that Barnard’s speculation is perfectly reasonable and that the campaign (somewhat successful) to muzzle him is an indication that more ideological diversity on the Williams faculty would be beneficial.
Would anyone bet against the hypothesis that Japanese baseball players are less aggressive (get in fewer fights, get ejected less often, make fewer threatening gestures) than non-Japanese baseball players?
May 15th, 2006 at 10:45 am
oh…my…freakin…wow…just…speechless.
After skimming the “stats” used in the New Century Foundation and noting the amazing lack of anything remotely legitimate in terms of their stats and their first page of bullet points, I had to wonder…who is the NCF? I know I had heard the name. And now I know why: they’re the people who put together American Renaissance. And American Renaissance, in the words of the ADL for example is “Founded by Samuel Jared Taylor in 1990, The New Century Foundation - known primarily by the name of its publication, American Renaissance — promotes “genteel” racism: pseudoscientific, questionably researched and argued articles that validate the genetic and moral inferiority of nonwhites and the need for racial “purity.” Generally avoiding overt bigotry and stereotyping, many of North America’s leading intellectual racists have written for the journal or have addressed the biannual American Renaissance conferences.”. That’s an unreal source to use, David, not only for the lack of integrity of the poster, but it’s absurdly poor statistics (and from you! shame!). (oh, and btw, they abhor interracial marriage as one of the leading causes of the supposed american decline).
That “race and crime” post on wikipedia is one of the classic examples of why wikipedia is dangerous if not looked at with a very critical eye. For one quick example of the obvious bias and flaws in it: why is the first external link in it to a site criticizing gangsta rap? That’s not race and crime, but it does fit perfectly into the sentiments of the author…sentiments that lead the author to not delve into any of the mainstream explanations for the difference in arrest rates (such as, say, unequal drug laws, hypersegregation, and so on and so forth). And look, Rushton, the man who said “big penis or big brain, you can’t have both” (i believe that’s the quote. it’s easy to find with a search) when explaining high rates of black fertility at a conference by the american renaissance, gets cited approvingly. And articles from the AR are links. pathetic. this is an especially sloppy wikipedia, linked to in an especially sloppy post.
The La Griffe whatever its called I did not read in full, but it is mostly hypothetical, appears not to take into account important attributes in explaining different levels of aggression, and, most seriously enough, does a zoom in on the extreme tail of a normal distribution to make it appear in its colorful graphs that blacks are seriously more likely via their aggressiveness to be violent, when the difference is something like .001 versus .0005. ooooo…Further, it also does not appear to control or consider alternative explanations for such aggressiveness, including the simple and classic “heat brings more opportunity for crime, more people in the neighborhood that you don’t know brings opportunity for crime” and other such logics that help explain how the sociological situation of african-americans in general would more easily explain their “aggressiveness” than this statistical poaching. But it’s the least troublesome of the three. Which is like saying: compared to Pol Pot and Stalin, Vladimir Putin isn’t that bad a leader. let’s get him (and that website) a trophy!
So, in effect, your graduation present to one of the writers is to rehash what was an ugly incident, post some links to some bullshit arguments including some by the leading proponents of “genteel racism” (as sourcewatch and the ADL call it), and generally piss a bunch of people off. bravo.
May 15th, 2006 at 10:57 am
Rory,
No whining about non-PC links here, please. Don’t click on them if you don’t want to read them.
But, just for the benefit of our readers who don’t know the sociology literature nearly as well as you do, could you explain why, in the US, Asian-Americans are imprisoned at 1/5 (or less) the rate of non-Asian-Americans. If the (white controlled) justice system were racist, I would expect Asian-Americans to be imprisoned much more often than whites.
Now, whatever explanation you use (and I expect that I will agree with much of what you say), wouldn’t that provide (indirect) evidence for someone who wanted to speculate that Asian baseball players in the US might be less likely to be ejected/suspended?
Much of the heat of this discussion centers around the (rightly) sensitive topic of Hispanics in the US. It is not my goal to annoy anyone (much less to increase readership). So, it is probably helpful to discuss the parallel point that Barnard did not make (but almost certainly believes) with regard to Asian players.
May 15th, 2006 at 12:09 pm
Kane, Rory wasn’t whining, he was critiquing the content. Whining would be saying “You’re a bad person for making feel uncomfortable.” Instead, Rory was saying, “You’re an unreflective boob and here is why.”
Dude, it’s your blog. If you want to link to wikipedia pages claiming
that is your business.
Come to think of it, I would prefer not to be associated with a blog tacitly endorsing such views without any reflection. Please remove my name as an author of the blog.
I’m not “whining.” I’ve just decided that your definition of “All Things Ephs” too frequently strays into your personal hobby horses that have nothing to do with Williams, and I see no reason to associate myself with your idiosyncratic views (e.g., the link between HIV and AIDS).
May 15th, 2006 at 12:17 pm
David: Because, as the saying goes, Asian-Americans are too nervous (read chicken-hearted) to steal. For you humorless PC mavens: THIS POST IS INTENDED TO BE FACETIOUS. I know, I know - there are certain subjects which are so serious that they are not proper subjects for attempts at levity. Baloney! Toughen up.
May 15th, 2006 at 12:42 pm
(d)avid writes:
You’re right. My mistake.
Done. This is a shame, just as it was when we lost three authors 2 years ago over the Loweel Quotes business.
I am not sure what can be done about these situations. How many times do we have to explain that, just because, we link to something, does not mean that we “tacitly” endorse it? Why is that so hard to understand?
I hope that (d)avid, although no longer an author, will continue to be a commentator since his writing adds so much value to the blog.
May 15th, 2006 at 12:44 pm
Frank, I didn’t particularly like the post, but I recognize it is a fitting way fro Kane to send off a blog participant and “¿Quién es más macho? Barnard o Rodriguez?” is pretty clever. I had no problem with the post until Kane included the completely gratuitous “non-PC” links. Given Kane’s expressed views in the past and fondness for contrarian cranks, a reasonable reader could assume that Kane endorses those views. At the very least, Kane should make the facetious nature of the links clear — but I don’t think he is being facetious.
I am not PC. Genetics play a powerful role in shaping behaviors. It would not surprise me if “race” is correlated with other difference and a predisposition towards particular behaviors. However, Kane typically links to “research” that has weak empirical evidence and is clearly driven more by ideology than sound scientific reasoning (which would explain why the vast majority of the reports do not appear in top scientific journals).
I’m tired of worrying about the content of Ephblog. Ideally, Ephblog would be a forum of discussing issues concerning higher education and college life. With a strong Williams tie (e.g., campus debate, professor or alum research), those debates could be expanded to include issues affecting broader society. I’m down with that. But too frequently, the “debate” consists of Kane gratuitously throwing out crackpot asides. The debates are neither interesting nor informative.
I stopped reading the blog on a regular basis many months ago for precisely this reason (which is a shame because I think the pictures of the catepillars and the chalkings are awesome). I no longer participate or post. Why have my name on a forum where I do not participate and often find the materially maddening?
Toughen up? Please.
May 15th, 2006 at 12:47 pm
Of course a book that discussed the Scot-Irish propensity for fighting would be allowed. They don’t have a student group that is cohesive enough to protest, and and I’m sure that no one would support the offended students. On another note, what would happen if a group of students tried to start as Scot-Irish student association much like Latin and African-American students have? I contend that it would immidiatly be branded as racist by many minority students just because it would have mostly if not all white members.
The hypocracy and self censorship of ideas that are not PC is disturbing and even if you disagree with something, then argue your view, don’t keep others from expressing theirs.
May 15th, 2006 at 1:03 pm
David,
I’m happy to give a quicker explanation of some of the more structural reasons for different crime and arrest rates. I would, however, appreciate whether or not you believe the links you made were to respectable sites that used responsible analyses and reasonable assumptions. I don’t think that’s the case (except maybe the last one, but I find the idea of looking at the tail end of a normal distribution sans controls for things like segregation a bad analysis). There’s respectable non-PC stuff out there that isn’t on the left (see, for instance, Orlando Patterson’s criticism in the NY Times of academia’s fear of talking about culture from a couple months ago. Or the arguments of Scalia, etc.. I might think them wrong, even blissfully ignorant of certain realities at times, but non-PC and worthy of considering and debating).
Anyway, as for the sociological/criminology/poly-sci/history/econ/whatever-social-science-someone-is-in-and-looks-at-crime reasons, a quick list for different rates of incarceration (with notes about books/articles worth looking at and how it relates to asians, because you asked):
1. Hypersegregation (Doug Massey and Nancy Denton’s work from the late 80s, American Apartheid, is still the premier book on this. It’s had class added in more depth via Wilson’s When Work Disappears) of African Americans. No group in this country is segregated like African Americans. Such segregation creates concentrated pockets of poverty and lack of resources no other group sees. Poverty and crime are linked. Asian Americans are especially integrated as a minority group, save for a couple ethnicities that show crime and education statistics on the low end within the group “asian” such as Filipinos.
2. Badly written drug laws. We’ve all heard this one. I don’t know good sociology about this in depth (not my field), but it is true that the drugs most pernicious to low-income areas are those that are most aggressively fought with tough policing and sentencing. Crack, for example, is predominantly an inner-city addiction, which is where African-Americans are most hypersegregation.
3. Capital theory (there’s no great overview): Namely that the lack of employment in many african-american poor communities has led to a lack of connections to economic opportunity or community support of the type that had previously been available through mutual (crap I forget the name. Groups that basically do microfinancing within a community…mutual assistance or something like that) groups. Similar economic systems exist in many immigrant communities and offer a type of economic capital, support, and social capital (a weird term that basically means social connections that can offer help in some form or another) that explain some of the difference between “native” african-americans, and immigrant racial groups (interestingly, such theories can also explain partly why, statistically, Puerto Ricans look more like blacks in terms of crime rates and educational outcomes than other Latino groups).
4. the role of schools.
5. Misunderstood culturation: Eli Anderson’s books talk of a “code of the streets”, an idea that everybody in a dangerous neighborhood has to act tough as a protective measure. Key to this is that it is a “performance” of toughness, but one that feeds into stereotypes and makes employers and outsiders to that area see it as a culture and the full expression of a person’s personality, instead of a vicious cycle of performed toughness that leads to needing to have two codes: the “decent” and the “street”. So where I get to live my life day in and day out in one code, an inner-city black person lives two codes that it is hard to pull off and keep separate as needed.
And now, back to reading a novel for the first time in months…thank god the semester is over!
I hope that helps.
May 15th, 2006 at 2:00 pm
perhaps the most interesting thing here now is the “don’t attack us” complaints coming from those on the right…the victimization of the right-of-center political viewpoint, the ever-present fear of the empowered that they’ve been silenced. Which is why I’m not surprised Kane at first thought I was whining about his links (I am, because they’re horrible, but more I’m criticizing and engaging them. Say what you will, as long as you let me say my response) and why I’m not surprised by your (tired and overused, IMO) example of the “what about a white group?” logic.
Honestly, Bill, I believe your post was completely out of place in this discussion, cherry-picked one little piece. And if you ask me, if a group of Scots at Williams wanted to put together a group and throw some parties and have some cultural events, it’d be welcomed there with open arms. Kinda like the Irish club that hosted a guinness night with traditional Irish music when I was there was welcomed and had some great and diverse populations at its parties (amazing what good beer can do for a club’s popularity!).
But I will defend the original premise behind PC, even as it has now been destroyed and decimated by constant critique, misunderstanding, and terrible leadership. PC-ness noted that there are empowered groups and unempowered groups, that the language of an empowered group can further disempower already marginalized groups within a dialogue. As such, it is a matter of respect that when engaging people in a dialogue, one is careful to treat all, and especially those with characteristics that have and sometimes still are disrespected by society, with respect, even and most importantly as you disagree with them. Now, there have been some really stupid outgrowths of that concept that only address the surface-level issue, and the term PC now only seems to encompass those surface-level issues, so I avoid it. But the idea of respect that is behind PC’s creation and post-PC movements and languages as outlined above, I see as fundamental to any successful dialogue.
Anyway, as for the scots-irish group, a thought. There’s a fundamental demographic difference between the white experience and minority experience at Williams: look at the bulk of clubs and groups at Williams and notice something; holy crap, the majority of them are predominantly white! i’ll be damned…
May 15th, 2006 at 2:46 pm
About differences between asians and other minority groups in terms of crime - etc - I would suggest looking into different immigration policies, and the subgroups who ended up both able to, and wanting to immigrate. Things to think about: asylum policy, and the economic conditions of refugees in the various different refugee producing country, quotas on skilled and unskilled immigrants, the economic characteristics of illegal immigrants before they leave their countries of origin.
And re general arguements about violence and culture - I actually have a hard time disagreeing that violence or aggressiveness may be more commen in certain cultures. The most violent and aggressive culture that comes to mind in certain european (broadly speaking) culture - how many wars have been started by latinos? Really - how many? Civil wars and conflicts in Latin America have killed how many people in the past hundred years compared to wars started by Europeans (and Asians have been pretty brutal too).
May 15th, 2006 at 2:49 pm
Rory writes
A fair question. The first link, La Griffe du Lion, is one of the smartest people writing on the web about these issues. That doesn’t mean that she is always right, but there can be no denying that she is very intelligent.
The second link, to Wikipedia, was weak. In general, I think that Wikipedia is an amazing resource. On average, the material there is amazing. I presented their page of race and crime because it is one of the top hits on Google and people like Wikipedia. It does provide good citations to some of the more controversial writers on the topic.
The third link, to Jared Taylor, was the most dangerous of the bunch, for all the reasons that Rory correctly cited above. I find Taylor to be a noxious individual, and not just because he would prefer an America without my (non-white) wife and children. I almost didn’t include the link. But, there can be no denying that Taylor is smart, that he writes well and that he has dived into the data. If you want to confront an intelligent opponent in this debate, then Taylor is your man.
I am not asserting that these are the world’s best links on race and crime/behavior. Readers are invited to post their own. But I spent thirty minutes looking for good links, links which suggested reasons why behavior and race might be correlated in ways which lent support to Barnard’s hypothesis. I do not think that there are better links out there. If there are, apologies for not finding them. I really did look.
May 15th, 2006 at 3:14 pm
The reason that this discussion deserves a new post is that this is the first time anywhere that the actual audio of the interview has been made public. (Which isn’t to say that I don’t think it acceptable to revisit old debates, but there is real news here, for those who care to listen.)
(d)avid writes:
Correct. I am honestly curious about, among other things, whites are more than 5 times more likely to be in prison than Asian Americans. Since going to jail is probably highly correlated with being very aggressive, it would not surprise me with Asians were less “aggressive” than whites. (I realize that this is tricky, that we need to define “aggressive” and so on.) If, then, Asians are less aggressive then whites in general, it would not surprise me to see this manifested among professional baseball players.
The hypothesis is that behavior (in this case degree of aggressiveness) might be different in different populations and that this difference might be manifested in the baseball field.
You should not express this opinion in public prior to getting tenure.
This is crud and you should know it. On the broad topics of race, I have posted many times and provided many links. The Wikipedia page highlighted Rushton who, as you know, is one of the premier scholars on this topic. (That doesn’t mean he is right and it doesn’t mean he is wrong. It just means that lots of other smart people, like Steve Levitt, take his work seriously.)
Why do you object to me mentioning people like Rushton while you don’t object to leading scholars like Levitt citing people like Rushton?
May 15th, 2006 at 4:00 pm
I said this in private correspondence with Kane, but given his comment above, I will opt to say it in public.
Omitted variable bias is real and colors results. That is why randomized experiments are valued so highly. When randomized experiments are not possible, omitted variable bias is the reason why economists look for natural experiments (or, to use jargon, valid instruments). When exogenous interventions of any sort are not possible, omitted variable bias is the reason that serious academics qualify their results (sometimes comically). Instead, Rushton publishes “Race, Evolution, and Behavior.”
Anyone doubting my description of Rushton, here is a handy summary:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rushton%27s_ordering_of_the_human_races. David is right, Rushton may or may not be wrong. My complaint is that he leaps to a conclusion that is unwarranted. That is not good social science.
May 15th, 2006 at 4:04 pm
I’ll take a couple more swings at this:
first, anonya is right, and I overlooked the immigration policy aspect of it. Who comes to the US from different countries and different times is an important aspect of a fuller understanding of these types of statistics.
second, I think David has made an error in his question, namely that incarceration and aggression should be linked. The large majority of incarcerated people are not in jail for violent acts. Further, being jailed for such acts is varied (a rich person getting busted for a street fight vs. a poor person in the same type of street fight. one is much more likely to go to jail than the other) by many measures. I doubt the correlation is nearly as high, nor nearly as simple as Kane’s question. There are tons of factors as obvious as aggression that could correlate with prison rate, from socioeconomic background, education background, drug availability, neighborhood effects, self efficacy, etc.
The links on the wikipedia are absurdly slanted. The large bulk of academic writing on the issue does not follow the path of those links: it was one-sided and did not link to any traditional criminology or psychology or sociology. Those were some terrible links. But perhaps there aren’t good sources for these theories because there aren’t good numbers.
I’d be curious to hear you respond to the fact that the tables in the back of Taylor’s “report” do not fit his bulletpoints on page two. I find it hard to defend such terrible statistical inconsistencies, if not outright lying. He’s not just noxious, he’s not an honest opponent in the debate (just look at the stats). Rushton is now head of the Pioneer Fund. These are not people who are respected and respectable scholars, these are, at best, racialists who find and manipulate data to fit their argument in the most unscientific of ways.
Levitt’s work built on his own research, and likely only mentions Rushton to explain Rushton’s racist conclusions as incorrect and Levitt’s more nuanced understanding of the interplay of race and socioeconomic status as more correct (even as I find those wrong in ways, they’re not patently offensive on their face).
Second to last, in looking for the links again, I don’t have them because they’ve been taken down because they were deemed “offensive” by some. They were called “crackpot” and “maddening” but no (d)avid did not resign out of taking “offense”. As the idea of taking “offense” has been so thoroughly reduced and denigrated on this site, I’d avoid that word. But I’m also tired of edits, so whatever.
Finally, as for baseball and aggressiveness, this is some foolishness. There have been brawls for decades, and brawls in lots of sports (remember how Rudy T. got his face broken back in the day? The Bad Boys of Detroit with Laimbeer? etc.), there have been rule changes that have affected how masculinity and aggressiveness can be shown in baseball, and the group of people who enter MLB are a very, very, VERY specific subgroup of larger cultures. To say Latino MLB players are more aggressive may or may not be true, but it’s hard to take one insignificantly small and self-selected subgroup from a “race” and then making claims about the entire race. that should be obvious on its face.
May 15th, 2006 at 4:05 pm
i need to stop being long-winded so I can stop being beaten to the punch. thanks (d)avid!
May 15th, 2006 at 8:37 pm
I appreciate that Rory took the time to explain this:
Alas, I don’t know this literature as well as I should, so I am pleased to learn something new. But isn’t this a perfectly plausible explanation for Barnard’s hypothesis. If Latino players are more likely than white players to grow up in neighborhoods (either in the US or abroad) in which a “vicious cycle of performed toughness” pervades, then it would seem plausible that Latino players might be more likely to exhibit, say, aggressive gestures, on the baseball diamond.
This could be true. It could be false. If Williams were truly open-minded, this would be the sort of discussion that would follow after Barnard’s remarks. Instead, the College muzzled him and VISTA refused to debate him.
May 15th, 2006 at 9:51 pm
From how I described it, possibly. But the key to the “code of the street” is how rare violence actually is. It is a sense of non-chalance and intimidation around the potential of violent acts, but not actually ever committing such acts.
So, to press the metaphor a little further, Anderson’s work might explain if people from “tougher” areas were more likely to scream and get in someone’s face, but it wouldn’t explain any extra violence–what might explain it is that people from non-tough background misunderstand such stances and escalate the situation accidentally.
But, I doubt it fits because baseball as a culture is more coherent on the field than the players’ cultures from growing up. They all are much, much more likely to share the “code” of baseball when on the field than competing codes of the street vs. more traditional middle-class codes. After years and years of acculturation in the minors, I really doubt this explains anything in baseball.
I also don’t think Barnard was thinking anything like what we’ve written. let’s not rewrite the history here.
May 16th, 2006 at 2:09 am
I am sorry but what the hell does this conversation have to do with “all things eph”.
May 16th, 2006 at 4:26 am
Are you using the Sosa and Marasco quotes to suggest that Latinos agree with Barnard?
I just looked up the Sosa article, and in context, it’s not about machismo (selfish and/or irrational male pride). Sosa didn’t walk because of pride, but because he thought offensive play was the way to get paid. Which is one of the points made by Marasco in his article regarding the the stereotype (his word, not mine) of the “too proud to walk” latin player.
David said:
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“If you find them all equal (either all objectionable or all not), then you ought to conclude that, whatever his other faults, Barnard is no less acceptable as a speaker on the topic of the interaction between Latino culture and baseball than, say, Sammy Sosa.”
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Sammy and Barnard would both be objectionable. But Sammy doesn’t teach or coach at Williams. I would expect Vista to have greater interest and investment in comments made by someone who is in a position of authority within the college community. Particularly someone who is essentially talking about his student players, and about some of the kids in the pool he recruits from every year.
In other words, it’s not a Latino pass at work (the assumption that because a Latino said it, Latinos ignore it). It’s anger modulation and time management. Vista cannot be expected to rail against every non-Williams comment negative to Latinos. There aren’t enough hours in the day.
From the Sosa link:
“When he first got here [in 1992], you could see he had great physical skills, but he was so raw,” Grace says. “He didn’t know how to play the game. He didn’t understand the concept of hitting behind runners. He didn’t understand the concept of hitting the cutoff man to keep a double play in order. So many little things he just didn’t know.”
This much he did know: If he was going to support his mother and family, it wasn’t going to happen with the bat on his shoulder. “It’s not easy for a Latin player to take 100 walks,” Sosa says. “If I knew the stuff I know now seven years ago–taking pitches, being more relaxed–I would have put up even better numbers. But people have to understand where you’re coming from.
“When I was with the White Sox, Ozzie Guillen said to me, ‘Why do you think about money so much?’ I said, ‘I’ve got to take care of my family.’ And he told me, ‘Don’t think about money. Just go out and play, and the money will be there.’ It takes a while.”
Says Minaya, “You’ve got to understand something about Latin players when they’re young–or really any players from low economic backgrounds. They know the only way to make money is by putting up offensive numbers. Only now is Sammy at a mature stage. Only now is he becoming the player he always could have been.”
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By the way, Vista is not an acronym. Someone must have capitalized it once and it’s stuck. Even the org’s pages use it in caps.
May 16th, 2006 at 12:57 pm
Responses:
Please read the FAQ. Barnard/Vista was one of the most important campus controversies of the last 5 years. It is always worth discussing. Moreover, in this case, EphBlog reported new information. We, and no one else, have provided you with the audio tape of the radio show. If EphBlog shouldn’t be posting this, raw source material about a major campus dispute, what should we be posting?
First, how do you know what Barnard was thinking? Second, Barnard was making a causal claim: if a person grows up in a culture in which aggress “performed toughness” is important (as it may be in Latino culture), then it is more likely that he will engage in aggressive gestures on the baseball field than someone who grew up in a different culture. Anderson’s theory applies directly to Barnard’s claim.
Barnard disagrees. And, given that he has years of experience with baseball culture, he is at least as qualified as almost any Eph to make these sorts of judgments.
One of the most annoying aspects of this dispute was the way in which college officials pulled a only-Ph.Ds-can-have-opinions gambit on Barnard. There can be no doubt that sociologists (like Rory) know more about sociology than Barnard. But there is also no doubt that Barnard knows more about baseball than almost any of us. He is just as qualified to speak on the cultural influences, if any, on the behavior of individual players as anyone on the Williams faculty.
He may be right. He may be wrong. But the College should encourage this conversation, not squelch it.
Perhaps. One of the sleazy little back stories here is how Vista even found out about the remarks. It isn’t that people like Lisha Perez and Nina Smith were sitting around listening to North Adams baseball radio. Instead, a reporter (I think) heard the show, and then called them (and other students up) to try and make trouble.
The problem with Vista (or at least its leaders) was not that they raised a ruckus. Ruckuses are good. Disagreement leads to conversations. Everyone learns something.
The problem was that, having raised the issue and tried, it seems, to get Barnard disciplined, Vista ran away and refused to discuss the matter. It was, perhaps, the most cowardly performance that Williams has seen in many a year. Read the above links for all the details.
May 16th, 2006 at 2:02 pm
Gee, thanks, David. Heh… well, thanks for the early congratulations, I suppose.
In the back of my mind I knew that you would never let this die, David, and I guess I was right. I’m not going to read all of the responses above, and I’m not really going to address this at length because I have said most of all of what I’ve wanted to say through my previous posts on the topic.
From skimming through the above responses, it seems that everyone is fixated on actually proving a causal link between being ethnically Latino and being aggressive. Unless I happened onto the “we prove pejorative cultural stereotypes to be factually accurate” blog, I don’t really see how this has anything to do with “All Things Eph”. It’s crap like this that makes me not want to associate with Ephblog. Whatever the case…
This discussion has nothing to do with my original objections to Barnard’s comments. To be perfectly honest, I didn’t lose a wink of sleep over what he said. I took issue with the response to Vista’s public denouncement of such comments.
Instead of conceding that we, as historically oppressed ethnic minorities, were right to vocally object to the perpetuation of stereotypes on our cultures, voices on this campus attempted to silence everything they saw as whiny overreactions to Barnard’s comments. As a sophomore green behind the ears in ethic/race/gender relations on campus, I made it a point to defend our actions and our right to be offended.
As a senior just weeks away from graduation, I can quite honestly say that I’m fed up with trying to defend minorities’ rights to openly attack their discreditors. You see, I’ve wasted much of my time and energy formulating eloquent and well-thought out responses to why anyone on the outside might view us as overly sensitive or whiny. You know what? I really don’t care anymore.
No matter what I tell you, you’re never going to agree with me. Do you know why?
You will never experience what it’s like to go through life as an ethnic or racial minority. It’s really as simple as that. No one of importance has ever written you off as inferior because of stereotypes on people with foreign accents and appearances like yours. You’ve never gotten treated as an infant because your accent makes obvious that your first language isn’t polished “Standard American” English.
Sure, you may have experienced reverse-racism at the hands of bullies at your inner-city school, or maybe you got singled out as a dumb jock during your time at Williams, but the very fact that you attended and graduated from Williams hints at the fact that these effects were temporary at worst.
As a result, those of the dominant race/class/culture/gender/whatever will find it quite difficult to comprehend why minorities are so damn touchy. Like I said, I have no intention to restate my original arguments for why Coach Barnard was wrong in stating his opinions as fact–portraying Latino baseball players as aggressive based on ethnicity. If you want those, you can click the links above.
If, like me, you realize that it’s just best to agree to disagree, then you can just lay the dead horse to rest.
May 16th, 2006 at 2:05 pm
No, everyone else, unlike me, realized that it was completely pointless trying to convince people that Latinos and Latinas had a right to be offended. You can sit here and intellectually masturbate yourselves to a stupor over the whole thing, but I really don’t care enough to rehash everything I’ve already said.
May 16th, 2006 at 3:56 pm
David R. sorry this got brought back. i hope i haven’t seemed to be trying to defend any connection between Latino culture and violence, that’s Kane trying to use my sociological ideas to fit his theory.
David Kane: you actually kinda prove my point. One of the things Anderson and others note about the codes is how much people who know both codes switch. code switching is a popular topic of study, and for some, there’s a difficulty in pulling it off. however, those people don’t succeed in getting out of code one. so, if baseball has any sort of code (an obvious yes), even if Latino culture is aggressive , any Latino baseball player successful enough to get to MLB is an able code switcher, else they couldn’t have succeeded so far.
So, really, either baseball has no code (at which point, a generalist is as good, if not a better, judge of aggressiveness in a baseball game than a person who coaches baseball), or it does have a code, and Anderson and others’ work doesn’t help Barnard.
What I do know is that Barnard is not a sociologist, and as famous as Eli Anderson is in the field and outside the field, I don’t think his writings on inner-city black culture popped into Barnard’s mind when talking about Latino machismo on the baseball diamond. maybe i’m wrong, but i’m kinda confident in that assumption.
May 16th, 2006 at 4:04 pm
David R: Irrespective of the possible virtues of your complaints, it remains that others perceive that you are behaving in a lacrimal and irritating fashion.
May 16th, 2006 at 4:25 pm
This is all 220 lbs of me crying like a baby: :*(
Honestly, Frank, on the list of things I might care about, where would you place coming off as irritating/lacrimal to people who will never understand what I have to say?
May 16th, 2006 at 5:55 pm
David R, no need to get so defensive.
May 16th, 2006 at 10:51 pm
David-
Two things.
First, although an interesting fact, the fact that a reporter is the one who informed Vista of the issue doesn’t really add anything to the discussion. Unless you’re implying that Vista made a tempest out of a teapot for press consumption. In which case, there’s I can’t imagine much I or anyone could say to prove their good faith.
Second, I read the posts you linked to. Am I right in thinking that you accuse Vista of cowardice because it refused to debate Barnard at your request? Vista did, however, respond at length elsewhere. Barnard’s own comments stated how far he was willing to go down the path to reconciliation, and Vista’s did as well. There was no meeting point there. I take David R at his word– students felt that a debate would have been useless. And, as explained above and suggested by Lisha, statistics (which you requested of Vista to prove the negative), would have been misleading, at best. Students are not at Williams to entertain the alumni.
Just my two cents.
May 17th, 2006 at 6:35 am
Martha: This alumnus is not entertained by students attempting to entertain him.
May 17th, 2006 at 7:31 am
Martha,
Thank you for your comments.
I brought up the reporter story for two reasons. One, it is interesting. Two, it seems relevant that Barnard made his statement on a radio show that (virtually) no Williams students listen to. There is a difference between standing up on the steps of Chapin and saying X and doing so “off-campus.” (Of course, if you find Barnard’s statements offensive, they are still offensive even if no student heard them live. But I still think that this adds perspective.) I do not think that Vista was driven by a desire for press attention.
Sort of. Let me distinguish between a random member of Vista, say someone like David Rodriguez, and Vista’s leaders at the time, Lisha Perez and Nina Smith. (Am I correct in assuming, based on the fact that their names were on the version of the statement published in the Record, that Perez and Smith were the leaders of Vista, either in general or on this issue? If not, my apologies!)
If have no problem with the actions of someone like Rodriguez. He thought that Barnard was out of line. He talked it over with some people. He wrote a few blog posts. And so on. Rodriguez has every right (as all Ephs do) to be offended and to give vent to his frustration. The resulting conversation is a good thing. Moreover, were I to suggest to Rodriguez that he should debate Barnard, it would be completely reasonable for him to turn down that opportunity, to say that life is too short for such a waste of time.
But the case of Perez and Smith is different for two reasons. One, they acted, I think, as official leaders of a student group. Their complaint was a much more formal one, a status that incurs some responsibility on their part. Second, they sought to get Barnard punished or perhaps even fired. There is simply no other way to read their statement.
Again, I have no problem with statements to the Record or with attacks on faculty members. The more discussion and debate, the better. But, having raised the stakes to the highest level, Perez and Smith had an affirmative obligation to continue the conversation, to facilitate the debate, to educate the community.
You can’t demand someones head and then crawl under a rock when a call goes out to debate the topic.
Really? Where? I have never heard about such a statement. I would be eager to read it and to link to it. If Vista/Perez/Smith did respond “at length” somewhere else and Barnard failed to engage their argument, then it would be reasonable of Perez and Smith to decline an invitation to debate and discuss. I don’t think that this happened though.
There was no “meeting point” because of Vista. It was their fault. They lost. Barnard was willing to talk, either in private or in public. Perez and Smith were not.
The fundamental value of the Williams community is free and open discussion and debate. You must be willing to listen to the other side. You must be willing to consider the arguments of your opponents. You must be willing to educate other members of the community.
Of course, life is short. There are too few hours in the day for Rodriguez to spend every minute educating his fellow Ephs. No problem. But, having thrown down the gauntlet with their statement, Perez and Smith had an affirmative obligation to continue the conversation. Their refusal to do so was cowardly. It was not in keeping with the central values of Williams College.
May 17th, 2006 at 12:07 pm
really quick as I hate to continue to rehash this story, but David, your statement that “There was no “meeting point” because of Vista. It was their fault. They lost. Barnard was willing to talk, either in private or in public. Perez and Smith were not.” is off base for a number of reasons.
This isn’t a “win/lose” situation first, so that’s just a bad analogy. Further, if one person feels wronged by the public statements of another person who feels his statements are appropriate but might need clarification, and if further the first person is relatively unempowered, then a public or private “talk” is not a legitimate option to that first person. What exactly does that person get? To be willing to have a dialogue in that case is either superhuman or unbelievably foolish.
For a tangential and more extreme example. I was at a training for students in high school in which a peer leadership program was doing some skits on sex and drugs and date rape. In the skit, the guy wasn’t sure what had happened, and the girl thought she had been raped. So the guy, when he hears she thinks he raped her (because he would never do such a thing), goes to talk to the girl. The skit presents that as appropriate, I think that’s absurd. The girl is supposed to explain to her date/rapist that he did rape her??? That’s absurd. Now, that example is obviously much more extreme, but it’s the same type of logic.
These were not peers talking, this was a highly successful baseball coach and a couple students, even if they were representatives of vista.
May 17th, 2006 at 12:35 pm
I think that this is a fair comment but the key is who is and who is not “relatively unempowered.” If you do not have tenure at Williams (as Barnard does not), you are not meaningfully “empowered” relative to a student who is making an accusation of racism (or any other serious accusation). If anything, it is clear that Perez and Smith felt plenty empowered, hence the statement to the Record. (This is where your example does not work.)
In other words, if Perez and Smith had felt, to use your analogy, similar to the rape victim, they would not have made a big push to get Barnard punished or to force him to recant. Those are the actions of empowered people. They can not act empowered in this way and then turn around and claim that a public or private discussion would be too hurtful or painful to participate in.
I stand by my original characterization. Perez and Smith were, in fact, the more empowered side of this dispute. They had the Dean of the Faculty on their side!
If, in the context of Williams, you kick up a huge fuss about topic A, you have a moral obligation to participate, to some reasonable degree, in the discussions and debate that follows. A failure to do so is a sign of bad faith.