I'm Not a Racist But My Brain Is

A sidebar to the matter of biological reductionism: An old acquaintance of mine posted a link to this article today, and commented:

When I've argued that the tendencies which create biases (but not specific biases) are hardwired in us because our brains try to be efficient and use heuristics when only incomplete information is available (and complete information is never available), so elimination of this or that -ism probably isn't a likely goal to strive toward, but diminution of it's impacts is, I've encountered understandable resistance. This item does a much better job than I've done of explaining this perspective and more.

My acquaintance is now a diversity manager at a state university somewhere, so he often posts material like this, a tendency which is no doubt part of his own brain trying to be efficient.  I realize it's just his DNA talking, but my DNA felt that a few remarks were in order.

First, organisms, including human beings, are not "hardwired."  Metaphors like this aren't necessarily harmful -- metaphors are unavoidable when talking about the world -- but using a machine-based metaphor to describe organisms usually leads to confusion.  The usual defense, used by Richard Dawkins among others, is to claim that "machine" refers not to the simple metal and plastic machines Man has so far created, but to idealized machines that don't yet exist.  If people would bear these nonexistent but superior machines in mind when they encounter the "machine" metaphor, there would be no confusion.  Alas, in the real world, people seem to prefer to fall back on the machines they know when they parse this metaphor.  A hardwired machine cannot strive toward any goal, cannot transcend its programming, cannot exert any agency at all.  Human beings can, because we aren't machines in the sense that a Cuisinart or a Mercedes is.  (True, we often suspect that machines have minds of their own when they fail at inconvenient times.  The tendency to anthroporphize the inanimate is also a common, possibly innate human trait.)

Second, to move to the article, it doesn't actually use the word "hardwired," which is good.  And the research it discusses may be suggestive.  Suppose for the moment that it actually points to innate human tendencies, which seems likely to me too.  It would be just as true, in that case, to title the article "If You're Black [or Asian, or Jewish, or Native American], Science Says You're Probably a Racist," because those tendencies are more or less universal to human beings.  Not quite universal, though: according to the article, "In a 2007 study of over 2.5 million IAT [Implicit Association Test] responses, University of Virginia psychology professor Brian Nosek and colleagues reported that 68% of participants demonstrated negative implicit attitudes toward black people, dark skin, and black children. A 2010 follow-up study headed by Nosek revealed that despite the US election of its first black president, little had changed."  Why the election of the first black US president would have changed supposedly innate brain responses is not clear, but it's worth stressing that 32 percent of the participants did not demonstrate these negative responses, so not everybody's brain is racist, at least not to the same degree.  The article doesn't attempt to explain this, nor how the researchers know that the implicit associations are innate -- after all, the respondents had presumably been alive long enough to soak up social cues on skin color in a historically racist society.  I suppose they simply assumed that whatever the majority does is inborn.

There are good PR reasons why the article has the title it does, and I doubt my acquaintance would have recommended it if it had ascribed racism to people of color.  There's at least anecdotal evidence that prejudice against darker skin is widespread in populations of color, whether they are minorities (as in the US) or majorities (as in Asia, for example).  As a diversity manager, my acquaintance also works within the paradigm that defines racism not as a matter of individual bias or prejudice but a structural feature of institutions and societies.  From what I've seen, there's a strong tension in university residential counseling departments between biological determinism and cultural determinism.  Biological determinism is applied to sexual orientation, for example, while cultural determinism governs discussions of culture, prejudice and stratification.  Gender is a topic where the two tendencies would clash, but so far they're just juxtaposed and harmonized; I don't think that will last.

Third, the article shows a rather crude understanding of "race."  Race is not just a matter of skin color, or even of any visible traits at all.  Perhaps the writer simply wanted to simplify a complex issue, but it still comes out as though race were a real-world, pre-cultural quality of human beings, instead of a messy social construct full of contradictions.  So, for example, "Studies have found that the human brain shows heightened responses in sensory and emotional areas when we observe others in pain (a likely marker of empathy), but not so much when the person in pain is a different race. We literally do not feel the pain of others."  This even though the writer goes on to cite a case which proves that race is ascribed: "Last year, sociology researchers Aliya Saperstein, Andrew Penner, and Jessica Kizer published a longitudinal analysis showing that that once someone is arrested, even once, that person is more likely to be classified as black rather than white or Asian."

"Blackness," then, is not necessarily an innate trait of a person to which the observer reacts, but a classification applied by the observer for reasons that have nothing to do with skin color.  And while it does appear that "race" and "racism" as means of defining people as fully human or not are relatively recent developments, historically people have classified others as Other for all sorts of reasons, from the language they speak to the gods they worship to the land they live on.  And that leaves out body configuration, or "sex," now called "gender."  This may mean that Othering is an innate trait, but by focusing on race the article oversimplifies the issues involved, by implying that "race" is the paradigm case of difference that inspires bias.

Finally, the article uses another problematic metaphor, that of a radical dualism in the human self:  "Our brains love to form and use stereotypes," even though "we want not to be racist."  Our brains do the wanting, after all, and it's arguable that "we" do want to be racist, thanks to the stereotyping mechanisms that Science has found according to the article, and depending on what you think "we" refers to.  Wanting not to be racist is also the product of tendencies in the brain, such as wanting not to be shamed in our communities.  Apparently the "bad," disapproved parts of ourselves are Othered by blaming them on our brains and our genes, while the "good," approved parts float free, struggling against the baser impulses of our biology.  It was my diversity-manager acquaintance whom I told, when he was a student at IU, that I'd love not to believe in Free Will, but unfortunately my genes programmed my brain to believe in it, and so I can't help myself.  It can be useful for some purposes, and certainly it's easy, to divide oneself into "I" and "me," Brother Spirit and Brother Ass.  But it's possible, and necessary, to put the pieces back together and see them as a whole, however complex and conflicted; otherwise we just chase our own tails endlessly.

Cut Along the Bias

The latest issue of the Gay and Lesbian Review has a brief article by Vernon Rosario about the question of bias in research into the cause of difference in sexual orientation.  Unfortunately it's available online only to subscribers.  It's also unfortunately titled -- "Is Sexual Orientation Research Biased?" -- which I blame on the editor, not the author.  The article itself seems incomplete, never really making its point.

Rosario begins by commenting on a recent book on the subject, Backdrop: The Politics and Personalities Behind Sexual Orientation Research by Gayle Pitman, a Professor of Psychology and Women's Studies at Sacramento City College.  Pitman's book isn't in the library, so I have to rely on Rosario and the description and user reviews at Amazon.  According to Rosario, Pitman explores how the work of researchers on sexual orientation has been influenced by their personal backgrounds; she interweaves this with a survey of the research.

[Pitman] definitely does not want to discredit these scientists as unobjective because of their own sexual orientation.  Yet she argues that all research exploits "the illusion of pure scientific objectivity."  Her conclusion veers off into a rumination on the role of fear in shaping this topic -- fear of homophobic religious groups and policy makers, fear of researchers who avoid sexual fluidity or non-biological paradigms so as not to undermine various GLBT political gains.  But she's really criticizing the fear of the GLBT community (without being specific) for condemning the research since, she finally concludes, gay scientists are really motivated by altruism and social justice, which are a legitimate subjectivity in science unlike the fear-based animus of the haters [24].

Again, without having read Pitman's book I can't accurately evaluate the notion of "the fear of the GLBT community."  Maybe she has some evidence to support that characterization, but from what I see most gay men and a good many lesbians don't "fear" scientific research into the causes of homosexuality.  I see almost no objections to that research, and virtually every gay person who mentions it does so positively, as proof that we can't help ourselves and we're entitled to our rights.  I suspect that she's attacking a straw man, partly because scientific apologists usually do.

According to Rosario, Pitman relied on secondary sources rather than actually talking to the researchers, although "all of the researchers Pitman discusses are alive and not reclusive."  As a corrective he reports a conversation with Francisco Sanchez, a gay Latino researcher at UCLA. Sanchez "believes that there's an 'interaction between our biological predisposition and the environment.  When we are born we are given whatever blueprint that predisposes us to certain interests, or personality, or complex behavior traits.  The environment interacts with the biology and genetics.'  But by environment he means primarily prenatal biological factors like gene interaction and hormonal effects.  Parenting and role models can influence behavior by suppressing or inhibiting sexual attraction, but innate feelings of attraction to males or females are fixed."  That's basically handwaving, but I guess it's useful as an account of the state of the research.

I continue to object that culture must have a larger role in sexuality.  He is willing to acknowledge that culture definitely complicates sexual self-identity because of sub-cultural stereotypes.  For example, a Latino man may not self-identify as gay because he doesn't relate to the Latino stereotypes of a gay man (the effeminate hairdresser), or he might experience conflict between identifying with the gay community versus the Latino community [25].

The "Latino man" here is evidently Sanchez himself, who grew up in Laredo, Texas, in "a traditional Mexican-American family" and he resisted coming out until he went to went to graduate school in Iowa because he "lacked gay role models" except for hairdressers.  I've come across this kind of story before, and it just makes me more curious.  Does it mean that inside Sanchez there's an effeminate hairdresser trapped in the body of a "muscular guy with an impish smile"?   (As a 70s clone told the sociologist Martin Levine, "Darling, beneath all this butch drag, we are still girls.")  That would fit the "science," at least.  As I've argued before, there's a great deal of confusion in sexual orientation research as to what it means to be gay, and the variety of experiences among people who are drawn erotically to their own sex is usually simply ignored.

Cisco has to admit that the convenience samples of most study groups tend to be skewed toward out, white, middle-class subjects -- the kind of people you could recruit at a gay pride festival or a university campus.  Someone on the "down low" is probably not going to consent to a study on the origins of homosexuality.  Ethnic minorities tend to be minimally represented.  Cisco allows that "it's a very complex picture and we can explain only a certain proportion of the variance we are seeing in our samples" [25].

More hand-waving.  But in fairness to Sanchez, I would insist that even among the "kind of people you could recruit at a gay pride festival or a university campus" there will be a lot more variation than his model can handle.  The same will be true among ethnic minorities.  One of the most noticeable flaws in the reasoning of biological determinists generally is their assumption that there is no variation in the populations they study -- even though such variation is one of the pillars of Darwinism.

Rosario concludes:

I have to agree with Pitman's conclusion that scientific research in general is not "objective," if only in the sense that it's not conducted by mindless robots that lack emotions and personal histories.  In human sexuality, research scientists like Cisco bring their subjectivity into the lab and have to acknowledge that the politics of their work is every bit as complex as the sexuality they study [26].

This is good as far as it goes, which isn't very.  If there were robots capable of designing and carrying out research at such a level, they would have robot subjectivities, which would be interesting but not objective.  The failings of sexual orientation research aren't just "politics" -- they come from researchers' ignorance of complexities that belong to the science itself.

I think (it was a long time ago) it was Walter Kaufmann who said that everybody is biased, but the time to inquire about a given person's bias is after they have offered an invalid argument, especially when they still insist on its validity.  Then it's proper to speculate that they went wrong because of bias.  I think this is pertinent in sexual orientation research.  The question isn't whether a researcher is gay or straight, or even antigay or progay, though for a long time it was a dogma in the study of sexuality that gay people couldn't be "objective" about homosexuality, but heterosexuals could.  But the relevant bias here isn't the sexual orientation of the researchers, it's their determined adherence to a biological determinism that has been discredited many times, yet never seems to lack advocates.  It's not "fear" that motivates my criticism of sexual orientation research as we know it today, but disdain for its inadequacies as science.

Confirmation Bias

My friend the Ambivalent Obama Supporter posted a headline from Fark on Facebook, as he often does: "Evangelicals, conservatives, and NRA members are shunned from academia, reports a study by the Wedgie Institute for Nerd Studies." I found the link on Fark, to a blog post by Peter Wood at the Chronicle of Higher Education. It purports to be a review of Compromising Scholarship: Religious and Political Bias in American Higher Education (Baylor, 2011), a recent book by George Yancey, "a professor of sociology at the University of North Texas." Wood crows:

A new study presents evidence that more than a quarter of sociologists (27.8 percent) would “weigh favorably” membership in the Democratic Party by a candidate for academic appointment, and nearly 30 percent would weigh favorably a prospective candidate’s membership in the ACLU. More than a quarter (28.7 percent) would disfavor hiring a Republican, and 41.2 percent would weigh negatively a candidate’s membership in the National Rifle Association.

I'm not an academic and a fortiori not on a hiring committee for academics, but I'm not sure I'd hire Peter Wood for anything. Notice how he chooses his numbers in the paragraph above. How many sociologists would "disfavor" hiring a Democrat, for example, and how many would weigh positively a candidate's membership in the NRA? If Democratic Party membership would please 27.8 percent, it's a reasonable conclusion that the other 72.2 percent includes some nay-sayers. If academia is as overwhelmingly liberal as Wood believes, shouldn't the pro-Dem bias be higher than 27.8? I suppose I'd have to look at Yancey's book to find out, and I don't really have much interest in doing that.

Wood mentions some other recent research by "Neil Gross and his colleagues" which indicates that there is no liberal bias in academia. I'm not particularly interested in reading Gross et al.'s work either. But under the circumstances, Yancey's work doesn't settle the question, though Wood seems to think that one conflicting study, by an evidently interested if credentialed party, not only must be taken into consideration but proves that the Libs and the Leftists control the Academy. No, I wouldn't hire him to help me wash dishes.

The discussion in comments under Wood's post is marginally better, and certainly better spelled, than much Internet discussion. It's the Chronicle of Higher Education, after all. Unfortunately there are no permalinks to the comments (that I could find, anyway), but this one, by one tsb2010, stood out for me.

and is this book any news to us (closeted) conservative professors? While people are coming out of the closet left and right, we are shoved right in...

What I find interesting here is the writer's apparent assumption that "coming out of the closet" doesn't encounter any resistance. "We are shoved right in ..." Gay people also encountered plenty of efforts to shove us right back in; we fought back. Conservative professors like tsb2010 evidently want everything given to them without any work on their part; typical.

Speaking of which, there was this comment at Fark, 2011-04-08 04:33:00 PM (Leslie, how do I find permalinks for comments on Fark?):

I talked with an educated, 22 year -old kid fresh out of college who was both a tea party conservative and openly gay. It was a interesting conversation, but the one thing that lept out at me was how he was going on about what a great president TR was, and in the same breath how we needed more leaders that weren't "Harvard and Yale educated liberals."

It was only later that I made the connection between Roosevelt and Harvard. And this from a kid who had just finished his own higher education about three weeks prior.

Ah yes, liberal leaders like the Yale-educated George W. Bush...