Sociologists are Scared to Study Asian-Americans

From Heterodox Academy, a podcast from a Professor of Sociology was studies Asian-Americans. That’s not a great career choice for an aspiring young sociologist, since that subject is a matter of intense embarrassment to the leftists in the profession. Some excerpts.

I’ve heard of debates about why sociology is so liberal and there’s some say it’s selectivity—liberals are the people interested in going into sociology…. My perception has been that within the field of sociology, the rewards for people who don’t conform to the conventional wisdom are slim, and I’ve known good sociologists doing good research who did not get tenure because their work didn’t fit into the paradigm very well.

I’ll be frank with you—I’ve been submitting to the American Sociological Review on Asian Americans for the past 25 years and apparently there’s no data good enough for the ASR [American Sociological Review]to convince the reviewers that Asian Americans have reached parity with respect to Whites. Every single one gets rejected. What happens is when the paper doesn’t conform to the conventional wisdom, the methodological standards are raised. But when you argue that there’s discrimination against Asians, the methodological standards are relaxed.

A lot of courses don’t seriously talk about Asian Americans systematically so you’re not provided with evidence or consistent data to test this paradigm for Asians. For example, Erik Olin Wright, former president of the American Sociological Association, has an intro textbook “How America Really Works.” And in the whole chapter on race there’s not a single datum on Asian Americans. And that’s “How America Works” is the name. It’s not uncommon for these data to be deleted, and they’ll talk about this or that particular instance of racism…. They’ll talk about instances of discrimination but they won’t go over systematic statistics which suggest that Asians are actually less likely to be murdered than other groups.

The reason for this is rather obvious, and is bluntly stated by a commenter:

I live in a community that is plurality Asian. I have worked alongside Asians all of my life and have many Asian friends, including my business partner. In my experience, they get married, stay married, and have children in wedlock. The ones I know are excellent parents and grandparents. Their work ethic is off the wall. Asian-Americans I know endorse “bourgeois values” more strongly than nearly every other ethnic group. Their endorsement of bourgeois values also threatens those who call those values racist.

Asian-American success is proof that the Melting Pot works. The hard left can’t stand that.

Even the “heterodox” people at Heterodox Academy shy away from bluntly saying why this is: the contrast between the success of Asians and the failure of blacks is stunning. And if we leave aside a fringe who attribute this to black racial inferiority, we have to face the ugly truth that culture matters. The culture of the inner city ghetto, with the vast majority of kids born out of wedlock, and absurdly high crime rates, condemns black people to inferior status.

Culture matters.

But the leftist hostility to “bourgeois values” goes beyond that. Bourgeois values create strong institutions (family, church, voluntary associations) that are a source of social capital and which rival the state. Leftists (the New Class) have a class interest in the expansion of state power, since the expansion of state power is the expansion of New Class power.

Thus, for the New Class, the role of “marginalized groups” in society is to fail, to articulate grievances, and to demand government benefits. To behave otherwise is to commit treason.

Islam: Europe vs. America

From Jeff Jacoby in the Boston Globe:

LONG BEFORE TUESDAY’S terror attacks in Brussels, it was clear that Belgium had become a breeding ground for Islamist extremists. Hundreds of Belgian Muslims — as many as 500, according to one estimate — have gone to Syria and Iraq to fight for ISIS, making Belgium by far Europe’s leading supplier of foreign jihadists. Last November’s horrific slaughter in Paris was masterminded by a Belgian radical, Abdelhamid Abaaoud, and at least four of the men who carried out those attacks were from the Brussels district of Molenbeek. One of them was Salah Abdeslam, who was captured in Molenbeek, after an intense manhunt, on March 19.

For Islamist imams and terrorist ringleaders, such neighborhoods — heavily Muslim, densely populated, with high unemployment and crime rates — have proved fertile territory for recruiting violent jihadists. “There is almost always a link with Molenbeek. That’s a gigantic problem, of course,” Belgium’s prime minister said after the Paris atrocities.

But it’s only recently that the country’s security officials began confronting that “gigantic problem” with an appropriate sense of urgency. The New York Times reported last fall that weeks before the Paris attacks, Molenbeek’s mayor, Françoise Schepmans, was given a list of more than 80 Islamist terror suspects living in her district. She took no action and was unapologetic even after three of the men on the list took part in the Paris massacre.

“What was I supposed to do about them?” Schepmans told the Times. “It is not my job to track possible terrorists.”

That jaw-dropping complacency helps explain how an ISIS fifth column has been able to operate with such brazenness in Western Europe. But incompetent policing doesn’t explain why Muslims living in neighborhoods like Molenbeek, or in the banlieues outside Paris that have experienced violent riots, should be susceptible to Islamist radicalization in the first place.

Muslim communities are not inherently predisposed to violence. The presence of a sizable Muslim population in a non-Muslim-majority country does not inevitably presage jihadist bloodshed or demands for the imposition of sharia. It is true that some 650,000 Muslims live in Belgium, but five times as many — 3.3 million — live in the United States. Why hasn’t America become a hotbed of Islamic extremism? Why aren’t American Muslims by the thousands flocking to fight for ISIS, Al Qaeda, and other terrorist organizations? Why, despite the efforts of Islamist pressure groups such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations — a Muslim supremacist operation that masquerades as an advocate for civil rights — are most American Muslims intent on adopting America’s customs and way of life?

The United States has been far more successful at assimilating and integrating Muslim immigrants into American society and culture than has Western Europe. There are no Muslim ghettoes here like those in Molenbeek or the Paris suburbs, where authorities turn a blind eye to antisocial behavior and aggressive incitement by radicals preaching jihad. Of course there have been some heinous exceptions, such as the Tsarnaev brothers, the Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hassan, or the killers in San Bernardino. And mosques in American cities have often been built with funding from Saudi Arabia, which promotes a harsh and puritanical version of Islam.

Nevertheless, at the grass-roots level, Muslims in the United States, like other cultural and religious minorities, have had no problem acclimating to mainstream norms. In a detailed 2011 survey, the Pew Research Center found that Muslim Americans are “highly assimilated into American society and . . . largely content with their lives.” More than 80 percent of US Muslims expressed satisfaction with life in America, and 63 percent said they felt no conflict “between being a devout Muslim and living in a modern society.” The rates at which they participate in various everyday American activities — from following local sports teams to watching entertainment TV — are similar to those of the American public generally. Half of all Muslim immigrants display the US flag at home, in the office, or on their car.

Given America’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the bloody battles with Islamic regimes and insurgents, and the threat to homeland security from “lone wolf” terror attacks, it might seem surprising that Muslims in Detroit or Brooklyn aren’t at least as alienated as those in Molenbeek. But they aren’t. For despite the rise of identity politics and the balkanizing pressures of multicultural correctness, America’s melting pot still works. Generations of Muslim immigrants have come to America to escape repression, poverty, or war in their homelands. The life they have made for themselves here has been freer, safer, more prosperous, and more embracing than the existence they left behind. There are tensions, but not enough to keep most Muslims from fitting themselves comfortably into the American mosaic.

At a time when populist demagogues are doing so much damage to our social fabric, it is well to remember why Molenbeek is a European phenomenon, and not an American one. At the core of the American experience is a conviction that immigrants who come to America can and should become Americans. Patriotic assimilation turns profoundly dissimilar foreigners into proud and happy Americans. “Muslims in the United States,” Pew found, “reject extremism by much larger margins than most Muslim publics” around the world.

Americanization — E Pluribus Unum — is not only a key ingredient in the American Dream. It also keeps us safe.

Bottom line: American culture, with its emphasis on individualism and personal freedom, is more benign than the culture of Europe.

But America has its enclaves of cultural pathology: colleges and universities. Under the tutelage of leftist faculty and campus bureaucrats, Muslim and Arab students are encouraged to nurse a sense of grievance, and especially to hate the state of Israel. Thus we have things like “Israeli Apartheid Week” week at Marquette.

In this, as in other things, academia is an island a cultural pathology in a generally benign national culture.

Romney to Israel: You Did Build That

From Front Page Magazine:

When Mitt Romney arrived in Jerusalem and suggested that Israel’s success contrasted with its Muslim neighbors was due to a culture of success, he was waving a red flag in front of a red bull. Romney’s comments were as provocative to the left as Obama’s “You didn’t build that” remark was to us.

To the left, success has become the Mark of Cain. Where success once used to be proof of good character, the balance has shifted and it is now proof of bad character. The left blames all disparities on injustice. If A has less than B, then B has somehow discriminated against A. All that’s left is for the sociologists and critical race theorists to plug in the variables, write their papers and explain the mechanism for the injustice and how it can be remedied through centralized redistribution.

This is the era of “You didn’t build that” where achievement is inherently unfair and an object of guilt. To succeed is to steal. Anyone who has achieved more than those around him has unfairly taken from them. And the more he succeeds, the more he has to feel guilty about and the more he must atone through social justice.

Mitt Romney didn’t build companies; he unfairly redistributed what should have been equal resources in an unequal way to create that success. America also didn’t build anything; it just looted the resources and markets that should have been divided equally among the nations of the world. And the same goes for Jews and the Jewish State. Individual success is not exceptionalism; it’s stealing from the collective. The left already knows why Israel is more successful. Because it’s a greedy country whose success has come at the expense of its poorer neighbors. The left finds the idea of explaining success in terms of character, either individual or national, to be offensive. To suggest that success is due to personal virtue is to also imply that failure is due to a lack of virtue. The left is not interested in exploring what’s wrong with nations or groups that fail, only in explaining how their failure is no fault of their own.

The left was only interested in Jews as an oppressed minority and in Israel as a small doomed country. Once Jews became successful and Israel emerged victorious, the left turned on them and on Israel.

Israel’s success is one of the greatest weapons that the left uses against it. If Israelis were still living in tents and trying to get the power to stay on for more than a few hours a day, the Jewish State wouldn’t make nearly as tempting a target. Israel’s transformation from a bunch of refugees and farmers armed with third-rate weapons to a prosperous nation of flowering orchards, booming tech companies and new towns rising out of the earth, is proof of its immorality. If the Jewish State were truly moral, it would have stayed poor.

Most offensively Israel’s economic success has kept pace with its transition from socialist collectives to free enterprise, going from a “You didn’t build that” culture to a “You built it” culture. While the Palestinian Authority and most of Israel’s Muslim neighbors still operate under government monopolies, Israel’s tech industry revolution has boosted its international trade while making it possible for a few army or air force veterans to cobble together a company that brings a revolutionary new product to market.

USB flash drives and instant messaging software came out of that “You built it” culture. On the other side of the border malaise and misery, bombs and fanatics, have come out of the economic monopolies wielded by military rulers, tribal leaders and religious despots.

Like the left, the Muslim world believes that Israel’s success and its failure is proof of guilt. But even out of the Muslim world come glimpses of the basic truth. Khalaf Al-Harbi, a Saudi columnist, wrote, “The secret to Israel’s survival, despite all the great challenges it has faced, lies in democracy and respect for the worth of the [Israeli] individual… The secret to the collapse of the Arab countries, one after another, lies in dictatorship and in the oppression of the individual… [Israel] drew its power from the honor it granted to its citizens, while its Arab neighbors trampled the [poor] creatures known as their citizens.”

Al-Harbi, no friend of Israel, went further than Mitt Romney did. If Mitt Romney crediting freedom and democracy as the ingredients that make for Israel’s culture of success is racist, then the Democrats must also charge Al-Harbi with racism.

Mitt Romney came to Israel to try and explain Israel’s success in the same terms that he has explained the success of the American businessman, by crediting the labor and dedication of the free individual in a culture that values freedom and accomplishment.

Every Israeli, like every American, who set foot in a new land, had to start all over again. They had to build houses, plant fields and raise cattle. They had to learn how to build armies and run institutions. And they had to do all those things while surrounded by enemies. They had to learn to sink or swim.

While the Muslim world wails over Palestinian refugees, the Jewish State is a nation of refugees populated by refugees from Czarism, Communism, Fascism, Nazism, Nasserism and Islamism. And each of those refugees had to begin a new life. The process wasn’t easy and Israel is still struggling with the challenges of absorbing millions of people from cultures as far apart as Russia, Yemen and France. But the refugee camps where they once lived, the tents and shacks, are a distant memory. The survivors of the Holocaust are not still living in DP camps in Europe and Iraqi Jews aren’t living in tents in Israel. The last DP camp in Europe closed in 1959. The last of Israel’s refugee camps shut down in 1963. Meanwhile the Shatila refugee camp for Palestinian Arabs has been an ongoing concern in Beirut since 1949 making it older than many Israeli towns.

In 1910, Theodore Roosevelt addressed the Cambridge Union and told them, “Success, the real success, does not depend upon the position you hold but upon how you carry yourself in that position.” That assessment is the final rebuttal to the class warfare worldview of the left. Success is not in what you have, but in what you make of it.

A culture of free men and women who believe that they are here to build rather than destroy is able to do great things. And a culture of slaves of Allah who believe that they are here to destroy what others build and who prefer the public martyrdom of the suicide bomb and the refugee camp cannot hope to equal their accomplishments. When the individual has the power to build then he is living in a “You built it” society. But when he only has the power to complain or destroy, then he is living in the Islamic or leftist “You didn’t build that” society.

For liberals and leftists, the assigned role of all minority groups is to fail. That failure justifies a sense of grievance, and an excuse for the expansion of government to redress the grievance. Groups like the Jews who overcomes great obstacles to success are thus traitors to the left. Admittedly, so long at they keep voting left (as Jews do in the U.S.) that can be forgiven.

But Israeli Jews are a different matter.

Blacks Who Don’t Play the Victim Card

From Salon.com:

It’s hard to believe that just a few years ago, issues of black vs. white dominated the national discourse. The Rodney King riots and the O.J. Simpson case inspired endless discussions and reams of editorial soul-searching. Affirmative action and racial preferences, multiculturalism, and political correctness were fraught topics. Then the twin towers fell, and suddenly we had a completely new enemy to worry about.

During the Katrina debacle, images of thousands of impoverished blacks jammed into the New Orleans Superdome brought the scandalous reality of black poverty back into view. But the moment passed. Today’s most charged racial issue, immigration, doesn’t involve blacks at all, but Latinos.

Regardless of the progress made in racial attitudes, the existence of the black underclass is an ongoing scandal. More than 50 years after Brown v. Board of Education ended de jure racial segregation in this country, poor urban blacks continue to be a group apart, plagued by disproportionately high rates of crime, incarceration, drug use, and poor health. Inner-city black children go to bad schools, live in substandard housing, eat bad food, are disproportionately raised by single mothers, and are exposed to a pathological street culture in which aggressive demands for “respect,” ugly misogyny and the crudest markers of male machismo are valorized, while education, self-discipline and personal responsibility are dismissed as “acting white.”

Something amorphous but potentially transformative is happening -- and, critically, it’s happening within the black community itself. According to a recent NPR/Pew poll, 37 percent of blacks agreed with the statement that blacks today are so diverse they can no longer be considered a single race. Among the youngest respondents, aged 18 to 29, a staggering 44 percent agreed.

This is extraordinary. More than a third of the blacks who responded, and almost half of the young blacks, have rejected the cornerstone of American racial politics: black racial solidarity. If the poll is accurate, the most emotionally charged and immutable racial truth, the one-drop rule, is no longer sacrosanct for a large number of black people.

Almost as noteworthy is that middle-class black Americans have joined most other Americans in dissociating themselves from the values (and, by implication, the behavior) associated with the black underclass. The Pew poll found that there was a growing “values gap” between middle-class and poor blacks: 61 percent of the black respondents, and 70 percent of the college-educated blacks, said that over the past 10 years, the values of middle-class and poor blacks have become more different. Just 44 percent said that in 1986. Further confirmation of this values gap is the study’s finding that 64 percent of blacks regard hip-hop and rap music as having a bad influence on society. Moreover, the study found that while most blacks believe that they are subject to widespread discrimination, most of them don’t blame discrimination for the lack of black progress: 53 percent say blacks who can’t get ahead are mostly responsible for their own condition.

Of course, there are challenges when polling black people. In the typical national sample, there might be 125 blacks, too few to draw reliable conclusions. And black interviewers get different responses from black respondents than white interviewers get.

But the Pew poll addressed both of these issues. It got a large sample of blacks (1007 people) and most blacks were interviewed by black interviewers (See pages 67-68 of the study).

(It is sometimes assumed that blacks give more honest answers to black interviewers, but that’s far from certain, and there may be a bias wherein blacks give “politically correct” answers to black interviewers.)

A detailed study of the survey shows good news beyond what is recounted above.

For example, when blacks are asked to rate black public figures as a “good influence,” a “bad influence” or “not much influence” the most favorably rated figures are Oprah Winfrey and Bill Cosby. While both have political opinions, Winfrey’s rating is almost certainly based on her economic and show business success, and Cosby’s conservative social message appears to resonate well in the black community. Unfortunately, race hustlers Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton rated highly, but Colin Powell rated higher than either of them.

Rapper 50 Cent ranked at the bottom of the list, with 42 percent of the sample rating him a “bad influence” and only 17 a good influence.

While blacks expressed far less confidence in “law enforcement” than whites, 55% claimed either a “great deal” or a “fair amount.”

Is all this good news? It depends on one’s point of view.

Commentator Juan Williams argued that the values gulf lies behind blacks’ questioning of the idea that there is a single black race. “It is getting harder to use political and racial solidarity to hide the division inside black America,” Williams wrote in the Washington Post. “The values issue is at the heart of the argument over the future of the race. This comes down to black Americans who believe in family, education and personal responsibility vs. those who point at ‘the man’ or the ‘system’ for the added weight on black Americans.”

Pew president Andrew Kohut concurred. “[The finding] fits with the rising percentage of blacks compared to previous polls who say that there is more values diversity between middle-class and poor blacks,” Kohut said in a phone interview. “It’s a combination of values and also economic differences within the black community.”

But there are other views.

Regardless of the reasons for the finding, some black commentators have seen it as a dire development -- and blamed rich blacks who have lost touch with their racial roots. Molefi Kete Asante, professor at Temple University’s African American Studies Department, told the Philadelphia Daily News, “There are some people who don’t live or operate in the African-American community because they are in a community of rich people, whether they are white, black, Japanese or Latino. They are just in a whole different world from the rest of us.” Mister Mann Frisby, a former Daily News reporter, told the paper he found the widespread black rejection of racial solidarity “scary.” “When I see studies like this, it makes me cringe because I never want to separate people,” Frisby said.

In an interview on NPR, Melissa Harris Lacewell, a professor of politics and African-American studies at Princeton, said she found middle-class blacks’ assertion of a values gap “shocking.” Lacewell blamed figures like Oprah Winfrey and Bill Cosby, who are famous for championing an ethos of personal responsibility, for convincing middle-class blacks that the culprit is poor blacks themselves, not “structural racism.”

But of course, professors of “African-American studies” are, almost by definition, race hustlers. Their jobs depend on articulating racial grievances, and they have a vested interest in black failure.

None of this is to say that blacks are becoming Republican or thinking exactly like whites.

The real point of the values answer is not that middle-class blacks are turning against “blackness,” whatever that is: It’s that they are insisting that they have the right to create their own signifiers of blackness. And it’s that middle-class blacks -- who suffer from white discrimination that is in part a response to black underclass behavior, and who are far more likely to be the victims of black criminals than whites are -- are no longer willing to simply give every knucklehead in the ‘hood a free pass because of “structural racism.”

Of course, the conservative social values of the black middle class are exactly the values that, if they come to prevail in the black community, will produce upward social mobility. And after a point, upward social mobility will eventually increase the number of Republicans among blacks.

This is something for which conservatives should devoutly wish. And something white liberals and race baiting black elites intensely fear.

Ludacris At Summerfest

It’s been the object of a campaign of Charlie Sykes’ joined by (for example) James Harris of The National Conversation.

Rapper Ludacris has been chosen to be a headline act at Summerfest.

Sykes post on the subject gives a fair sample of the really vile stuff that the cultural elders of the city have decided to endorse.

But the disapproval shown by Sykes and Harris has not been universal in the blogosphere.

Christian Schneider of Atomic Trousers has posted something that is not exactly a defense of the foul mouthed rapper, but at least an explanation of why he thinks it’s not a big deal.

As far as I know, Ludacris didn’t shoot anybody. Suggesting that he, a popular entertainer, is in any way responsible for violence on the street has it exactly backwards. . . . And why people who usually abhor those who blame the criminal actions of individuals on society are now handing the killers a “rapper made me do it” defense is beyond me.

The nihilistic culture of violence and sexuality exists in our inner city, and Ludacris is holding a mirror up to that way of life so it can see itself. Ludacris is a byproduct of that culture - the culture is not a byproduct of Ludacris.

Rappers aren’t millionaires because they sell CDs to black people. Rappers gain fame worldwide because they sell CDs to white people. Suburban white kids eat this stuff up because it makes them feel “authentic.” If you looked at Ludacris’ record sales, I bet you’d see just as many CDs sold in Brookfield, Menomonee Falls, and Franklin as you do in Milwaukee. But where is the violence in those “white” communities? If Ludacris was such a negative influence, why aren’t all the white kids in Oconomowoc gunning each other down?

It’s simple - because the culture comes first. Fatherlessness. Poverty. Lawlessness. Those are the problems that face our inner cities - rap music just packages those themes and markets them to the world.

We left a comment on Atomic Trousers, and we’ll repeat it here.

Christian,

I agree with you about “the culture.” But what is “the culture?”

It’s probably an easy 100 things, but Ludacris is one of those 100!

So how does one improve the culture? Shunning and isolating Ludacris would be one thing. Doing the same to another dozen like him would be a dozen things.

A dozen good black role models would be another dozen good things.

Attaching some stigma to having kids out of wedlock would be a huge good thing.

Getting tough with men who knock women up and fail to take responsibility would be another huge good thing.

As for those suburban kids who are probably buying Ludacris CDs: there is a fair amount of something very close to racism about that.

Probably a lot of these kids are liberals and think that this is “authentic black culture” and that they are being “multicultural” somehow. But the truth is they are getting enjoyment out of seeing black people demeaned.

So the white kids don’t go out and shoot people (mostly)? If you have enough advantages in your life, a nasty influence or two is something you are likely to blow off. Besides, if you don’t actually indentify with the blacks in the rap videos, you aren’t likely to emulate them.

Cultural change happens when a large number of people decide they will fight to turn this or that “one thing” in the right direction. Not understanding rational choice theory, they ignore the fact that their sole contribution makes an insignificant difference.

With enough of those people, the culture can turn.

It’s long past due to turn on the racist rappers.

In fairness to Schneider, he points out that a fair amount of rap has a positive message.

Fine. Let’s all encourage that. But let’s don’t encourage or endorse people like Ludacris.