An Honest Conversation on Race: Politically Correct Edition

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Social Psychologists Finally Admit: Liberals are Prejudiced

Since the field of social psychology leans sharply left, it’s no surprise that a lot of “scholarly literature” claims that conservatives are more “prejudiced” than liberals.

Of course, “prejudice” is defined, by these professors, as disliking groups that the liberal professors like and are solicitous of. If you express negative attitudes toward such groups, it must be “prejudice” rather than some principled moral stance. If one believes homosexual acts are immoral, is one “prejudiced” or has one simply reached a different conclusion about sexual morality? The liberal social psychologists assume the former.

But sometimes, in the social sciences, empirical reality wins out.

From Politico, an article outlining recent research, titled “Why Liberals Aren’t as Tolerant as They Think: The political left might consider itself more open-minded than the right. But research shows that liberals are just as prejudiced against conservatives as conservatives are against liberals.”

This conclusion won’t surprise anybody who reads this blog; the only surprise is that several social scientists have admitted it, based on their research.

There is a long list of groups that liberals dislike, and they dislike those groups as much as conservatives dislike the groups they dislike. Citing just one example, while conservatives don’t like atheists, liberals don’t like Christians.

We, not surprisingly, think that liberal intolerance is a much bigger problem than conservative intolerance, for one simple reason: intolerant conservatives tend to be marginalized, far from centers of power, and intolerant liberals tend to be at the centers of cultural power and influence, in the media, schools and colleges, government bureaucracies. Where “social issues” like gay and transgender issues are concerned, they dominate the business world.

Thus we can’t remember when any leftist speaker on a college campus was shouted down or assaulted, but that happens to conservative speakers about once a week.

Virulent, Abusive Facebook Posts of Former Marquette Official

That Marquette’s administration is strongly leftist and politically correct is obvious from their actions. Their public statements are also politically correct, but one wonders just how much virulent passion lies behind their public statements?

At least one of them, no longer working at Marquette, has let it all hang out. Bob Deahl, recently retired Dean, College of Professional Studies at Marquette University, has a Facebook page on which he does nothing to conceal his hatred of Republicans and conservatives.

[Warning: Offensive Language]

Attack on Conservative Christians

At the top of his page at this moment, he reposts (with obvious approval) an article that claims:

Worse than this chronic fixation on sex, gender, and sexuality, is that Conservative Christianity has somehow deputized itself as qualified and entitled to police such things for the world, with the Bible (not Science, facts, or reason) as its sole authority on the matter.

More accurately, not merely the Bible—but the Bible as carefully filtered through a repressed, puritanical, selective interpretation crafted almost exclusively by men raised to believe that God was a dude and that Eve ate the fruit and seduced poor Adam.

If that’s not bad enough, he adds his own comment:

F’ing sick nutcases

We all, of course, can imagine what would happen to any university bureaucrat who said anything even faintly resembling this about Muslims. But he doesn’t work at Marquette anymore, so he can let it all hang out.

On Trump and His People

In another shared post he says:

Well the Russians sure have succeeded in ruining AmeriKa....they got Trump elected who is, almost everyday, using his ignorant power to change things that will ruin our environment, health care, freedom and personal liberties, education, progress on sustainability, and on and on ....this monster asshole is a tool of the Russians and is RUINING this country.

If that seems pretty ordinary anti-Trump rhetoric these days, that’s merely a symptom of how the president has utterly deranged his enemies.

In other shared post about Mike Flynn he said “Disgusting white trash like the entire Trump family and administration.” But that was nothing compared to his next post, which said about Trump:

Corrupt, Incompetent, Mentally Disturbed, Malignant Narcisist, Idiot, asshole, monster

And then about Mike Pence:

You total fucking piece of inhuman shit.....You piece of pathetic gutless, heartless, cruel piece of shit...

And then about mild-mannered Boy Scout Paul Ryan:

Ideological asshole and morally bankrupt to boot

And then back to Trump:

this monster is destroying this country

He is a bit milder with Betsy DeDevos:

she is just one of many completely clueless, ignorant, arrogant right wing cabinet members...

But then returns to Mike Pence:

Just remember this is the extremist right wingnut bigot, sexist, homophobic, mysoginist that is now our VP...

Then, in a commentary on a video, he goes into a more extended rant on Trump:

Here is what everyone is missing...the ESSENCE of this asshole, what Trump REALLY believes in is....MONEY...he believes everything exists to MAKE MORE MONEY. And many of the Republicans see that this is Governments role as welll...they confuse Governing and Running a Business. So they don’t give a shit about you or me or the well-being of society or the common good or that government is about care and service and assistance...hence go fuck yourself about health care and social security and safety, etc....everything is just about making money. ThatHere is what everyone is missing...the ESSENCE of this asshole, what Trump REALLY believes in is....MONEY...he believes everything exists to MAKE MORE MONEY. And many of the Republicans see that this is Government's role as welll...they confuse Governing and Running a Business. So they don’t give a shit about you or me or the well-being of society or the common good or that government is about care and service and assistance...hence go fuck yourself about health care and social security and safety, etc....everything is just about making money. That’s all Trump cares about...he does NOT care about you duped Trump voters and supporters THAT IS FOR SURE....That’s all Trump cares about...he does NOT care about you duped Trump voters and supporters THAT IS FOR SURE....

Then Deahl posts a fake video with Donald Trump holding up a book reading “Fuck the Planet,” and comments:

Sums up this complete asshole's approach to life

Fan of Angela Davis

And of course, he is enthusiastic about Angela Davis speaking at Marquette. Indeed, he claims:

So proud of Marquette University for hosting Dr. Angela Davis who spoke on Freedom, equality, gender, race, feminism, LGBT, transgender, Palestinian, and other rights issues! Lots is students and faculty AND LOTS of members of our great community

Back to Trump’s People

And of Ivanka Trump joining the White House staff:

More pathetic ignorant corruption

If Ivanka can be attacked, of course Sean Spicer will be, with Deahl calling him a “mentally unbalanced man” and then back to Trump calling him an “asshole” and Republicans “Pathetic heartless bastards...ALL of them.”

Then, why not lump a bunch of people together and say:

Trump and Spicer and Bannon and all these Trump relatives are ALL fucking incompetent idiots

Not satisfied with attacking Trump and his Administration, he asked of Scott Walker:

When will this pathetic little boy idiot drop out ignoramace just finally go away

But then back to Pence:

Pence is an extremest to the extreme, a cruel, hateful homophobe and terribly anti gay and anti women....He must NEVER become president

And then Mike Pence meeting with the Congressional Freedom Caucus, with the observation:

Mysoginist racist white pigs, ALL

Conclusion?

We could go on and on, since Deahl does, but this raises a question. Is Deahl the secret id of the Marquette Administration, having come out of the closet since his division (Professional Studies) went down the drain?

That would be a questionable generalization, but neither would be be completely off base.

Campus bureaucrats are motivated by two things: their own ideology, and their own bureaucratic interests. Thus when an administration panders to the campus left, is it because the bureaucrats are leftists, or because they fear that campus leftists can make trouble for them, and thus need to be placated?

Marquette has gone much further than it has had to to merely placate the campus left. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that attitudes like Deahl’s are pretty common among people who run this “Catholic university.”

Update

As of 4/16/2017 Deahl seems to have sanitized his Facebook page by deleting the vast majority of his posts.

The Tolerant, Compassionate Liberals: Trying to Manipulate Kids

Window of a real estate agency in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn. pic.twitter.com/bZJWgNlxrC

— Matt Welch (@MattWelch) November 21, 2016

Leftist Intolerance in Academia

From Bloomberg News:

Consider this recent account of a graduate admissions committee meeting. An applicant to a linguistics Ph.D. program is a matriculating senior at a small historically black college unknown to some committee members. “Left-wing black nationalists,” one committee member said of the college, while another said, to much laughter, that the college was “the academic arm of Black Lives Matter.”

The committee then spent more time discussing details of the applicant’s GRE scores and background — high GRE scores, high-poverty urban school district — than it did with some other candidates. The chair of the committee said, “I would like to beat that college out of her,” and asked, to laughter from committee members, “You don’t think she’s a nutcase?”

Other committee members defended her, but didn’t challenge the assumptions about the historically black college or the people who attend it. One noted that the college had a good reputation in the humanities. And another said that her personal statement indicated intellectual independence from her college and good critical thinking. She was eventually passed on to the second round but rejected there, and given the comments of the earlier reviewers, it’s reasonable to think that in that second round, her background probably counted against her.

This is beyond outrageous. Giving a candidate a harder look because they grew up in a high poverty school district, and attended a historically black college? No, no one said “we don’t want blacks in this program”; they don’t have to. They just have to decide that traits common to black candidates, like growing up in a high-poverty neighborhood, or attending a historically black college, disqualify you from being “one of us.”

While characters in movies often make explicit speeches about how they hate black people, in reality they aren’t necessary. Racists build their racist consensus in coded language, perhaps sometimes language so coded the speaker doesn’t think about the true message.

That makes it that much harder to root this kind of pervasive bigotry out of our society. And why it’s so outrageous to hear this kind of racist talk on a graduate admissions committee in this day and age.

“But,” you are thinking, “I can’t imagine a bunch of liberal professors talking this way.” And you would be right. Read on.

Or it would be, if graduate admissions committees talked like that. I changed a few of the important details. In fact, the conversation I’m alluding to concerned a young woman who was home-schooled before attending a small Christian college, which the reviewers of her application dismissed as a place of “right-wing religious fundamentalists” that was “supported by the Koch brothers.”

What happened on that committee is bigotry, plain and simple. And it’s not just a problem for conservative Christians, and people seen as conservative Christians. It’s a problem for academia.

Needless to say, the woman did not get admitted. The author goes on:

In fact, few other professional spheres are as strongly skewed to the right as academia is to the left; when I looked into this a few years ago, the only professional group I could find with a similar rightward skew was Southern Baptist ministers, a comparison that neither group probably finds very flattering. Military officers are weakly conservative (two-thirds to one-third), but the enlisted are less so, and whether your business skews Democratic or Republican varies by industry and job description. Professors really do stand out as extremely politically concentrated on the left in a way that few other groups are, especially in areas like social psychology.

As Jonathan Haidt and the good folks at Heterodox Academy have argued, this makes it too easy for the group to adopt weak theories that flatter consensus beliefs without giving them the rigorous interrogation they’d get from a more balanced profession.

There’s another harm: The leftward skew disconnects academia from the society that it is supposed to serve. The bitter culture wars we’ve been living through, and the increasingly nasty partisanship, are the signs of a society whose factions no longer know how to talk to one another.

This reminds us of a conversation over lunch with one of our colleagues in the Marquette Political Science Department. He was fussing and fuming about the fact that the American Political Science Association convention was being held in New Orleans, in spite of a campaign by the political science gay lobby to have it moved. It seems the good citizens of Louisiana had voted against gay marriage.

It did not occur to him to ask whether the APSA should violate its own constitution, which forbids it to take positions on partisan political issues.

It also didn’t occur to him to ask why the gay lobby should pick on Louisiana, since many other states (including Wisconsin and California) had voted against gay marriage.

When we brought up the notion of political correctness, he responded that he didn’t know what “political correctness” meant.

But of course, fish don’t know what it means to be wet. That’s an apt metaphor for academics. They are so immersed in their insular culture that they don’t know that they have any particular culture.