I, myself, believe that this Board is (generally) a tolerant, welcoming place...at least with regards to race, sex and ethnicity. Your persistent drip, drip, drip of veiled racist hate really lowers the quality of discussion on this Board, and I hope you will just STFU.
Your arguments are pseudo-science and sophistry.
I don't know where you went to school, but I seriously doubt that it had
either a Department of Sociology or a curriculum in mathematical statistics. If it did, I am sure that you never partook of either.
First of all, you cite the theory of "Cultural Determinism" as if it were valid, established science. Far from it.
Psychology Today took this theory apart in a well-regarded article published a few years ago, from which I excerpt but a small part:
Why Cultural Determinism Is Not Science (Psychology Today, Nov 2012)
The leading theory in the social sciences is cultural determinism. Yet, it lacks plausibility as a scientific theory. It is often untestable. When tested, it frequently fails. Such failures are widely ignored because social scientists cannot conceive of a plausible alternative. Evolutionary social science may fit that bill.
Cultural determinism is based on cultural relativity: the notion that growing up in one society is so different from growing up in another that they cannot be properly compared. It’s as though a resident of one country operates in a different reality from a resident of another -- because they speak a different language, believe a different religion, and so on. So, societal differences are attributed to “cultural” differences. The problem with this “parallel universes” approach is that it flies in the face of scientific method and natural science (physics, chemistry, biology, etc.) that teaches us the same laws generally hold good everywhere.
Up to now, evolutionary psychologists challenged cultural relativism by arguing that genetic influences cut across rearing environments — for instance, men being more physically violent in every society — but they had little to say about why societies are different, a sin of omission that surrendered much of the subject matter of the social sciences to cultural relativism.
Cultural determinism in a nutshell
Societal variation (or diversity) is the subject matter of cultural determinism. For sociologists and social psychologists, the key differences are attitudes to women and minorities and class differences. Anthropologists focus on bodily decoration, marriage, sexuality, warfare, home construction, religion, language, subsistence economy, and so forth.
Such variation is commonly viewed by cultural determinists as ironclad evidence that societal differences are caused by “cultural” differences. A person imbibes the ideas of their society and goes on to behave much like everyone else there, whether they happen to live in a developed country or belong to an indigenous tribe.
What is wrong with cultural determinism as science
Viewed as a scientific project, cultural determinism encounters several crippling problems. Its explanations are mostly circular. For instance, violent crime is attributed to a culture of violence. We never learn what causes some societies to be more violent in the first place. Instead, the outcome is used to explain itself—an exercise in circular reasoning that lacks scientific validity.
The key explanatory constructs in cultural determinism are generally moralistic (e.g., judgments of racism, sexism, lookism, imperialism). They take sides and prevent researchers from maintaining the sort of objectivity that is the key to good science.
Finally, cultural determinists assume that humans belong to a different scientific realm than all other evolved species on this planet. The upshot is that cultural determinism truly explains very little and the sciences that are infected by it make little or no progress.
Secondly, every competent statistician in the sociological field knows that static cross-sectional analysis of race and violent crime statistics is fatally flawed. It is a static snapshot of a characteristic of society which is in constant motion.
Or, as Mark Twain so eloquently put it, "Just because frogs are observed after the rain, doesn't mean it rained frogs."
I grew up in New York City -- one of the more enlightened and scientifically-managed cities in the United States. In 1990, New York City published a study of the correlation of violent crime to race spanning the period 1900 to 1980 -- an 80-year vista. This is what is called a "
longitudinal analysis" -- or a statistical study that tracked the behavior and evolution of behavior over time, as individual ethnic populations entered the NYC "ecosystem" and adapted to it.
What the study concluded -- with significant statistical validity, I might add -- is that there is NO CORRELATION between race and violence.
If one were foolish, and decided to base your judgments only on static snapshots of particular (relatively small) periods of time in New York City, one would conclude:
- Based on crime statistics 1900-1920, that the Irish were an inherently violent ethnicity
- Or if you looked at 1930-1940, the Italians were
- Or if you looked at 1950-1960, the Puerto Ricans were
- Or if you looked at 1970-1980, the African-Americans were
But if you stepped back, and looked across this 80-year period, you would realize that there was no correlation at all between ethnicity and violence. Poverty, the proportion of young men (age 15 to 30 -- the violent years) in any population and family structure (proportion of households with
both a father and mother present) were, statistically,
far more valid predictors of societal violence.
The tragedy of the black population today is not violence (although that is, indeed, tragic), it is that our African American brothers and sisters have struggled so long to overcome poverty, unemployment and to successfully seize the American Dream. They have struggled longer and harder than several other populations whose transition to success in America happened more quickly (for example, latinos, Cubans and Vietnamese).
While you don't read this anywhere, one man's opinion is that the African-American struggle has been more difficult for several reasons:
- Overcoming greater barriers of institutionalized racism, "benevolent paternalism" and, in the words of Daniel Moynihan, "benign neglect"
- A legacy of "single head of household" families arising from destructive welfare policies of the '60s, '70s and '80s -- which provided perverse incentives that undercut black family structure and encouraged single parent households
- A tragic cynicism about the American Dream, which has led many young black men to lose hope and conclude that the American Dream is for everyone...but them
- The heart-breaking failure to develop compelling and persuasive black leaders after the tragic assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King (including, inexplicably, the failure of Barack Obama to step up to this challenge)
While I was too young to have the privilege of ever meeting Dr. King, I did have the good fortune (later in life) to meet Nelson Mandela.
20 minutes with this man broke my heart. How
different American society
might have been had Dr. King not been lost so young!
One man
can change a whole society...if he's not shot down by a racist asshole.
Like you.
