Yglesias: Why are you so "unseemly and inappropriate?"

Matt explains how mentioning NBA racial patterns leads to Hitlerism.

Matthew Yglesias writes on his Slow Boring substack about how, even though he is an NBA fan, he favors ignorance and lack of curiosity about the demographic patterns he sees with his own eyes when he watches the NBA on TV.

Taboos can be good

I have noticed that Black people are significantly overrepresented in the top ranks of professional basketball, and my guess is that you have noticed this as well. You need to be more of an NBA fan, though, to have noticed that residents of the former Yugoslavia are also overrepresented. I’m not sure why people from the Balkans outperform other people experiencing a lack of melanin. I am also not sure why Black Americans outperform white ones.

Because scientists have found that people from the Dinaric Alps are among the tallest in the world on average, and they tend to be more ruggedly built than other currently particularly tall people like the Dutch and the Dinkas (e.g., the Bols, father and son).

Another tall and skilled group are Baltics (e.g., the Sabonises, father and son).

You could imagine these dual outperformances having similar underlying causes or very different ones. I have not looked into it, and frankly I don’t intend to, because I am happy living in a society where it is considered unseemly and inappropriate to preoccupy oneself with such questions.

After all, think about how much less anti-black racist violence there would be if the NBA was only broadcast on the radio, but not on TV. Then, white racists wouldn’t notice the racial gaps, and there would be so many fewer lynchings of NBA players.

Oh, wait … now that I think about it, that doesn’t actually happen.

In fact, just about everybody seems to be totally cool about the huge racial discrepancies in the NBA.

Except … lots of public intellectuals get hot under the collar when anybody mentions NBA disparities.

Maybe, just maybe, if it weren’t “considered unseemly and inappropriate” to study other racial discrepancies, that also actually wouldn’t lead to Hitler’s brain being revivified and elected President, which Yglesias seems to be worried about.

In my opinion, it is completely correct to observe that dogmatic accounts of disparate impact à la Kendi are dangerous and bad.

But if you can’t explain evidence for why Ibram X. Kendi is wrong without being “unseemly and inappropriate,” then naive but reasonable people would tend to assume Kendi must be right, because nobody seemly and appropriate ever explains why Kendi is wrong using logic and evidence.

After all, Kendi offers an Occam’s Razor explanation for a huge social issue: if all races are equal, then black problems must be caused by white evilness.

Only unseemly and inappropriate people ever respond, and we can safely ignore them.

Traditionally, unseemly and inappropriate nobodies in the comments sections would reply to Kendi’s fashionable racist anti-white hate by pointing out the existence of racial disparities in the NBA.

But, we know that replying to Kendi with the NBA example is unseemly and inappropriate.

Not surprisingly, there are a lot fewer comments sections than there used to be.

So, also not surprisingly, Kendi, with his low 1000s SAT score, became America’s dominant intellectual for a few years during the Black Lives Matter era, at least among the seemly and appropriate.

This in turn helped boost black homicide deaths by 44% and motor vehicle accident deaths by 39% from 2019 to 2021. But only unseemly and inappropriate people mention the Floyd Effect.

Insisting on perfect racial balance in everything (automatic ticket enforcement, advanced math enrollment, etc) makes it very hard to design functioning social systems. Besides which, nobody has ever tried to apply this in a truly comprehensive way (do we need initiatives to get more white kids playing basketball?)

Perhaps. After all, a few generations ago, the best white basketball players often came from places like New York City where they’d grow up around black basketball players. Now the best white players tend to come from place Serbia and central Maine. How come?

or developed a principled account of exactly which ethnic groups matter in this accounting (is it necessary to inquire after the balance of WASPs to Irish Catholics on America’s police forces?).

Here, Matt is dog-whistling to his fellow Jews about Jewish dominance of many of the really good jobs.

But I also think it’s perfectly reasonable for people to worry that stereotyping will lead to discrimination.

After all, the United States doesn’t have a competitive market that rewards businesses for hiring the people who can make them more money, the way the Brooklyn Dodgers prospered from 1947-1956 by taking the lead in hiring black baseball players.

Nor does America have any sort of civil rights apparatus to prevent discrimination based on stereotypes. It’s not like there are laws against discrimination or lawyers who file discrimination lawsuits, much less government agencies devoted to preventing hiring based on crude stereotypes rather than on individual traits. Nor has science invented any means to identify individuals who are non-stereotypical, such as the legendary but non-existent IQ test.

Oh, wait …

And parsing the difference between “taste-based” and “statistical” discrimination doesn’t really change the fact that people are individuals, and they reasonably do not want to be discriminated against.

Look how affirmative action discrimination against white men was invented in 1969, and it only took the white men of the Supreme Court a few months to outlaw it for violating the 14th Amendment’s equal protection of the laws clause. White men didn’t want to be discriminated against, and the Constitution agreed with them, so the Supreme Court banned affirmative action in 1970, or 1971 at the latest, right?

What … you are saying it took 54 years until 2023 for the Supreme Court to outlaw racial preferences in college admissions, and then in 2024 most elite colleges appear to have largely ignored the law of the land?

Why wasn’t I, Matthew Yglesias, informed?

Conversely, I think there is a broadly accurate stereotype that people who roam around the world articulating unflattering statistical observations about ethnic groups they don’t belong to mostly are, in fact, bigots with bad intentions.

Like Charles Murray: what a horrible person! What a bigot with bad intentions! How do I know Charles Murray is a bad, bad person? Because he is so unseemly and inconsiderate as to carefully study the truth and report on reality.

And the classic postwar observation that this kind of behavior can lead to extremely dark places with terrible results for everyone strikes me as pretty much correct.

As opposed to egalitarian ideas, which only ever led to happy places like the Gulag and Phnom Penh in 1975.

It’s not a coincidence that movements that want to destigmatize racism also want to do World War II revisionism.

But what if, when the Charles Murray revives Hitler’s brain, it turns out to have a low IQ score?

Huh?

Years ago, there was a take that what some disparage as “political correctness” is really nothing more than the basic habit of being polite.

Hence, the enormous degree of politeness in the prestige press during the Great Awokening toward straight white men, those hair-touching subhumans.

I don’t think that holds up to much scrutiny.

What is true, though, is that politeness is a virtue, and that the habit of bending over backwards to try to be polite to people who are disadvantaged or groups that have historically been discriminated against makes sense.

After all, look at who has been legally disadvantaged by affirmative action over the last 56 years of history.

Oh, wait … Forget I ever said that.

Anyway, the 14th Amendment explicitly spells out that the most recent 56 years of historical discrimination don’t count. Read the text of the Constitution: “You can, legally, do whatever you want to the currently disfavored groups for at least 56 years. (But what about for more than 56 years? How long is too long? Well, that’s a secret that would be unseemly and inappropriate to reveal.)”

And while not everything that right-wingers attack as “woke” or “PC” is just politeness, much of it is, and the impulse in some quarters of the right to say that we need to become a ruder, crueler society that no longer observes politeness norms is bad. The mistake of anti-racist excess was in going beyond trying to downplay ethnic differences to insist on measures that in fact reify them and increase their salience.

Or maybe the worst thing was all the lying, hate, and racist discriminating.

But going in the other direction, and doing it in a mean-spirited way, isn’t going to solve anything and poses massive downside risks.

Seriously, what would actually improve things all-around is for there to finally be a reckoning for the Racial Reckoning.

A huge current problem is that The Establishment has never quite admitted how much racist and sexist animus and bias they not only tolerated but encouraged during the Great Awokening. They are, instead, busy memoryholing recent events.

So, a lot of their victims assume that The Elites will just do it to them again once they are back in power, so they’d better stick with their team no matter what. Sure, they’re aren’t too certain about the wisdom of Trump’s tariffs or RFK’s vaccine theories, but they feel those guys aren’t likely to turn on them just because of their race and sex.

Thus, a formal apology by a respected leader of the left-of-center to straight white men for all the racist anti-white hate and discrimination that peaked in this very decade would establish the precedent that racism against whites and sexism against men are also bad and not to be tolerated.

Instead, at present it’s considered unseemly and inappropriate to assert that racism against whites is bad. The respectable position is, well, we won’t say being racist against whites is good, but we won’t say it’s bad, either. We’ll just ask you questions about why you are asking? Are you one of those bad whites? If you are not, why are you so preoccupied with the question of whether or not bigotry against whites is to be deplored?

Huh?

Huh?

Seriously, there actually is a guy who is well-positioned to bring the country a little closer together by apologizing for how much racist anti-whitism ran amok in recent years: Barack Obama.

If the former President made an eloquent speech apologizing for how things got out of hand beginning in his second term and peaking in the craziness of the 2020s, then national healing could begin in earnest.