RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2020-9-23-the-taboo-on-reporting-the-r

When you read something, you generally notice the things that the writer explicitly mentions, while you rarely take note of what the writer omits. So at first it’s easy to skip over the omission, in nearly all reporting about violent crime in the United States, of the information about the race of the perpetrator or suspect. Still, if you read enough about this subject of violent crime, at some point you just can’t help noticing this universal omission. Indeed, should you once start to look for information on the race of criminals or suspected criminals, you will quickly realize that something weird is going on.

Is it appropriate that this subject of race of perpetrators almost never gets mentioned? Perhaps there is some legitimate concern about not wanting to potentially tar all members of a race with the suspected bad conduct of a relative few. But that concern would not explain the extremes to which the suppression of this information gets carried. Even when the race of the perpetrator is known and could be helpful to the public in potentially assisting the police in identifying a suspect, you won’t find the information in a media report of the crime. Clearly there is a powerful taboo at work. Maybe it’s a rule officially prescribed and enforced by media higher-ups; or perhaps it’s one of those unspoken orthodoxies that reporters must follow in order to avoid being “canceled” by their erstwhile friends and colleagues.

This subject turns out to be important. The reason it is important is that the general suppression of information about the race of suspects enables narratives to arise that run directly contrary to facts, but the facts have been so effectively suppressed that no one knows them. The obvious narrative at issue here is the narrative that police across America unfairly target young black males in enforcement of the criminal laws.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/woke-science-is-an-experiment-certain-to-fail-11600972161?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

President Trump has ordered an end to training on “white privilege” and “critical race theory” in the federal bureaucracy. The directive is a good first step toward removing identity politics from federal operations. Next up should be the millions of taxpayer dollars devoted annually to cultivating race- and sex-based grievance in the sciences. The National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have all embraced the idea that science is pervaded by systemic bias that handicaps minorities and women. Those agencies have taken on the job of extirpating such inequity on the theory that scientific advancement depends on a “diverse” scientific workforce.

Earlier this year the NIH announced a new round of “Research Supplements to Promote Diversity in Health-Related Research.” Academic science labs could get additional federal money if they hire “diverse” researchers; no mention was made of relevant scientific qualifications. This latest grant solicitation expanded the agency’s social-justice agenda into novel territory. Besides the usual preferences for blacks, Hispanics and women, the NIH would fund student researchers who were or had been homeless, who were or had been in foster care, who had been eligible for free school lunches, or who had received WIC payments (a food program for low-income mothers) as a child or mother.

The federal science agencies have absorbed the vocabulary of academic victimology—from “intersectionality” to “heteronormativity” and “stereotype threat.” Intersectionality holds that people who can check off more than one victimhood box are particularly burdened by American bigotry. Science labs angling for the latest NIH diversity supplements will increase their chances of federal funding by hiring a woman who is also an underrepresented minority, disabled or from a “disadvantaged background.”

The National Science Foundation is currently doling out $29 million through its “Advance” program. Advance seeks to use “intersectional approaches in the design of systemic change strategies” to combat bias in the STEM fields. Successful applications will recognize that “gender, race and ethnicity do not exist in isolation from each other and from other categories of social identity.” The NSF funders are particularly concerned about policies that “do not mitigate implicit bias in hiring, tenure, and promotion” and that lead to “women and racial and ethnic minorities being evaluated less favorably.”