On October 6, 2018, I attended the event for the installation of new members of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, in a hall at Harvard University, not far from the headquarters of the Academy (136 Irving Street, Cambridge, MA 02138). My wife was one of the new members to be installed. Otherwise, I had never heard of this organization, which was actually founded by John Adams and friends in 1780. I had heard of their journal, Daedalus, but I had not read it.
Each group of inductees, sorted into categories of sciences, humanities, fine arts, etc. was introduced with a speech from someone representing the category. The group for philosophy and religion, which included my wife, was introduced by Robert Gooding-Williams, of Columbia University. Gooding-Williams was identified with a short biography in the event program:
M. Moran Weston/Black Alumni Council Professor of African-American Studies; Professor of Philosophy. Major figure in contemporary philosophy of race. Leading historian of Afro-modern social and political philosophy. Du Bois scholar and Nietzsche scholar. Writings demonstrate an ability to interpret complex social phenomena and to parse the nuanced interplay of race, class, gender, nationality, and other social positions. Drawing on European and American philosophical traditions, analyzes inherited racial narratives both to criticize racial injustice and to illuminate the ideological content of racial representations. Work engages topics of immediate social concern and shows how philosophically literate social criticism can contribute to public debate.
The bio obviously contains no particular political claims, and none of the other speeches at the Academy were overtly political, although several involved stories or claims about immigration that were apparently aimed at the policies of the Trump Administration, without addressing what those policies actually were, or how they might differ or correspond to the recounted stories or claims. What was noteworthy, perhaps, is that even people who had fled Communist regimes in Vietnam or Cuba reserved their criticisms, not for the Communists, but for the United States, without any expression of gratitude for the welcome or opportunies provides here, despite their own obvious successes in American life.
But the speech of Robert Gooding-Williams was overtly political, and inflamatory, apparently attributing all evils of American life to racism. Thus, he said the economic inequally between the races was the result of racism; and the epidemic of white policemen shooting young black mean was also because of racism.
As it happens, both of these assertions are false. That economic inequality is the result of racism and, presumably, racial discrimination has long been refuted by the detailed work of economist Thomas Sowell (b.1930), in many books (about one a year) and articles, but perhaps the most conveniently in Ethnic America, A History [Basic Books, 1981], which I used to use as a texbook for my ethics classes. Thus, while (as of 1980) average Black family income in the United States was only 62% of the national average (with only American Indians lower, at 60%), the average family income of people of West Indian ancestry was actually 94% [p.5]. This poses a challenge for the race theorist. White people are unlikely to turn off their racism and oppression just because some black person has a Jamaican accent, however charming that is. At the same time, Black people from families free before the Civil War also did better than the national average for blacks.
There are also lessons from the rest of the table and treatments that Sowell provides. The top six ethnic groups in family income are people whose derivation is Jewish, Japanese, Polish, Chinese, Italian, and German. Since Jewish, Japanese, and Chinese Americans have been subject to intense prejudice, discrimination, and even legal disabilities and violence in American history, one might wonder how they can have ended up so economically successful. Similarly, in the years since 1980, many people from India have immigrated to the United States. They tend to be dark, and some have even passed for black as an experiment in deceiving the "affirmative action" systems at American universties. Nevertheless, people of Indian ancestry are now the most prosperous ethnic group in America, in so far as they can be identified by census data, which does not ask for religion (or Jews probably would still be on top). That a practical form of racial prejudice exists against Indians is confirmed by some recent murders of Hindus and Sikhs, by idiots who thought their victims were Arabs or Muslims.
The lesson of Sowell's studies is that, given a basic framework of law and civil rights, culture is what determines economic success. The thesis of the Left, however, is that economic success depends on political power. This is refuted by situations where majority populations with political power do poorly economically (i.e. the entire Soviet Union), while minority populations with no political power may do much better than the majority populations -- i.e. the Chinese in Malaya, Vietnam, the Philippines, and Thailand, or people from India in East and South Africa, or, for that matter, Jews in Poland.
From this information it is apparent that Sowell's studies have gone far beyond American society alone, and various theses can be tested using his data. Thus, one of the most revealing cases is from Hyderabad in India, where the economic success of people who share the same race, language, and religion in the former Princely State of Hyderabad, and who also lived under British colonial administration along the coast of the Bay of Bengal, has been very different. Because both populations were Telugu speaking Hindus, they were combined in the new Indian State of Andhra Pradesh. However, it was soon apparently that the coastal people were entreprenurial and successful, while the natives of Hyderabad were less so. When people moved from the coast to the city of Hyderabad and began to take over the economy, the locals resented them, with the result that laws were passed to stop the migration.
Sowell has many such examples, which demonstrate the role of culture, all other factors being equal. An interesting example he does not consider, but works the same way, is the difference in success on the Chinese Civil Service Examinations at the beginning of the Ming Dynasty, between candidates from the South of China, and those from the North. Southerners kept doing better, winning up to 75% of the degrees, which was an embarrassment, since Northerners were favored politically, from the tradition of supposedly being morally superior and more martially inclined. The only remedy for this was quotas. After some other expedients, the degrees that could be earned by Southerners were simply capped -- just as elite American universities limited the number of Jews admitted before World War II and now limit the number of "Asian" students (which means everyone from Arabs, Indians, Indonesians, Chinese, Japanese, etc.) that will be admitted.
All this also leads to a lesson about the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. Thomas Sowell, who I would put on the short list of candidates for "Wisest Man in America," is not a member of the Academy. Economists John Kenneth Galbraith (1908-2006) and Paul Samuelson (1915-2009) were members of the Academy; but neither Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973) nor Friedrich Hayek (1899-1992) -- who both early and uniquely predicted that the Soviet economy would not work -- were members. The Academy did admit the free market economist Milton Friedman (1912-2006), but the omission of Sowell, and of von Mises and Hayek, betrays a marked bias against real free market Capitalism. Galbraith, as it happens, admitted before his death that he had always been a socialist.
Thus, perhaps Robert Gooding-Williams fits right in at the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. Certainly, his understanding of culture and economics will not meet much opposition from the tendencies revealed by the Academy's membership.
Now, I also said above that the assertion about racist police shooting young black men was also false. Such claims have been steadily debunked by Heather MacDonald, most strongly in her The War on Cops, How the New Attack on Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe [Encounter Books, 2016]. I have examined some of this elsewhere in these pages, where I have my own complaint that the War on Drugs has resulted in much in the way of misconduct by the police and prosecutors, with a neglect and erosion of civil rights, not to mention justice, in the process. And there will always be bad cops and bad shoots, for which I also prefer a return to the situation were urban police departments not be armed, as originally in the 19th century they were not in Britain and America, where otherwise at the time there were no gun laws applicable to private citizens.
Nevertheless, where a political movement in the United States, "Black Lives Matter," 
began because of deaths at the hands of police, almost everything about it has been fraudulent. Michael Brown was indeed shot by a white policeman on August 9, 2014, in Ferguson, Missouri, and the claim was that he had been shot in the back, or while surrendering; but the evidence ended up showing that he had attacked the policeman, breaking his eye socket, and that he had not been shot in the back. Witnesses who confirmed the forensic evidence were then threatened by political activists.
Eric Garner did die in police custody on July 17, 2014, in New York City; but he was not shot, and his death, probably from an asthma attack, was under the supervision of a black policewoman, NYPD Sergeant Kizzy Adoni. Neither she, nor any other officer involved, were charged. Similarly, Freddie Gray did die in police custody in Baltimore on April 12, 2015; but the officers involved, who were subsequently charged with murder, were themselves Black. Perhaps the argument is that even Black officers, by being policemen at all, embody white racism (such an argument wouldn't surprise me). But the case against them fell apart. White officers were charged, simply for arresting Gray in the first place, but after some were found innocent, all prosecutions in the matter were dropped.
Otherwise, as Heather MacDonald found, white suspects were more likely to be shot by policemen than black ones. And the slogan that "Black Lives Matter" looks insincere when gang warfare in Chicago every week kills more people, usually black, gangsters and bystanders, than the police have killed in several years of questionable shootings. These deaths, which have been going on for years, are invisible to political activists and also to the ruling class, which apparently really doesn't care about Black lives. The suspicion now is that the drug gangs on the South Side of Chicago are actually part of the Democratic political machine of the City. They are tolerated and protected, and the police make no real effort to suppress them. The cost in lives is the price the Democratic Party will pay for power, just as it holds Black children hostages to Teachers Unions in miserable, dangerous, and ineffective public schools. It is all part of the layers of Leftist fraud and deception in American politics.
Robert Gooding-Williams said nothing about any of that. Instead, the ultimate point of his speech seemed to be that "deliberative democracy" could not be expected to work with rampant racism infecting society. But if racial inequality (which winks at West Indians and South Asian Indians) and police shootings are evidence of the degree of the infection of racism, and if democracy is going to be ineffective in eradicating all this racism, Gooding-Williams never got around to his recommendation about what kind of government would be effective against racism. There my suspicion is that his recommendation would have been unwelcome even among the complacent liberals of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, for my persistent impression is that the ideal form of government to the American Left remains the totalitarian dictatorship of Cuba, where "progressives" can deceive themselves (and it is a deception) that racial injustice has been eliminated. Otherwise, if democracy cannot work, what is the alternative? Especially when the speaker does not candidly provide an answer to such a question?
Gooding-Williams illustrated his argument with an account from W.E.B. Du Bois of a conversation involving a "Christian gentleman" and a "white male" racist. The Christian, of course is all for equality, but ineffectively so. The "white male," who somehow is presented as thereby more racist than white females (a most improbable proposition), will never give up on "white supremacy." This is a very odd story, and I am not sure what Gooding-Williams thought it was going to prove. Most Southern Segregationists were putative Christians. Also, the principles of equality in American law rely on a secular theory of natural rights, to which Christians might assent, but whose assent is unnecessary. This makes the account of Gooding-Williams, as well as, perhaps, that of W.E.B. Du Bois, entirely beside the point. Instead, I gathered that the story, whatever its original purpose, was meant to reinforce the argument that "deliberative democracy" would be ineffective at ending racism -- leaving whatever unstated alternative that Gooding-Williams may have had in mind. At the same time, Du Bois himself found, at times at least, Communist regimes attractive, got in trouble over it, and was consistently deceived about the effectiveness, or even interest, of Communism in fighting racism.
Now, the biographical note identified Gooding-Williams as a scholar of Du Bois and of Nietzsche. We got a little of Du Bois, but nothing of Nietzsche in his speech. As a theorist of power, Nietzsche appeals to those on the Left to whom power is everything. But considering that Nietzsche is a raving and unapologetic racist, and says things like, "The negro represents an earlier phase of human development" [der Neger (diese als Repräsentanten des vorgeschichtlichen Menschen [i.e. prehistoric man] genommen --) [The Birth of Tragedy and The Genealogy of Morals, translated by Francis Golffing, Doubleday Anchor Books, 1956, p.200; German text, Zur Genealogie der Moral, Philipp Reclam, Stuttgart, 1988, p.58;], I am curious how Gooding-Williams deals with that.
When Nietzsche is the only historic philosopher identified as Gooding-Williams' area of specialty, can he be condemned with the degree of rage and indignation that Gooding-Williams otherwise reserves for, well, America and white people? Does Nietzsche get a pass? Finding no clue in his speech, and being otherwise unfamiliar with his work, I cannot say. And yet, altogether, there was not enough there to attract or encourage any investigation. If Gooding-Williams cannot admit what his alternative was to "deliberative democracy," and if he perpetuates falsehoods exploded by Thomas Sowell and Heather MacDonald, my expectation would be to find a case of the characteristic dissimulation of the Left, without the sort of honest discourse that, to be sure, "deliberative democracy" would require. Since the officers of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences themselves voiced platitudes about civility and discourse, I'm not even sure why Gooding-Williams would have wanted to participate, although he could reasonably expect that no one in such a group would ever voice any criticisms or contradictions to whatever he might condescend to say. His speech was rewarded with vigorous applause.
The data plainly show that a race-blind process would admit roughly twice as many Asian kids. Still, Harvard insists it doesn't discriminate -- though it has failed to show why, as the law requires.
Harvard's brahmins plainly think they're doing right -- but so did their forbears a century ago, when the quotas were keeping Jews out. The discriminaiton is just as wrong now as it was then. "Standing Up to Racism," The New York Post, September 1, 2018, p.16; see here. In a column, "Who 'Deserves' to Go to Harvard?" in The Wall Street Journal of June 14, 2019, Heather Mac Donald discusses a graduation speech by the Dean of Harvard College, Rakesh Khurana. To get the feel for the business, let me quote a bit of her description directly:
We have come a long way with this from the First Inaugural Address of Thomas Jefferson, in 1801:
Dean Khurana, like many leftists, is thinking of reasons why he can "take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned," with the justification that it has not "earned" it. All that bread is the result of a roll of the dice in the Monopoly system of "capitalism." And Dean Khurana is just the guy, or one of the guys, who should decide who gets it instead.
With no little irony, Rakesh Khurana himself benefited from the fact that his parents immigrated from India to the United States, after Rakesh himself had been born there in 1967 -- all of them thus becoming part of what is now one of the most successful ethnic groups in the country. All the initiative and hard work of his parents are now dismissed and insulted by Dean Khurana, who must think that it was chance that landed him in the Administration of Harvard University. From what "structural inequalities" did Dean Khurana's parents benefit? Did they have "white privilege," even though they were not white? Dean Khurana must think so.
Indeed, Khurana is part of the Harvard Adminstration that systematically discriminates against Asian applicants, which includes people from India. This is actually illegal, since Harvard receives Federal money and must observe the 1964 Civil Rights Act, but Harvard did achieve a victory against the on-going lawsuit over these practices when they found a blatantly dishonest federal Judge, the Dishonorable Allison Burroughs, willing to rule for the University, voicing the same sophistries and falsehoods that Harvard had used before World War II to disciminate against Jews. Perhaps Burroughs, who was born in 1961, did not realize that there was an anti-Semitic history there, which she was reenacting. Good work. We can all be proud.
Mac Donald says, "Mr. Khurana accuses capitalism of fostering a 'zero-sum' mentality." This is rich. It is the Left that sees wealth as a fixed "pie," which ought to be divided up equally, with everyone, especially the "under-privileged" deserving at least an equal share. Unfortunately, it is Harvard that has the $39 billion endowment, larger than any other school in America, which it doesn't share with anyone else. But we see the ideology at work. Benjamin Franklin already understood that in economic exchanges, both traders benefit, which now is called a "positive sum game."
It is the Left whose interest is in obscuring this and in portraying the free market as a zero-sum game, which makes their own program of "redistribution" unexceptional -- although the discerning observer will gather that in socialist countries, the ruling class, whether the Soviet Communist Party or the Faculty of Harvard College, always ends up "more equal" than others. The Left also benefits from "false friends" of captitalism who misrepresent Say's Law (sometimes carelessly accepting the Left's terminology of "trickle down" economics), who invoke Bernard Mandeville as an informed and correct advocate of capitalism, or who accept Leftist characterizations that "greed is good" in capitalism. Thus, Rush Limbaugh has repeated and used "trickle down" as proper, and John Stossel the same with "greed is good." This is as bad as the Russian socialist anti-Bolsheviks calling themselves "Mensheviks," i.e. the "minority," which is what the Bolsheviks called them. As Thomas Sowell says, this all involves the Left "attributing their own misconception to others," who carelessly accept the labels. It is the mentality of losers.
Rakesh Khurana is thus among the ranks of vicious fools. He is also dishonest, since Harvard University does not believe, as Khurana says, that no one is really "deserving." Their own preferential policies in admission are based on their own ideas of "deserving," where the "underprivileged" victims of capitalism and life's lottery deserve a Harvard degree more than, say, immigrants from India who have worked hard, like Khurana's parents, to aspire to an education at Harvard.
The final irony, of course, is that a college education in the United States, besides saddling students with mountains of debt, from which they cannot escape through bankruptcy, is increasingly worthless. Ethnic studies degrees qualify one for no job outside academia, government, and perhaps the media -- none of which really contributes towards the growth of national wealth. Instead, what might be a worthy substiute for job qualifications, a genuine Liberal Education in the enlightened culture of Western civilization, is increasingly ruined by ideologues who despise the genuine principle of Liberal Education, in favor of anti-American and totalitarian principles from Marxism and "post-modernism" -- people whose ideal of government is Cuba, and whose economic understanding does not rise above the level of a Cargo Cult.
Finally, I might note a phenomenon with Dean Khurana that was evident in some of the speeches I saw at Harvard in 2018. He is what I must call an "ungrateful immigrant." Instead of being thankful for all that America afforded to his parents and to him, Khurana ends up with no understanding, respect, or graditude for the principles and way of life of the country from which he has benefited his entire life. This is not entirely new or unusual. Immigrants to the United States a hundred years ago were in general profoundly grateful to be here, where their opportunities for success and advancement were vastly greater than back home in, say, Russia, Italy, or Armenia. Yet even then, there were immigrants who rejected the principles of America and became anarchists or communists, throwing bombs or planning the violent overthrow of the United States government, in favor of fantasy utopian schemes that would soon effect the slaughter of millions of people in Europe, China, etc.
Indeed, this was another case where the defenders of America often carelessly have accepted the misconceptions of others, for instance that Joe McCarthy was a villian rather than a hero. The phenomenon now of the disloyalty and anti-American conspiracies of the "Deep State" (includling the FBI spying on the Trump Presidential campaign with fraudulently obtained warrants), is nothing new -- we now know that the espionage of John Stewart Service (1909-1999) was white-washed (in the "Amerasia Affair") by Soviet agents in the Truman Administration, e.g. Charles Dexter White (1892-1948). The continued existence of "Deep State" bad actors is one effect of the hateful lies told about American history and capitalism, often by people just like Rakesh Khurana.
The Speech I Didn't Hear
The Address of Rakesh Khurana,
Dean of Harvard College,
to the Class Day Graduating Seniors,
May 29, 2019Harvard, you see, uses a purely subjective "personal rating" that consistently finds Asian students have less interesting personalities than kids of other ethnic groups. That's right: It's an elaborate charade to "scientifically" declare Asians to be ... boring.
Power imbalances were a big theme of Mr. Khurana's remarks. He proposed to "interrogate" what it means to deserve something, whether being at Harvard or being successful in life. The "capitalist ethos," according to Mr. Khurana, tells us that "we deserve to win because of our skill, our hard work, and our contributions." Mr. Khurana -- who is also a professor of business and of sociology -- claimed to be mystified by that belief. In Monopoly, the board game Mr. Khurana called synonymous with the capitalist system, it's the roll of the dice that determines "whether we land on Park Place or land in jail." Monopoly is like real life, he concluded, which is often detrermined by factors beyond our control -- above all by "those privileges sociologists [like him] call 'structural inequalities'."
Still one thing more, fellow citizens -- a wise and frugal government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government.
If the concept of "deserving" is objectionable, Harvard could institute admission by lottery. In fact, the elite university believes itself capable of making minute distinctions of worth among student applicants. It has adopted a racial caste system, giving black applicants a fourfold admissions advantage over other applicants, according to the plaintiffs in a lawsuit against the school [Students for Fair Admissions, 2014]. Richer black students are catapulted ahead of poorer but more academically qualified Asian-American and white students. Do those perferred students "deserve" their advantage?
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