~1400 Academics Denounced Me as Racist for Using a Quote from Fiddler on the Roof

Notes from a Witch Hunt 2.0

You think, “You can’t be serious. Surely this is hyperbole!” No. It is literally true but of course it is a bit more complicated than that. But I know where the bodies are hid.

If you are not familiar with this event, you find a chronology spanning over two years here. In this essay, I am not re-reviewing the whole event, and, instead, focus on my experience within it. Ready for a wild ride?

My Original Sin: Contesting “Social Justice” Claims

I recently wrote a paper titled Diversity is Diverse, which can be found here. The paper was written as a response to a critical commentary by Hommel (2022) of a published paper by Roberts et al (2020) titled Racial Inequality in Psychological Science. The journal is Perspective on Psychological Science, of whom Klaus Fiedler was the editor. Three other critical commentaries were also accepted for publication (I predict all will be “unaccepted” though as of this writing it has not happened).

The general topic was diversity and racism in psychology. Oversimplifying only slightly, Hommel argued that Roberts et al: 1. Overstated the extent of racism in psychology, and this was demonstrable from their own data; 2. the scientific justifications Roberts et al gave for advocating for more focus on racial diversity applied equally well to a myriad of other forms of diversity:

Hommel wrote:

• … the call for diversity was restricted to just one of more than 100 possible personal features of already demonstrated psychological relevance. If we are to report the race of editors, reviewers, authors, and participants, as Roberts et al. demand, it seems logical to also demand reporting their cultural, religious, and economic background, their political orientation,…[list continues for 2 lines]…, in addition to tens, if not hundreds of other personal features that might have affected the measures of interest in past studies

Among Hommel’s conclusions:

• uncritically accepting activist claims, demands, and reasoning, and translating them into scientific practice creates a potentially toxic mix of science and ideology that is likely to damage scientific freedom and independence.

The preface to the denunciation for using a quote from Fiddler on the Roof begins with an exchange of ideas among many papers and the way in which that exchange was handled by a journal editor, which I am not revisiting here. All original sources involved in what was to become a hunt for (metaphorical) witches supposedly cavorting with (ideological) demons, can be found here. Go there to do a deep dive on who said exactly what and when and about whom.

Let’s get right to the Witch Hunt. Suffice it to say I mostly agreed with Hommel (but feel free to read my whole paper) that the original Roberts et al paper is more propaganda than science. As you will see, I had yet to learn just how expert he was at such rhetoric.

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My Depravity Began with Fiddler on the Roof

My commentary mostly concurred with Hommel’s analysis, but took it one step further. My paper led off with this quote from the Fiddler on the Roof song, Tradition (which begins at 5:50 in the clip shown above):

“Of course, there was the time he sold him a horse, and delivered a mule.”

  The Oxford Languages Dictionary provides two definitions of diversity:

1.      The state of being diverse, variety.

2.      The practice or quality of including or involving people from a range of different social and ethnic backgrounds and of different genders, sexual orientations, etc.

Inasmuch as “the state of being diverse” is not very helpful for understanding the meaning of “diversity,” I looked up “variety.”  The same dictionary defines “variety” as “the quality or state of being different or diverse; the absence of uniformity, sameness, or monotony.”  The first definition is clearly the broader of the two and subsumes the second definition. This risks creating confusion about what is being discussed. If someone promises “diversity” interpreted in the broader sense, but delivers “diversity” in the narrower sense, that person is plausibly interpretable as having, metaphorically, sold a horse but delivered a mule.

The point of this was the disingenuousness of much modern academic discourse around issues of diversity. Agree or not, the point was obvious. It was also obviously a point about ideas and rhetoric around diversity. What are often presented as scientific arguments for diversity (which are often well-justified and apply to the wide range of human experience described by Hommel), in academia, often boil down to calls for practices that implement far left visions of social justice and reparations. In addition to failing to include myriad forms of human diversity other than those progressives care about, they exclude the vast majority of Americans who are unwilling to conform to progressive dogmas. As such, academia is in the midst of a political purity spiral that looks like this (for data on which Figure 1 below is based go here):

I then used the Fiddler horse/mule metaphor throughout the paper to capture the disingenuousness of various claims about diversity, equity, and inclusion in academia. Here is another excerpt:

• “However, if one takes a political activist lens, one demanding reparative social justice rather than a scientific one, to atone for historical discrimination, “inclusion” must be satisfied by biases favoring those historically marginalized groups. Similarly, when using that same political activist lens, “representation” does not mean statistical representation in proportion to the population, it means overrepresentation (in order to provide reparations for past bias). Inclusion and representation, too, then, can constitute (political social justice) mules delivered when (scientific) horses were promised.”

Again, its completely obvious that this passage refers to the disingenuous manner in which words like “representation” are used in psychology and academia. It does not refer to any particular identifiable group of people.

Roberts was given a chance to reply to the exchange (which included two other articles on the Roberts-Hommel exchange). He first presents this extended quote from my paper (the quote is accurately excerpted):

• To be sure, if some psychologists in some fields wish to devote extra effort and attention to samples of color, I have no objection. Special attention to samples of color¹ deserves a place in psychological science. Let’s not pretend, however, that such samples are somehow inherently scientifically more rigorous than ones that more closely approximate the demographics of the underlying population. Scientists who wish to plow their fields with mules should permitted to do so; they should not, however, pretend that those mules are horses or suggest that, unless others give up their horses, they are doing something scientifically suboptimal.

Did you think I was simply carrying through my horse/mule metaphor to encapsulate the disingenuous hypocrisy of diversity rhetoric? Of criticizing the idea that a special emphasis on particular groups is somehow scientifically superior to work on broadly more representative samples? You are so naive.²

“The art of propaganda lies in understanding the emotional ideas of the great masses and finding, through a psychologically correct form, the way to the attention and thence to the heart of the broad masses.”

Roberts reveals the “truth” (emphasis mine, Appendix III presents a screenshot in full of Roberts’ text):

• …this metaphor… explicitly parallels people of color with mules…which is a well-documented racist trope used to dehumanize people of color. As one historian put it, “mules and African Americans shared close ties in the minds of white southerners,” who conceptualized and portrayed them both as unintelligent, inefficient, and inferior “beasts of burden” that belonged in the field and away from their masters (Ellenberg, 1998). Again, I grant Jussim (forthcoming) the benefit of the doubt, but given the present question of the intersection between ideology and science, it is important to make crystal clear that the scientific consensus is that racial categories are social categories, not animal categories, and that conceptualizing racial categories as if they were animal categories is an essentialist worldview that predicts (and is predicted by) stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination, and a decreased interest in contact with individuals from diverse racial backgrounds… Depicting people of color as mules is a historically outdated, inaccurate, and dangerous concept that reflects and reinforces the belief that White people are better, purer, and more productive (Davis, 1991; Ellenberg, 1998; Roberts et al., 2022). People of color are not mules, and they are no longer required to plow fields.

“The art of propaganda lies in understanding the emotional ideas of the great masses and finding, through a psychologically correct form, the way to the attention and thence to the heart of the broad masses.”

This is a brilliant piece of rhetoric. Effective propaganda stokes emotions and outrage and short-circuits thinking. He claims to be giving me the benefit of the doubt while simultaneously damning me as the worst sort of 19th century racist. The best propaganda builds on things people can see for themselves to craft falsehoods and mobilize behavior. Every statement in Roberts’ analysis is true, except for one lie.³ There are two big lies here:

1. 1. it “explicitly parallels people of color with mules.” I did no such thing, of course. But you would need to have read my paper to understand that the source of the horse/mule metaphor was not 1880 Mississippi, but a 1970s play about early 20th century Jewish life in Russia.

2. There is no racist mule trope.

As (the Black linguist) John McWhorter has pointed out:

• In today’s America, to be called a racist is almost equivalent to being called a pedophile.

However true that may be in general, it is even more true among regressively “progressive” academics. Each of these features of leftwing authoritarianism was on full display during the mobbing:

Roberts weaponized a 19th century racist trope that disappeared by 1950 according to his own source (Ellenberg (1998), which concludes with this:

• “But by 1950 one thing was certain, the real and symbolic marriage of mules and African Americans was ending as the mule South bowed to the machine.”

This trope had disappeared three generations ago. Few Americans, I suspect, had even heard of it, until Roberts dredged it up in his masterful denunciation. So far, I have found no one who says they knew of the trope before Roberts revived it.

There was no racist mule trope in my paper.

The Mob

Nonetheless, Robert’s framing of that section from my paper quickly got picked up by academics on social media who proceeded to immediate outrage with no fact checking. The move was to link to Roberts paper and also to excerpt just the Roberts denunciation. None linked my paper, showed any sign of having read it, any knowledge about it other than Robert’s out of context excerpt. There was no evidence of knowledge that its metaphor originated, not in 19th century racist tropes, but in Fiddler on the Roof, a 1960s era play about early 20th century Jewish life in Russia:

Within hours of my first seeing this hit social media, an online open letter was organized, petitioning for redress of the injustices inflicted on Roberts. It opened with this denunciation:

• “The racism, general editorial incompetence, and abuse of power enacted against one of our colleagues (detailed here) is atrocious…”

It also included demands for Fiedler to be fired as editor, for blocking publication of our accepted papers, and, instead, publishing Roberts’ rhetorically brilliant propaganda hit piece. Within days, it had almost 1400 signatories. Fiedler was given no chance to explain or defend his actions, but he was given an ultimatum by APS (the professional organization overseeing the journal) to resign or be fired. He resigned.

In contrast to, I suspect, nearly all of the ~1400 academics, Fiedler actually read both my comment and Roberts’ reply. And this is what he wrote to Roberts (go here for source materials):

• I read your article with great interest, and I must say I really liked it for the most part, maybe with one exception, namely the passage on mules (vs. horses). I found this was polemic, because every reader understands that the way in which Jussim meant the analogy is misrepresented here…

Yes, Klaus, every reader who actually read my paper would understand that. But that is not how Outrage Mobs work. It is not how radical dogmatic political movements work. It is no longer how much of academia works. Actually read the paper? How quaint.

Postscript: Some Interesting Conversations

Nonetheless, several people have told me something along the following lines:

• “I think you have been mistreated but I disagree with your use of the horse/mule metaphor.”

Combining several such conversations, these have usually continued something like this:

Me: Had you ever heard of the mule trope before Roberts denounced me with it?

Them: Uh, no.

Me: Me either. Did you read my paper?

Them: Uh, no.

Me (voice raised, agitated): Then how the fuck can you “disagree” with my use of the metaphor if you haven’t even read my fucking paper?

Them: Uh, mmm, errr, [other incoherent gutteral sounds, when face to face. Discussions via email/dm were slighly different but not much].

Me: Would you mind reading the first page of my paper?

Them, uncomfortable now: Sure.

[I show them the first page, displayed earlier in this essay. They read it].

Me: What is the origin of the horse/mule metaphor?

Them (kinda stunned): Fiddler on the Roof.

Me: Is there anything racist about Fiddler on the Roof?

The tension then drops a few hundred decibals. Sometimes they even smile.

Appendix: Screenshot of Roberts “Deconstruction” of My Horse/Mule Metaphor

Full paper here.

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Footnotes

1. “Samples of color” is the term used here because it was first used in the Roberts et al (2020) paper.

2. I have purposely not identified the author of the quote because I want you to digest its meaning and not be distracted by the author. Feel free to look it up. Its appearance twice, bracketing Roberts’ denunciation of me, is not a typo.

3. “Except for one lie.” Unfortunately, even I made the mistake of giving credence to Roberts’ description of the mule trope. It was so vivid, and he did have a reference. After things settled down, I did a deep dive on the reference, and even I was shocked to discover There is No Racist Mule Trope (click link to find out how I disovered that).