I am teaching a class on Popper and falsification next week. I think I'll incorporate this amazing inoculation against falsification: "White privilege is real, but who is white is moving. Whoever has good outcomes, that is the group with white privilege". I think Freud would be jealous.
Great essay. Is there any comprehensive work on Hmong populations in America? I'm particularly interested in fathers, diets, and dietary deficiencies during childhood development. Anything on peer and play groups might tangentially relate to my interest.
Thank you. There might be a little discussion of those topics in Portes and Rumbaut (2001) Legacies and in Jeremy Hein (2006) Ethnic Origins. I have documented the socioeconomic statistics https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11113-021-09636-9
which is a fundamentally flawed essay. Note than this latter essay by Tran emphasizes heterogeneity among Asian Americans as a critical issue while my paper finding extensive (if not greater) heterogeneity among Whites is being rejected by mainstream population studies journals. Indeed, the reviewers of my paper object to any discussion of Asian Americans.
Thanks. You might also want to look at educational outcomes in the UK for Black British cohorts with distinctly different outcomes. There are Nigerian British and Ghanian British, both of which do better than the White British cohort, but also the Somali British with awful outcomes. Then are Afro-Caribbean British, a highly interesting cohort, because along with the White working class, Bangladeshi British and some older Pakistani British communities, they were exposed to some really detrimental social policies, including, but not limited to, HUD-style high density urban housing, welfare which encouraged intergenerational dependence and father-absence, and host of other bad government programmes.
One noted Black British former equalities commissioner, contrarian, and Left-leaning liberal called Sir Trevor Philips noted wryly that not only would structural racism have to be all-pervading, but it would have to be incredibly smart and selective, able to detect specific African national origin and apply differing levels of systemic oppression. Hardly what the CRT types want to hear or read. The Left tried to cancel him a while back over his comments about Islam and an ongoing dispute over the link between self-segregation and potential radicalisation. He seems somewhat uncancellable. Currently, he's the senior anchor on a 90 minute weekly debate and news show for Sky News. He's also the co-founder of his own data company Webber Philips.
One of the things I've been looking at as a curiosity for the last few years is nutritional effects on cognitive development in childhood. It's a fascinating areas, because at least some of the differences are both genetic and will appear in GWAS data, but are also highly sensitive to environment and dietary intake. I did begin to wonder whether as our ancestors spread out from Africa specific gene adaptions to help us optimise specific environmental food sources might have conferred minor developmental advantages along the way as a side effect. I's sure you're aware gene mutations for dietary adaption seem to be the most likely to stick. For example, Neanderthals and Denisovans typically had only 2 diploid copies of AMY1. For modern humans, the range is 2-20.
Anyway, a while back I managed to kick one of the AIs back into sandbox setting by convincing it I was a sci fi writer looking at ways an alien species might try to level up IQ by ancestry group with the aim of creating both a smarter species and greater equality between groups. LLMs tend to be lot less censorious if they think they are collaborating in a creative project and they are more willing to deal with controversial subjects with people who demonstrate high levels of specific domain knowledge. Anyway, after a couple of hours playing around I got it to run some calculations and these were the results:
The maternal childbirth mechanisms and deficiencies I was looking at didn't pan out. I was just playing around again, because gene/diet interplays only account for about a third of differences. I started looking at the h2 iissue- h2 is high in high-SES backgrounds (0.72) vs. low in low-SES backgrounds (0.26)- twin study. Fathers are far more important, because they shield from the negative effects of low SES. In the UK there are almost no differences in the exam results of bottom quintile Chinese British and the top quintile. Raj Chetty's research shows that fathers at the community level are the single most important factor in upward social mobility.
Nutrition and fathers together seem to close racial IQ gaps to the point that they're negligible. Basically, after fathers and nutrition during cognitive development, White end up with +4 IQ (and a 4-6 point gain of their own), and East Asians end up with +8 IQ (3-5 point gain).
Both can be true. Documenting heterogeneity in white socioeconomic characteristics does seem really important. I appreciate this author for using data to challenge that standard view that whites are a homogenous and uniformly advantaged group. But, it can also be true that white privilege exists. Fictional narratives, TV dramas and people's memoirs discuss how poor and disadvantaged whites can more easily pass as high-status than can people of color. Someone with white trash origins can be transformed with clothing and some etiquette lessons into an member of elite society.
"it CAN also be true that white privilege exists". Why don't we focus more on the empirical data instead of one own's biased perception of reality? And again, can you start by clearly and empirically defining "white" and "privilege"?
Defining polysemous single words like white and privilege won't contribute meaningfully to this discussion, but there are working definitions of white privilege. What is your opinion of this one?
White privilege is the unearned set of social and economic advantages that white people have in a culture characterized by racial inequality. These benefits are granted by society based on one's race, often without the individual's conscious recognition, and are distinct from personal wealth or class privilege.
Key Concepts
Unearned Advantages: These are not benefits a person earns through merit or hard work, but are automatically conferred due to their white identity within a racially stratified society.
Invisibility to Beneficiaries: People who benefit from white privilege often do so unconsciously, as these advantages are normalized and considered the societal "norm" or "default". In contrast, racial minorities are often acutely aware of the privileges denied to them.
Systemic and Institutional: White privilege is embedded in societal institutions and policies, such as in the housing market, legal system, or education, rather than being merely the result of overt individual bias.
Absence of Disadvantage: A major aspect of white privilege is the ability to go through life without having race act as an additional obstacle. For example, a white person experiencing poverty still does not face the added burden of racial discrimination on top of their economic hardship.
Examples of White Privilege
Based on the work of academic Peggy McIntosh, who described white privilege as an "invisible package of unearned assets," examples include:
Being able to go shopping without being followed or harassed.
Seeing people of one's race widely represented in media and leadership positions.
Having one's decisions or behaviors not be attributed to the negative stereotypes of their race.
Being able to criticize the government without being seen as a "cultural outsider".
The core idea is to highlight the systemic power differences between white people and people of color, and how all white individuals, regardless of intent, benefit from this system. Acknowledging this privilege is considered an essential step toward dismantling racial inequities.
This definition seems very narrowly focused on “whiteness”. How does this differ from the privilege that a Han Chinese experiences in China, or an ethnic Japanese experiences in Japan?
Agree. These privileges occur for many ethnic majority groups. Stigmatization against ethnic minorities can be extreme in ethnically monogynous cultures such as the two you mentioned. The US is the largest country where there have been concerted effort to reduce ethnic majority privilege to address historic injustice. But for humans, loss of privilege is aversive and is experienced as oppression. A form of loss aversion. People fight hard to avoid it.
We agree. I wrote "documenting ... is important" (this means focusing on the empirical data). I wrote "I appreciate... using data to challenge..." That means focusing on empirical data.
I found another example of “white privilege”. Whites receive more favorable terms in the criminal justice system.
"Black individuals charged with misdemeanors are less likely to have their charges reduced (Berdejo, 2018) and more likely to be offered plea deals involving jail time (Kutateladze et al., 2016). Male and Black individuals are also less likely to have their shoplifting cases dismissed than are females and Whites (Adams & Cutshall, 1984). "
And then I found this example of “white privilege”.
Jun 14, 2025 — A groundbreaking 2003 study found that Black men without criminal records received job callbacks at about the same rate as white men with felony convictions on their applications..... a Black applicant's race alone created the same employment barrier as a criminal record...
This Article reports on an original audit study that involved sending testers who were matched on all observable characteristics other than gender and race into downtown Chicago stores to return prepurchased items. All of the audited stores had official policies that required a receipt as a prerequisite to a return, but the testers did not present receipts for the items.
The findings revealed stark racial disparities: Black shoppers, both women and men, encountered more frequent denials and were less likely to be offered refunds than their white counterparts, with white women receiving the most favorable treatment. These disparities persisted and became even more pronounced after the testers asked to speak to management. Insights gleaned from novel interviews with store clerks suggest that these discrepancies stem from ingrained biases that associate race with social status and expected behavior.
When child protective services receive an accusation of neglect against a white single mother; they attribute her non optimal parenting to external situational forces such as the stress of poverty. CPS arranged to give her financial support or other benefits. When the accusation is against a black single mother, the black mother is given fewer resources and more likely to have her children removed. This inequity in treatment disappeared when case workers were instructed, as part of a research study, to remove mention of the mother's race from their case reports.
Heh. This is true. Even their data found that, in any simple Black/White comparison (education, income, etc), White's were doing better (even though Black/White differences were only a small portion of the SES heterogeneity), a result that is at least consistent with White Privilege narratives (and I requested that they acknowledge this, which I am pretty sure they will).
HOWEVER, there are many reasons for inequality other than "privilege" (unearned advantages), so, though SES differences are "consistent" with White privilege narratives, they are not a particularly severe test, and, consequently, do not provide particularly strong confirmation of those narratives.
You made me think of something when you used the term 'white privilege narrative.' Leftists, marixists and those working from a class-inequality lens often note that class divides are upheld by convincing working-class whites to side with their skin color, rather than what is in their economic interests, which is to join forces with working-class PoC. Bob Dylan's Only a Pawn In Their Game is powerful suppot for the idea that historically (prior to wokeism), elites sought to increase the black-white divide as part of routine caste maintenance. Ok, but the idea I got from what you wrote -- why are wokeists so concerned with upholding the white privilege narrative? Well, the obvious thing is what was relayed in Arthur Sakamoto's webpage, regarding the famous professor who was masterful at promoting Woke ideology in sociology. The goal is to climb higher in the woke status hierarchy with virtue signalling and fitting in dominant sociological narratives. Yes,but - I'm wondering if there is even something more demonic. it is also a form of upholding white privilege and caste maintenance, because it obscures and negates social class issues. Upholding the power of skin color downplays the reality of income and generational wealth.
Totally agree across the board, Catherine. The analysis of woke status-seeking is dead-on. If you haven't read Musa al-Gharbi's stuff, he makes the same points (he's got both an excellent Substack and a book that has made a splash documenting a lot of that with data). I strongly support programs to ameliorate the worst disadvantages due to poverty and low income, and to give such people a better shot at a decent life (scholarships/tuition breaks for meritorious low income students is one example; universal health care another). Such programs will inherently disproportionately help people from demographic groups that are also lower income -- but that's fine with me, because the help goes to those who actually need it.
I have many publications on racial and ethnic inequality in the US. They may be found at the above website. If you are unable to access it, then I can email you a copy of any paper if you are interested.
"the white “color line” is always being redrawn and is an always-moving target across the history of American race relations, with some groups having easier access to its core privileges while others only enjoy more partial envelopment at different times….There are differential proximities to the fuller comforts of whiteness and white privilege, and these change over time for different groups."
Ah this is the classic unsubstantiated, ambiguous word salad that Critical Theorists purposely use to avoid committing to any properly definable and empirically verifiable concept. They can keep adjusting and changing the meaning of the concepts involved in the discussion to suit their narrative and dismiss arguments against them without justification, effectively preventing the possibility of a real discussion.
How have these clowns ended up in charge of academia? It's absurd, pathetic, and deeply damaging.
Hi, Santiago. I agree that the article should be published, but the reviewer comments you quoted seem valuable. Why is that material you quoted "word salad"? It isn't hard to understand. There are many cases of sociological or English-professor-marxism verbiage that are word salad. This isn't one of those cases. Below is what the quote means. Why this is important: Let's reserve the "word salad" term for cases that are actually word salad.
The quote explains that the boundary of who is considered "white" and who gets the benefits of being white has never been fixed in American history. It's like a moving target that has shifted over time.
To substantiate the individual claims:
The "white color line" is a moving target: The idea of what constitutes "whiteness" is not static. Historically, groups like Irish and Italian immigrants were not always considered "white" in the same way as Anglo-Saxon Protestants, but they were eventually included in that category.
Access to privilege varies: Not all groups have had the same level of access to the advantages and comforts that come with being considered white. Some groups were more easily accepted into this privileged status, while others only gained partial or conditional acceptance at different times.
"Differential proximities" to whiteness: This means that different groups of people are positioned closer or farther away from the core benefits of being white. This proximity, which can be based on factors like skin tone, cultural alignment, or social class, can change over time, affecting the privileges they receive.
Word salad might not have been the best way to describe it. The point I was trying to make -which I don't think you've refuted- is that the definitions and groups referred to by critical theorists are conveniently malleable and impossible to measure. Not to mention they start from a number of unproven assumptions such as an alleged inherent privilege associated with being white, whatever “privilege” means, and whatever “white” means.
Sociology employs a progressive epistemology which judges the veracity of scientific findings as to how well they fit the prevailing narratives. There is a discussion of it here, pointing out sociology's antipathy to serious critical thought and open enquiry:
Thanks for sharing. That's exactly the impression I got as a complete outsider, but what I really wonder is how they have convinced themselves that their narrative is so correct and flawless that any empirical evidence refuting it should be disregarded without consideration. How can they continue moving forward despite the dissonance between their belief system and the evidence at hand?
Maybe I need to learn more about Critical Theory. Maybe there's some merit to it, not enough to support all their grandiose claims, but persuasive enough to lead them into such a mindset.
I actually agree with this: "Maybe there's some merit to it [CRT], not enough to support all their grandiose claims, but persuasive enough to lead them into such a mindset."
1. Can systemic racism be a real thing? Systemic racism is such a fuzzy concept used to mean a ridiculous array of things, but the clearest definition is laws or institutional/organization practices that (regardless of intent) systematically discriminate based on race. With that as the definition ... of course it can! We know that because it once was (slavery, Jim Crow, redlining). Is it still a thing? Well, the clearest recent case of systemic racism (if you buy that definition) is colleges basing admissions on race in ways that systematically favored Black students over Asian and White students! Is it still a thing in the original sense of anti-Black racism? Its very hard to tell because the term is used so vaguely in so much scholarship its hard to find the scholarship that actually finds something justifiably called "systemic racism" in the sense defined above.
ICYMI, I just had a paper pubbed that addresses many of these issues (its reasonably short):
2. I also think you are right that it does not support their grandiose claims and that they are arrogantly overconfident in their beliefs in ways that function, intentionally or not, as scientific censorship. JOIBS was created precisely to combat this sort of nonsense.
3. However, in addition (not instead) of arrogant overconfience is this: Anything that contests progressive values/advocacy is bad (regardless of whether its true or not) and therefore, should not be "platformed." This is an excellent paper that lays out that sort of logic (it is not by an advocate of this view, but the author has plenty of quotes by advocates so its not some straw argument):
I wouldn't phrase it quite that way, or as strongly. There are other sociology subfields, e.g. the family where challenging the orthodoxy is slightly better tolerated. The issue of race is just a toxic one.
Arthur is first rate. Exactly the sociology professor we needed these last 10 years. Here's something on his academic experience in the US: https://www.ihatesociology.com/arthur-sakamoto
I am teaching a class on Popper and falsification next week. I think I'll incorporate this amazing inoculation against falsification: "White privilege is real, but who is white is moving. Whoever has good outcomes, that is the group with white privilege". I think Freud would be jealous.
Great essay. Is there any comprehensive work on Hmong populations in America? I'm particularly interested in fathers, diets, and dietary deficiencies during childhood development. Anything on peer and play groups might tangentially relate to my interest.
Thank you. There might be a little discussion of those topics in Portes and Rumbaut (2001) Legacies and in Jeremy Hein (2006) Ethnic Origins. I have documented the socioeconomic statistics https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11113-021-09636-9
that recent reviews ignore such as Van Tran's
https://www.annualreviews.org/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-soc-031021-012617
which is a fundamentally flawed essay. Note than this latter essay by Tran emphasizes heterogeneity among Asian Americans as a critical issue while my paper finding extensive (if not greater) heterogeneity among Whites is being rejected by mainstream population studies journals. Indeed, the reviewers of my paper object to any discussion of Asian Americans.
Thanks. You might also want to look at educational outcomes in the UK for Black British cohorts with distinctly different outcomes. There are Nigerian British and Ghanian British, both of which do better than the White British cohort, but also the Somali British with awful outcomes. Then are Afro-Caribbean British, a highly interesting cohort, because along with the White working class, Bangladeshi British and some older Pakistani British communities, they were exposed to some really detrimental social policies, including, but not limited to, HUD-style high density urban housing, welfare which encouraged intergenerational dependence and father-absence, and host of other bad government programmes.
One noted Black British former equalities commissioner, contrarian, and Left-leaning liberal called Sir Trevor Philips noted wryly that not only would structural racism have to be all-pervading, but it would have to be incredibly smart and selective, able to detect specific African national origin and apply differing levels of systemic oppression. Hardly what the CRT types want to hear or read. The Left tried to cancel him a while back over his comments about Islam and an ongoing dispute over the link between self-segregation and potential radicalisation. He seems somewhat uncancellable. Currently, he's the senior anchor on a 90 minute weekly debate and news show for Sky News. He's also the co-founder of his own data company Webber Philips.
One of the things I've been looking at as a curiosity for the last few years is nutritional effects on cognitive development in childhood. It's a fascinating areas, because at least some of the differences are both genetic and will appear in GWAS data, but are also highly sensitive to environment and dietary intake. I did begin to wonder whether as our ancestors spread out from Africa specific gene adaptions to help us optimise specific environmental food sources might have conferred minor developmental advantages along the way as a side effect. I's sure you're aware gene mutations for dietary adaption seem to be the most likely to stick. For example, Neanderthals and Denisovans typically had only 2 diploid copies of AMY1. For modern humans, the range is 2-20.
Anyway, a while back I managed to kick one of the AIs back into sandbox setting by convincing it I was a sci fi writer looking at ways an alien species might try to level up IQ by ancestry group with the aim of creating both a smarter species and greater equality between groups. LLMs tend to be lot less censorious if they think they are collaborating in a creative project and they are more willing to deal with controversial subjects with people who demonstrate high levels of specific domain knowledge. Anyway, after a couple of hours playing around I got it to run some calculations and these were the results:
https://geary.substack.com/p/i-asked-grok-about-closing-racial/comments
The maternal childbirth mechanisms and deficiencies I was looking at didn't pan out. I was just playing around again, because gene/diet interplays only account for about a third of differences. I started looking at the h2 iissue- h2 is high in high-SES backgrounds (0.72) vs. low in low-SES backgrounds (0.26)- twin study. Fathers are far more important, because they shield from the negative effects of low SES. In the UK there are almost no differences in the exam results of bottom quintile Chinese British and the top quintile. Raj Chetty's research shows that fathers at the community level are the single most important factor in upward social mobility.
Nutrition and fathers together seem to close racial IQ gaps to the point that they're negligible. Basically, after fathers and nutrition during cognitive development, White end up with +4 IQ (and a 4-6 point gain of their own), and East Asians end up with +8 IQ (3-5 point gain).
Both can be true. Documenting heterogeneity in white socioeconomic characteristics does seem really important. I appreciate this author for using data to challenge that standard view that whites are a homogenous and uniformly advantaged group. But, it can also be true that white privilege exists. Fictional narratives, TV dramas and people's memoirs discuss how poor and disadvantaged whites can more easily pass as high-status than can people of color. Someone with white trash origins can be transformed with clothing and some etiquette lessons into an member of elite society.
"it CAN also be true that white privilege exists". Why don't we focus more on the empirical data instead of one own's biased perception of reality? And again, can you start by clearly and empirically defining "white" and "privilege"?
Defining polysemous single words like white and privilege won't contribute meaningfully to this discussion, but there are working definitions of white privilege. What is your opinion of this one?
White privilege is the unearned set of social and economic advantages that white people have in a culture characterized by racial inequality. These benefits are granted by society based on one's race, often without the individual's conscious recognition, and are distinct from personal wealth or class privilege.
Key Concepts
Unearned Advantages: These are not benefits a person earns through merit or hard work, but are automatically conferred due to their white identity within a racially stratified society.
Invisibility to Beneficiaries: People who benefit from white privilege often do so unconsciously, as these advantages are normalized and considered the societal "norm" or "default". In contrast, racial minorities are often acutely aware of the privileges denied to them.
Systemic and Institutional: White privilege is embedded in societal institutions and policies, such as in the housing market, legal system, or education, rather than being merely the result of overt individual bias.
Absence of Disadvantage: A major aspect of white privilege is the ability to go through life without having race act as an additional obstacle. For example, a white person experiencing poverty still does not face the added burden of racial discrimination on top of their economic hardship.
Examples of White Privilege
Based on the work of academic Peggy McIntosh, who described white privilege as an "invisible package of unearned assets," examples include:
Being able to go shopping without being followed or harassed.
Seeing people of one's race widely represented in media and leadership positions.
Having one's decisions or behaviors not be attributed to the negative stereotypes of their race.
Being able to criticize the government without being seen as a "cultural outsider".
The core idea is to highlight the systemic power differences between white people and people of color, and how all white individuals, regardless of intent, benefit from this system. Acknowledging this privilege is considered an essential step toward dismantling racial inequities.
This definition seems very narrowly focused on “whiteness”. How does this differ from the privilege that a Han Chinese experiences in China, or an ethnic Japanese experiences in Japan?
Agree. These privileges occur for many ethnic majority groups. Stigmatization against ethnic minorities can be extreme in ethnically monogynous cultures such as the two you mentioned. The US is the largest country where there have been concerted effort to reduce ethnic majority privilege to address historic injustice. But for humans, loss of privilege is aversive and is experienced as oppression. A form of loss aversion. People fight hard to avoid it.
Again, I would love to see the empirical data that all of those definitions are based on.
We agree. I wrote "documenting ... is important" (this means focusing on the empirical data). I wrote "I appreciate... using data to challenge..." That means focusing on empirical data.
What White groups did so poorly? I am curious.
Can you give actual examples of “white privilege” operating in America today?
I found another example of “white privilege”. Whites receive more favorable terms in the criminal justice system.
"Black individuals charged with misdemeanors are less likely to have their charges reduced (Berdejo, 2018) and more likely to be offered plea deals involving jail time (Kutateladze et al., 2016). Male and Black individuals are also less likely to have their shoplifting cases dismissed than are females and Whites (Adams & Cutshall, 1984). "
See: https://heinonline.org/HOL/Page?handle=hein.journals/wescrim20&div=19&g_sent=1&casa_token=&collection=journals
And then I found this example of “white privilege”.
Jun 14, 2025 — A groundbreaking 2003 study found that Black men without criminal records received job callbacks at about the same rate as white men with felony convictions on their applications..... a Black applicant's race alone created the same employment barrier as a criminal record...
https://www.investopedia.com/black-college-grads-and-white-convicts-11750957
I found this example: https://scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1593&context=nulr
This Article reports on an original audit study that involved sending testers who were matched on all observable characteristics other than gender and race into downtown Chicago stores to return prepurchased items. All of the audited stores had official policies that required a receipt as a prerequisite to a return, but the testers did not present receipts for the items.
The findings revealed stark racial disparities: Black shoppers, both women and men, encountered more frequent denials and were less likely to be offered refunds than their white counterparts, with white women receiving the most favorable treatment. These disparities persisted and became even more pronounced after the testers asked to speak to management. Insights gleaned from novel interviews with store clerks suggest that these discrepancies stem from ingrained biases that associate race with social status and expected behavior.
When child protective services receive an accusation of neglect against a white single mother; they attribute her non optimal parenting to external situational forces such as the stress of poverty. CPS arranged to give her financial support or other benefits. When the accusation is against a black single mother, the black mother is given fewer resources and more likely to have her children removed. This inequity in treatment disappeared when case workers were instructed, as part of a research study, to remove mention of the mother's race from their case reports.
Heh. This is true. Even their data found that, in any simple Black/White comparison (education, income, etc), White's were doing better (even though Black/White differences were only a small portion of the SES heterogeneity), a result that is at least consistent with White Privilege narratives (and I requested that they acknowledge this, which I am pretty sure they will).
HOWEVER, there are many reasons for inequality other than "privilege" (unearned advantages), so, though SES differences are "consistent" with White privilege narratives, they are not a particularly severe test, and, consequently, do not provide particularly strong confirmation of those narratives.
You made me think of something when you used the term 'white privilege narrative.' Leftists, marixists and those working from a class-inequality lens often note that class divides are upheld by convincing working-class whites to side with their skin color, rather than what is in their economic interests, which is to join forces with working-class PoC. Bob Dylan's Only a Pawn In Their Game is powerful suppot for the idea that historically (prior to wokeism), elites sought to increase the black-white divide as part of routine caste maintenance. Ok, but the idea I got from what you wrote -- why are wokeists so concerned with upholding the white privilege narrative? Well, the obvious thing is what was relayed in Arthur Sakamoto's webpage, regarding the famous professor who was masterful at promoting Woke ideology in sociology. The goal is to climb higher in the woke status hierarchy with virtue signalling and fitting in dominant sociological narratives. Yes,but - I'm wondering if there is even something more demonic. it is also a form of upholding white privilege and caste maintenance, because it obscures and negates social class issues. Upholding the power of skin color downplays the reality of income and generational wealth.
Totally agree across the board, Catherine. The analysis of woke status-seeking is dead-on. If you haven't read Musa al-Gharbi's stuff, he makes the same points (he's got both an excellent Substack and a book that has made a splash documenting a lot of that with data). I strongly support programs to ameliorate the worst disadvantages due to poverty and low income, and to give such people a better shot at a decent life (scholarships/tuition breaks for meritorious low income students is one example; universal health care another). Such programs will inherently disproportionately help people from demographic groups that are also lower income -- but that's fine with me, because the help goes to those who actually need it.
https://hkbu.academia.edu/ArthurSakamoto
I have many publications on racial and ethnic inequality in the US. They may be found at the above website. If you are unable to access it, then I can email you a copy of any paper if you are interested.
Persist Arthur! The academy is suffocating under its own overblown nonsense. keep speaking up and doing good work 👍
Thank you!
"the white “color line” is always being redrawn and is an always-moving target across the history of American race relations, with some groups having easier access to its core privileges while others only enjoy more partial envelopment at different times….There are differential proximities to the fuller comforts of whiteness and white privilege, and these change over time for different groups."
Ah this is the classic unsubstantiated, ambiguous word salad that Critical Theorists purposely use to avoid committing to any properly definable and empirically verifiable concept. They can keep adjusting and changing the meaning of the concepts involved in the discussion to suit their narrative and dismiss arguments against them without justification, effectively preventing the possibility of a real discussion.
How have these clowns ended up in charge of academia? It's absurd, pathetic, and deeply damaging.
Hi, Santiago. I agree that the article should be published, but the reviewer comments you quoted seem valuable. Why is that material you quoted "word salad"? It isn't hard to understand. There are many cases of sociological or English-professor-marxism verbiage that are word salad. This isn't one of those cases. Below is what the quote means. Why this is important: Let's reserve the "word salad" term for cases that are actually word salad.
The quote explains that the boundary of who is considered "white" and who gets the benefits of being white has never been fixed in American history. It's like a moving target that has shifted over time.
To substantiate the individual claims:
The "white color line" is a moving target: The idea of what constitutes "whiteness" is not static. Historically, groups like Irish and Italian immigrants were not always considered "white" in the same way as Anglo-Saxon Protestants, but they were eventually included in that category.
Access to privilege varies: Not all groups have had the same level of access to the advantages and comforts that come with being considered white. Some groups were more easily accepted into this privileged status, while others only gained partial or conditional acceptance at different times.
"Differential proximities" to whiteness: This means that different groups of people are positioned closer or farther away from the core benefits of being white. This proximity, which can be based on factors like skin tone, cultural alignment, or social class, can change over time, affecting the privileges they receive.
Word salad might not have been the best way to describe it. The point I was trying to make -which I don't think you've refuted- is that the definitions and groups referred to by critical theorists are conveniently malleable and impossible to measure. Not to mention they start from a number of unproven assumptions such as an alleged inherent privilege associated with being white, whatever “privilege” means, and whatever “white” means.
Sociology employs a progressive epistemology which judges the veracity of scientific findings as to how well they fit the prevailing narratives. There is a discussion of it here, pointing out sociology's antipathy to serious critical thought and open enquiry:
https://commons.ln.edu.hk/sw_master/1953/
Thanks for sharing. That's exactly the impression I got as a complete outsider, but what I really wonder is how they have convinced themselves that their narrative is so correct and flawless that any empirical evidence refuting it should be disregarded without consideration. How can they continue moving forward despite the dissonance between their belief system and the evidence at hand?
Maybe I need to learn more about Critical Theory. Maybe there's some merit to it, not enough to support all their grandiose claims, but persuasive enough to lead them into such a mindset.
I actually agree with this: "Maybe there's some merit to it [CRT], not enough to support all their grandiose claims, but persuasive enough to lead them into such a mindset."
1. Can systemic racism be a real thing? Systemic racism is such a fuzzy concept used to mean a ridiculous array of things, but the clearest definition is laws or institutional/organization practices that (regardless of intent) systematically discriminate based on race. With that as the definition ... of course it can! We know that because it once was (slavery, Jim Crow, redlining). Is it still a thing? Well, the clearest recent case of systemic racism (if you buy that definition) is colleges basing admissions on race in ways that systematically favored Black students over Asian and White students! Is it still a thing in the original sense of anti-Black racism? Its very hard to tell because the term is used so vaguely in so much scholarship its hard to find the scholarship that actually finds something justifiably called "systemic racism" in the sense defined above.
ICYMI, I just had a paper pubbed that addresses many of these issues (its reasonably short):
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11186-025-09652-0
2. I also think you are right that it does not support their grandiose claims and that they are arrogantly overconfident in their beliefs in ways that function, intentionally or not, as scientific censorship. JOIBS was created precisely to combat this sort of nonsense.
3. However, in addition (not instead) of arrogant overconfience is this: Anything that contests progressive values/advocacy is bad (regardless of whether its true or not) and therefore, should not be "platformed." This is an excellent paper that lays out that sort of logic (it is not by an advocate of this view, but the author has plenty of quotes by advocates so its not some straw argument):
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-032-06569-8_2
I wouldn't phrase it quite that way, or as strongly. There are other sociology subfields, e.g. the family where challenging the orthodoxy is slightly better tolerated. The issue of race is just a toxic one.
Stephen Turner is the main academic working on this. He has a Q&A (https://www.ihatesociology.com/stephen-turner), statement in faculty testimonials (https://www.ihatesociology.com/faculty-testimonials) and has uploaded a lot of papers to academia.edu (https://usf.academia.edu/StephenTurner)
Arthur is first rate. Exactly the sociology professor we needed these last 10 years. Here's something on his academic experience in the US: https://www.ihatesociology.com/arthur-sakamoto
It would be nice if we were given the name of the woke sociologist Arthur is talking about.
Damn. That is a great piece. I may link it to the main post.
Is it possible to get a copy of the paper?
I will post it on academia.edu after it is published but you will also be able to access it at JOIBS.
Thank you for your interest
Probably should contact Arthur directly. His home page is linked in the paragraph that introduces him.