Call it the Bigfoot Stumble

No, it's not the latest dance craze. It's what happens when a prominent person comes out with a remark that disparages a certain group of people, usually on the basis of race or gender.

The Bigfoot often pays a price for the mistake -- losing a a TV talk show (Don Imus), a job, or a or a position on a prestigious board. The incident is allegedly then soon forgotten.

But is it really? Often, the answer is no. The statement lives on both in "Factoid Eternity" via the internet and in the "PC Gallery of Paranoia," both thriving places.

Take the comment by Nobel laureate James Watson, who said recently that blacks aren't as smart as whites. Oh sure, he did the ritual apology and was dismissed from the board of Cold Spring Harbor, but how many people will remember the statement and not the apology?

Quite a few, actually, thanks to cognitive dissonance. Research shows that people tend to accept and remember ideas and information that agrees with what they basically believe, and dismiss and forget information that conflicts with those core beliefs.

We journalists believe that all we have to do is speak the truth, and people will believe it. Actually, we have to speak the truth over and over and over again until it can pierce the veil of cognitive dissonance. That's why bigoted or misinformed statements by people that society holds in high esteem are so problematic. If James Watson thinks blacks are dumb, well, that's what many whites believe, deep down, so they are far more likely to listen to Watson than to, say, some peer-reviewed study someplace.

And even when the stumbler apologizes and says he didn't mean what he said, there's a huge group of people out there who believe the apology is due to political correctness, shutting up someone who is delivering an uncomfortable truth.

Take the case of former Harvard president Larry Summers, who lost his job after suggesting that women are absent from senior faculty positions at universities -- especially in math and science -- because of innate gender differences.

To his credit, Summers admitted he botched the science and even said that he really was wrong, not merely apologizing because he was pressured. . But the idea that Summers was simply a victim of the PC police continues to be made in op-eds and on blogs and on radio and TV talk shows. Most recently, in a column syndicated in September of 2007 by The Washington Post, Kathleen Parker said flatly that "scientific evidence"proved Summers was right.

Today, we are already hearing on the Internet that James Watson was right when he said he was "inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa" because "all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours -- whereas all the testing says not really." He said he hoped that everyone was equal, but noted that "people who have to deal with black employees find this not true."

Immediately, one blogger on Yedda.com posted this response. "This is not some rednecked hick who says this, but a bona fide scientist with the highest credentials possible. Why is everybody so upset? I am sure this is not one man's opinion and a anyway, why shouldn't he say what he (and so many others) know for a fact."

What prompted Watson's remarks? Probably a consistent gap of about 15 IQ points between whites and blacks, and the belief that IQ is strongly inherited and that it is unaffected by education or social class.

But nature and nurture intertwine in complex ways, about which we yet know very little. Many critics dismiss the idea that the IQ test is culture-neutral. As London Times health editor Nigel Hawkes notes, class and economics do matter.

"The neatest example of this is a study of identical twins by Eric Turkheimer of the University of Virginia. Previous studies of identical twins have tended to show they have very similar IQ levels, reinforcing the idea that IQ is strongly heritable. But most twins share the same environment, and most studies have been on middle-class twins. Professor Turkheimer searched for identical twins among poor families and found their IQs varied quite a lot. A French study found that when identical twins were separated for adoption, those adopted by poor families had IQs fully 10 points lower than those adopted by well-off familes."

Well, what about the Summers suggestion that women inherently lack the capacity to do top level math? The evidence says otherwise.

The classic 1990 meta-analysis of data on SAT math scores of 4 million students, by the University of Wisconsin's Janet Hyde. found sex differences were tiny- less than 1 percent between girls and boys. In 2006 Hyde reported a new analysis of seven million students that found things hadn't changed.

Some people argue that because boys typically score at the high end of the math ability curve more often than girls, this means the best mathematicians will always be men. True? Unlikely.

A major 2007 paper published in Psychological Science in the Public Interest by six noted scientists examined more than 380 studies. It.found that male-female ratios among precocious kids scoring 700 or more before age 13 used to be seven to one, boys to girls. But now the ratio is less than four to one. Possibly because more girls are taking math seriously at earlier ages, they are getting much better.

But when such facts hit the invisible wall of cognitive dissonance (or ideological agendas), they can simply melt away. The Bigfoot Stumble feeds fantasies about the PC police, a cadre of shrouded elites who are keeping THE REAL TRUTH from the rest of us.

After all, could a Nobel laureate and the president of Harvard really be wrong?

Boston University journalism professor Caryl Rivers is the author of "Selling Anxiety,: How the News Media Scare Women (University Press of New England.)

Comments

[pfc1369]

As Steve Martin once wrote in a satirical New Yorker piece:

"I'd like to apologize to the NAACP for referring to its members as 'colored people'."

[realitytrumpsbull]

I disagree, I think Political Correctness
amounts to sugar-coated censorship, I'd
ten times rather have bona-fide free speech
complete with the poor taste than have
make-nice empty platitudes that frankly aren't
worth the airtime.

Insofar as ivy-leaguers are concerned, well,
they haven't proven themselves equal to the
task of detecting things like the mortgage
business prior to it having its' inevitable
effect, nor have they made any significant
headway in propagating good, quality digital-
based K12 education, despite the prevalence
of computers over oh, say, the last 30 years
or so, so I don't have that much faith in
an education credential anymore either, and
specifically when you say Ha-avad, well
that's been a liar's club for years.

Enter the Great Equalizer, Asia. They don't
screw around. It is common still in Japan
for students that don't make the grade to
consider the old hari-kari, because education
is still closely tied to your employment future,
meaning that if you don't have some good
grades behind you, employers won't consider
you for employment in their business because
they're competitive and can't afford any
weak links, especially weak links from rich
families that have enough money to pamper their kids and send them to expensive ivy league
schools despite any externally detectable
signs of talent or motivation...which is probably the case more often than not in any argument concerning IQ...Bill Gates, one of the richest people of all time, dropped out of college. And, he's probably not alone.
So, IQ? Who cares? A score on some test
is no indicator of your future success,
it just means that you can identify patterns
and recognize symbols and stuff. The
Really Smart People seem to be able to
identify ONE symbol consistently, this one:
$

[channelXRFR]

Don Imus as a performer told a joke, on a scale from Comedy Central to VH1, to MTV to BET his remarks hardly raise a blip on the offensive meter.

The Imus Debacle was mostly orchestrated by MMFA and associated organizations for political gain. Since Imus, MMFA has attempted the same ambush tactics and failed primarily because the tactic has been recognized and countered. Imus will be back effective 12/03 bigger and better then ever.

NHH Satire: An old white guy talking "hip-hop"

[gladiatorpodolsky]

Actually journalists don't speak the truth. They speak what they think will be interesting reading and sell newspapers, and everybody knows it.

[research]

Watson is infamous for his racism. This is not news. I have a tested IQ of 156. I have worked with many incredibly smart black people. I don't for a moment believe that blacks are intellectually inferior to whites. Rascism is just bullshit.

[research]

of course, If I was so smart, I would have noticed I missspelled Racism.

[bethinCary]

People remember Watsons' statement-because the apology took a while to come. Plus he didn't say he didn't change his beliefs any-or even try to understand his own sterotyping.
Saying I'm sorry is quite a bit differnt than saying he's sorry and that he does not think that way anymore. By not saying so, especially in the science field-one who have to wonder if the issue would come up again or that future statistics would be skewed by his own prejudices. I'm glad he resigned.

[Camel54]

It is ridiculous to say that entire races are smarter or that one gender is de facto better at something than the other. I am certain that there are statistical differences that may seem to prove this or that, but without understanding the full effect that our personal environment has on our intelligence, those numbers are little more than pointless, doctoral theses. I think the real madness here is this quote in the above blog, "We journalists believe that all we have to do is speak the truth, and people will believe it. Actually, we have to speak the truth over and over and over again..." I wonder if Nobel Laureate Al Gore would agree with that.

[sorenmeetsdylan]

Summers did not botch the science at all but only offered an apology because of the idiotic PC hysterics he was met with.

[CriminallySane]

The question specifically relative to Summers was properly this: Do women pursue, beginning with graduate programs, scientific and mathematical careers in numbers proportional to their enrollment in undergrad programs? And if so, did they gain admission in proportional numbers? And if so, did they pursue the undergrad programs in proportion to their raw numbers in college settings?

It is with the answers to those questions that we will know if there is deliberate discrimination or simple opting-out. All else is noise.