The Global Afrosphere
As you see from my sidebar, like everyone else, I have a blog roll. One unique section of my blogroll are of brothers and sisters that are expats or international travellers in locations outside of the US, African nations, and Brazil.
It's all good to have a list, but I like to visualize information. This custom google map was easy to create, and gives a unique perspective on the afro-precense in the world.
Mostly the links are to blogs, but I plan to directly link posts from the Black Travels forum to their respective locations on the map.
The goal is to aid networking for business, travel planning, and plain old fun.
Shizi
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Web-Disappointment of the Decade: Blackprof.com
The last ten years have seen profound changes in the laws of our republic, many, in my opinion, for the worst. But whether or not you like the changes that have happened, most observers would agree that the behavior of the government at all levels and across all branches has been unprecedented in the modern era.
Almost weekly we hear about supreme court rulings, law enforcement incidents, and the blatant law breaking of our elected officials, so much so that it is becoming hard to be enraged anymore.
Last month, we found that
- The top officials in the Bush administration discussed and approved torture techniques.
- Another seemingly cut-and-dry police murder of an unarmed civilian was sanctioned by a judge.
- The presumptive republican nominee was found to violate his own campaign laws.
- The people of Zimbabwe have been wrestling with fundamental democratic issues.
- We have a right-wing talk show host that is inciting riots and illegally encouraging election law violations from his soapbox.
- A jury has for a second time given a mistrial for the case of a group of so-called terrorists in Miami, and the feds have elected to try these railroaded black men for a third time.
The commonality of all of these events is that they are about legal issues. And these issues are of particular importance to African Americans. These nuanced issues could best be addressed by, say, a blog of black law professors.
Yes, it would really be nice to have a group of proud African American law experts weigh in on these important issues. Luckily such a blog exists! Blackprof.com even has a banner with the faces of 11 black law professors to testify to the integrity of the blog posts. Oh Joy.
So, with the above legal issues in mind, what did Blackprof.com find worthy of discussion last month?
THE NATIONAL BLACK POLICE ASSOCIATION: THE SEAN BELL VERDICT EMBOLDENS LACK OF CONFIDENCE IN JUDGES
Juanita Bynum: Do Blinged Out Pastors go to Heaven
Dog the Bounty Hunter and Neo-Nazi Relative
Vogue Seems to Think Black Men Make Good Monkeys
Judgmental Judges and The Art of Fear: Come On People, Let’s Stop Being So Damn Scared
Why the World Hates Kwame Kilpatrick
Why I Won’t Be Watching March Madness
Granted, these were by a guest blogger (a finance professor!, no less).
So, what did members of the core group talk about over the last month? Two entries on Obama. One MLK memorial. And "The Gangsta Lifestyle on Trial".
This is par for the course for Blackprof.com. Par for the course.
Over the last few years of astounding, frightening and important legal events and stories, Blackprof has amazingly been silent on many of these issues, let alone distilling any black view of them. They have chosen instead to produce a blog that competes more with the tabloid genre than one that could hold its own with the legal or political space. They have forgone hardhitting analysis for trite and cheap pop commentary.
I used to read them regularly, until I figured out that the authors did not want to rise above tabloid blogging, and that aside from the rare gem in the rough, I could expect to be disappointed month after month.
"Who d'ya trust?": The Mortage Bond Raters
Triple-A Failure, an interesting look into the bond-rating agencies.
Imagine a college-educated analyst in a little office, working an excel sheet that describes a bunch of homeowners borrowers. This "quant" lacks crucial expertise and visibility into the mortage market, but he sure can work a pivot table!
This ignorant, but well-meaning analyst has been a crucial cog in the mortgage mess. They, and their employers, have been key influencers in the international market for mortgage-backed securities. The ratings given to mortgage backed bonds are critical to their acceptance to investors, and thus the growth of this market.
The growth of this market for mortgage-backed bonds, in turn incentivized banks and lenders to prime the lending pump, encouraging shaky borrowers, cajoling loan officers and generally cutting corners to approve more home loans. Thus, we have the growth of the mortage industry, fueled not by demand from the housing market, but by demand from the bond market.
One of my interests is in quantitative finance, partucularly in finding ways to model and price "real" assets. One of the things I have learned, and is illustrated in this article, is the fact that many folks who have to model markets and assets, have little connection to what they are modeling. The analysts had no good method of checking the validity of their models or assumptions. And the people who depended on these models to make decisions misvalued investments and misread risk. The same thing happens all the time in banks, product companies, and marketing firms.
(hat tip to Agonist)
Is "IQ" Science?
(Update: Hat tip to Pro6 for this NewYorker article)
(Update2: Another great article that gets closer to my point about scientific legitamacy, but tackles it from both ends: IQ and "race".)
Whatever you call IQ, don't call it science.
I have recently had a few discussions with colleagues about intelligence testing and the racial correlations researchers have drawn from various studies of IQ. Cnulan has covered alot of these controversies well in various posts.
Many of the people in these conversations take the social conclusions drawn or implied from these studies at face value and as fact. The assumptions is that these studies are science, and thus a large psychological weight is placed on their implications or conclusions.
Any study, statistical or not, that you may peruse is not, in fact, science. The field of IQ is pseudo-science at best, and to consider conclusions drawn from such studies as fact because of the authoritarian veneer of science placed upon IQ practitioners is simply wrong.
Why isn't "IQ-ology" science?
Let's start by what is being measured. Just what the heck is IQ? From what I have seen, it is the score that is given to a subject after said subject answers a series of exam questions. The definition of IQ is fully subjective, and depends on who makes up the questions. There is no way to objectively and logically derive the definition of IQ. It depends upon the bias of those who make up the exams and the weight that they assign to a subject's responses. That is why people say that since white guys have made up most of these questions, these exams are strongly biased toward european cultural memes.
By contrast, the gravitational constant, the mass of an electron, and the speed of light are all quantities that can be objectively measured and fit within a theoretical framework which allow them to objectively derived. No committee of guys in white coats agreed on c, the speed of light. There is an extremely specific definition of what c is, which is based on concepts which are themselves objective and logical. IQ is nothing like this.
I realize that social sciences by their nature can lean away from objective quantities and objective measurements, but when the item of measurement is absent of objectivity, social sciences become social "sciences". Any measurement could be held up as science if this is not the case. Measuring "mackadociousness", or "MQ" is science under the standard that we give "IQ". Credit scoring is science. Any man with a yardstick is a scientist.
Another reason I reject IQ as a science is more fundamental. Scientific conclusions or "facts" should deliver predictions that are observable by independent parties. These predictions should be specific and repeatable. What does IQ predict? What repeatable predictions have IQ-ologists made that can be verified by independent parties? I know of none.
By predictions, I'm not talking about a Johnny Carson swami-type of prediction, but specific outcomes being forecast based on specific inputs/conditions.
A controlled environment. Some think that IQ predicts educational achievement and "success", but where are the controlled conditions to prove this? How do you eliminate these factors enough to make a prediction that is observable? You can't and maintain a modicum of legitmacy.
Without predictable results and specificity around the measured quantity, calling IQ-ology and results derived from IQ studies science and fact is raising this pseudo-science to a level of authority is has not merited.
Will Globalization Destroy Black America?
This is the title of an article by Phillip Jackson (thanks Native Son). Good question, and asked with the best intentions, but approached with too many wrong assumptions, IMO. I will address part of the article here and finish in a later post.
Firstly Mr. Jackson assumes that blacks are a monolith or at most bi-sected into a large majority of those doomed by globalization and a sliver of beneficiaries.
Secondly, Jackson assumes that everyone else is doing well by comparison. One of his opening statements says it all:
"While much of the world has adapted to the new-world economy and new-world standards of existence, most of Black America is still operating much the same way it did in the 1950s and 1960s."
Most of the world has "adapted" in a most curious way. Not everyone in China and India (and the dozens of other examples held up as symbols of globalization) are techno-saavy millionaires. Most of those people are locked in economic binds that relegate them to the status of neo-serfs. I would argue that only a few people are truly benefiting from globalization, and since black americans just happen to live in the world's superpower, they benefit from globalization alot more than the person on the street in Mumbai benefits. Try to tell someone from rural india or china about black american poverty, and they will laugh in your face.
So, "adapting to the new world economy" could mean resigning yourself to never leave the dorm-room living conditions of the factory of Corporation X - that is until the powers that be kick you out for a younger assembly line worker that can twist on bottlecaps faster. Is this what we want black people to emulate?
I guess Jackson is refering to the winners of the "new economy". There are however few winners. And being left out of the new economy is not a black-exclusive problem:
Black people who live in different parts of the country, saying to each other, “We are in trouble!” We know it and the rest of the world knows it! Black America, as we know it, is in danger of not surviving globalization.
Replace "black" with any racial/ethnic group that has been in America for more than a generation, and you would still be on the money. Ask these white corporate drones who are being laid off and having their job downsized and/or outsourced Foreigners from Mexico are benefiting. The Mexican-American population is a different story. Whites probably have it worst. They are in a worse position than blacks because they actually have a strong feeling of entitlement to the rewards of American empire: safe jobs, cheap or subsidized credit, etc.
Although education has become the new currency of exchange in the 21st century, the old American educational paradigm stopped working decades ago for Black Americans. Simply sending Black children to American schools without a clear purpose or goal has contributed to the demise of the Black community. Black America watched formerly third-world countries catapult over America to become educational super powers while America rested on its old, stale educational laurels and fell way behind much of the world in educational performance. And because Black America unthinkingly depended on the American education system to educate its children, we have fallen way behind.
What 3rd world countries are being referred to? Only the elites of these countries have catapulted, the majorities of these nations are mired in poverty and social/economic stagnation, relative to Americans, even Black Americans. And many black people have indeed taken advantage of educational opportunities, ask any HBCU graduate, or the people on the blog links on the leftside of this page. Black kids indeed have been sent to school with a clear purpose; many may not have been paying attention----like most americans. However, unlike the majority, a mediocre black kid will be eaten alive by the system.
The problem is that black people are not using their educations to create a block of wealth and affluence. Many educated black people are content to work for corporations, and not enough establish their own businesses. Of those with businesses, I don't see any concerted effort to get create a coalition with the economic influence to shake things up.