Race and Free Speech in America
One of the more obvious areas where race presents an obstacle is free speech. There are many obstacles to free speech, but there is none that is ostensibly greater than race. I say ostensibly because I am not certain, so we looked at the data.
Qualitative Analysis
A qualitative review of race and free speech is very simple. You talk about legitimate scientific questions such as IQ differences (not a matter of legitimate disagreement at this point), and we can’t talk about it. It is not necessarily non-whites. I think that Latinos would care the least. For example, Jason Richwine’s dissertation was nothing compared to the backlash others get because he did not talk about black people much. The paternalistic views of whites are problematic.
College Grads are higher IQ than those that did not go to college on average. This is a statement that is so obvious that it does not bother many people. The gap between the college and non-college is about the size of the black-white gap.
Could you say that people in congress and billionaires are smart?
I am confused as to what part of making groups and saying that they are different in intelligence for a mix of genetic and environmental reasons is difficult to deal with. It is so childish to be this way.
Quantitative Reality of Race and Free Speech
Freedom Institute Survey 2019
Less than half the sample (46%) agreed that an invitation should be retracted if the speaker’s remarks would likely offend groups or individuals. Participants were heavily divided by race — 61% of black, 44% of white, 44% of Hispanic and 25% of Asian respondents agreed the speaker should be disinvited in this scenario.
It seems that the free speech — IQ correlation is what Noah Carl suspected.
Sixty-eight percent of Democrats and 56% of Republicans agreed that a speaker’s invitation should be revoked if the speaker is accused of sexual harassment. White participants (56%) were less likely than black participants (69%) to agree that the speaker should be disinvited.
The #metoo mafia was powerful in 2019. This is absurd to be honest. The number of predators crawling around universities is so high to begin with. Why are people will to talk to fraternity men all night, but not hear from alleged predators.
Caravan Survey (September) 2019
“The First Amendment, which provides the right of Americans to have free speech, was enacted more than 200 years ago. Do you agree or disagree with this statement? ‘The First Amendment goes too far in allowing hate speech in modern America and should be updated to reflect the cultural norms of today”
43% of Whites, 69% African American, and 62% of Hispanic Americans agreed. This shows racial differences in the understanding of free speech and history. It is a beautiful thing that messages can spread rapidly, and surely a double edged sword, but who benefits the most from this? Probably outrage movements like BLM.
Do you think that hate speech should be against the law?
44% of Whites, 60% of African Americans, and 50% of Hispanics agreed. All groups are disturbingly high numbers, but a SUPERMAJORITY? That is insane! 43% of men and 53% of women agreed, so it was probably a pretty low percentage of white men.
Cato Summer 2020 Political Climate Survey
During the summer of 2020, there was a lot of stuff going on about allegations of systematic oppression and societal racism.
I think that the reason the gap between everyone and African Americans on this particular question is that people are afraid to talk about how African Americans are killing way too many people to be whining about a man who was allegedly killed by an officer. It turns out the George Floyd overdosed and the guys that “killed” him may not have done all that much — it turns out that he may have OD’d on fentanyl which is tragic, but not worth rioting and burning over.
This was in the summer of 2020, so I do not know why why nearly a third of African Americans felt this way.
I guess Asians are libertarian on economics or still mad about Trump’s comments saying “Kung-Flu” and whatever. It is possible that they are just really overrepresented in healthcare workers and were unsatisfied with Trump’s response to the COVID-19 Pandemic. I did a whole bunch of math an calculated cumulative binomial probabilities of knowing a doctor for each race, but that is such a digression I will just say, Asians are more likely to know doctors and it is not even close. If the doctors were critical of Trump, that is going to sway Asians a lot more than any other demographic when you consider the probabilities of having a friend of a friend that is a doctor by each demographic.
Obviously, very conservative people are by far the most likely to lose jobs due to the way comments about BLM, homosexuality, and immigration are most likely to disagree with mainstream “default views.” I am not sure why they are not afraid of losing their jobs at the rate of regular conservatives to be completely honest.
Whatever the deal with Asians and politics is, it is really weird. While a stereotype of a confused foreigner that sees high levels of political tension is what comes to my mind at first, I do not think that is remotely representative of reality. Asians assimilate very easily and do not have views that go against the mainstream. I think that it may be contempt for these affirmative action type programs that actively discriminate against them.
There is survey data that suggests Asians support affirmative action, however, these questions are awfully biased:
“Next, do you favor or oppose affirmative action programs designed to help [SPLIT SAMPLE Blacks/Black people], women, and other minorities get better access to higher education?”
This implies that Asians will be net beneficiaries. I do no know that Asian immigrants have access to scholarships that not all demographics have access too, however, that is a trivial fraction compared to the ones who get discriminated against. I would argue that the premise of the question is wrong. “Better” education implies that there is a huge difference between Harvard and your local community college in terms of course content. Chemistry, math, biology, and so on is not really different based on the school. Maybe social sciences and other things differ but that is it.
CATO 2017 Free Speech Survey
The page tries to highlight areas of broad agreement as best as possible as seen from the images below. It is crazy! 71% of people agree? That is wild! This level of agreement is incredibly rare in US politics. Unfortunately, when you dig deeper, the disagreement is often along racial lines and we should not sugar coat it.
Showing “partisanship” is a cute way of hiding the truth. We know that partisanship is stratified by race to an extent and racial views is a driver in ideology formation.
They acknowledge some level of division, however, they fail to highlight the degree of the divide. For the record, I do not support the 19th amendment, that is why I will not be discussing women’s opinions on free speech (some of them are really bad!). Women are not going to increase there share of the voting age population by a considerable amount in the coming decades.
As pictured on the left, we cannot really agree on what is and is not offensive. I understand some of them: “I don’t notice people’s race.” is just stupid. I cannot see myself telling a black person “woah I did not notice your race.” Yes, we all notice race because it is a biological reality.
The mantra “America is a melting pot” is something that I heard in K-12 and a little bit in college. I had a variety of teachers that were not white say this, I have had textbooks say this, and so on. This bothers a considerable number of Latinos and African Americans. Nearly a quarter of African Americans being offended by the idea that anyone can succeed if they work hard enough is probably an artifact of the IQ scores and other traits in the left side of their bell curve.
In conclusion, knowing what offends people means that we cannot legislate hate speech because somebody will be offended by anything. This does not mean that you should go around and be a jerk because even if you were nice, it would offend people, I am just saying that people get mad about everything and you will have to tough it out+apologize for saying normal things.
82% of everyone agrees that there is a fuzzy line on what is and is not hate speech. When you look at the demography of the dissenters, it is disproportionately non white, particularly African American. The divide by partisanship is ostensibly not an issue because you see that more educated people (typically associated with more liberal) are more likely to agree with the statement and gender is not a factor here (men are persistently more conservative). It seems likely that African Americans (and Latinos to an extent) sandbag the net-agreement amongst democrats. College grads, Republicans, and Libertarians really only have one thing in common which is being mostly white. It is really troubling to me, even with white people I am sort of disappointed because this is an issue where everyone should strongly agree because nobody can define the line.
Of the people who disagreed, a minority of them were white despite whites being over 60% of the sampled population. A recurring theme is going be that the concept of consensus is going to become more and more foggy in the future as we move forward. As consensus ceases to exist or the term “consensus” begins to mean “majority,” there will likely be more and more polarization which feeds into the cycle of decaying social capital.
Some might point to political ideology or “typology” however, there is room within each party for basically anyone at this point (cringe, I know, but Lady MAGA is a thing). The male female gap is comical, because we are not worried about women increasing their share of the population by 10% in the next 20 or so years. Basically, why is it that the gap between whites and non whites is larger than the gap between the two parties? In fact, I bet that if you broke down each party by race, you would shave off a chunk of the party line gap.
Again, we really do need to think about the idea of a minority majority. You support the freedom of speech? We are not necessarily going to have these things. The idea that the courts will always be their for you is silly. At the end of the day, a culture where you are allowed to say whatever you want on the internet without fear of people trying to ruin you life is optimal. Also, who picks the courts? Ultimately elected officials do. If AOC is president and has a senate majority, who is to stop her from appointing somebody to the supreme court that thinks free speech means nothing offensive?
I believe that Connecticut (very white state) has laws against the N word (really not a big deal in practice, but it is problematic as precedent), so there are respected judges that are willing to uphold these sorts of laws due to their ideology. I do not care how many degrees somebody has, free speech means the right to say things that may offend people.
The gender gap on anti-LGBT speech is inherently problematic, however, racial gaps in opposition are concerning. A 20%+ and an 8% gap on these two questions between whites and non whites is concerning. Do you not just hear these people talk about the pronouns and think “can you please shut the f — k up?”
Europe already has laws against holocaust denial, and I oppose those laws (so do most Americans. I can only infer what they would say if asked about people who deny slavery given what I know about race and ethnocentrism. Next thing you know, they will support criminalizing denial of systemic racism. Okay, maybe that is a bit of a slippery slope, but these are not difficult things to understand. People who support holocaust denial laws are again presumably, majority minority.
You may expect that the white population would be more militarist, but that does not appear to be the case. Given the way it was only white people who were largely bothered by football players kneeling for the anthem, I cannot tell if the African American and Latino people even internalized the meaning of the question. The line with these things is fuzzy, and “saying” things can be with words, shirts, actions, tweets, and more. Laws against disrespecting the military would certainly include kneeling for the national anthem.
One research paper that examined the correlation between support certain views with verbal intelligence found these correlations with support of speech suppression:
Suppress communists: −.317 (Carl, 2014)
Suppress racists: −.208 (Carl, 2014)
Suppress militarists: −.254 (Carl, 2014)
These correlations were persistent when controls for demographic characteristics were placed in, but they were reduced a little.
Further investigation was done using a similar method and they found that there were correlations between intellectual humility and support for free speech that helped increase free speech support, there was high internal consistency of support for free speech which suggests that those who argue whites support free speech more because people are not racist to white people are wrong. Chronbach’s alpha values were persistently at .87 or above so it means that people are not really picking or choosing when they like free speech as much as they value the principle. Additionally, it was found that people do not have to like the people that they support the rights of. There are high levels of contempt for racists that support the suppression of speech (De keersmaecker et al., 2020).
I do not think that this second study is perfect however, they conflated the hereditarian hypothesis with racism in there commentary — historically race realists have been more likely to support lower taxes for the obvious reason of the race-IQ belief (if they are poorer because of the IQ scores, then you would not support the social programs). These days, Democrats are more likely to believe in the race-IQ stuff than Republicans, but I would not say Democrats are racist unless I am talking about the contempt for whites that is frequently demonstrated.
