1/ I went down the surreal rabbit hole of Steven Pinker's tweets on race. I noticed some things.
2/I was struck by the fact that "race doesn't exist" is a "PC 1/4-truth," but examining police violence against black people is a "[distraction]." So, race is only useful when showing how different we supposedly are, but not how differently we're treated
3/With anti-black state violence out of the picture, we can swallow his claim "US race relations are improving," clearly proven with a series of Excel graphs. The timing of this tweet--during the rise of an racist authoritarian populist--was impeccable.
4/Given all of our progress, it's in keeping with this theme that identity politics threatens "harmony," as he said in an interview with the neoconservative Weekly Standard. 
5/And we don't want to burden our less gifted brethren with undue representation in universities where they will only fail, or diversity programs that make life harder for black students' fragile psyches, unlike centuries of enslavement and subjugation.
6/We can instead turn to capitalism, which has never been linked to racism. (What?) Never mind the entire economic history of the US. Never mind the profit motive in mass incarceration/neo-slavery.
7/Aside: To learn about how mass incarceration is the new slavery, read The New Jim Crow, and watch @ava's documentary "13th." (Pinker clearly hasn't; it might spoil his insufferable optimism). Blackmon's Slavery By Another Name is also worth your time.
8/The fact that he felt the need to chide "racial justice advocates" (which he clearly isn't) could certainly use further explanation. (Or not.) . But to do so in the same sentence as he claims no link between racism and capitalism is bizarre.
9/If we go (slightly) beyond his tweets, we find these gems, noted by others who have actually read his latest book.
10/Lest we think him a crypto-racist, we're assured that believing in race doesn't mean one can't oppose racism, which is certainly a relief.
11/He even tweeted that blacks lives matter and that we therefore "need good policing." The article helpfully points out that black-on-black crime isn't given enough attention in the "convenient" narrative of over-policing and mass incarceration.
12/Here's another tweet claiming that "data" show that blacks aren't shot at a higher rate than others. (This is not what the data show).
The quote in the previous tweet (4) is actually from Prof. Alfred McCoy in the latest @intercepted podcast. I posted it erroneously, but it's fortunately very relevant to this thread.
13/ And I think we can all agree that what we really need right now is a defense of The Bell Curve.
14/ And we should stop whining about appropriation, because, after all, would it have made any difference if black people had made money off their own culture and given credit instead of Elvis and other white people? Or the countless other examples?
I'm not claimng anyone is a racist in this thread. The NYTimes has already told us that Twitter makes us dumb, and I certainly wouldn't want to contribute to that.
People can decide for themselves whether Pinker's ideas are worthy of the "marketplace."
nytimes.com/2018/01/11/opi…
People can decide for themselves whether Pinker's ideas are worthy of the "marketplace."
nytimes.com/2018/01/11/opi…
(In case it isn't obvious, my comment about the NYTimes is sarcastic. They're hardly the arbiters of acceptable discourse for me.)
It gets better. He praises Razib Khan here:
Khan was essentially deemed too racist for the New York Times opinion page.
Khan was essentially deemed too racist for the New York Times opinion page.
