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This morning’s New York Times story on the Dominique Strauss-Kahn rape investigation declared that the case was collapsing due to “major holes in the credibility of the housekeeper who charged that he attacked her.” That article, however, contained no allegations that the complainant had lied about the attack itself. Instead, the paper claimed that prosecutors had found inconsistencies in her asylum application and evidence that she had engaged in (and attempted to cover up) shady financial dealings prior to the incident. In the wake of the publication of the Times piece, many — myself included — have argued that such alleged misrepresentations had no bearing on the question of whether she had given an accurate account of her encounter with Strauss-Kahn.
Now, however, in a letter to DSK’s lawyers, the District Attorney’s office contends that the accuser lied to them about the immediate aftermath of the incident itself.
In conversations with detectives and prosecutors, they say, as well as in her grand jury testimony, DSK’s accuser repeatedly declared that she fled to a nearby hallway after leaving his suite (Suite 2806), remaining there until she encountered her supervisor, to whom she reported the assault. “The complainant has since admitted,” the DA’s office says, “that this account was false and that after the incident in Suite 2806, she proceeded to clean a nearby room and then returned to Suite 2806 and began to clean that suite before she reported the incident.”
Such misrepresentations do not themselves prove that DSK’s accuser was not attacked. As I’ve noted before, a woman who has been “raped in circumstances in which her judgment may be called into question … can expect to be disbelieved, shamed, and attacked, and that expectation may lead a rape survivor to alter her story to make it more palatable to police, or to a jury, or even to her friends and family.”
That said, though, this latest allegation is of a very different character than those the paper reported earlier. The Times bungled the story, and in doing so seriously misrepresented the state of the case.
Yesterday the Supreme Court struck down a California law banning the sale of certain video games to children without their parents’ consent, and Justice Clarence Thomas disagreed. In a long and history-heavy dissent, he argued that minors properly have no First Amendment rights to read or view anything that their parents have not consented to let them access.
Strikingly, though, his dissent went even further, arguing that in early America — and thus, by his reading of the constitution, still today — “parents had a right to the child’s labor and services until the child reached majority,” and in fact to “complete authority” over their kids. That authority, he argues, remains in effect until the child reaches his or her 18th birthday.
Oh, and he also finds room to express doubt that video games are “speech” at all.
It’s worth noting that although three other justices disagreed with either the majority’s finding (Breyer) or its reasoning (Alito and Roberts), none co-signed Thomas’s wacky reading of the First Amendment.
Heavy summer teaching load and other obligations kept me from getting a real post up today, but I did finally take the Student Activism Tumblr account live with some thoughts on the Anthony Weiner scandal.
If you’ve got suggestions for must-follow Tumblrers, let me know in comments.
When the brouhaha over the Psychology Today “Why Black Women Are Less Physically Attractive Than Other Women” article broke, I wrote a quick blogpost pointing out some of author Satoshi Kanazawa’s most ludicrous, obvious mistakes. But now someone with a bit more competency has gone back to look at the actual data Kanazawa used, and discovered that the problems with his “study” go much deeper.
Much, much deeper.
Basically, Kanazawa completely misrepresented the data. His source material just flatly doesn’t say what he says it says.
Here’s the deal. Kanazawa drew his conclusions on the relative attractiveness of black women from the “Add Health” study, a long-term survey of American adolescents. He claimed that the study showed — proved — that black women were less attractive than women of other races. But that’s not the case.
The attractiveness “data” is itself suspect, for one thing. It consists of the subjective judgments of interviewers who were asked to rate their interviewees’ appearance. There’s no effort in the numbers to control for the interviewers’ (unstated) ethnicity, no protocol for their judgments, no reason to believe that their conclusions are in any way representative. It’s just their opinion, and different interviewers reached dramatically different conclusions about the same interviewees’ attractiveness.
Let me underscore that last bit. According to a review of the original data, most of the difference in attractiveness between individuals in the study can be explained by different interviewers “grading” the same interviewee differently.
But it gets worse.
This study is, as I noted above, a study of American adolescents, tracked through early adulthood. And though Kanazawa portrayed his article as a study of the attractiveness of adults, the samples he used included children as young as twelve. He based the majority of his conclusions on data on the youngest two groups, who had an average age of just sixteen.
Still with me? It gets even worse.
Kanazawa admitted that the supposed difference in attractiveness was less in “Wave III” than in “Wave I” and “Wave II,” though he actively concealed the fact that Waves I and II weren’t adults at all. (He labeled the relevant charts “Wave I: Men,” “Wave II: Men,” “Wave I: Women,” and “Wave II: Women,” even though the vast majority of those subjects were teenagers and pre-teens.)
What he didn’t admit was that there’s a Wave IV.
Wave IV, it turns out, is the only wave composed entirely of adults. And an analysis of the Wave IV data shows that it doesn’t support Kanazawa’s thesis.
At all.
In Wave IV there is no difference between the perceived attractiveness of the black women and that of the other ethnic groups examined.
None.
At all.
And again, I want to underscore something. Wave IV is composed of the same interviewees as the previous waves. So what the data really shows is that some (presumptively white) interviewers thought that the black adolescent girls in the study were a little less cute than the white, Asian, or Native American girls.
But when interviewers went back and spoke to the same women as adults, that “attractiveness gap” disappeared. Completely.
This isn’t just shoddy statistics. This isn’t just crap reporting. This isn’t just incompetence. It’s scholarly malfeasance.
It’s fraud.
In August 1970 James Baldwin and Margaret Mead sat down to talk about race, culture, history, and the United States of America.
Mead, 68 years old, white, and liberal, was the most famous anthropologist on the planet. Baldwin, 46, black, living in exile in France, was one of the most prominent novelists of his era. The two had never met before. Their conversation, carried out in three long sessions over two long days, was tape recorded, transcribed, edited, and published as a book: A Rap on Race.
I’ve just finished A Rap on Race, and it’s a weird and fascinating document. The early pages read like a slightly demented graduate seminar, or the opening hours of the best first date ever — all jousting and empathy and audacity.
It bogs down later, as our heroes start getting irritated with each other. They gradually stop interpreting each others’ statements generously, start nitpicking, start interrupting. As they each struggle to synthesize what’s come before, they drift farther away from discussing lived experience and begin to retreat into metaphor and platitude.
But these are two very sharp people, and when they’re on, they’re on. The book exasperated some readers at the time, and subsequent academic assessments have dismantled many of its arguments, but I was mesmerized. Forty years after A Rap on Race was first published, I read it not as a weighty intervention in the world’s problems or as a serious addition to scholarly literature but as an artifact of its moment — a conversation between an aging white observer of world cultures and a middle-aged black expatriate, both struggling to make sense of their own histories and the country that was changing around them.
Here in 2011, we Americans have a pretty settled narrative of the civil rights era. What Betsy Ross and George Washington were to older generations, Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King are to us. We know the stories by heart, and we tell them again and again. But it’s easy to forget how short that era really was — just twelve years passed between Parks’ refusal to move to the back of the bus and the gunshot that took King’s life. Twelve years, four months, and three days.
Mead and Baldwin were both adults when Rosa Parks took her stand — Mead an acclaimed scholar, Baldwin an established author. Both came of age in the time of Jim Crow, and they met well after the movement that ended it had run its course.
And so the civil rights movement is not a central concern of their discussion. When Medgar Evers’ name comes up, it’s in the telling of a story about white supremacy’s stifling, deadly grip on the South. King is mentioned in passing, but Huey Newton (for instance) is a much more immediate presence.
This is a book, in other words, not about civil rights but about two subjects Americans don’t talk much about at all — what came before, and what came after. It’s a window into two eras in American history that we rarely contemplate today, two eras which together did more to construct the one we now live in than did the brief moment that separated them.
Over the course of this coming summer, I’m going to be posting a series of excerpts from A Rap on Race. Some of those passages I agree with, some I find ridiculous, some I’m not sure what to think about. Sometimes I’ll share my own thoughts in the original post, sometimes not. In all cases, I welcome questions and comments and disputation.
Hope you enjoy it all, and I hope you feel moved to bring the conversation forward. This should be fun.
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