I made the comment on Facebook the other day that social scientists habitually ignore data on Asians when they study minorities. I probably shouldn’t have. I know I have friends who are concerned with whether words feel good and not concerned with whether they’re true.
I could have been clearer. Social scientists ignore data on Asians when it is convenient. The data is oftentimes available, but it doesn’t fit the story they’re telling so it is ignored.
Examples are easy to find. Just look for situations where social scientists would find it convenient to ignore Asians. Here is an article against the war on drugs, it is the first one that pops up on google. It actually caters to my political conclusions.
Today, black males have a 29% chance of serving time in prison at some point in their lives, Latino males have a 16% chance, and white males have a 4% chance…
African-Americans comprise:
• 35% of those arrested for
drug possession;
• 55% of those convicted for
drug possession; and
• 74% of those imprisoned
for drug possession…This skewed enforcement of drug laws has a devastating impact. One in three black men between the ages of 20 and 29 are currently either on probation, parole, or in prison. One in five black men have been convicted of a felony. In 7 states, 80-90% of prisoners serving time for drug offenses are black…
The statistics on latino population are equally disturbing. Latinos comprise 12.5% of
the population5 and use and sell drugs less than whites, 6 yet they accounted for 46% of those charged with a federal drug offense in 1999…
It would be so easy for me to make friends with the leftists and fight the war on drugs together. I’m quite eager to find common ground, but not at the expense of serious intellectual discipline.
What about the Asian population? They’re a major minority. It seems like it would matter. Especially if you’re going to say something like,
These statistics are not the product of chance, but of purpose and can be found throughout the country.
Asians are unusual because their outcomes differ radically from Latinos and Blacks. They generally fare much better than whites, in fact. Is that a product of chance? Or do white people maliciously discriminate against other whites in favor of Asians? We can’t just write a big article filled with evidence for gender differences in outcomes and assert that its because of discrimination.
Okay, lets try again. I googled, “employer discrimination minorities”. This is an obvious place to ignore data on Asians. This is the first article that popped up. It limits discussion to blacks and women. Asians would be an obvious counter-point to mention, but they’re ignored completely.
One could do a study of social scientists studying minorities and discover that many of them exclude Asians from their data sets. Are they discriminating against Asians? Of course not, they just have a lot of beliefs about minorities that the Asian demographics don’t support. So why even mention them?
