Dear Brooklyn Latin Community,
We are writing to you with an apology from those of us in the Latineer. It has come to our attention that a particularly inflammatory article was released onto the website, with evidence that was cherry-picked according to the views of the writer, as well as possibly unintended messages that have had a deeper impact on our community than anticipated. We wish to embody the meaning behind vox discipulorum and truly represent the beliefs of those within our community, but it is our primary concern to ensure that the articles we release are properly fact-checked and substantiated while also celebrating our community. Therefore, we would like to apologize for our carelessness in letting this misleading article slip through the cracks, and we have attached a counter piece below the original article in order to immediately address the issues brought up in the former and make it so that the original article cannot be viewed in isolation.
Thank you for your understanding,
The Brooklyn Latineer
Advisory Diversity Training: A Critique
By Jack McComb
A few weeks ago, TBLS initiated a diversity training lesson plan to be done in advisory. Apparently, some students felt that our school doesn’t talk about “race relations,” in America. Also, “certain events” among students also sparked the initiation of these lessons. Many were happy to talk about this topic, others were ambivalent, however I was skeptical from the start.
As I sat there in the first of these lessons, I learned that we were going to learn about “microaggressions,” which have been criticized for being overly sensitive and divisive. Then I learned that we were going to learn about “racism in America,” which does exist, but debated as to what extent it is prevalent. I wasn’t scared or mad that we were going to talk about race issues, but rather that I was only going to hear of only side about the issue, after all it is often taken as a given among people that America suffers from systemic racism when it is a debatable (and debated) issue. A concern that came to fruition.
My main gripe came from our 3rd lesson where we learned about “subconscious bias” towards different races. The idea goes that “the media and entertainment” promote messages that make us have biases against other types of people, and it's so subconscious that we don’t even know it! I, however, would argue that such reasoning is flawed because the claim is borderline infallible. After all, if something is “subconscious,” it's difficult to figure out if it exists by definition. On top of that, there is a clear confirmation bias with this belief because if you “self-reflect” to find how you have been “biased” against other races, you’ll find memories and label them as being influenced by racism despite that it might not be the case. We watched a CNN video that mentioned the (now sacrosanct) study found that people had stereotypically African American names like “Larkisha” or “Jerome,” on resumes, were less likely to get a job than white people, with white names, with the exact same resume. We also learned about various studies that supposedly proved the subconscious bias exists. But this is just one side (the leftist side) to this extremely debatable issue.
For one, the way we talk about the study about job hiring bias is misleading. If we break down that study by gender, we actually find that Black women and white women were pretty much just as likely to get the job, while there was a disparity among Black men. This is a clear indication that there are other factors at play. On top of that a study, researchers from Harvard, University of Virginia, and University of Wisconsin-Madison found “that the correlation between implicit bias and discriminatory behavior appears weaker than previously thought.” The idea about Implicit Bias, arose out of a test called the Implicit Association Test. The IAT would see how long someone would put “pleasant or unpleasant words” like “joy” or “crime,” with words like “black,” “white,” “male,” or “female.” However, according to an analysis by the Heritage Foundation, one can get wildly different results if you take the test multiple times. It also didn’t account for cognitive abilities of the people being tested in how fast they could answer.
This is just one example of however, these diversity lessons are taking a controversial issue, with multiple sides to them, but only looking at one side. Both sides deserve to be represented so people can form their own opinions and debate it. Most students take their teachers to be authority figures so if they hear an opinion or claim from them, they will take it as a fact or give it a lot of weight. Especially if they aren’t particularly used to talking about these issues, or only used to hearing one side. It makes it difficult for students (like myself) with opposing views to express those views especially considering these advisory sessions are treated as actual lessons. One doesn’t have to agree with me, but at least acknowledge that both sides deserve to be shown.
A Response to "Advisory Diversity Training: A Critique"
By Ethan Royce
An article recently published to our website entitled “Advisory Diversity Training: A Critique,” written by Jack McComb, Class II, has been gaining traction lately among the school population, and rightfully so: it’s problematic for a number of reasons. And although in writing this response piece I do not intend to attack McComb personally, I wish to offer a thorough response and a sort of post-mortem dissection of the original piece.
The piece’s publication, first off, is not a good reflection of our brand. There’s a noticeable amount of typos, air quotes, and syntax errors, and for these most basic faults, the responsibility is mine and my fellow editors. As Editor-In-Chief, I have failed to uphold the standards that have been set by The Brooklyn Latineer up until this point, and for that, I apologize.
As for the content of the article, there are several issues. Firstly, opinion pieces that speak to issues in this country that affect all of us need to be well-sourced and have a concrete foundation for which to argue their points. The article fails to do this in several ways. Firstly, the Heritage Foundation is a conservative think tank based in Washington D.C. which has been consistently reported as holding right or extreme right views within the U.S. political spectrum--as was noted by SourceWatch--which places it amongst other traditional conservative news outlets such as Fox or The Washington Examiner.
The failure of the article to acknowledge the source’s bias, in addition to it being the only source listed in the article, speaks to an overall bias and agenda that the article has and is trying to push without acknowledging contrasting perspectives even as an afterthought, something that seems to be a major point of critique for the diversity training at TBLS throughout the article.
As for the following statement:
“When I learned that we were going to learn about ‘racism in America,’ which does exist, but debated as to what extent it is prevalent.”
This is simply not true. The issue of systemic racism in the United States is hardly contestable, and arguments that do challenge antiracist thought often rely on dog whistles, something also present throughout the article. Dog whistles are statements that often allude to something else and appeal to those who understand its double meaning - for instance, arguing that building a border wall specifically with Mexico is about immigration security and job protection, when, in reality, both of those things are dog whistles for racist and reactionary ideas about POC immigrants.
As for the idea I briefly mentioned before, there is a slew of evidence against the idea that systemic racism has been removed in this country simply because legal segregation has come to an end. One compilation of studies and subsequent analysis by The New York Times saw that overwhelmingly, even black people from upper class backgrounds were more likely to earn lower incomes than whites, and those born in poverty were more likely to stay poor and with a low income throughout their life if they were black.
Another point of contention in the article is the idea that subconscious bias should be dismissed as an idea because by definition it exists in the subconscious and, according to the article, therefore is “infallible.” The issue with viewing things this way is that, again, it is uninformed and easily disproved. There are dozens of studies demonstrating the vast and far-reaching effects that implicit bias has on marginalized communities within this country, with one particular one of note by the University of Nevada Las Vegas coming to the conclusion that drivers are less likely to slow down for black pedestrians in the street. But more broad studies exist, too, that can have more tangible and generational consequences: a comprehensive study as recent as 2012 by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development showed that housing discrimination, influenced either by implicit bias or explicit racism, affected minorities across the country.
Overall, I would like to again apologize for letting this slip through the cracks. I accept the burden of allowing an article that does not have relevant or informed citations to be published. I promise you all that the issue is being addressed within our staff, and there is going to be austerity and reform in the way articles come through our hierarchy before being published.
We live in a very diverse city, country, and world. The principle here is what is at stake - the article is, generally speaking, uniformed and as a result served to spread an incomplete and false understanding of systemic racism in America and how we can work together to combat it.
The Brooklyn Latineer’s motto is vox discipulorum, “voice of students.” As a community-based newspaper, our goal, in conjunction with promoting this student voice, is also a celebration of all discipuli and magistri involved. This diversity training incentive was not curriculum forced upon us, rather, it was created by the magistri at this school with the intent of promoting the ideas of inclusion, awareness, and representation that we value and prioritize above all else.
For Further Reading:
SourceWatch notes on The Heritage Foundation: https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Heritage_Foundation
NY Times Analysis on Income Across Races in the US:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/03/19/upshot/race-class-white-and-black-men.html
Study on Drivers and Black Pedestrians:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S000145751630361X
2012 U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development Conclusions:
https://www.huduser.gov/portal/Publications/pdf/HUD-514_HDS2012.pdf
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