Journalists Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa, authors of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book “His Name Is George Floyd,” are still unclear why they were told they couldn’t read from their book or talk about systemic racism to a room full of high school students in Memphis.

Two days before an event at Whitehaven High School, they said they were “blindsided” by the last-minute restrictions, which they believed event organizers issued in accordance with Tennessee laws restricting certain books in schools. They said they’d also been told the week before the appearance that their book wouldn’t be distributed at the event.

One thing is for certain, the authors said: The students paid the price ultimately.

    • @[email protected]
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      77 months ago

      Yep. They are big on not having any censorship, unless of course it’s any kind of progressive or humane ideas and speech.

    • @[email protected]
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      7 months ago

      The professor who “discovered” systemic racism was recently barred from research because it turned out he literally made up the stats and rigged his research to present systemic racism as being real.

      The dude has been barred from all academia for his incompetence and every single paper he wrote and that used his data as a basis for their own research on the existence of systemic racism was pulled. Whether it does or does not exist matters much less now that we are fully aware that people in positions of power over the research are blatantly lying about their findings.

      More info on the piece of trash found here: https://thepostmillennial.com/renowned-criminology-professor-who-proved-systemic-racism-fired-for-faking-data-studies-retracted

      • @[email protected]
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        7 months ago

        I think the subject of the post begs the question a little. It’s hardly intellectually honest to insinuate that institutional racism doesn’t exist in broad form because the guy who formalized it fudged the numbers.

        It speaks plenty that conservatives won’t allow institutions that they control to even talk about it. If those numbers are so radically false, why stifle the conversation? Especially when the data would then benefit conservative counterpoints.

        The truth can be seen in raw data from other sources, like the prison population of the state I live in for instance. How come in Louisiana, black people make up a third of the population but two thirds of the prison population?

        Are you going to argue that there’s not enough data to draw the conclusion that black people are incarcerated at a higher rate? The numbers are right there. Are you going to try to justify the (racist) idea that black people just do more crimes? Maybe it’s just that people stuck in lower socioeconomic positions resort to crime more often. So is it that black people tend to not have the same resources other people do to lift themselves up? Possibly due to a generational pattern of poverty?

        Or maybe it’s that the police here know that people of a certain color won’t be able to afford to fight back as often. Or that the judges in this shit hole state are ancient racists (with the exception of a couple I know) and don’t believe black people can reform.

        That doesn’t sound like institutionalized racism to you?

        That reasoning exists independent of the guy who formalized it. It’s pretty asinine to deny the existence of something because of flaws in the way it was studied, regardless of the intent of the person who wrote the paper.

        • @[email protected]
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          -77 months ago

          The correlation to jim crowe and red lining is exceptionally clear in regards to criminal behaviour of individuals whose families were impacted by those laws, that’s not in question, how much of an impact it has is definitely in question. i.e. do they commit to these behaviours because of a society that pushed them to do this, or are they using the excuse of an unfortunate past to commit these behaviours? Are individuals in power actually using racist agenda to dictate policy or are they following empirical facts. I would hazard that the latter is emphatically not the case. I do believe many lawmakers use empirical data, but in regards to criminality and racial tension, I’m of the opinion that most lawmakers just throw their personal views and opinions behind their actions as opposed to the research and evidence therein (here, plainly, we see the negative impact that the liar has had because now EVERY research paper is questioned because the vast majority use 1 or more of his papers as referential material.

          For the same reason people of jewish heritage claiming the holocaust negatively impacts them when they’re 2-3 generations removed, sure it impacts them in how they were raised by their parents and how their parents were raised by their parents, but beyond that? Extremely doubtful that the event that changed the world only impacts the jewish community, especially when the concentration camps killed scores of people from every background with emphasis on minorities, the mentally disabled and the queer community.

          I am not saying to disregard the research as a whole, I’m saying we need to repeat all of the research to verify the findings are accurate and reliable as opposed to just going ‘well I see one bad thing and another bad thing and although they’re clearly correlated, I’m arbitrarily going to note they’re causally related’.

          • @[email protected]
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            7 months ago

            are they using the excuse of an unfortunate past to commit these behaviours?

            This reasoning is exceptionally racist to even suggest. The logic that black people on the whole commit a higher rate of crimes enough to reflect statistically because they think it’s ok because of their races’ past, is a conservative talking point and a scare tactic.

            It’s like suggesting that, because white people tend to make it further in their careers, is it because society as a whole favors white people to be more capable of higher paying jobs? Or is it because white people actually have higher work ethic? The latter is racist to assert, even if you juxtapose it with the actual reasoning like it’s supposed to be considered just as equally.

            I am not saying to disregard the research as a whole

            It seems like you’re just brushing on the point but still missing it. Sure, the studies need to be made again with regards to the actual data. But the data is public. The conclusions can be made without published scientific work. Those help, but conservatives sure aren’t quoting published research papers when they say things like “drag harms children” or “a fetus is a baby”.

            The point I’m making is that just bringing up that the guy who formalized the concept falsified his findings, is not enough justification to deny the people talking about their personal convictions to an audience willing to listen, and it’s damn sure not enough for an institution to decide to snip and cut certain things such a group might want to talk about in a way that neuters the point.

            The Tennessee school/government has an agenda, just as much as they might claim the group in question does. If that researcher hadn’t have been deposed as a liar, they’d be saying the same things and making the same restrictions, just like they did in the years before he was outed as a liar.

            • @[email protected]
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              -57 months ago

              The difference in this conversation is that I only care about the science and don’t care about the politicking.

              • @[email protected]
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                77 months ago

                That’s fine and dandy. But this is an article about politicking and you’re making a point as if the science invalidates the fact that the politicking is the major motivation.

                Whether you like it or not, social science bleeds into politics and vice versa. It’s not really something you can take one without the other.

                I guess we’re done here?

                • @[email protected]
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                  -37 months ago

                  Asking that the experiments are replicated in order to verify their reliability is not a political stance.

                  Insuring veracity shouldn’t be on a left or right spectrum, everyone should be aspiring to be as correct as possible, regardless of the politicking.

      • @Duamerthrax
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        47 months ago

        And that means that all other studies done by other researchers, using different methods, studying aspects of the phenomenon are also wrong?

        • prole
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          17 months ago

          Just look at their “evidence”. It’s far right propaganda.

          • @Duamerthrax
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            17 months ago

            Oh, I know. We all know. They only have one way of speaking because all their ideas com from the same “think tanks”.

        • @[email protected]
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          -47 months ago

          It means that the premise they’re doing research on needs to be reevaluated. Most new research used his research as a baseline to conduct their own research. It means we need to redo the experiments that were related to the original papers but also it would be ideal to complete each piece of that assholes research over again to get the actual data and then rework all papers based off of the accurate data.

          The problem is that thousands of research papers used this man’s data and all of them and the research inspired by them need to be retested with the knowledge of the erroneous data in the core information that formed the hypothesis in the first place.

          • @Duamerthrax
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            67 months ago

            This isn’t bio research. This sort of research is just statistics. Each study can be taken by itself even if it’s inspired off of a bad paper.

      • prole
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        27 months ago

        Lol I clicked the link, and was immediately visited by Charlie Kirk’s head and strangely small facial features

        Totally an unbiased, well-regarded source 🙄

        • @[email protected]
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          -27 months ago

          Oh, you want unbiased? You probably should get off the internet then.

          If you can’t ignore someones opinion and look at the facts they’re stating, that’s a you problem, not a source issue.

    • Travalaaaaaaanche!
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      387 months ago

      “…which they believed event organizers issued in accordance with Tennessee laws restricting certain books in schools.”
      Legal worries, I’m guessing.

      • @Linkerbaan
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        27 months ago

        Free speech is bait to put dissidents in jail

    • @[email protected]
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      47 months ago

      While it would be an epic and radicalizing event for the school to have them arrested on stage, it might not be worth tanking their whole movement for one middle finger in the asscrack of Tennessee.

  • @RizzRustbolt
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    177 months ago

    But by telling them that they couldn’t talk about systemic racism, they themselves were talking about systemic racism.

    Checkmate.