Thanks for clearing that up. That’s funny! (I didn’t think my mom was in Texas!)

The other “Chap” must be a really interesting and smart and good looking and stylish guy, of course.

Hi, guy-with-the-same-name’s mom! Maybe he can do his speaking tour during Spring Break or after his residency…

I think you gots the wrong guy, lady. Never even lived in Texas.

But, hey, thanks for the sentiment, I think…

Bomani’s note - she’s talking about me with those references. Coincidentally, she has a son named Chap. What a tiny universe in which we live.

But I suspect that we perhaps expect too much usefulness from the social sciences in general, and economics in particular. We fail to recognize how complex social behavioral phenonmena actually are–much more complex than say the laws of motion that define modern phyics.

Perhaps we as individuals have too much of a personal stake in say employment policies, to detach ourselves from their fundamental essence.

Be that as it may, I only hope that black America takes intellectualism serious, and work at producing more intellectuals, who are committed not to being just talking heads, but functioning scientists who have something important to say about the world–in refereed scientific journals.

Remember bad man can have good ideas and vice versa. But, truth can only be found if there is an adversarial process (is the earth flat or not?) with different methods, approaches, and even sensibilities. Call me naive, but I beleive the truth is out there waiting to be discovered–not revealed—God is dead. So, let’s get cracking.

DS

I find it curious that there is so much talk about what black political policy ought to be, and yet I’ve yet to see anyone but the BRC put anything resembling policy statements on the web. So who gets to do that job? Haven’t we been talking about that for a decade already? So what Fryer’s data adds or subtracts from the mix depends primarily on the ability and willingness of the miasma of black academic geeks to step out of the ebony towers and put down some paragraphs. I don’t see why it is that economists have to follow any particular political line anyway, after all there is no Black Leviathan. You may ask perfectly but you will recieve butkis. So It seems to me to be nothing other than perfect hateration for Fryer’s heterodoxy considering that nobody is flying back from Texas over the weekend to implement ANY black agenda (as if there were a black agenda).

If Fryer makes whitefolks laugh, giggle and feel comfortable, thats all about the way he arrange his furniture. If he can be made an existential pariah so easily then that is little more than a demonstration of how little economic research means in the scope of things. Same with the dismissal of Loury.

Sooner or later there’s going to be a Wiki or some genuine artifact of black collaborative policymaking on the web. At the pace blackcontract.com is going, social security will be broke aright about then. Until that day, I still see much of black academia as talented servants on a different kind of farm, the products of which are mostly unintelligbly cryptic.

That said, I imagine that all of his work on Affirmative Action is interesting only as a post-mortem. Since the issue is dead politically, although not quite as dead as reparations, I wonder exactly what it is we would have black America’s economist actually research… Actually, I have an idea.

Based just on the NYT article I would come to a similar conclusion about how a guy in that position could thrive or become discredited over the arc of a career. In a position such as this guy is in, integrity would be rather fragile, and rather precious–all sorts of people will be bashing the guy personally and professionally no matter how good or bad he really is.

I sent Dr. Fryer an email with a bunch of links about Hyman Rickover (similar drive, achieved excellence; controverisal Navy admiral). He sent a very gracious response despite what I’m sure was a burst of publicity-response email.

OT: Have you met Prof. Cori Dauber at UNC? She might be an interesting person to know. She’s a professor of rhetoric and runs RantingProfs.

I’ve found the past couple days’ assessment and response to Roland Fryer immensely gratifying. It’s not that I care about Fryer. I consider much of economics to be *just-so* storytelling limited by the specific cultural psychology over which it is…

First, I think Fryer represents the relatively new phenomenon that we’ve seen with black political conservatives. The road to success is much shorter for blacks who identify with political conservatism than those that embrace a more “pragmatic or liberal” political ideology. With this in mind, I suspect that we will see many black academics who embrace the notion of “public intellectualism” through an investigation of black culpability in our own state of affairs.

However, what struck me about this guy is that he identifies DuBois as his mentor. I would imagine that anyone who is black, an academic, and concerned with the inseparable problems of blackness and racism (to use Bomani’s words) must deal with DuBois’ life-long devotion to writing, research and advocacy. DuBois is one of the greatest intellectuals that the world has known, and he is certainly (at least in my mind) the greatest American intellectual of the 20th century. But DuBois used scientific investigation to identify and propose solutions to the “Negro’s” problem in the U.S. Never did DuBois posit that the gulf between whites and blacks might be based, in some way, on genetics. In my mind, this is “Bell Curve” science. And, it’s interesting that the professors who work with Fryar talk about how “liberating” it is to work with him. I think that’s code for a few white professors using a young black academic to pose radical, race-based hypotheses in the absence of any rigorous scientific investigation.

This guy’s story almost seems to be a mixture of opportunism and naiveté. He allows the writer to devote almost half the article to his past, as if to point out the whole “look how far I’ve come” notion. Any black person who looks at himself/herself as some kind of black anomalous phenomenon (no matter how much they’ve accomplished) isn’t the person who should take the lead on identifying solutions to our problems

I’m not really qualified to comment on the heady discussion about Roland G. Fryer and his views on race and economics. However, I will say that it appears he is in a very unique position to inform and enlighten both blacks and whites. He could also help to put the wheels of serious change in motion, as long as he doesn’t allow himself to be ‘used’ as a puppet by the elite of the academic/economists world. Let’s all pray that as he matures he grows into his own thoughts and moves away from some of his ‘liberal’ white mentors. Kudos to Fryer for sharing his background, no matter how painful. There are many in his position who would not have been willing to do the same.

It sounds to me, if all this guy’s doing is baggin’ on black people, like he’s really pissed off about how he grew up and, I guess, blames black people for it; much like Americans seemed to blame all Muslims for 9/11.

Bomani’s note - The paper you’re probably referring to is the Berkeley paper. And I’m not sure he blames all black people for everything. I do think that he’s seen that it’s lucrative to avoid putting the onus on racism. In fairness, though, I do think he believes a lot of what he says. Just what that means is a discussion I’m unqualified to properly address.