A problem with that implicit-racism thing

In the context of a discussion of a misleading New York Times article of a problematic PNAS paper, Peter Dorman writes:

What I find really disturbing about both the study and the way it was used by the NYT is that they support the claim that medical people in some general sense believe that physical racial differences make Blacks less susceptible to pain. We are seeing that a lot these days, “white people,” “the culture,” etc. are racist.

Racism is an immense social problem. To characterize it—and misrepresent research accordingly—as a generic, undifferentiated force is really letting true racists off the hook. I have no doubt there are some racist doctors. It would be useful to have a sense of how many there are and to what extent it influences their treatment. That would mean doing research designed around capturing differences across medical people. And that would take us back to a longstanding issue, the fixation on finding average effects when the structure of effect differences is what we ought to be interested in.

I agree. Dorman’s comment touches on several important issues:

1. Sophisticated—or, I guess I should say, sophisticated-seeming—social science can be a distraction from big obvious issues. There are lots of arguments of the form, “X’s are the real racists.” But that takes away from the central point that racists are the real racists.

2. Variation is important. Lots of social science has the form of, “People be like X” or, perhaps, “People who be like X do Y.” We need more of “Some people be X, some people be not-X, some people don’t care about X,” and so on.

3. That said, racism—and lots of other things—are societal issues, even if they manifest themselves through individual differences. In a game of musical chairs, not everyone will find a seat when the music stops. You can focus on who finds a seat or you can just count the number of people and the number of chairs. Racism isn’t just about racists, it’s also about who’s got mortgages on those chairs.

P.S. Just a coincidence that this post, which I wrote awhile ago, happened to pop up the day after Lizzie posted on the challenges of biological research in the context of racism and naive anti-racism.