Prison and Athletes Redux

I so do _not_ want to turn this blog into a forum on race and genetics. It’s so tiring. Nonetheless I thought I’d do a round up on some links and reccomendations I’ve gotten from readers in response to my previous post.

First, “Kerim”:http://keywords.oxus.net/ points to Loic Wacquaint’s essay “From Slavery to Mass Incarceration”:http://www.newleftreview.net/NLR24703.shtml at New Left Review (subscription necessary :( ) while an ASAO homie reccomends “Ruth Wilson Gilmore”:http://www.speakoutnow.org/People/RuthWilsonGilmore.html (“CV here”:http://www.usc.edu/dept/geography/private/faculty/cvs/Wilson_Gilmore_CV.pdf), both of whom talk about how a lot a lot of people are getting locked up. I know that I’ve mentioned him on this blog before, but it’s worth noting again the work of “John Hoberman’s”:http://www.utexas.edu/depts/german/faculty/hoberman.html (“CV here”:http://www.utexas.edu/depts/german/faculty/HobermanVita.htm). His original work was on Jews, Nazis, race, and so forth. His most recent book, “Darwin’s Athletes”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0395822920/qid=1110586958/sr=2-1/ref=pd_bbs_b_2_1/102-4114845-8819356 is about the search for racial athletic aptitude. The amazon reviews are mixed, with everyone who identifies as a pro-nature type giving it 1 star and everybody who identifies as a pro-nurture type giving it five. I am only about twenty pages in, but it impresses me as a careful and well-documented book which if much more careful than either of these polarized positions. Thus:

A critique of the search for racial athletic aptitude can be legitimized on both scientific and humanitarian grounds. It is easy enough to show that a great deal of naive speculation about purported racial differences has appeared in scientific and medical journals; indeed, many examples of such biased thinking are presented in this book. We can also point to the malign role that racial science has often played in human affairs over the past two centuries. Yet it is also the case that these arguments can take the form of a disingenuous (and unscientific) opposition to the investigation of racial differences per se on the grounds that they are either too trivial or too potentially dangerous to examine.

So that seems promising.

Finally: *Zimbardo* on abuse in Abu Gharaib:”You Can’t be a Sweet Cucumber in a Vinegar Barrel”:http://edge.org/3rd_culture/zimbardo05/zimbardo05_index.html:

When you put that set of horrendous work conditions and external factors together, it creates an evil barrel. You could put virtually anybody in it and you’re going to get this kind of evil behavior. The Pentagon and the military say that the Abu Ghraib scandal is the result of a few bad apples in an otherwise good barrel. That’s the dispositional analysis. The social psychologist in me, and the consensus among many of my colleagues in experimental social psychology, says that’s the wrong analysis. It’s not the bad apples, it’s the bad barrels that corrupt good people. Understanding the abuses at this Iraqi prison starts with an analysis of both the situational and systematic forces operating on those soldiers working the night shift in that ‘little shop of horrors.’

If anyone would know it would be him.