The Science of Racism: Everything You Need to Know but Probably Don’t―Yet in The Majority Report Podcast Goodreads Group

Jul 05, 2025 M W rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: audiobook, 2025

Very valuable book because moving the conversation from anecdotes to actual data clearly exposes dishonest actors. That said, it was a bit curious that while the author starts the book by emphasizing this data based approach and how it differs from other popular literature on the topic, he still often states a large number of anecdotes and then tries to connect these to the actual data, which is just not really possible and falls into the same trap he criticized at the beginning. While this is s Very valuable book because moving the conversation from anecdotes to actual data clearly exposes dishonest actors. That said, it was a bit curious that while the author starts the book by emphasizing this data based approach and how it differs from other popular literature on the topic, he still often states a large number of anecdotes and then tries to connect these to the actual data, which is just not really possible and falls into the same trap he criticized at the beginning. While this is sometimes acknowledged, it often goes unstated.

Also, I think while West has an excellent understanding of the sociological aspects of his research area, you can often tell that his statistical intuition is very lacking. This materializes in essentially two ways throughout the book.
The first and less severe is that mathematical facts that could strengthen his arguments are left unstated. For instance, when talking about people being more wary of groups of black adolescents compared to white ones and linking this to prison populations, he correctly states that the overwhelming number (>99% in both cases) of both groups is not criminal, and hence any apprehension is somewhat unwarranted. But he could have gone even further, since differences in group sizes in the prison and general population are immaterial to the discussion. If the white prison population is twice as large as the black one, then conditioned on actually encountering a criminal, you are more likely to encounter a white person than a black one. So a so-called rational person should be more afraid of a group of white adolescents.
The second type is more problematic because it actually weakens his arguments by making nonsensical statements. The prime example of this is when West tries to counter the focus on black-on-black crime by saying that the majority of white people are also murdered by other white people. This is completely expected, since a plurality of the US population is white, so you would actually expect every racial group to be murdered the most by white people. The problem with conservative's focus on black-on-black crime is that they try to represent this as some kind of biological issue instead of looking at socioeconomical reasons.

That said, I reiterate that the book is very good and provides valuable insight into how studies are actually set up to investigate difficult to study problems like racism. The chapters on color blindness and unconscious bias training are also excellent and expose how these naive approaches to tackle racism can actually be harmful. ...more

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