"Keeping Your Mouth Shut: Spiraling Self-Censorship in the United States" | Hacker News Reader

"Keeping Your Mouth Shut: Spiraling Self-Censorship in the United States"

reason.com

12 pointsjseliger16 comments

The referenced PDF isn't loading for me, but the year-over-year chart from the Reason article is extremely suspicious. In 1954, at the height of Jim Crow, only 13% of Americans self-censored? Or were the only people surveyed middle-aged white men?

I don't know why you're singling out the middle-aged or men, but in the 1950s the US was in fact 87.5% non-Hispanic White [1], so all other groups accounted for only 12.5%.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_racial_and_ethnic_d...

“According to the 1950 Census, the population of the United States was 150,697,361. Of this total, 15,042,286, or 10 percent, identified as Black or African American alone.”

I guess Reason would see it as a period of maximum freedom.

Intellectually lazy comment and cheap smear that doesn't really contribute much to the conversation.

Reason certainly doesn’t support racism or not giving full civil rights to blacks.

And if you RTFA, you’d see 25% of liberals agree they have to self-censor so clearly it’s not just the right who thinks this is a problem.

They don't support overt racism, but they do have an ideological blindspot for any racism that might require government action to resolve.

They are biased towards an individualist, "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" interpretation of racism. As long as there isn't overt discrimination, any racial discrepancy is assumed to be the result of choices or inate capabilities differing between individuals of different races.

They are heavily biased against admitting to the existence of any systematic racism.

It’s sounds like their bias is “they don’t agree with me”.

That’s not a bias, that’s approaching a problem differently.

Like is said, actually critique their ideas, don’t just say “oh, they’re just stupid”. That’s just intellectually lazy.

I'm immediately curious about how bad the undercount[1] was in 1950. At the height of Jim Crow, how many people avoided self-identifying Black or African American for obvious reasons?[2]

1. https://www.census.gov/newsroom/blogs/random-samplings/2023/...

2. https://insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu/article/jim-crow-er...

Dismantling Jim Crow does not seem to have affected their numbers much - the census found Blacks to be 10% of all Americans in 1950, and 12.4% in 2020: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_racial_and_ethnic_d...

You'd almost think that identifying as Black in the US still entails significant risks and disadvantages.

So it is your claim that Blacks still lie about their race on the census, in significant numbers, because they are afraid of... what, exactly? Except in rare cases, race is obvious on sight, so I don't see what they would gain by giving a different answer on the census.

Of course you presumably have a good source backing up your claim that Blacks are afraid to identify their race on the census, and trustworthy alternate statistics counting the racial makeup of the US?

It's a good time to point out that the Reason Foundation is a libertarian think tank funded by the Koch Foundation.

Ok? But what do you think about the points being made?

Or do you just dismiss all ideas and comments by people who don’t align to your political views?

It's a good time to point out that Reason didn't publish the study, they simply referenced it in a blog post.

Who did publish it?

Here's one of the authors:

>Gibson has published well over 100 refereed articles and chapters, in a wide range of national and international social-scientific journals, including all of the leading political science journals. He has also published eight books, including the award-winning Overcoming Apartheid: Can Truth Reconcile a Divided Nation? In 2009, Cambridge University Press published his Overcoming Historical Injustices: Land Reconciliation in South Africa. His three South African books – Overcoming Apartheid, Overcoming Historical Injustices, and Overcoming Intolerance in South Africa (co-authored with Amanda Gouws in 2004) – trace the evolution of South Africa’s democracy in the post-apartheid era, and have become known as Gibson’s “overcoming trilogy.” His Citizens, Courts, and Confirmations: Positivity Theory and the Judgments of the American People (co-authored with Gregory A. Caldeira) was published in 2009 by Princeton University Press.

"Nazis are not a fragile endangered species who need you to be agonising over the nuances of their free speech" https://mastodon.social/@Daojoan/111575230408608775

48% of the US, including 35% of those self-described as liberal, and 25% of those self-described as extremely liberal, are nazis? What a flexible (and useful!) term. I'm so glad it's only ever applied to my opponents.

It's the 68.3% of "Extremely conservative" who feel censored because they can't openly talk about their hate and violence that matters.

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