If you don't know the facts, rely on personal prejudice and imagination

 The Old Grey Lady is neighing again.  Which is a more polite way of saying, they are once more barking at the moon.  

In a long form creative writing assignment similar to the 1619 project and in contrast to actually investing in real reporting, Helene Cooper has managed to produce this threadbare, omission committing, context ignoring and reality denying pseudo babble.  

I love the ratioing the Times is receiving in their tweet and the comments in the thread are gold.

Proud and fierce in their identity, the Marines have a singular race problem that critics say is rooted in decades of resistance to change. A handful of white men rule over 185,000 white, African-American, Hispanic and Asian men and women. https://t.co/C3YvLQMr41

— NYT Politics (@nytpolitics) September 1, 2020

Click for the thread.

At the time of posting, there are about 50 hearts and 1,100 comments.  Not the mother of all ratios, but certainly a daughter.

As I posted earlier, one of Thomas Sowell's three questions for refuting social justice claptrap is to ask "Compared to what?"

Helene Cooper, being a journalist and therefore constitutionally incapable of either factual reporting or numeracy, does not answer the question.  She can't even do percentages.  She reports:

Out of 82 Marine generals overall today, there are six African-American brigadier generals and one African-American major general.

Doing the math, 7/82 is 8.5% of all Marine Generals are African-American.

Compared to what other professions with necessarily stringent standards?  

8% of all white collar professionals at any level are African-American. 

6% of surgeons are African American.

6% of university professors.

5% of all medical doctors. 

3% of all engineers.

3% of airline pilots. 

2% of law partners.

0.3% of accounting partners.

OK.  Rather than being a racist institution, it appears, consistent with its reputation for color blindness, that the Marines are, when compared to competitive professions where standards are high and failure deeply consequential, at least 35% more successful at advancing African-American leaders. 

What about Helene Coopers own field of journalism where the standards are notoriously low and the consequences of failure tends to be more failure?

Journalism - Only about 6% of all journalists are African American.  Among leadership, it is less than 4%. 

Cooper has written a long form article critical of the Marines, making claims of racism with very little evidence and without ever mentioning that the Marines do a dramatically better job of racial representation than her own profession or any other high-standards profession.  In fact, the Marines are more than twice as effective as the field of journalism.  

To be fair to Cooper, in a fashion that she is not with the Marines, there is racism among individuals in America.  It can be found.  But it tends to be rare and fleeting.  

What Cooper is struggling with is that people aren’t blank slates to be molded.  Different cultures have different degrees of effectiveness.  Individuals are diversely competent.  In any major enterprise, there will be departures from proportionality based on all sorts of attributes (handedness, height, race, ethnicity, religion, gender, marital status, hair color, weight, age, class, etc.)  

Some of these departures from strict proportionality may be due to prejudice of one form or another.  But, despite the fondness and prevalence of the belief in critical theory circles, racial prejudice is nowhere near the most prevalent form of prejudice (class, educational attainment, and age being far more common).  

Even when there is no prejudice involved, some variances in proportionality will be due to historical path dependence.  Some will be due to direct causal mechanisms (time available based on marital and family status; personality traits rewarded within particular cultures or religions; personal attributes such as work ethic, or relative experience, etc.).  

Disentangling all these elements - degree of manifested prejudice, real differences in capability, necessary institutional requirements, etc. requires granular data on a massive scale.  We usually do not have the data quality or process knowledge to second-guess the thousand incremental outcomes which make up a career progression.

We can get rid of the most obvious instances of prejudice (racial or otherwise) but we cannot get rid of variance in outcomes.  Attributing all variances simply to racial prejudice is massively ignorant and bigoted.  And that is what Cooper is doing.  She doesn't understand the Marine Corps and she does not appear to have a strong grasp on numeracy so what she produces is an article reflecting her own ideological prejudices and assumptions.  

Were she obviously smart, wise or accomplished, she might be worth reading to try and understand what she sees that the normal reader does not.  Absent those conditions, she is just another run-of-the-mill producer of cognitive pollution.