Religious knowledge among Hispanics

This Pew table shows that Hispanics have much less religious knowledge than whites; their mean is even lower than that of blacks. One reason why Hispanics, most of whom are Catholic, are not socially conservative is that they do not even know what they are supposed to believe.  I place some of the blame on the Church. Republicans who argue that we want Mexican immigrants because they are Catholic and therefore conservative are ignorant or dishonest.

Archie Bunker is black, brown, or yellow

In this study of 109,745 patients and 1,750 physicians, it was found that Hispanics, Asians, and especially blacks are more likely to choose a same-race physician than are Caucasians if patients get to choose. (The study controlled for availability). This demonstrates that non-whites are more racially nepotistic than whites. 

Think about it. Caucasians are basically colorblind when choosing a doctor. This contradicts in dramatic fashion the image of whites as bigots who prefer their race, especially on important questions like health. Archie Bunker sure as hell would find a white doctor if humanly possible. Truth is, most of the Archie Bunkers nowadays are black, brown, or yellow.

Caucasian not white

How strongly does race predict voting? Here is a multivariate model of six predictors:

Voted for Bush in 2004 (standardized OLS regression coefficients)

Black -.35
Other race -.10
Male .07
Years of education -.08
Income .09
Church attendance .22

All predictors are significantly related to the outcome variable--voting for Bush over Kerry or Nader. (The dependent variable is evenly split so I can get away with using OLS).  "Black" is a comparison of blacks versus whites, and is the strongest predictor in the model. Frequency of church attendance is next. "Other race" is in comparison with whites, and is about as predictive as sex, education or income. Another way of stating this is that whiteness is a relatively strong predictor of voting Republican. 

For those interested in getting more people to vote Republican, none of these predictors is easy to manipulate. For example, how do you get more people to go to church?  Setting aside the question of practicality, Republicans might benefit if more people saw themselves as white. If America embraced, say, a Coonian understanding of Caucasian, and focused on facial features rather than skin color, fewer Americans might be drawn to the party of people who feel like aliens--the Democrats. You know--feminists, homosexuals, immigrants, Jews, non-Christians, and non-whites.  

The use of the term "white" does not help since it brings some pasty dude to mind. This has always been a misleading term. My ancestry is 100 percent northern European, and I can give John Boehner a run for his money any day. One of my brothers looks a little like an Arab. A rough rule of thumb would go like this: "Forget the little groups around the world. Does he look like an East Asian? Does he look like a sub-Saharan African? Does he look like an American Indian? No? Then he's a Caucasian guy."     

Who's to blame for all the foreclosures?

In knee-jerk fashion, liberals blame everything on business practices. If minorities are less likely to have home mortgages, racist lenders are to blame. If lending is too generous, and minorities get loans they cannot repay, mortgage companies are predators.

Fortunately, Americans aren't falling for the BS. According to Rasmussen, only 20 percent--liberal kool-aid drinkers, I'm sure--believe that current home foreclosures are due to unfair lending practices. Fifty-nine percent believe the problem is that people chose to get loans they couldn't afford. Once again, we see the gulf between elites and ordinary folks. I see that Rasmussen did not offer "lenders were encouraged by government to make risky loans to low-income people" as an answer-choice.


UPDATE: I missed this shocker:

Blacks by a two-to-one margin over whites are more inclined to think unfair lending practices are the reason for bank foreclosures.

Racial differences in the link between waist fat and diabetes

Here are the results of a study of 5,446 American men and women between the ages of 45 and 84:

For small waist, risk of incident diabetes was <1/100 person-years for all racial/ethnic groups. At intermediate waist levels, Chinese had the highest and whites the lowest rates of incident diabetes. At the respective 95th percentiles of waist circumference, risk of incident diabetes per 100 person-years was 3.9 for Chinese (104 cm), 3.5 for whites (121 cm), 5.0 for blacks (125 cm), and 5.3 for Hispanics (121 cm). Adiposity influenced relative diabetes occurrence across racial/ethnic groups, in that Chinese had a steeper diabetes risk per unit of adiposity. However, the generally low level of adiposity in Chinese led to a relatively low diabetes occurrence.

The moral of the story seems to be that everyone should be thin, but obesity is particularly a problem for non-whites. The finding for Chinese Americans surprises me.   

Buchanan on the gender pay gap

You don't have to agree with everything Pat Buchanan writes to acknowledge that he's a rare instance these days of a man in the mainstream media with balls. (And Ann Coulter, of course):

The assumption of the Jarrett-backed law is that the sexes are equal in capacity, aptitude, drive and interest, and if there is a disparity in pay, only bigotry can explain it.

But are there not other, simpler answers for why women earn less?

Perhaps half of American women leave the job market during their lives, sometimes for decades, to raise children, which puts them behind men who never leave the workforce. Women gravitate to teaching, nursing, secretarial and service work, which pay less than jobs where men predominate: mining, manufacturing, construction and the military.

Over 95 percent of our 40,000 dead and wounded from Afghanistan and Iraq were men. Men in prison outnumber women 10 to one. Is that the result of sex discrimination?

Sports have become a national obsession, and among the most rewarded professions in fame and fortune. And TV viewers prefer to watch male athletes compete in baseball, basketball, football, hockey, golf, tennis and boxing.

Is unequal pay for men and women professional athletes a matter for the government?

Larry Summers lost his job as president of Harvard for suggesting that women have less aptitude for higher math and that may explain why they are underrepresented on Ivy League faculties in the sciences, economics and math. Would not that male aptitude help explain why men are dominant in investment banking and corporate finance, where salaries are among the highest?

Help catch illegals at the border

I found an awesome website. The Texas Border Sheriff Coalition has partnered up with BlueServo and has this website with a bunch of cameras focused on border spots where many illegals cross. You watch the cameras and report any movement. Can't get down to the border to patrol as a Minuteman? Don't have a concealed-carry permit? Well, you've obviously got an Internet connection. Add time, and you're there. They say you're a Virtual Texas Deputy which makes me feel a little like Dwight Schrute on The Office. Check it out, seriously.   

Obama, the Mexican irredentist

President Obama excites the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute with his claim that Mexicans were here long before America was even an idea. (The meeting of the Congressional White Caucus Institute was held down the hall). Let's set aside the fact that Mexico didn't declare independence from Spain until 1810. (If Palin had said it, it would be used as proof that she's an idiot). 

Obama's words here work to undermine the legitimacy of the United States. He says that many peoples have occupied these lands. Americans are simply one of a long list. According to him, the only thing that binds us together and gives the U.S. any moral claim is government commitment to equal outcomes and opportunity. He's trying to generate Hispanic turnout in November, so "opportunity" means the right to immigrate as much as anything else. If we don't keep the country's doors wide open and use government to impose equality, America loses it raison d'etre. 

It sounds like he's implying that if America were to become skeptical about immigration and indifferent to equal outcomes, the country would have no particular value, and the land might as well be occupied by some other random people, say, the Chinese. What a wonderful man we have in the Oval Office. 

Racial differences in panic disorder

From the Fall 2009 issue of CNS Neuroscience and Therapeutics:

The current study investigates race-ethnic differences in rates of panic disorder, panic attacks and certain panic attack symptoms by jointly combining three major national epidemiological databases. The compared groups were White, African American, Latino and Asian. The White group had significantly higher rates of panic disorder, and of many panic symptoms, including palpitations, as compared to the African American, Asian and Latino groups.

Here's a table which shows more detail:

The rates tend to go like this: Caucasian > African > Hispanic > Asian, but clearly whites are higher than the rest.

According to this study, heritability for panic disorder is .44.

Intermarriage and the drug and alcohol dependence of children

From the July issue of Journal of Ethnicity in Substance Abuse:

The percentage of multiracial youth appears to be increasing in the United States. However, little has been disseminated about problem behaviors among multiracial Native Hawaiians, Other Pacific Islanders, and Asians on a national level. Using the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, the authors compared multiple-race Native Hawaiians, Other Pacific Islanders, and Asians, while disaggregating by ethnic subgroups, with single-race individuals within respective Asian ethnic subgroups and Caucasians for prevalence of alcohol/drug use and dependence. For multiple-race Native Hawaiians, Other Pacific Islanders, and Asians, high rates of alcohol dependence were observed compared with both single-race Native Hawaiian, Other Pacific Islander, and Asian subgroups and single-race Caucasians; for some multiracial Native Hawaiians, Other Pacific Islanders, and Asians, high rates of drug dependence were also observed.

I don't have access to the journal so I don't know how the authors interpret their results. The findings might suggest that people should marry within their own group to lower the risk of problems for their future children, but my guess is that people who marry inter-ethnically and inter-racially are more unconventional than other people, and their unconventionality is passed to their children, which in turn raises the risk of alcohol and drug dependence.

The Tea Party Conspiracy

Dammit, Jon Hamm has got our number. Pretending to be a marketing expert on TV has really got him wired into the American public. He says the Tea Party has got a secret racist agenda. According to Gallup, 28 percent of Americans are Tea Party supporters. That works out to be roughly 87 million people. The lair where we plot the takeover of the world and teach each other the codewords he's talking about is one hell of a lair.  

Masturbation and infidelity

It's amusing how liberals like Rachel Maddow in this video are trying to make Christine O'Donnell look ridiculous by showing how she criticized masturbation on MTV in 1996. Right--if you really want to be cool, you need to jerk off. As often as possible. It's just about the coolest thing you can do.

But I see here a chance to weigh in with data. I can't find any raw data on "solo sex" but the General Social Survey does ask people if they have watched an X-rated movie in the past year.  Here are the percentages of men and women who have cheated on their spouse (sample size = 12,256):


Percent who ever cheated

White male
Watched movie 31.4
Did not watch 17.9

White female
Watched movie 24.6
Did not watch 11.7

Black male
Watched movie 47.8
Did not watch 31.3


Black female
Watched movie 25.6
Did not watch 16.4

For all demographic groups, those who watch porn are much more likely to have been unfaithful. There's a message there for guys looking for a wife: If she's into porn, there's a greater chance that she's not into monogamy.

Who knows the cause-effect relationship here--super-sexual folks are probably more likely to cheat and consume lots of porn--but, with respect to masturbation, Steven Pinker explains that there is a planning element to fantasizing. A sexual fantasizer gets aroused by asking himself, how would I get together with her?

Educational level and dislike of Jews among Muslims

In the last post, a reader suggested I look at the relationship between education and disliking Jews among Muslims. Terrorists make it seem like it's educated Muslims who are most likely to be extremists.

The numbers below are the percentage of Muslims (from many countries) who say they would not want to have a Jewish neighbor. I also included percentages by sex and age.
  
Percent who do not want a Jewish neighbor (sample size = 9,220)

Educational level
Lower 39.7
Middle 32.4
Upper 29.6

Sex
Men 34.6
Women 35.8

Age
15-29 36.4
30-49 34.5
50 plus 34.6

Educated Muslims are least likely to dislike Jews. Attitudes do not vary much across gender or age.

Who likes Jews less: religious or secular Muslims?

One gets the impression from terrorists that, among Muslims, dislike for outgroups grows with religiosity. But what does the data tell us?

Muslims around the world who participated in the World Values Survey were given a list of various groups and were asked if they would not want a member of any of the groups as a neighbor. Here are the percentages who said they do not want a Jewish neighbor by religious service attendance:

Percent of Muslims not wanting a Jewish neighbor (sample size = 9,363)

Never attends 45.7
Less than once a year 29.6
Once a year 24.3
Only on special holidays 29.2
Once a month 29.5
Once a week 36.0
More than once a week 33.9 

Secular Muslims like Jews the least, although dislike rises a little among highly religious folks.

Racial differences in domestic violence

In a recent post, I suggested racial differences in violence in personal situations like a caregiver abusing an elderly person. I plan to look for any kind of relevant data, but I did find a question on a college survey that asked: "For an average month, indicate how often one of your parents or stepparents delivered physical blows to the other."

13.3 percent of the 330 black college students answered at least one time per month, compared to 7.6 percent of the 1,135 Caucasian students. The differences are significantly different at the 95 percent confidence level (two-tail test). So blacks are 1.8 times as likely to assault the child's other parent monthly. I find this striking (no pun intended) given that so many black parents are split up, not married, do not live at the same place, and thus have fewer opportunities to fight.

A valid measure of prejudice

FINALLY, a valid measure of prejudice. When liberal researchers want to measure the extent of prejudice in American society, they ask people if they are against affirmative action. They pose as scientists, but really they're conmen. If you want to ask somebody if they're prejudiced, ask if they're prejudiced. The researcher responds that nobody, not even a bigot, will admit it.  But we see here that 43 percent of Americans--a large number--admit to feeling at least a little prejudice toward Muslims.  

It's revealing that more Americans are prejudiced against Christians than Jews. The country is more anti-Christian than anti-Jewish.

Maureen Dowd is a treat. First she says, "How dare Newt Gingrich suggest that Kenyan anticolonialism is a disreputable ideology."  Then she says, "How dare Newt Gingrich suggest that Obama subscribes to such a loathsome doctrine."

Elder abuse risk factors

This video of an abusive caregiver serves as a warning. (By the way, if you think this kind of abuse is rare, you're naive.) Anytime you leave a vulnerable loved one with someone else, you run the risk of abuse. Caring for children, the elderly, or for the disabled can be a frustrating job, and the wrong kinds of people sometimes end up in this line of work. Second, we know from social science research that certain groups have higher rates of physical aggressiveness. If you have a choice, you might want to think twice about leaving a loved one with a man, a teenager, or a black person (the worker in the video appears to be Brazilian). Put all those characteristics together--an adolescent black male--the risk seems clearly too high. Of course, the reality is only a difference in probability, but we're talking about family here.

I don't have data that bears directly on the question, but will look for it.

PC Priests

At View From the Right, folks are surprised to see an Orthodox priest criticizing anyone who opposes the Ground Zero Mosque. No one should be surprised that even conservative faiths fail to produce conservative people. According to the GSS, only 28.6 percent of Orthodox Christians say they are conservative, compared to 34.1 percent of all Americans. This from a church that officially believes that women should not be allowed behind the iconostatis; that they should wear scarves in the sanctuary; and that women should wait 40 days after giving birth before re-entering the sanctuary.

Mainline churches are accomplices in the area of politics. Roman Catholics are as liberal as non-Catholics. Priests take their cues from the New York Times, not God. It's shameful.   

Big decreases in criminal immigration

Have you ever seen a more beautiful graph?

"Unauthorized" immigration--that's rich. Liberal analysts like to feign objectivity but are such liars. They pretend that entering the country illegally is not a misdemeaor which can be prosecuted as a felony if committed repreatedly, but is merely a bureaucratic problem. 

What Rauf's argument implies

Imam Rauf informs us that he does not plan to move the site for the Ground Zero Mosque because doing so would inflame the Muslim world and would put U.S. soldiers and citizens in danger. In other words, people will be murdered because some Muslims were pressured to build their mosque down the road a bit. Although he doesn't realize it, what Rauf is arguing is that the extremists of his faith truly are deranged. He sounds the same as a right-winger who contends that the actions of Islamic terrorists have no rational basis whatsover. Rauf's argument implies that the only solution is to exterminate every last one of them; such deranged people certainly cannot be reasoned with. 

Armenian Americans

Val Avery

Richard Bakalyan

Mike Connors

Ken Davitian

Michael Goorjian

Armenia can be considered part of Europe or Asia, but Armenians are another interesting test of white Americans' definition of whiteness. These are actors of Armenian descent. They all look white to me, but Ken Davitian (the manager from Borat) looks pretty exotic. I suspect an anthropological education has widened my definition of white.

I probably should mention that Kim Kardashian's father is of Armenian descent. (While we're at it, so is Cher's).

NAMs desire respect, whites seek to be liked

Here is the conclusion of an interesting study reported in the August issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology:

Pervasive representations of Blacks and Latinos as unintelligent and of Whites as racist may give rise to divergent impression management goals in interracial interactions. We present studies showing that in interracial interactions racial minorities seek to be respected and seen as competent more than Whites do, whereas Whites seek to be liked and seen as moral more than racial minorities do.

Don't these folks look white to you?

Ray Lahood

Tony Shalhoub

George Mitchell

Diane Rehm

Doug Flutie

An anonymous reader claimed in the post on Hispanic assimilation that only European Caucasians are considered white in the United States. I posted the photos of the first five people listed at the Famous Arab Americans page of the Arab American Institute. They all look white to me. Are there whites out there who disagree?  Go to the website and read about the others--some might surprise you. I don't know if any of these folks here have mixed ancestries, and I don't have time to look into it, but the Institute says they're Arabs. I see Arabs when I attend Orthodox church. They look like white folks to me, but I can't speak for others.

Taking the Alternative Right's ideas seriously--or just taking them

It might be plagiarism, but I'm glad someone is taking ideas from the Alternative Right seriously.  

I read Dinesh D'Souza's The End of Racism back in the mid-90s. I liked it but remember reading Jared Taylor's claim that D'Souza drew on his ideas while condemning him as a racist at the same time.

Now I see that D'Souza is arguing that at Obama's core he is trying to fulfill the pro-black, anticolonialist dreams of the African father who abandoned him. Where have I read that before?

Hispanics assimilating toward victim class

As you can see in the table, over the past four decades fewer and fewer GSS respondents of Mexican descent self-identify as white. In the 1970s, almost all Mex-Ams thought they were Caucasian. The drop could be due to fewer recent white Mexican immigrants and/or due to a reduced tendency to call oneself white.

This table shows that while the percent of blacks and "others" who are Hispanic is on the rise, the percent of whites who are Hispanic has stalled or is dropping.

Television programs and college ads in Mexico (see Steve Sailer's post) show that being white is popular there, but a recent study published in the American Sociological Review reported that as Hispanic immigrants spend more time in the U.S. and learn English, they are less and less likely to self-identify as white. The authors interpret this as immigrants encountering so much racism here, they begin to see themselves as Hispanic since the country won't let them be white. There could be some truth to the claim that America has a narrower definition of white than in Latin America, but I suspect that the finding also reflects that, while whiteness is popular in Latin American countries, being a person of color is popular here and carries with it financial benefits. (The study also shows that darker-skinned Hispanics earn less, and, of course, conclude that this proves racism, and, of course, fail to mention the possibility that skin color might be a rough indicator of genes that predict economic success).

I take the trend of turning away from whiteness as a sign that a majority of Hispanics are assimilating toward a victim class, rather than merging with the white majority. This squares with their consistent two-to-one voting for Democrats.

Religion and political involvement--again

To improve my recent analysis of the worldwide relationship between religion and political activism, I looked at the percent who ever participated in a boycott and the percent who ever participated in a demonstration.

To control for education, I limited the analysis to only those with a university degree. The World Values Survey sample was almost 5,000 people from countries all over the world. The table shows the results by religion--religions with fewer than 20 respondents were omitted. Overall, Jews are the most politically active. (Israel did not participate in this survey).

Tommy, the heroic trespasser

It is interesting how so many Americans speak admiringly of illegal aliens. "They're trying to get a better life. They brave the desert and the thirst and the coyotes in order to escape their hellholes back home." 

That's like admiring Tommy whose from the wrong side of town for having the guts to pick your lock. He lives in a hovel, and when everyone else is sleeping peacefully, he walks miles and miles to the good part of town where he finds the Johnson home. It's a very hot night; there's no water anywhere around to drink. Undaunted, Tommy works away at the lock on the front door until finally, finally he unlocks it and quietly moves into the basement. Without anyone finding out, he heroically cleans it spotlessly every day.

We don't care about your motives or how nice you are. If you enter and live in our house without getting our permission, you are a common criminal. And you remain a common criminal until you leave.

Married moms don't want to work full-time

It turns out that feminists haven't got their claws in as deeply as it looks. From Heritage:

In reviewing data from the 2000 National Survey of Marriage and Family Life, Wilcox found that only 18 percent of married women with children said they would prefer to work full-time, in contrast to 46 percent who would prefer to work part-time and 36 percent who said that they would prefer to stay at home. In addition, among married moms who were working full-time, nearly 75 percent said they would rather work fewer hours or not at all.

Machete

I know some whites are angry about Robert Rodriquez' Mexocentric movie Machete, and it is true that the message is the worst kind of submental propaganda, but how can anyone take seriously a political philosophy inserted into a Mexploitation film?  I mean, who is going to care about "revolucion" when everyone is going to the movie to see boobs and  blood?  Does any non-retarded person actually believe that U.S. Senators pick off border crossers with deer rifles just for fun? The only thing that saves the odd coupling is that the politics is as moronic as the action.   

PC hysteria on the rise

Am I the only one to have noticed that elite minds are increasingly disordered?  According to The New York Times, New Yorkers--New Yorkers!!--have turned out to be bigots since a third of them believe that Muslim-Americans are more sympathetic to terrorists than other citizens. If the guys writing this editorial genuinely think that Muslims have no more sympathy for Muslim terrorists than people who do not share their faith, they need psychiatric help. The DSM-IV is going to need a new category called "Psychosis--PC Induced." 

Amerindians, Hispanics, and Alcoholism

According to this study, two polymorphic alleles considered candidates for alcohol-related diseases are distributed very differently in an unmixed, indigenous Mexican group versus a sample of Mexican mestizos. This helps explain the high rate of alcoholism among Amerindians. 

Here are death rates (per 100,000) from alcoholic liver disease (CDC):

Amerindian 15.4
Hispanic 4.4
White 4.5
Black 3.4
Asian 1.0

Notice how, compared to whites, Hispanics do not have a problem with alcoholism despite having some Amerindian ancestry.

I'll keep a lookout for more examples (and correct me if I'm wrong) but it looks like American Hispanics overall are not a comparatively unhealthy group of people. 

Predictors of childlessness

I looked at over 5,000 respondents from the GSS to estimate a model that predict the odds of having at least one child. Here are the results (logistic regression coefficients):


Having at least one child

Age .05 
IQ -.05
Years of education -.15
Income .00
Belief in God .15
Political conservatism .08

All of the relationships are statistically significant at the 95 percent confidence level (two-tailed test). The estimates depend on the scale of the predictor: the income coefficient is so small, for example, because income varies so widely. Income is actually a comparatively strong predictor of not being childless, as is age (not surprisingly). Education is also a strong predictor of having no kids. IQ is weaker. Belief in God is a strong predictor the other way, while conservatism is a weaker predictor.

Long story short: being an educated liberal atheist is like having a disease where your testicles rot and fall off.  

And you develop this mysterious desire to get a dog or a cat.

Wealth and religiosity

This table from Gallup shows that national-level religiosity drops off with increasing per capita income.  Jesus was aware of this pattern 2,000 years ago: "Blessed are you poor, for yours is the kingdom of God." (Luke 6:20)