The Other McCain

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Professor Demonizes ‘Wealthy White Men’ for ‘Violence, Deceit, Irresponsibility’

Posted on | April 18, 2023 | Comments Off on Professor Demonizes ‘Wealthy White Men’ for ‘Violence, Deceit, Irresponsibility’

University of Texas professor Kirsten Bradbury

As recently as 2018, Kirsten Bradbury was paid $105,697 a year as an associate professor of psychology at the University of Texas. Bradbury, who also has a private practice in Austin as a clinical psychologist, apparently now only teaches part-time at the university, so that her pay in 2022 was only around $60,000, but still I doubt she could be counted among the victims of oppression, as such things are reckoned by the progressive calculus of “social justice.” Nevertheless, Professor Bradbury wants to make sure her students know who to blame for oppression:

A University of Texas psychology professor is apologizing to her students after including a question on a quiz that stated “wealthy white men” are “most likely to repeatedly violate the rights of others.”
The quiz was a part of Professor Kirsten Bradbury’s Personality Psychology course and asked students which demographic is most likely to be diagnosed with Antisocial Personality Disorder.
After stipulating the disease itself is “a racist diagnosis in the way that it has been applied,” Bradbury’s quiz stated: “Neither race nor gender is determinative in Antisocial Personality Disorder. However, if we must go there, which sociodemographic group is most likely to repeatedly violate the rights of others in a pattern of behavior that includes violence, deceit, irresponsibility, and a lack of remorse?” The answer: wealthy white men.

After distributing the quiz to students, Bradbury, who has been celebrated as one of the university’s most outstanding teachers, then backtracked, telling students that “given the current rate of sociocultural and scientific change” the quiz had “grown too stale to use.” She did not indicate what scientific changes had rendered the quiz obsolete or what scientific research had at one point served as the basis for the question.
Bradbury did not respond to a request for comment.
Bradbury was the recipient in 2017 of the University of Texas Board of Regents’s highest teaching honor, which comes with a $25,000 cash prize. Her biography on the university’s website indicates that her academic interests include “parenting stress,” “firearms and firearm safety,” and “firearm-related parenting.”
The syllabus for her Personality Psychology course, University of Texas-Austin’s psychology 309, indicates that the class aims to teach students about the “normal and abnormal development of personality across the life span” and includes open-note quizzes and self-graded “experiential writing assignments” at the conclusion of which students assign themselves a “journaling grade.”
It also includes a diversity statement voicing the department’s commitment to “a journey of inclusion and justice for all students from groups that are marginalized or minoritized.” It goes on to state, “Our department is in the process of diversifying and creating identity safety for all students.”
“In keeping with the department’s values, I am committed to creating a learning environment that is safe and supportive of the identities and perspectives of all marginalized and minoritized people,” Bradbury wrote.

Any objective inquiry would require us to ask whether the “pattern of behavior” typified by the diagnosis of antisocial personality disorder is (a) more common among men than women, (b) more common among the wealthy than among those with lower incomes, and (c) more common among whites than among other races. Only if the answer to all three questions was “yes” could her claim be regarded as true.

Let us consult the Mayo Clinic:

Antisocial personality disorder, sometimes called sociopathy, is a mental health condition in which a person consistently shows no regard for right and wrong and ignores the rights and feelings of others. People with antisocial personality disorder tend to purposely make others angry or upset and manipulate or treat others harshly or with cruel indifference. They lack remorse or do not regret their behavior. . . .
Adults with antisocial personality disorder usually show symptoms of conduct disorder before the age of 15. Symptoms of conduct disorder include serious, ongoing behavior problems, such as:

•Aggression toward people and animals.
•Destruction of property.
•Lying and dishonesty.
•Theft.
•Serious violation of rules.

Antisocial personality disorder is considered a lifelong condition.

Why would Professor Bradbury assert that “the way that [antisocial personality disorder] has been applied” makes it “a racist diagnosis”? Is this something she picked up from an article in an academic journal? If so, could she provide a citation? Some footnotes? A bibliography?

Because I am merely a journalist, and not an academic with a Ph.D., all I can offer is a few results found via Google, including this article in the Journal of Criminal Justice that explores the possible relationships between race, crime and personality disorders, and suggests that “criminology has avoided offering explanations due mostly to political correctness.” Hmmm. Why would someone say that?

Well, it appears there has been great controversy on this subject centered on the work of a British professor, Richard Lynn, who in 2019 published a book, Race Differences in Psychopathic Personality: An Evolutionary Analysis that directly addressed the topic. You will perhaps not be surprised to learn that Professor Lynn has been denounced as being “at the forefront of scientific racism,” by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Many of my readers will take that as a ringing endorsement — “Denounced by the SPLC? I must buy this book now!” — but probably Professor Bradbury feels otherwise, and I think this is an explanatory clue to the content of that exam question. If there are, as Lynn claims, measurable differences between racial groups in terms of antisocial behavior, then the statistical disparity itself would suffice to render it a “racist diagnosis,” in the eyes of most academics, whose progressive worldview is based on the belief that there is no such thing as real racial differences, but that all such observable differences are caused by systemic racism and the oppression of white supremacy.

Being a mere journalist, I am not qualified to settle such a quarrel among academics, but I do know that if you order Professor Lynn’s book through my Amazon Associates link, I’ll collect a small commission on the sale and did I mention it’s been denounced by the SPLC?



 

 

Category: Education, Racism, Texas

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