Motivation and Standardized Testing

In the Viewpoint section on Sunday, January 8, 2016, in the Memphis newspaper the Commercial Appeal (the opinion section with op ed pieces), a white teacher named Carly Fricano wrote a column in which she described a conversation with one of her students. Ms. Fricano works for the heavily African American school district in Shelby County, and the student was named Marquavan, so I am assuming he was African American.

The student came up to her and said, "Ms Fricano, I know you think I'm dumb or something, but I'm not."

"What makes you say that I think you're dumb?" She replied.

"You keep giving me these tests that say I don't know this stuff, but I do. I just don't really care about these tests."

I italicized the last statement because it makes a point I have sometimes made. Even though this story is just anecdotal, I believe it is a valid representation of the folly of using standardized tests alone to evaluate teacher competency, the intelligence of the test taker, their academic achievement, or much of anything else actually. The problem is that there is no way to control for a student's motivation to do well on the test, and without that, you may be getting more of a measure of how little or how much the student is trying to answer correctly on the test than of how much he or she actually knows or is capable of learning.

And teachers do not have a lot of weapons they can employ to help students get motivated to perform well if the student's parents do not care about that either. The parents' attitude is the far bigger problem than that of less-than-competent teachers.

Of course, in saying this I will no doubt be accused of "parent bashing" and/or discounting the sad legacy of racism in determining the attitudes of both the parents and the students. To that I call, "Bullshit!"

Of course the parents play a huge role in determining their children's attitude towards learning. Do you really think that the relatively higher average achievements of Asian and Jewish students are just a result of their having higher average IQ's? That's nonsense. It's the family attitudes of Asians and Jews that is the primary determining factor.

And what about the other nonsense about my discounting the effects of racism in discussing African American student achievement? One can only accuse me of that if they think that I believe that these families reside in some sort of cultural vacuum. Or if they themselves are ignoring the wider context! It isn't only scientists who can be reductionistic.

Actually, it IS the racism that is the larger cause of the attitudes of many African American parents (and of course not all of them have troublesome attitudes - not by a long shot. I just said that, so please do not say I did not).

I will oversimplify the process in order to make it clear, but not really by much: Under slavery and Jim Crow, the latter of which existed for quite some time during my own lifetime, Whites' mistreatment of Blacks was justified on the basis of Blacks being thought of as stupid and lazy and therefore somehow less than human. 

Any black person who tried to disprove that mythology by sticking his neck out and showing how intelligent he really was was ritually and routinely humiliated, beaten, or even lynched and killed. Entire neighborhoods of successful black businesses were attacked and burned to the ground.

Culturally, this understandably led to a lot of fear within Black communities of looking too smart in front of white people, or even among themselves. This fear was then transmitted to the children by the parents - for the kids' own protection from the very real negative consequences, not because the parents had some innate defect or deficit. When these children grew up and had children themselves, they may not have completely understood where the fear had came from originally, but the damage to their attitude about education, success, and intelligence was already done. 

And the ongoing racism of Whites that is still evident all around them reinforces their fears. And so their kids "catch" it.

And thus we have the Marquavans of the inner city. 

I am afraid it is up to African American parents themselves to solve this problem, despite the continuing racism by Whites all around them, by taking the bull by the horns and learning how they have been affected, and by starting to start push their children to succeed academically. 

The fact that the odds may be stacked against their children is no excuse. That makes their success more difficult; it does not make it impossible. And the risks of Black success are now greatly reduced from what they had been. Not nearly as many lynchings these days. And please do not tell me that the last statements mean I am discounting current ongoing racist attitudes among Whites, or the fact that law enforcement still reacts with more violence and worse punishments against black suspects than white ones, because the statements simply do not do that.

Book Review: David and Goliath by Malcolm Gladwell

In my blog post of May 12, Are Scientists More Objective and Rational than the Rest of Us?, I related the stories of some scientists who somehow were able to “think outside the box,” to use the annoyingly well-worn cliché. They broke through the conventional wisdom, academic politics, and scientist groupthink and made radical changes to accepted scientific concepts and explanations for various phenomenon. 

I discussed Clare Patterson, who successfully took on a respected scientist who had became an oil industry lackey and who had pushed the idea that lead in gasoline was not dangerously polluting the environment. 

Then there was Elizabeth Gould, who took on neuroscience guru Pasko Rakic, who had set the field of neurobiology back a full decade by refusing to believe a lot of data coming out that disproved the prevailing notion that sophisticated animals are born with essentially every brain cell they would ever have, and that no new neurons develop during adulthood.

Another good example was German meteorologist Alfred Wegener, who first proposed – way back in 1915 - that South America and Africa had one time been joined. He was almost laughed out of academia. He even had fossil evidence for his proposition, but the geologists of his day not only mocked him but counter-proposed that there are (now sunken) land bridges to account for the fossils - without any evidence that this was in fact the case. Now all geologists accept the theory of plate tectonics.

So what makes some people able to do this? This is actually two questions, not one: First, why can some people think in novel ways while others seem stuck with the groupthink no matter how preposterous it starts to become? Second, why do some of these people succeed in creating – again pardon the second annoyingly well worn cliché – a paradigm shift in the scientific community, while others fail?

I was discussing these questions with a friend, and in response he gave me an interesting book called David and Goliath, Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants by New Yorker journalist Malcolm Gladwell.

Malcolm Gladwell

It’s mostly about the individual and group factors that lead some people to think apart from prevailing wisdom, rather than about which of these people succeed in making a mark and which do not, but I thought it was a very interesting read.

Now of course Mr. Gladwell is a journalist and not a neuroscientist or psychologist, and his work has garnered a lot of public criticism from professionals in those fields, particularly Steven Pinker and Chris Chabris. Gladwell is above all a storyteller, but he goes on to make some interesting hypotheses about the psychology – and to a lesser extent the sociology – of the people at the center of his stories. He then speculates further about what these hypotheses could mean more generally.

Chabris accused him of “telling just-so stories and cherry-picking science to back them up,” and “presenting as proven laws what are just intriguing possibilities and musings about human behaviour.”

Fair enough, although I'm not sure I would agree that Gladwell is saying his ideas are proven. On the other hand, the belief of some psychologists in the sanctity of statistics and so-called empirical studies in the social sciences is also grossly overestimated. There are some inherent limitations in our current ability to explain and predict things, particularly in psychology. In the words of the neurobiologist Steve Rose, "It is in the nature of living things to be radically indeterminate."

I discussed the issue of “anecdotal” evidence versus inductive conclusions in a prior post. But an even bigger problem is the obvious difficulty in precisely mapping out the interactions between genes and environment, when there are literally thousands of environmental variables and a trillion constantly changing synaptic connections between brain cells, all of which interact at constantly changing frequencies over decades. No one can even come close to controlling for all of these variables in a lab experiment. This is the definition of chaos.

Sometimes the best way to eventually understand a psychological question of this sort – and one can only talk about increased or decreased probabilities of certain results given certain pre-conditions, never about anything approaching absolute certainty – is by looking at all the details in the stories of a variety of individuals. With all of the variables at work, only individual stories can provide some of these necessary details. With psychology, details matter. 

And sometimes it is the exceptions to the conventional wisdom that prove or disprove a perceived “rule.”

So with this in mind, reading Gladwell’s stories does bring up some intriguing possibilities. His major premise is that the experience of certain types of adversities can make someone stronger and far more resolute than he or she might be otherwise. Gladwell brings up, for example, the strength of the population of London during the rocket and bombing attacks by the Germans in World War II. The fact that so many people experienced what he calls a “near miss” – surviving a bombing in which your neighbors did not - can strengthen people's resolve to carry on.

He also discusses how some people with dyslexia had to ingeniously develop alternate ways of accomplishing certain tasks in order to overcome their limitations, which later helped them to be wildly successful. Again, I do not think the author is arguing that dyslexia is a good thing, or that for most people it does not impair or even destroy their attempts at success. So other variables are obviously involved.  

But that doesn’t necessarily negate the premise that sometimes weaknesses can be turned into strengths – as David did in the story of David and Goliath. Goliath was only prepared to fight someone who fought just like him, which left him vulnerable to a projectile from a slingshot.

Then there was the story of Emil “Jay” Freireich, a doctor who was a major player in the vast improvement in the treatment of childhood leukemia. The good doctor lost his father when he was quite young to a probable suicide after the stock market crash of 1929. The family was left destitute, and the mother was frequently absent in order to work, leaving him to fend for himself.

To oversimplify just a bit, Freireich realized that children were dying because individual drugs, which were causing horrific side effects, did not work fast enough. The leukemia killed the children before the drugs really had time to work. The drugs were just not killing enough cancer cells quickly enough. He knew that this meant that the children needed more aggressive treatment, and that drug “cocktails” were probably called for. But this meant that the children would suffer even more horrible side effects as the cocktails were given to them, and the medical establishment recoiled in horror at such a thought.

But Freireich had learned to persist in the face of adversity, and would not be deterred. Of course, the places in which he worked could have easily fired him for his activities, so a lot of luck was also involved. He had to be surrounded by at least some people who recognized the possibility that he might just be right. Fortunately, that was the case. Today’s cure rate for the type of cancer he fought stands at about 90%.

As Gladwell points out, “Does this mean that Freireich should be glad he had the kind of childhood he had? The answer is plainly no. What he went through as a child was something no child should have to endure…the right question is whether we as a society need people who have emerged from some kind of trauma – and the answer is that we plainly do.”

As an aside, Gladwell also brings up sort of in passing something that I wanted to mention because it puts an additional, very interesting new spin on the problem of some African Americans internalizing the racist, negative attitudes of Whites toward Blacks, so that they end up treating each other just like Whites used to treat them. I discussed this in my post of 8/14/2010 called The N-word. 

In some cases, apparently African slaves actually pretended to act out White stereotypes - in order to passive-aggressively harm their slaveholders! Gladwell quotes historian Lawrence Lavine about the phenomenon of the "trickster hero": 

"...a significant number of slaves lied, cheated, stole, feigned illness, loafed, pretended to misunderstand the orders they were given, put rocks in the bottom of their cotton baskets in order to meet their quota, broke their tools, burned their master's property, mutilated themselves in order to escape work, took indifferent care of the crops they were cultivating, and mistreated the livestock placed in their care to the extent that masters often felt it necessary to use the less efficient mules rather than horses since the former could better withstand the brutal treatment of the slaves."

So, when African Americans makes themselves look like a parody of a White stereotype, are they doing this on purpose to be a trickster, or subconsciously out of fears - originally concerning retribution - passed down unknowingly from one generation to the next? Actually, any given case could be either one - or even both. That the behavior can be this ambiguous shows the power of what I call the actor's paradox.

Book Review: "High Price" by Dr. Carl Hart: A Life and the Lies in Drug Abuse Research

For a long time I have been critical about conclusions drawn from animal experiments which purported to be models for addictive behavior with drugs in humans. In particular, I got annoyed hearing over and over about how rats and rhesus monkeys would press levers to get cocaine, heroin, or methamphetamine compulsively, even until they died, choosing drugs over even food and water. These experiments were touted  incessantly by so-called experts. As I mentioned in a previous post, the head of the National Institute for Drug Abuse, Dr. Nora Volkov, even had the nerve to say that rats and humans could have the same phenotype!

My usual response to this was that rats and monkeys do not know about the damage the drugs might do to them, but that humans do, and that makes the comparison ridiculous if not completely preposterous. Furthermore, if a monkey experienced the “crash” that followed stopping cocaine or meth, it would not know that the crash was due to the drug, only that the drug stopped the crash.  And scientists even STILL have had no luck in finding rats who hide bottles of alcohol.

As it turns out, these points, while probably valid, are only minor considerations in determining the lessons to be learned from these animal studies. A far bigger issue was that the experiments were not even accurately or honestly described by those touting them. In an outstanding new book called High Price by African-American neurospsychologist Carl Hart, a faculty member at Columbia University, the author points out that descriptions of the environments in which the animals were kept were completely missing from the descripions, but that environmental factors were key in determining animal drug use behavior.

Dr. Carl Hart

The animals in these experiments were essentially kept in solitary confinement, as they had throughout most of their lives, and had nothing else to do but push the lever!  If they were instead placed in an enriched environment with alternatie activities available and other animals with which to socialize, their “drug-seeking” behavior changed drastically.

A series of experiments that the drug warriors don't want you to know about were conducted in the 1970s, and known as Rat Park. Researchers allowed two groups of rats to self-administer morphine. They housed the first group in stark cages, one rat to a cage. They placed the second group in an “enriched environment,” which offered opportunities to burrow, play, and copulate. The isolated rats drank 20 times more morphine-laced sugar water than those enjoying the Rat Park. These results have been reproduced using both cocaine and amphetamine.

Dr. Hart points out that if you were held in solitary confinement with just one movie to watch, you might watch it over and over. That would not prove that the movie itself was addictive!  In people, when they have appealing alternatives, they often do not choose to take drugs in a self-destructive manner.

Add to the mix of misinformation about drug abuse is the unheralded but monumental effect of racism on both drug use and the prevailing ideas about it.  Legal bans on certain drugs (and not others) were legislated after widespread reporting of highly exaggerated horror stories about drug use by a despised minority:  crack cocaine by Blacks, marijuana by Blacks and Mexicans, methamphetamines by toothless "poor white trash" in Appalachia, and opium by Chinese railway workers. No one was immune from these cultural influences and myths, including the minorities themselves. The Black Caucus in the United States Congress was, originally, solidly behind the huge and unfair differences in the length of jail sentences for people convicted of using crack vs. powdered cocaine, the effects of which drugs are physiologically identical.

Some facts:  The problems in the black urban community attributed to crack were already prevalent well before crack was even introduced. The vast majority of illegal drug users do not become addicted or even psychologically dependent on the drug. Among addicts, half are employed full time. Violent convicts in jails are less likely to abuse drugs than other prisoners. The vast majority of homicides do not involved drug use, and alcohol is probably the worst offender among those that do. Dealing crack is only about as profitable as working at McDonalds for low level dealers. Few people who abuse drugs take only one drug, yet there are very few studies of the effects of combinations of drugs. Self reports from addicts who are asked about their cravings for the drugs do not predict whether or not an addict in recovery will relapse.

Adderall and Methamphetamine are nearly identical molecules with identical effects, yet drug manufacturers go out of their way to say that those children treated with stimulants for “ADHD” are no more likely to go on to abuse drugs than anyone else.  Of course, since their drugs are already being legally provided to them by physicians, they have no need to obtain them from illegal sources, which is one of the measures the experts use to measure drug abuse!

This kind of circular reasoning in the literature abounds. In a series of experiments with rhesus monkeys, Dr. Hart reports, “…researchers found that the animals’ choice to use cocaine is reduced to the size of the food reward they are offered as an alternative.” People are now using this data to claim that junk food is as addictive as cocaine, when initially cocaine was claimed to be “…especially addictive because animals preferred  it to food when hungry.” (p.93).

The book by Dr. Hart is especially eye opening because it combines discussions of this sort of pseudoscience with the author’s explorations about his own personal story. As an African-American having grown up in an inner city in which many of his friends and relatives did poorly and got into drugs and crime, he asks himself why he not only escaped this but became an Ivy League professor and an expert. The experiences of this black man in America shines a bright light on the real causes of self destructive behavior. It is not drugs.

The following graphic is not discussed in the book, but, with what we know about the havoc that a felony conviction and hanging out with convicts for months or years can create in the lives of young men, it is clear that far more harm is inflicted on drug users by the laws against drug use than by the drugs themselves.

By the way, do you know how to abuse drugs? You hold them in your hand and scream at them, “You worthless pile of sh*t!  You call that a buzz?? You suck!” You then throw them to the ground and stomp on them. 

Yeah, it’s the self that’s being abused by addicts, not the drugs. 

You owe it yourself to read this highly engrossing and informative book.

Medical Racism in America: a Giant Mind-Boggling Game Without End

An explosive book that came out last year, Black and Blue:  the Origins and Consequences of Medical Racism, should have reverberated throughout the medical community and caused we physicians to closely examine our own prejudices and how they have affected the behavior of, and our relationships with, our black patients. 

So of course there has hardly been a whimper in the medical community. I did see a rather bland, "balanced" (almost namby-pamby) review by two African-American psychiatrists in the American Journal of Psychiatry, the official journal of the American Psychiatric Association. I don’t think much will come of it.

The author of the book, University of Texas professor John Hoberman, explains many of the reasons why the medical profession does not look at itself much in this regard, most of which I will not discuss in detail here. One of the biggest reasons can be summed up in one phrase: the mutual estrangement of puzzled Whites and resentful Blacks.

John Hoberman

Just to be extremely clear, there is no doubt that the problem of racist beliefs in medicine started with white racists and not their black victims. Many of the ideas about physical and mental differences between Blacks and Whites came from the colonialist opinions of Europians that Africans were more primitive than white people – less further along than Whites on the evolutionarily scale and therefore sub-human. Thus, their bodies and minds were supposedly simpler and therefore less or more prone to certain diseases. 

As seen originally by colonialists,  the black body, being more simple, was hardier than the white one. Black skin, for example, was thought to be tougher. This conveniently provided slaveholders a justification for working their slaves in the cotton fields for long hours in the hot sun. At the same  time, being supposedly simpler mentally, slaves could be thought of as less likely to get depressed, so the myth was born of the happy black slave, grinning from ear to ear with his strong white teeth while eating watermelon, content being taken care of by his benign white masters.

While physicians in general no longer express these ideas, derivatives of them became part of medical folklore and were passed down as an oral tradition from medical student to medical student. For example, observations by white doctors of what a non-naïve individual would see as the understandable reluctance of Blacks to be put under anesthesia (and therefore under the complete control of a potentially racist doctor), was instead put together with the notion of black hardiness, and voila!  Black patients are far less likely even today of being given adequate anesthesia during surgery.

Hoberman describes in detail how racist ideas from the past have morphed into medical folklore about Blacks concerning the treatment of diseases of nearly every organ system.

Disparities in the health care of white and black patients such as the one just mentioned have been endlessly documented, so their existence should not be in the least controversial. White doctors unfamiliar with the racist history of American medicine, however, are likely to misinterpret the mistrust of their black patients as an innate tendency to be non compliant - or just plain lazy - which in turn makes the white doctor reluctant to put a whole lot of energy into convincing black patients to follow their advice.

Black patients have good reasons for their mistrust of the medical profession, including of psychiatrists.  White physicians tend to think that 1962 was a long time ago.  That was the year the American Medical Association stopped deferring to Southern state medical associations (doctors have to join the state and national associations at the same time), and allowed all African American physicians to become members.

Then again, I guess 1972, while more recent, seems like the distant past to such physicians.  That was when the Tuskeegee Syphilis Experiment came to public light -  a clinical study conducted between 1932 and 1972 by the U.S. Public Health Service to study the natural progression of the untreated disease in rural African American men who thought they were receiving free health care from the U.S. government. The men were never told they had syphilis, nor were they ever treated for it.

When I moved to Memphis, I was impressed that seemingly every African American I spoke with was aware of this history – even those who were not particularly educated.  For white doctors, not so much. Unfortunately, human beings have very long memories. The Serbs and Albanians, for example, still have strong feelings about a battle that was fought in the year 1389! 

It doesn’t help when white doctors like conservative commentator Sally Satel blame treatment disparities entirely on the resistant attitudes of black people without any reference to this history.  She also writes that racial profiling is important in medicine and justifies this idea (http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/05/magazine/i-am-a-racially-profiling-doctor.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm) with the example of the implications for choosing medications based on the real difference in the racial distribution of different versions of enzymes that metabolize certain drugs (different alleles on the genes responsible for producing the metabolizing enzymes). 

In picking on one of the extremely few areas where there actually are racial differences, she ignores the far greater quantity of ideas within medical folklore purporting differences that do not in fact exist.  Like the supposed proneness of the black brain to produce hallucinations in psychiatric disorders, for example (originally attributed by doctors to its “primitive” state).

The mistrust of racism in medicine has unfortunately led a significant proportion of Blacks to believe in some seemingly far-fetched conspiracy theories. Many Blacks believe HIV and birth control programs were invented and designed by the white establishment in order to commit genocide against minority groups. 

These conspiracy theories even reached all the way to Africa, leading to the disasterous AIDS policies of South African president Thabo Mbeki. To most Whites, these theories sound completely irrational and paranoid. Of course, historically, Planned Parenthood was indeed founded by an Anglo-American eugenicist, one of whose goals was to limit the number of children of east European immigrants to the United States, whom she considered genetically inferior beings.

There is also a rather crazymaking problem for Whites who attempt to take an interest in the whole problem of the consequences of racism on black folks. This problem was exemplified by the vicious attacks on Senator Patrick Moynihan for his 1965 report, “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action.” The report discussed the “pathology” that racism had created for many Blacks and their families.

According to the Hoberman’s book, the black intelligentsia protested the report with sentiments something akin to, “How dare some white social scientists tell black people who and what they are?”  They thought that the report pathologized and stigmatized black urban culture, and that it seemed to be an oblique endorsement of old racist biology that regarded black people as inherently diseased and beyond salvation.

This has led to a situation where even today it is considered a breach of academic etiquette for any white social scientist to theorize about Black culture. I personally was crazy enough to do some of that in my first book, since a problem seen frequently in the Black urban poor community provided the clearest example of a point about the development of family system dynamics I was trying to make. Fortunately - I guess - that section of my book was completely ignored by reviewers. Whew!

So one of the reasons that white doctors are reluctant to look at their own attitudes and the history and consequences of medical racism is a fear of open discussions about that very subject. They do not want to be considered racists. So what are they supposed to say?  That racism did not create a host of problems for African Americans, so they do not seem to pathologize them and over-generalize about them? If it did not, then what is the big deal? If they ignore the problems, they could then be accused of covertly wanting racist practices to continue. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

Maybe if we just do not bring up the subject, no one will notice. Except maybe for that troublemaker Hoberman.

So here we have the explanation  for the “mutual estrangement of puzzled Whites and resentful Blacks” phenomenon. To oversimplify a bit, Blacks will not tell doctors that they are mistrustful of white doctors (and of Black doctors as well, for reasons discussed in the Hoberman’s book) for fear of being labeled as paranoid, and white doctors are afraid of getting labeled as racist no matter how they discuss the problem!

This is a perfect example of the family system game without end on a larger, societal scale, which makes solving this problem so devilishly difficult. No one trusts anyone else who claims they want things to be different, so anything anyone does or says can be - and invariably is - reframed as just the same old thing – just another manifestation of the Black belief in the incorrigible racism of all Whites, or of the White belief in the presence of innate Black pathology and inferiority. No wonder we get stuck!

This game without end can lead to paradoxical and at times bizarre situations. Hoberman bemoans the fact that black kids are much less likely to get stimulants for “ADHD” than white kids, which he attributes partially to white doctors’ subconscious belief in the stereotype of the “happy Negro” described above. Black mothers, on the other hand, do not want their kids to take these drugs because they believe that the drugs would be used to pacify young black males and rob them of their spontaneity, thereby making social control of Black people easier.

I doubt that the motives of most White doctors are that pernicious, but the mothers are actually right about the effects of the drugs. In this case, the idea that stimulants are being used to control behavior is correct, and the black kids are better off not getting the drugs. The problem is not, as Hoberman implies, that black children are not getting a needed medication, but that too many white kids are getting medication they do not need instead of getting family therapy! Of course, black families are not getting as much of that as white families either.

The author’s solution to the problem of medical racism, although he probably does not know about the concept of the game without end nor necessarily totally appreciate the intricacies of interpersonal miscommunication, is for medical schools to teach the history of medical racism and about the presence of incorrect folkloric beliefs that many physicians still hold. This way, the doctors would hopefully not misinterpret the lack of cooperation they receive from their black patients, and take time to explain more about what they are recommending, and reassure the patients that they understand any reluctance the patient may have to follow their doctorly advice. 

Hoberman admits, however, that there are not very many people available who are qualified to even begin to teach such a course.

As to his book itself, it is sometimes annoyingly repetitive, and at time a little confusing. When he discusses discrepancies in the care of black and white patients, it is sometimes unclear if his examples are due in his opinion to medical mythology, a misunderstanding of actual differences, black mistrust of white doctors, or all of the above. Nonetheless, since there aren’t many books that take this whole subject on, I recommend it.

The History of Racism in America: The Curious Case of Al Campanis

Alexander Sebastian Campanis (1916 –1998) was an American executive in Major League Baseball. He had a brief Major League career, playing for both the Brooklyn Dodgers and the Montreal Royals, the Dodgers' minor-league team. Campanis is most famous for his position as general manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers from 1968 to 1987, from which he was fired on April 6, 1987 as a result of controversial remarks regarding Blacks in baseball during an interview on Nightline.

The odd thing about Al Campanis, a white man of Greek descent, was that nobody who knew him ever thought he had a racist bone in his body.  In fact, when Jackie Robinson famously broke the modern major league color barrier in 1947, Campanis, then a Brooklyn Dodger infielder, offered – repeatedly - to room with him. 

Jackie Robinson

Campanis taught Robinson how to turn a double play to avoid spiking by the charging, Robinson-hating base runners. Throw the ball at the base runner's forehead, Campanis advised. Do that a couple times, he said, and goodbye, human javelins.

Being the first Black player in major league baseball, Robinson faced a daunting challenge. He was subjected to  a horrible barrage of the most vitriolic, vile, and vicious racist bile imaginable from fans and other players alike, but had to keep his cool so he would not get his whole race labeled as incapable of playing in the big leagues. 

According to Robert Kuwada, a sportwriter for the Orange County Register in Southern California, while in the minor leagues, “Campanis once threw down his glove during a game and challenged an opponent who was bullying Robinson. He was also known to invite Robinson to eat with him while many other whites chose to keep their distance."

As a player development executive with the Dodgers, Campanis signed, among others, African-American stars Roberto Clemente, Willie Davis and Tommy Davis.

On the fortieth anniversary of Jackie Robinson’s Major League Baseball debut, Campanis was invited by the ABC TV newsmagazine show Nightline to comment, and began making what sounded like the most racist comments imaginable, basically seeming to say that he did not think Blacks had the mental capacity or administrative skills necessary to serve in baseball as managers or general managers. He compared this to Blacks not being good swimmers because they “don’t have the buoyancy.”

Ted Koppel, the interviewer, could not believe what he was hearing. He kept giving Campanis the chance to clarify what he was saying, but Campanis seemed to keep digging himself into a deeper and deeper hole.

Here’s most of the interview (watch it at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O4XUbENGaiY).

KOPPEL: Mr. Campanis, it's a legitimate question. You're an old friend of Jackie Robinson's, but it's a tough question for you. You're still in baseball. Why is it that there are no black managers, no black general managers, no black owners?

CAMPANIS: Well, Mr. Koppel, there have been some black managers, but I really can't answer that question directly. The only thing I can say is that you have to pay your dues when you become a manager. Generally, you have to go to minor leagues. There's not very much pay involved, and some of the better known black players have been able to get into other fields and make a pretty good living in that way.

KOPPEL: Yeah, but you know in your heart of hearts -- and we're going to take a break for a commercial -- you know that that's a lot of baloney. I mean, there are a lot of black players, there are a lot of great black baseball men who would dearly love to be in managerial positions, and I guess what I'm really asking you is to, you know, peel it away a little bit. Just tell me, why you think it is. Is there still that much prejudice in baseball today?

CAMPANIS: No, I don't believe it's prejudice. I truly believe that they may not have some of the necessities to be, let's say, a field manager, or perhaps a general manager.

KOPPEL: Do you really believe that?

CAMPANIS: Well, I don't say that all of them, but they certainly are short. How many quarterbacks do you have? How many pitchers do you have that are black?

KOPPEL: Yeah, but I mean, I gotta tell you, that sounds like the same kind of garbage we were hearing 40 years ago about players, when they were saying, ''Aah, not really -- not really cut out --" Remember the days, you know, hit a black football player in the knees, and you know, no --" That really sounds like garbage, if -- if you'll forgive me for saying so."

CAMPANIS: No, it's not -- it's not garbage, Mr. Koppel, because I played on a college team, and the center fielder was black, and the backfield at NYU, with a fullback who was black, never knew the difference, whether he was black or white, we were teammates. So, it just might just be -- why are black men, or black people, not good swimmers? Because they don't have the buoyancy.

KOPPEL: Oh, I don't -- I don't -- it may just be that they don't have access to all the country clubs and the pools. But I'll tell you what, let's take a break, and we'll continue our discussion in a moment.

Later:

CAMPANIS: Well, I don't have the crystal ball, Mr. Koppel, but I can only tell you that I think we're progressing very well in the game of baseball. We have not stopped the black man from becoming an executive. They also have to have the desire, just as Jackie Robinson had the desire to become an outstanding ballplayer.

Still later

KOPPEL: Just as a matter of curiosity, Mr. Campanis, what is the percentage now of black ballplayers, for example, in your franchise?

CAMPANIS: I would say, I think Roger mentioned the fact that about a third of the players are black. That might be a pretty good number, and deservedly so, because they are outstanding athletes. They are gifted with great musculature and various other things, they're fleet of foot, and this is why there are a lot of black major league ballplayers. Now, as far as having the background to become club presidents, or presidents of a bank, I don't know. But I do know when I look at a black ballplayer, I am looking at him physically and whether he has the mental approach to play in the big leagues.

Wow. Naturally a national uproar ensued, and Campanis was of course fired from his job almost immediately after the interview. Everyone was talking about how horrible a racist the man was.  Except for everyone who knew him. They just could not believe the man could have possibly meant was he was saying. It seemed so totally out of character.

So what happened here? I surely could not blame anyone, Black folks especially, for assuming the worst about Mr. Campanis. I certainly did at the time of the interview. That is, until I read a somewhat cryptic interview on the subject by one of the few African-Americans in baseball who actually was a manager – Frank (not Jackie, no relation) Robinson.

Frank Robinson (no relation)

Here is the interview with Frank Robinson, from the April 27, 1987 issue  of People Magazine:

 

Q: Why haven't blacks been able to break the management color barrier?

A: Because we haven't been in the position either to do the hiring or to say, "Hire me or else." Blacks haven't put pressure on baseball. So baseball says, "If we don't have to give you a job, we won't." Part of this is our fault. You talk to some black players and they say, "I'm a happy man. I'm making a good living. Why should I stick my neck out?" You talk to people outside the game, and they say, "I don't want to be bothered."

Q: Why don't more black players speak out?

A: Speaking up could be damaging. Someone will get buried. The ownership might think, "He's mouthing off. Who needs him?" I won't say that today they could blackball a great player. But they could make it tough for him. At the end of his career, he might not get to play those extra years if they feel he's a troublemaker.

While Robinson did not exactly defend Campanis, he did not exactly attack him either. But what was that bit about Blacks not “sticking our necks out?” What does that mean exactly, and what does it have to do with Campanis? Well of course I can only speculate, but what I hear in the interview is an implication that African Americans may not have demonstrated to White baseball people the ambition, aptitude or inclination to be higher-ups in the organization.

Why? Because just a couple of decades earlier, Black Americans who “stuck their necks out” by showing intelligence, ambition, or even moxie were labeled as “Uppity N….’s” and were in serious danger of they or their families being attacked or even lynched. If you had these qualities, it was very wise to hide them from any Whites in the area. You just could not trust them, even if they seemed to be your friends.

This certainly is not an excuse for his being so tone deaf, but at least it makes his behavior understandable.

So call me naïve if you will, or hate me if you think I am someone who appears to defend a racist, but maybe, just maybe: Campanis did not think Blacks had the capacities he spoke of because he never saw any black players demonstrate them, just as Frank Robinson was alluding to. Therefore, he had nothing with which to compare the stereotypes about Blacks to which he had undoubtedly been exposed his whole life.

Maybe , just maybe, Campanis appeared to be more of a racist than he was because he was stuck in a game without end with his Black friends.