Less than two weeks after publication, an essay on poverty and race which critics decried as “unscholarly” and “overtly racist” has been retracted.
The essay, by Lawrence Mead, of New York University, appeared in the journal Society on July 21. It immediately drew the ire of hundreds of academics and advocates who, in a pair of petitions, demanded among other things that the journal retract the paper.
Earlier this week, Springer Nature, which publishes Society, flagged Mead’s essay with an editor’s note stating that it was investigating the matter. Now the publisher has decided to remove the article. The retraction notice reads:
The Publisher and Editor-in-Chief have retracted this article [1]. Following publication, serious concerns were raised. Subsequent review of the publication process and the article by the Editor-in-Chief concluded that the article was published without proper editorial oversight. The Editor-in-Chief deeply regrets publishing the article and offers his apologies. The author does not agree to this retraction.
According to a statement from Springer Nature:
We are deeply sorry that this commentary was published in one of our journals and for the harm and distress this has caused. Owing to a lack of editorial oversight, on both content and process grounds, this article should not have been published. Following an expedited investigation, the article has now been retracted and removed from the journal’s website with the full support of the Editor-in-Chief. We have a responsibility to publish scholarly literature that is based on, and supported by, facts and evidence. In this instance we fell far short of the standards we set ourselves as a publisher, resulting in an article being published which failed to meet a high standard of research. We are doing everything we can to make sure this does not happen again.
Springer Nature condemns racism and discrimination in all its forms. We unequivocally condemn the content of this article which is in stark contrast to our values as a company.
Mead did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
While some Retraction Watch commenters have claimed the criticism was due to political correctness, others have called the essay shoddy and unscientific.
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Wow that was fast.
Maybe next time the data thugs discover a paper with falsified images that is leading to needless risks for clinical trial participants, they should call it racist instead of fraudulent.
I read the first couple paragraphs of this paper and had to stop. I am utterly shocked that anyone ever published this piece of racist garbage. This has nothing to do with science. It sounds more like the Klan.
Haven’t read the paper. But when scientists contact editors and institutions having discovered serious errors or manipulated data in papers, the most common response is silence. If they make any progress, retraction takes years. And scientists with multiple retractions due to falsified data remain employed, polluting the literature and burning public money.
I only wish that actual fraud would be dealt with as swiftly.
Your point being? Stop whining. This example was plain clear. Other examples where you gotta check statistics and more thorough issues, needs time. This was plain clear just by reading it.
I am completely persuaded and now 100% on your side.
The point being that some publishers are now more concerned with quickly retracting papers that don’t meet
the newly established racial purity standards than retracting papers by authors that contain obviously fabricated or fraudulent data that ends up polluting the scientific record for years until a publisher might just happen to get around dealing with those papers.
“plain clear”?
It’s plainly clear that you disagree with the author’s thesis, but it’s not plainly clear that you actually read it before pronouncing on it, or are in any way capable of formulating a criticism of it deeper than that you don’t like it.
“While some Retraction Watch commenters have claimed the criticism was due to political correctness, others have called the essay shoddy and unscientific.”
Is this trying to “promote conversation”? I mean in all honesty, who give a fuck about what “Retraction Watch commentators”, a collection of random people on the internet, think about the merits of an academic paper? Some quotations about the lack of merit from the academics in question would actually be informative
Many RW commenters are academics. This is a fairly niche site and audience. Often, experts in the field are relaying knowledge in the comments.
Not so much. Most of the comments I see on here are from anti-vaxxers or similar nutty groups.
Seriously ? I should read more the comments, let’s see anti-science people here !
Tom, it depends on the individual RW post. For example, for the recent J. Mikovits RW posts, the antivaxxers and others whose comments indicated a basic ignorance of how science works, came out of the woodwork in her defense. Other RW posts on subjects not directly connected with ‘hot-button’ political/cultural issues or those that seem of little interest to the general public often result in thoughtful, informed comments often coming from self-identified scientists and academics.
That “others have called the essay shoddy and unscientific” when “some Retraction Watch commenters have claimed the criticism was [instead] due to political correctness” is the epitome of “uninformative”. Which is it?
All Retraction Watch commentators are known for their great intelligence, beauty, and strength.
Some of us said BOTH that the paper was shoddy and unscientific, and that the criticism was due to political correctness. It was no more shoddy that most “scholarly” writings on race. If this paper deserved retraction, so does the entire swath of grievance studies.
Bro isn’t a scientist, the paper in question wasn’t a scientific paper, and the journal isn’t a science journal.
A journal retracting an asinine racist opinion piece has nothing to do with science (other than the fact that Springer also owns scientific journals).
From Wikipedia: “Society is a journal that publishes discussions and research findings in the social sciences and public policy. […] Society is abstracted and indexed in the Social Sciences Citation Index. According to the Journal Citation Reports, the journal has a 2017 impact factor of 0.529”
Lawrence Mead (whom I assume it is you refer to as ‘bro’?) has published a number of cited papers.
If you are just making the point that social sciences aren’t “real” science, maybe you could say it directly, instead of confusing the issue with what looks like falsehoods?
You are correct that the article in question isn’t a research article. I am not sure it is all that relevant, unless you think research articles making the same arguments should be protected from retraction in this manner.
What is racism?
a) ACTION based upon negative bias and prejudice of another ethnicity?
b) THOUGHTS based upon negative bias and prejudice of another ethnicity?
I posit that unless we believe we can read others minds and create dystopian thought police, racism should be restricted to actions, deeds, not thoughts.
Who wishes to reply to the above statement?
Writing a paper is an action.
Yes, writing & submitting for publication a scholarly paper are actions. So the post to which you’ve replied challenges you on another ground—…” based upon negative bias and prejudice of another ethnicity”— or, specifically, the mind-reading aspect, which your comment ignores.
How do you prefer your herd-thinking?: “rare”, “medium”, or “well-done”?
Reading an article is kind of like mind-reading. The author put his thoughts on paper. You don’t need any mystical powers in this case. You only have to be literate.
What specific excerpts from the paper were racist?
Nothing in the paper was really racist. It just didn’t toe the line for the whole “blacks as eternal victims” narrative that the liberals have foisted on society as the excuse for minorities not succeeding in society. And for that one unforgivable sin the author becomes an unperson to be ridiculed and vilified and the paper memory holed so as to not offend the sensitive feelings of liberals and minorities.
(And let’s see if this comment actually gets posted. I have my doubts but we’ll see what happens.)
Obviously, it didn’t. And I’m not replying to it.
The racism of implying that blacks and other minorities do not succeed because of their own culture, not because of other factors, like entrenched, systemic racism. That is racist. Blaming the black for being black.
Being black has never caused anyone to be poor, and the hard working blue-collar black men I’ve known my whole working life would be insulted by that insinuation. If you didn’t like being poor you would just get a job and work. Are we truly at a point where “systemic racism” is the only acceptable explanation for a black person being poor?
Not having a job, not getting married, not graduating high school, having children out of wedlock, not seeking education or vocational training, commiting crimes – we know that these are markers for poverty, and they are markers for poverty no matter what race. Either stop explaining all of black people’s problems with esoteric conspiracy theories about racism, or actually DO SOMETHING about this supposed conspiracy instead of just see it everywhere.
You know what black leaders in churches and business want from young black people most of all? Personal responsibility. Listen to those leaders, it sounds like they may know a bit more about being black than you do.
You can’t blame everything on someone else.
Are you serious? Criticising a culture isn’t racist unless, or to the extent, you assert that the culture is downstream from racial characteristics. Does Mead do this? (And if he did, can you demonstrate that he wrong? The appropriate response to a thesis is to answer it, not burn it.)
Baloney. If you can prove otherwise then write a paper and provide the proof. Otherwise, calling a paper “racist” simply because it doesn’t toe the “blacks as the eternal victims” narrative is pointless. Worse than pointless really. And it does a disservice to everyone to retract such paper for that reason. But I guess racial purity trumps everything else. Disgusting.
When you spend 75% of your time performing the same behavior over and over, it becomes a habit which is easy to recognize.
Whites spent over 75% of this country’s history implementing, enforcing and benefiting from anti-Black racist laws and policies which oppressed Black Americans socially, educationally, financially and psychologically for generations. Those laws only ended 50 years ago. The effects have not.
I think it’s helpful to separate out Lawrence Mead’s scholarly agenda from the quality of his argumentation in this instance. Mead has been at NYU since 1979 and has published many peer-reviewed studies that are consistent in their political outlook. As much as I personally disagree with Mead about social welfare, I don’t think that’s really the issue here. Other scholars have found that his work had intellectual merit and NYU liked him enough to grant him tenure and to keep him around for 40 years.
I would say that what happened in this instance was that Mead got sloppy with argumentation. He equated white people with Western culture and indvidualism, and other races with “non-western” and “communal” culture. I chalenge you to find any cultural anthropologist, sociologist, or cultural geographer–even ones who reject critical race theory–who think that Professor Mead’s use of these terms
are accurate. A more tightly-argued paper with assertions grounded in evidence would still have been controverisal, but I don’t think would have led to retraction. It was the lack of reasoned evidence that was the final straw here.
So you say. Where’s the reasoned response?
Individualism and western culture being white are primary (and racist) tenets of critical race theory.
Bingo. The question, now, is instead what kind of crap this “journal publishes” that it DOESN’T choose to “retract”. All we have here is a libelous claim that the paper is “raci[st]” and “discriminat[ory]”, with no specific criticism, just name-calling. The piece may or may not be crap, but we can be pretty sure now that this “journal” is crap.
The correct way to argue against a published paper is to write a reply, explaining what is wrong with it, and giving your references.