Hundreds Call Paper 'Unscholarly' and 'Racially Violent' - Medscape

[erronis]

https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/934722

Hundreds of academics, anti-poverty advocates and others have signed petitions demanding the journal Society retract a new commentary which argues, in essence, that poor Black and Hispanic people in the United States are poor because they haven't figured out how to be more white.

One petition, to the editor of the journal, Jonathan Imber, had garnered more than 550 signatories by the time of this writing. Another, to the author of the paper, the editorial board of the journal, and the CEO of Springer Nature, which publishes the journal, was at 400 and counting.

The essay, by Lawrence Mead, a public policy researcher at New York University, argues that racism and a lack of good jobs do not explain why America, the world's richest country, continues to have a problem with poverty. "More plausible," Mead states, are differences in "culture":

Link to petition:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nwWTW2sNrkn9mwxtcUBcGVZL2x6hXv7FOX3P_3VgTLA/edit

[Loki Liesmith]

1. Lol you want people to sign a petition to withdraw a paper? No.

That should not be how science is conducted.

[Beausoleil]

2. Sounds like it was not a research paper

But an opinion piece, a "commentary".

That was one of the complaints: he made extraordinary claims with no empirical evidence.

[erronis]

4. Ah, yes. Let's just let the journals self-police. No external opinion tolerated.

In this world of Elsevier and pay-to-play journals, there is lots of room for other interested and informed parties.

The new pre-print world is also threatening the pay-walled model.

[spooky3]

3. Was B. Cosby, Ed.D., a coauthor?

/sarcasm