Posted: Fri 04 Nov 2005 21:15 Post subject: Academic Racists Make Mainstream Inroads
Someone once said that it was wrong of me to say that Steve Sailer is a racist. I remember being mystified, gobsmacked, and thuderstruck by such a comment. Sailer is more than just a "bad man," he's a white supremacist, who hides his villiany behind a smile and a psuedo-scientific gleem. When people make use of his work to further their cause, they do so with the full knowledge of his bias and intensions; thus, these people become culpable in his invidious pursuit.
Academic Racists Make Mainstream Inroads
From National Review to the New York Times
By Steve Rendall
Resurgences of biological determinism correlate with periods of political retrenchment and destruction of social generosity.
—Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man.
''If the black man wins,'' warned a New York Times editorial on the eve of the historic 1910 fight between Jack Johnson and ''Great White Hope'' Jim Jeffries, ''thousands and thousands of his ignorant brothers will misinterpret his victory as justifying claims to much more than mere physical equality with their white neighbors'' (New York Times, 7/3/1910—as cited on PBS’s Unforgivable Blackness, 1/17/05). In an earlier editorial (11/1/1909), the editors worried over the fight while revealing what passed for discretion at the Times of nearly a hundred years ago: ''[We] will wait in open anxiety at the news that he has licked the—well, since it must be in print, let us say the Negro, even though it is not the first word that comes to the tongue’s tip.''
Of course, great strides have been made by American media and society since that editorial, and many others like it, were published. But progress seems to come in fits and starts. It doesn’t help that journalists often fail to recognize and challenge racism, even when—or perhaps especially when—it involves their own institutions.
Racism, in fact, may be gaining a firmer foothold in American media institutions as its promoters adopt more stealthy and sophisticated ways of presenting it. Consider two recent episodes in which David Brooks and John Tierney, both conservative New York Times writers, touted the work of Steve Sailer, a well-known promoter of racist and anti-immigrant theories.
''Ghetto hellions''
Following the November elections, David Brooks used his column (12/7/04) to celebrate something he called the ''natalist'' movement. Natalists, said Brooks, defy Western trends toward declining birth rates by having lots of children and leaving behind the ''disorder, vulgarity and danger'' of cities to move to ''clean, orderly'' suburban and exurban settings where they can ''protect their children from bad influences.'' According to Brooks, natalists are more churchgoing and conservative than their less wholesome neighbors in more liberal urban areas, and are an increasingly important political force.
Though the movement sounds a bit like the post–World War II demographic trend dubbed ''white flight,'' Brooks makes no reference to ethnicity until halfway through the column, when he cites Sailer on white fertility:
As Steve Sailer pointed out in the American Conservative, George Bush carried the 19 states with the highest white fertility rates, and 25 of the top 26. John Kerry won the 16 states with the lowest rates.
Brooks is well-known for lightly documented demographic analysis (Philadelphia, 4/04), but he never explains why he believes white fertility is more important than that of other groups.
Did Brooks understand his source’s views? A look at the American Conservative article (12/20/04) that Brooks presumably read, since he cited it, ought to have raised the suspicions of an engaged columnist. In it, Sailer describes the undesirable urban traits he says white people are trying to escape: ''illegal immigrants and other poor minorities,'' ''ghetto hellions'' and ''public schools.'' Are these the things Brooks meant when he alluded to ''disorder, vulgarity and danger'' and ''bad influences'' in his Times column?
As American Prospect Online found (12/7/04), a little research reveals Sailer as a leading promoter of racist pseudoscience. As a principal columnist on the white nationalist website VDare.com, named for Virginia Dare, the first English child born in the ''New World,'' Sailer (e.g., 2/23/03; 12/12/01) extols the work of academic racists who say Africans as a group are innately less intelligent than whites or Asians. He is also a staunch defender of the Pioneer Fund, a primary funder for such racist research (as well as of VDare.com).
On the rare occasion Sailer gives race a rest, it’s usually to make some other mock-Darwinian argument, as when he ruled out the possibility of a gay gene, suggesting instead that homosexuality is a disease, possibly caused by a germ (VDare.com, 8/17/03): ''An infectious disease itself could cause homosexuality. It’s probably not a venereal germ, but maybe an intestinal or respiratory germ.''
A New York Daily News column (12/13/04) rebuked Brooks for plugging Sailer, suggesting that the Times columnist ''might want to do a background check on the next 'expert' he quotes,'' pointing out that “Sailer also writes for VDare.com, which the KKK-fighting Southern Poverty Law Center has labeled a 'hate group.''' According to the News, the Times failed to respond to inquiries about the matter. No other mainstream outlets seem to have commented on the affair.
Conservative “bona fides”
In addition to writing for VDare.com and American Conservative, Sailer has contributed to the National Review and National Review Online. He also maintains a private email discussion group called the ''Human Biodiversity Group'' that includes many leading white supremacist intellectuals and ''scientific'' racists.
Sailer’s job as a national correspondent for United Press International (UPI) may seem surprising to those unaware the old mainstream wire service has drifted far rightward since its purchase by Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church in 2000.
A lucid writer with an accessible style, Sailer is a smooth propagandist operating in a community of increasingly sophisticated nativists and racists. Neither a researcher nor a scientist, Sailer’s value to the movement is as a popularizer of its ideas and theories.
Weeks before the Brooks column, Times reporter John Tierney (10/24/04) quoted Sailer, describing him as ''a conservative columnist at the Web magazine VDare.com and a veteran student of presidential IQs.'' Tierney cited Sailer’s claim that George W. Bush’s IQ was likely greater than John Kerry’s, information Sailer extrapolated from the results of different tests the two had taken—tests that were not intended to measure IQ.
Were Brooks and Tierney aware of Sailer’s racist work? Were they sucked in by Sailer’s sophistication, his academic sounding arguments? Or was it his bona fides with ''mainstream'' conservative outfits like the National Review and American Conservative?
''Civilized standards''
American Conservative was co-founded by Pat Buchanan, Peter ''Taki'' Theodoracopulos and Scott McConnell, who serves as editor. When McConnell was a New York Post columnist in the mid-'90s he suggested a brand of apartheid might be the solution to U.S. race problems (10/11/95):
I do believe that American race relations would not be the worse for acknowledging that blacks and whites have between them the power to develop alternatives to living together. Indeed, it seems to me possible that the very act of considering seriously such alternatives would, in and of itself, bring a rapid halt to some of the more flamboyant rhetorical and behavioral excesses now flourishing in the black community.
McConnell would later be named the Post’s editorial page editor, before being fired in 1997 for writing a series of anti–Puerto Rican columns—but only because they reportedly threatened Post owner Rupert Murdoch’s business prospects (New York Daily News, 9/17/97). Sailer is just one of the racist writers McConnell has published in American Conservative (see, e.g., Robert Stacy McCain, 5/19/03; Sam Francis, 6/7/04).
The National Review’s support for racism traces back to its founding in the mid-'50s. A 1957 editorial titled ''Why the South Must Prevail'' (8/24/57) asked ''whether the white community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas where it does not predominate numerically?'' Citing the ''cultural superiority of white over Negro'' and ''civilized standards'' National Review editors answered, ''Yes—the white community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race.''
Similarly, the magazine supported apartheid South Africa’s white minority rule (4/23/60): ''The whites are entitled, we believe, to preeminence in South Africa.'' When Nelson Mandela and other ANC leaders were sentenced to life in prison in South Africa, National Review editors mocked critics of the verdicts (6/30/64): ''The South African courts have sentenced a batch of admitted terrorists to life in the penitentiary, and you would think the court had just finished barbecuing St. Joan, to hear the howls from the liberal press.''
Over the years many leading eugenicists and ''scientific'' racists have been warmly received by National Review. In a positive review of Race, Evolution, and Behavior, a 1994 book by Philippe Rushton, the current Pioneer Fund president, reviewer Mark Snyderman eagerly recounted the book’s ''ambitious'' and ''fearless'' thesis (9/12/94): ''Orientals are more intelligent, have larger brains for their body size, have smaller genitalia, have less sex drive, are less fecund, work harder and are more readily socialized than Caucasians; and Caucasians on average bear the same relationship to blacks.'' (To be fair, this kooky book also got a thumbs-up from New York Times science writer Malcolm Browne—10/16/94. See Extra! Update, 12/94).
National Review tapped Rushton to write a review of a new edition of The Mismeasure of Man, Stephen Jay Gould’s critique of eugenics—resulting in a predictable pan (9/15/97). And when Gould died in 2002, the magazine called on Steve Sailer (5/22/02) to do some grave-spitting.
''War against the white race''
Until his death on February 15, the award-winning writer Sam Francis was another member of this tightly knit circle of sophisticated racists. Francis had come far since his 1995 firing by the Unification Church–owned Washington Times for a speech he gave at the white supremacist American Renaissance conference.* Francis (Washington Post, 9/24/95) had told the gathering that a ''war against the white race'' was underway, and insisted that fellow whites
reassert our identity and our solidarity, and we must do so in explicitly racial terms through the articulation of a racial consciousness as whites . . . . The civilization that we as whites created in Europe and America could not have developed apart from the genetic endowments of the creating people, nor is there any reason to believe that the civilization can be successfully transmitted to a different people.
Francis was also a contributor to VDare.com, and since 1999 he had been the editor of the Citizens Informer, the publication of the Council of Conservative Citizens, the racist offspring of the old white citizens' councils of the Jim Crow era.
Francis also wrote a twice-weekly column for the mainstream Creators Syndicate. According to Creators, the column was distributed to 22 of its newspaper clients. The column also ran on right-wing and racist websites such as Townhall.com and Amren.com.
In one recent column (11/26/04), Francis attacked an ABC Monday Night Football promo because it featured a sexually suggestive scene between a black football player and a white TV actress. Francis wrote that the ad was meant to ''hurl a pie in the face of morals and good taste, but also of white racial and cultural identity,'' concluding:
Breaking down the sexual barriers between the races is a major weapon of cultural destruction because it means the dissolution of the cultural boundaries that define breeding and the family, and, ultimately, the transmission and survival of the culture itself.
When the media watch group Media Matters for America (12/7/04) wrote to Creators decrying the ''clear bigotry'' of the column, and asking why the syndicate would circulate it, Creators editor Anthony Zurcher defended publishing the column: ''Did I disagree with the column? Yes. Did I feel it was so reprehensible that it shouldn’t have been sent out? No.'' With that judgment, Creators asserted that white supremacism was just another point of view in the marketplace of ideas.
Francis' death occasioned fond remembrances across the white racist spectrum, from groups he contributed to like VDare.com and American Renaissance, to neo-Nazi websites like Stormfront.org (''A Great Man Has Fallen''--2/16/05) and NationalVanguard.org (''Pro-White Columnist Will Be Missed by Many''--2/16/05). David Duke’s website (2/16/05) had a telling farewell to what the one-time Klan leader called a ''true brother in the Cause'':
When I entered some presidential primaries, he invited me to the editorial board of the Washington Times, where I was asked to explain and expound on my presidential platform. Sam was right there in the lion’s pit—sometimes backing me up from some scurrilous attacks before I had a chance to respond.
“Race-relations expert”
On Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Jared Taylor was talking about King on half a dozen radio shows in cities spanning from Orlando, Florida to Columbus, Ohio. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette columnist Dennis Roddy (1/23/05), who carefully tracked Taylor’s media appearances that day, summed up Taylor’s depiction of King as ''a philanderer, a plagiarist and a drinker who left a legacy of division and resentment, and was unworthy of a national holiday.'' According to Roddy, in one appearance, on Pittsburgh’s KDKA radio station, Taylor was introduced repeatedly as a ''race-relations expert'' by conservative host Fred Honsberger.
Roddy described calling Honsberger to ask him about Taylor:
What Taylor did not say, and what Honsberger didn’t seem to know until I picked up the phone and called in myself, was that Jared Taylor believes black people are genetically predisposed to lower IQs than whites, are sexually promiscuous because of hyperactive sex drives. Race-relations expert Jared Taylor keeps company with a collection of racists, racial ''separatists'' and far-right extremists.
In fact, Jared Taylor is one of the country’s leading white supremacists. Yale-educated with a soft-spoken manner, Taylor may not fit the stereotype of an active racist, but he has links to Ku Klux Klan and Council of Conservative Citizen leaders. And as the president of the Virginia-based New Century Foundation, he publishes the racist magazine American Renaissance and organizes conferences featuring speakers such as Philippe Rushton and Sam Francis. (It was at one of these conferences that Francis gave his job-ending speech.) The Southern Poverty Law Center’s Mark Potok (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 1/23/05) describes Taylor as “the cultivated, cosmopolitan face of white supremacy. He is the guy who is providing the intellectual heft, in effect, to modern-day Klansmen.”
The past isn’t even past
Although sophisticated racists are thriving in conservative outlets and are gaining a foothold in centrist, mainstream outlets, the subject of racism is not one to which most newsrooms devote a great deal of resources.
When Ken Burns' PBS documentary Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson (1/17/05) highlighted the poisonous racism that Johnson's career had inspired on the part of editorialists a century ago, the Los Angeles Times published a belated editorial mea culpa (1/14/05) titled ''Shame on Us.'' In it, the editors republished some of the paper’s ugliest commentary of the time, e.g., an editorial (4/6/1910) headlined ''A Word to the Black Man'' that cautioned, ''Do not point your nose too high.''
In concluding, the modern-day L.A. Times editors joined a call for a posthumous pardon for Johnson, who’d been the victim of a phony federal morals conviction, and stated: ''Count the members of this editorial board among those who believe that the best way to surmount the past is to confront it.''
That’s good advice. Would it be too much to ask that they confront the present too?
* Francis’ firing shouldn’t give people the wrong idea about the Washington Times. As the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Report (8/14/03) noted, the Times continues to employ assistant managing editor Robert Stacy McCain; McCain, a member of the white-supremacist League of the South, is noted for posting Internet comments like, “The media now force interracial images into the public mind and a number of perfectly rational people react to these images with an altogether natural revulsion” (New York Press, 12/11/02). Managing editor Francis Booth Coombs, meanwhile, is married to Marian Kester Coombs, a contributor to racist publications (as well as to the Times) who has urged white men to marry “racially conscious” white women (Intelligence Report, 2/9/05). [back]
More On The New Orleans Nightmare: Why We Have To Talk About Racial Reality Even If John Podhoretz Says We Can’t
By Steve Sailer
On this fourth anniversary of 9/11, I'm reminded that VDARE.com's immediate response to the terrorist attacks was to evoke Rudyard Kipling's 1919 poem with the funny-sounding name The Gods of the Copybook Headings. ("Copybook headings" are the stern ancient maxims that English schoolboys once had to write at the top of their notebook pages.)
Our message: hard social truths can be ignored or derided—but not permanently avoided:
We were living in trees when they met us. They showed us each in turn
That Water would certainly wet us, as Fire would certainly burn:
But we found them lacking in Uplift, Vision and Breadth of Mind,
So we left them to teach the Gorillas while we followed the March of Mankind...
And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return
Now, in the wake of the shameful anarchy in New Orleans, our elites are again confronted with the need to relearn some unfashionable, politically incorrect lessons.
But whether they will remains much in doubt.
I don't like watching my fellow American citizens of any color suffer the horrors of anarchy. So my September 3rd VDARE.com essay "Racial Reality and the New Orleans Nightmare" expressed anger that all levels of government had made the happy-clappy multi-culti assumption that, in case of hurricane, the politicians, police, and people of New Orleans would all pitch in together like Good Samaritans to help each other out.
In many places, survivors will do that. But the demographics and culture of New Orleans were always prohibitive.
My article elicited a firestorm of rage from the pundits. As when television news broadcasts hours of blacks behaving badly, enormous pressure builds up amongst the commentariat to denounce furiously the first person who is so crass as to mention what everybody can see with their lying eyes. Almost all these condemnations of me have been of the now-traditional point-and-sputter ilk. The critic can't think of any facts or logic to disprove my argument. So he merely gesticulates about what an awful person I must be to say such a horrible thing.
For example, the thuggish John Podhoretz at National Review's Corner demonized my article for purportedly containing the "the most disgusting sentence [sic] yet written about Katrina."
My disgusting “sentence” (paragraph, in fact) turned out to be merely:
All this is now common parlance, more or less. What you won’t hear, except from me, is that "Let the good times roll" is an especially risky message for African-Americans. The plain fact is that they tend to possess poorer native judgment than members of better-educated groups. Thus they need stricter moral guidance from society.
Yet, my essay has been one of the most emailed-out in VDARE.com history, and for precisely the same reason the media folks hated it: because it explained honestly the reasons behind the ugliness we could all see.
Our mainstream media is so intellectually hamstrung by self-censorship, so lacking in a conceptual vocabulary for describing racial realities, that after watching blacks tormenting blacks night after night in New Orleans, shooting at the helicopters and boats trying to rescue their fellow African-Americans, all the pundits could do was scream "white racism!"
And prescribe massive new spending on urban poverty—despite all the evidence that the last War of Poverty made the New Orleans Nightmare worse by undermining African-Americans' already tenuous family structure.
The revelations of the succeeding eight days have vindicated my original analysis.
While partisan talking heads continue to blame whichever level of government is controlled by the opposition, my criticism of each, along with the culture and residents of New Orleans, has stood up well:
Bush's appointee to run the Federal Emergency Management Agency, political hack Mike Brown, turns out to have been a failed horse show bureaucrat.
Louisiana's state government, while perhaps somewhat less at fault than the federal and city governments, once again lived down to its notorious Latin political heritage of incompetence and demagoguery.
And the performance of the black-run New Orleans government, especially its police force (which was gutted to make room for unqualified blacks after the African-American takeover of city politics), was disgraceful.
Each of these failures of government was unsurprising, given their track records.
Even more controversially, I pointed out that officials should have expected that the population that failed to evacuate would be numerous, improvident, poor in judgment, laced with criminals, and highly dangerous to each other.
Even when New Orleans's police force is not otherwise occupied with looting and fleeing, the city's overall murder rate is ten times the national average. Among that fifth of the population who did not evacuate, the homicide rate would have been something like 30 times the national average.
Hundreds of school buses were left lined up in a flooded parking lot because residents were supposed to offer rides to their neighbors without cars. But let's think through a common situation. Imagine you are a single mother on a poor street who owns a car. After you've loaded up your family to evacuate, to which car-less neighbor are you going to offer your one empty seat: the churchgoer on your left or the gang-banger on your right?
But if you and all the other decent people flee your street, who is going to stop the left-behind criminals from looting your hard-earned possessions?
So you decide to stay behind—only to be forced to flee to the Superdome or the Convention Center when the levees break.
Everybody should have assumed that when the hammer finally came down, the New Orleans Police Department would fold and underclass thugs would run amok, making it unsafe for unarmed rescue workers to do their jobs. Rescue can't proceed effectively when workers fear for their lives from violence. How enthusiastic would you be about going out in a small boat to haul survivors off their rooftops if you needed to wear a heavy bulletproof vest that would drag you right down to the bottom if you fell in?
The first priority of government in a Hobbesian place like the impoverished 'hoods of New Orleans must be to provide order. The government should have planned to helicopter combat troops in and do what it takes to restore order: tear gas, rubber bullets, even live ammo if necessary.
But nobody is supposed to mention the barbarism likely to break out, so nobody in government initially acted as if they had a serious problem on their hands.
For instance, according to the New York Times, the hapless FEMA boss Mike Brown admitted, "that the lawlessness surprised him."
Why didn't anyone discuss realistically how the people who were going to be left behind by the city's feckless evacuation effort would behave? Because they were overwhelmingly black. And, as the Two Minutes Hate conducted over my essay shows, you can't talk about that if you want to keep your job.
In fact, it's much safer for your career if you train yourself never to think about it at all.
While a sizable majority of the 365,000 African-Americans in New Orleans had the assets, prudence, and/or friends or family to get themselves out of town before the hurricane, something like 100,000 were left behind.
And, as we all saw on TV for several horrible days, the survivors were not, on average, the most civic-minded.
Yet they were still human beings and American citizens. They shouldn't have to survive in chaos.
Government, at bottom, is supposed to maintain a monopoly on violence. And that's exactly what was lost.
Just as Donald Rumsfeld catastrophically refused to stop the looting that broke out in the wake of our conquest of Baghdad in 2003, government agencies delayed disastrously in doing what it took to put down the chaos in New Orleans.
(I'm going to focus now upon IQ. But it's not the only racial difference. For over a decade, VDARE.com contributor Professor J.P. Rushton has been documenting that for a host of measures, not just IQ but also behavioral, Northeast Asians and West Africans tend on average to stand at opposite ends of the spectrum with Europeans in the middle.
(Of course, you don't have to read Rushton's book Race, Evolution, and Behavior to see this for yourself: Anybody who lives in a cosmopolitan big city and hasn't noticed this general pattern must not get out much.
(What are particularly relevant to the New Orleans disorder are the large racial gaps in crime rates. My next VDARE.com article, on the evening of Sunday September 18th, will review a major new study of racial differences in crime, as revealed by government statistics of arrest rates, imprisonment, and victim surveys, to be published by American Renaissance. For example, this report provides the first estimate I've yet seen of Asian-American imprisonment rates. They turn out to be, to the surprise of nobody with eyes in their heads, about 1/30th the African-American rate.)
The racial IQ distribution, however, is something that's both powerful in impact and relatively simple to understand. So all semi-numerate public-spirited citizens owe it to their country to take time to familiarize themselves with it.
Let me
start with the vexed question of the innateness of the IQ gap;
then discuss its size,
then show that those on the left and right who claim that IQ is meaningless are either uninformed or hypocritical, and finally
air a new and helpful idea on one small step we can take regarding this massive fact of American social life.
The innateness of the IQ gap
A bugaboo that often paralyzes rational thought about IQ is the controversy over whether or not the racial IQ gap stems solely from environmental differences, or has a hereditary component as well. Yet, this question isn't terribly relevant for thinking about planning better for urban disasters. As Thomas Sowell has pointed out, IQ is fairly stable throughout one's lifetime. So environmental interventions in the hope of raising black IQ would take at least one generation to work. So we can say for sure that the IQ gap will be around long enough to make it worth understanding.
My New Orleans Nightmare article was exposed to a lot of scientifically illiterate loathing. But I had a couple of genetic aces up my sleeve: I knew that later in the week, the leading American scientific journal, Science, would publish two blockbuster papers by U. of Chicago geneticist Bruce T. Lahn about the global distribution of brain development genes.
Here's Nicholas Wade's article "Researchers Say Human Brain Is Still Evolving" in the New York Times:
"Two genes involved in determining the size of the human brain have undergone substantial evolution in the last 60,000 years, researchers say, suggesting that the brain is still undergoing rapid evolution…They report that with microcephalin, a new allele arose about 37,000 years ago…Some 70 percent or more of people in most European and East Asian populations carry this allele of the gene, as do 100 percent of those in three South American Indian populations, but the allele is much rarer in most sub-Saharan Africans.
"With the other gene, ASPM, a new allele emerged some time between 14,100 and 500 years ago, the researchers favoring a mid-way date of 5,800 years. The allele has attained a frequency of about 50 percent in populations of the Middle East and Europe, is less common in East Asia, and found at low frequency in some sub-Saharan Africa peoples."
These findings are far from definitive on the IQ innateness question. But I can assure you there will be more announcements to come about these two brain genes that will be most interesting. And more brain genes with politically incorrect racial distributions are likely to follow.
What we can say for sure is that Darwinian logic suggests there's something about sub-Saharan Africa that prevented these brain gene variants from becoming common there—either the Sahara kept blacks reproductively isolated from the rest of the world while these genes were spreading, or the sub-Saharan environment wasn't conducive to the survival of people with these genes.
The size of the IQ gap
The size of the black-white racial gap in IQ has been studied for over 80 years. Of course, the answer is purely probabilistic. To say that blacks on average have lower IQs than Asians or whites is not to say that all blacks have lower IQs. In fact, about six million African-Americans possess higher IQs than the average white.
The most comprehensive investigation of the size of the white-black IQ gap was carried out by Philip L. Roth of Clemson and colleagues in a 2001 article, "Ethnic Group Differences in Cognitive Ability in Employment and Educational Settings: A Meta-Analysis," in the academic journal Personnel Psychology.
They looked at 105 different studies covering 6,246,729 individuals and found an overall average difference between whites and blacks of 16.5 IQ points, or 1.1 standard deviations. The 95 percent confidence interval runs merely from 1.06 to 1.15 standard deviations (in other words, there is strong agreement among the 105 studies).
(By the way, Roth et al. found that the IQ gap between non-Hispanic whites and Hispanics is 10.8 points.)
IQ tests are typically set up so the average score is 100 and the standard deviation is 15. Because IQ scores fall according to a normal distribution (or "bell-shaped curve"), you can use the NORMDIST function in Microsoft Office Excel, or this interactive web applet, to see where different IQ scores appear in percentile terms.
For example, if the average white IQ is 100 and the average black IQ is at 83.5 (according to Roth's meta-analysis), then the typical black falls at about the 14th percentile among the white population.
The most readable and up to date discussion of the white-black IQ difference is Charles Murray's "The Inequality Taboo" in the September 2005 issue of Commentary. (Paradoxically, John Podhoretz's father Norman has been Editor or Editor-at-Large for the last 45 years, during which time the elder Podhoretz has given strong support to Murray's book The Bell Curve.)
As I pointed out in VDARE.com two weeks ago, Murray presents tentative evidence suggesting that in recent years the IQ gap may has narrowed to 14 points, which would put the median black at about the 18th percentile among whites.
The black-white IQ gap is not the end of the story. I've been arguing for close to a decade, IQ tests probably do not measure well certain cognitive skills that blacks may tend to be better at than are whites and East Asians, such as improvisation. Life consists of trade-offs, so perhaps it's not startling that New Orleans, home to the great black improvisatory art form of jazz, did not display tremendous talent at planning ahead for this inevitable disaster.
But, nevertheless, the IQ gap does matter.
You thought the IQ test has been officially discredited by somebody or other? Not according to the Supreme Court and the military.
In the 2002 case Atkins v. Virginia, the Supreme Court, in effect, abolished the death penalty for killers with IQs below 70. Liberals applauded. As Andrew Sullivan blogged:
"It's an article of faith among many liberals that I.Q. has no meaning, it's culturally constructed, and should never be used to judge people's intellectual ability. But suddenly, when I.Q. is the means by which to rescue retarded criminals on death row, I.Q. is just fine, thank you very much."
Roughly 10-20 percent of the overall black population is now ineligible for capital punishment (compared to approximately two percent of whites and one percent of the Asian-Americans). Among the survivors at the Superdome and Convention Center, it would hardly be surprising if a quarter or more were so unintelligent they are legally immune from the death penalty.
Now, let's be clear. I'm not saying that low IQ people are not morally culpable or that they lack free will or all those other metaphysical issues that are fun to stay up all night talking about in the dorm room.
What I am saying is that policymakers need to plan for the likely problems that have been shown to be statistically correlated with having large numbers of low IQ people around.
But, how can any public servant make plans based on realistic assessments of how a particular population is likely to react in an emergency if the entire subject of racial behavioral differences is a career-killing thought crime?
Those were our fellow human beings and our fellow Americans in New Orleans. But we let some of them die because we've been terrified to make plans based on politically incorrect facts.
The meaningfulness of the IQ gap
Many on the right as well claim, at least in public, that IQ is meaningless. As the rightist blogger Tacitus alleged:
"I tested with a ridiculously high IQ as a child, and I was pretty proud of that till I got to the Army and found it didn't count for anything... we should not pretend [IQ tests] are an objective basis for science."
Well, go tell it to the military, which has been giving IQ tests to enlistment applicants since the First World War.
Almost nobody in the media is aware of the vast investment the U.S. military has made over the last 88 years in IQ testing of potential recruits, and the huge number of correlation studies they have done comparing soldiers' IQ with their actual performance. I was only barely aware of it myself until I spent hours last fall interviewing military psychometricians for my article showing that John F. Kerry scored a bit lower on his officer application IQ test than George W. Bush did. (This was the report that Tom Brokaw asked Kerry about on the NBC Nightly News.)
Because the U.S. military knows that bad things tend to happen to low IQ soldiers—and to their comrades who have the misfortune to be standing nearby—since 1991 only about one percent of new enlistees have IQs below the 30th percentile (i.e., an IQ of about 92). (See Table 2.8 in this Defense Department report.)
Last year, the Army announced that because of tribulations in meeting recruitment quotas due to the Iraq War, it would up its share of new soldiers scoring below the 30th percentile all the way to … 2 percent.
Even a guerilla war isn't making the military enthusiastic about inducting volunteers from the bottom 30 percent of the Bell Curve.
Stop and think about that for a second: well over 80 million Americans lack high enough IQs to become a buck private in our high-tech modern military.
I bet you'd never heard that from the mainstream media!
The fine 1997 book All That We Can Be: Black Leadership and Racial Integration the Army Way by sociologists Charles C. Moskos and John Sibley Butler reported that in 1994:
"83 percent of white recruits scored in the upper half of the mental aptitude test (compared with 61 percent of white youths in the national population), while 59 percent of black recruits scored in the upper half (compared with 14 percent of the black youths nationwide)."
In other words, the Army's black enlisted personnel score just as well on the general aptitude test as typical white Americans—although not as well as white recruits. (African-American officers average even better, of course.) That shows the impressive patriotism of blacks who possess many options in life.
On the other hand, a sizable majority of all blacks are ineligible to enlist. This has created a social problem that nobody has noticed…because you aren't allowed to talk about race and IQ.
We like to imagine that the military frequently instills character-building discipline in underclass ghetto youths raised by single mothers. But, in fact, it hasn't let in many truly poor blacks since the collapse of the Soviet Union allowed the military to get leaner and meaner.
Black enlistees are well above the national black average in IQ. They come from families that average 15 percent higher income than the national black mean.
My new and helpful idea about the IQ gap
But perhaps there's an opportunity for a government program that might actually improve the morals of the poor. So I'd like to end this perhaps bleak summary of the basic facts of American urban life with an idea I've been kicking around for years.
I want to tell you first, though, about a young African-American man I knew from a rough neighborhood in Chicago.
High school wasn't easy for him, but he stuck it out, stayed out of trouble, and got his degree. He went to work at McDonald's, where the boss liked his attitude and the way the other kids followed his lead, and put him on the management track. But he messed up the paperwork too many times and got fired.
He started hanging out with loser friends and had a minor scrape with the law. He decided then that he didn't want to waste his life and that his best shot at getting on the right path was the Army. It offered the purpose and order he craved.
The recruiting sergeant liked him a lot, seeing leadership potential in him. Everything looked promising, but then he flunked the military's IQ test (the one used throughout The Bell Curve), the Armed Forces Qualification Test. Like more than 80 million other Americans would have done, he didn't score in the top 70 percent.
However, the recruiter was so enthusiastic about this young man that he offered him a special chance: the Army would pay to send him to a lengthy training program where he'd live in a barracks, wear a uniform, and cram for the AFQT.
He found there that he loved military life. And the military liked him: he won the award as the best cadet in his class. Fired up, he went home, and took the AFQT again.
And flunked once more.
Sadly, we don't live in Lake Wobegon, where all the children are above average. The tautological fact is that 30 percent of Americans are going to score below the 30th percentile on IQ.
The tragic conundrum is that the young men like this fellow who could most benefit from serving a hitch in the Army, the decent but not too bright 18-year-olds who are on the knife-edge between getting their act together and falling into a lifetime of drugs and crime, are the ones least likely to make the Armed Forces' cognitive cutoff.
Now, the military exists to win wars. Modern weapons are so lethal and so complicated that the Pentagon is perfectly sensible in only wanting easily trainable recruits. The military isn't a social program. Indeed, much of what success it has as a social program originates from its asking soldiers, unlike the participants in the old Job Corps, to serve larger moral goals—duty, honor, country—than merely their own financial advancement.
Perhaps, though, our country could make good use of a Disaster Relief Corps, one with the discipline of the military but somewhat less rigorous IQ requirements, accepting young men down to, say, the 10th percentile (80 IQ, which is the legal minimum for soldiers). Many young men want the chance to be heroes, which is why small towns get by with volunteer fire departments. Those ambitions should be encouraged.
Disaster Relief Corpsmen would wear uniforms and train for a year on a base, learning to fill sandbags to fight floods, perform first aid, control crowds, and other basic skills that would have been useful in New Orleans.
After that they'd go home and serve, say, six years in the Disaster Relief Reserves, spending one weekend a month training (where they'd also take a drug test to keep them on the straight and narrow).
When the worst happened, each community, instead of waiting passively for FEMA functionaries to fly in from around the country, would have 19-25 year old men on hand ready to take initiative to organize and protect their neighborhoods…rather than loot them.
Of course, this program would only offer a modest remedy for the terrible social problems we saw in New Orleans. Maybe it wouldn't work at all. I'm sure somebody could come up with a better plan.
But to get this crucial conversation started, the media, left and “Righteous Right,” have to stop demonizing anybody who mentions the hard facts about IQ and racial differences.
[Steve Sailer [email him], is founder of the Human Biodiversity Institute and movie critic for The American Conservative. His website www.iSteve.com features site-exclusive commentaries.]
Racial Reality And The New Orleans Nightmare
By Steve Sailer
It was the Perfect Storm.
No, not Hurricane Katrina. That could have been much worse. Back in the 1990s, my friend Rob Brennan wrote an unpublished novel called Category 5 about a ferocious hurricane that strikes New Orleans at the worst possible angle. Katrina, in contrast, was a Category 4 hurricane and hit New Orleans only a glancing blow.
No, the perfect storm was actually the combination of social and governmental incompetence at local, state, and federal levels—and unmentionable racial reality.
Republican Presidents are supposed to provide adult supervision for crooked Democratic urban machines. But the White House is now occupied by George W. Bush, a politician so irresponsible, so uninterested in proficiency and honesty among his minions that late last year he tried to appoint as Secretary of Homeland Security the egregious Bernie Kerik.
Mr. Bush shows no evidence of holding his appointees accountable, so long as they remain loyal to him personally. Just as he has never vetoed a bill, he almost never fires anyone for poor performance.
VDARE.com readers are familiar with the contempt with which Mr. Bush treats his sworn duties to uphold the laws against illegal immigration. Now the whole country is starting to catch on to his disregard for his duties in his pursuit of image over effectiveness.
His invade-the-world-invite-the-world policies have left America unprepared for predictable domestic troubles, as Paul Craig Roberts recently pointed out here.
The ineptitude displayed by the Louisiana state government is also unsurprising. The state is unique in having a Latin political tradition (it uses the Code Napoleon rather than the English common law, even though Napoleon didn't release his code until the year after he sold Louisiana to Thomas Jefferson), a culture in which the Argentinean demagogue Juan Peron would have felt at home.
The unofficial state motto is "Laissez les bons temps rouler" or "Let the good times roll." Compare that to New Hampshire's official motto of "Live free or die," which display a rather different understanding of freedom. Louisiana's reigning philosophy is freedom from responsibility.
It's a general rule that the tastier the indigenous cuisine, the lousier the government. Its culture has provided America with jazz, A Street Car Named Desire, and the great American comic novel of the 20th Century, A Confederacy of Dunces. New Orleans is a nice place to visit. But you wouldn't want to raise your kids there.
All this is now common parlance, more or less. What you won’t hear, except from me, is that "Let the good times roll" is an especially risky message for African-Americans. The plain fact is that they tend to possess poorer native judgment than members of better-educated groups. Thus they need stricter moral guidance from society.
New Orleans itself is two-thirds black. It has had nothing but black mayors since 1978. All four of them are from the light-skinned "creole of color" elite, including the notorious Marc H. Morial, now head of the National Urban League. The city government is corrupt and lackadaisical. While the police department has perhaps rebounded from the depths it reached a decade ago when an officer was condemned to death for having a mother of three rubbed out by drug gangstas in his employ, nobody should be surprised that last week numerous officers ran away, and some even freelanced as looters.
In a racially diverse democracy like New Orleans, voting for good government takes a backseat to voting for your tribe's representatives in the eternal ethnic tussle over slices of the pie. As the ultra-competent but not terribly democratic founder of the state of Singapore, Lee Kwan Yew, noted in a recent interview:
"In multiracial societies, you don't vote in accordance with your economic interests and social interests, you vote in accordance with race and religion."
For instance, after blacks took control of New Orleans, they required new police recruits to live in the city itself as a way to exclude white cops. Dean M. Shapiro writes for Court TV's "Crime Library":
"The department was being depleted of experienced officers and the numbers within the ranks were decreasing as crime stats were rising at an alarming rate… In order to beef up the rapidly dwindling numbers of NOPD, the department was forced to lower its acceptance standards. Recruits with criminal records, DWIs, unfavorable employment records and dishonorable discharges from the Armed Forces were allowed to enter the Police Academy, whereas they had previously been excluded… Their records were expunged and, on completion of their training, they were issued badges, guns and patrol cars and turned loose on the street… These new officers were expected to suddenly straighten up and begin enforcing the laws they had not-so-long-ago been breaking. They were expected to arrest those suspected of crimes, even if those accused had once been their street buddies. But this was an unrealistic expectation."
The state's Southeast Louisiana Hurricane Evacuation and Sheltering Plan made all the right noises about evacuating residents without cars by school bus. But state and local authorities apparently failed to execute, as the famous picture of about 200 New Orleans school buses neatly lined up in a flooded parking lot shows.
It also should have been expected that a large fraction of New Orleans's lower class blacks would not evacuate before a disaster. Many are too poor to own a car, or too untrustworthy to get a ride with neighbors, or too shortsighted to worry.
Judging from their economic and educational statistics, New Orleans' blacks are not even an above-average group of African-Americans, such as you find in Atlanta or Seattle, but more like Miami's or Milwaukee's. About half are below the poverty line. With the national black average IQ around 85, New Orleans' mean black IQ would probably be in the lower 80s or upper 70s.
And of course nobody, despite what they may say, is all that much startled that, when the city's whites and more prosperous and/or foresightful blacks left, New Orleans quickly turned into its demographic analog, Haiti—where 2004's Tropical Storm Jeanne unleashed similar mayhem and chaos.
Bill Quigley, a law professor at Loyola of New Orleans who represents political prisoners in Haiti, stayed behind with his wife, who is a nurse. He noted:
"I had always hoped that Haiti would become more like New Orleans, but what's happened is New Orleans has become more like Haiti here recently."
In contrast to New Orleans, there was only minimal looting after the horrendous 1995 earthquake in Kobe, Japan—because, when you get down to it, Japanese aren't blacks. For example, the per capita imprisonment rate for Asian-Americans is about 1/30th that of African-Americans.
Nor is it surprising that the black refugees at the Superdome and the convention center failed to get themselves organized to make conditions more livable. Poor black people seldom cooperate well with each other because they don't trust other blacks much, for the perfectly rational reason that they commit large numbers of crimes against each other.
Indeed, as Francis Fukuyama's best book, Trust, makes clear, in most of the world—outside Japan and the more British-Germanic-Nordic parts of Europe and their overseas offspring like America—people seldom trust fellow citizens beyond their extended families enough to voluntarily come together to solve community problems. Force is generally needed to get them to work with each other. Which is why "civic society" is relatively rare.
(Why Mr. Bush wants to import vast numbers of additional immigrants from cultures where unrelated residents have no tradition of self-organizing as free individuals is a mystery for another day.)
But if all these disasters in New Orleans should have been expected, why did nobody at any level of government act as if they expected them?
Because to anticipate the problems would require noticing that racial differences are relevant. And that can ruin one's career.
Governmental bodies naturally decay rapidly in competence, especially when free discussion of unpleasant realities is suppressed.
New Orleans should remind us that we still live in a harsh world. The make-believe that passes for public discourse, even at the elite level, simply isn't adequate for protecting American citizens.
[Steve Sailer [email him], is founder of the Human Biodiversity Institute and movie critic for The American Conservative. His website www.iSteve.com features site-exclusive commentaries.]
Anyone who has done research on the internet on such topics as race, genetics, or interracial marriage may have directly or indirectly come across an infamous race researcher named Steve Sailer.
Who is Steve Sailer? He is one of a handful of extreme "scientific racists", affiliated with and often paid by extreme right-wing groups like VDare, American Renaissance, and others. He has written numerous pseudo-scientific articles on the internet that will fit his racist agenda that any race other than his own race, the White race, is inferior. He has a racist and condescending tone toward other races.
His falsified and racist writings have permeated the internet, creating many rumors and misunderstanding which have spread through many internet forums. Many unsuspecting people who have written articles on race or interracial marriages may have used Steve as a source while researching on the internet.
Steven Ernest Sailer is a white American male born in December 20, 1958. He attended UCLA in the early 1980s and worked for several years as a businessman in Chicago after college. In the late 1990s, he and his family (white wife Carole Sailer born 02/27/1959 and two sons) moved to his birthtown, Studio City, in the Los Angeles area where he currently resides.
It is the field of journalism, not as a businessman, which propelled Steve's publicity. Being a so-called race researcher who writes on and judges other races, and frequently condemns the non-white races as inferior and undeserving to live in America, it is only appropriate to ask, "What sort of experiences does Steve possess to research and judge other races?" He has no record of employment from the mainstream media, and he certainly has never been associated with Pulitzer winning publications or credible mainstream journalist organizations. He is not a doctor or scientist from an accredited institution in the field of race or genetics.
Possessing eloquent writing skills and a trashy attitude, Steve's first major employment debacle in journalism was for the National Review magazine, a far right-wing media publication infamously known for it's trashy, politically incorrect, borderline racist pieces of work. From 1994 to 1998, Steve wrote numerous inflammatory articles and excerpts on race and interracial marriages, primarily based on media stereotypes and his heinous group of extreme right-wing scientific racists (e.g. Phillipe Rushton, Sam Francis, the Pioneer Fund, Social Darwinists, etc...).
Once of his most (in)famous works for the National Review which boosted his publicity was the 1997 article on interracial marriages, "Is Love Colorblind". In the article, he believes Asian males and Black females are so inherently inferior and unattractive by birthright, they will be at a significant disadvantage in finding relationships and will be breeded out of society. This overexaggerated article was known to create gender divides among the races. Knowing the stir initially created by this article, he wrote another article in 2003 where he flat out lied about the 2000 Census stats on interracial marriages to repeat the havoc initially created so he can profit.
In the late 1990s, Sailer made two more accomplishments in the name of scientific racism. First, he created the Human Biodiversity Group, a right-wing eugenics thinktank where people with the mindsets of Steve Sailer can discuss and promote academic racism, homophobia, xenophobia, and eugenics policies. Among the worst members of the HBD group, whom Sailer Primarily bases his scientific research upon, are Charles Murray, Vincent Sarich, Arthur Jensen, John Derbyshire, Chris Brand, Philippe Rushton, Jim Woodhill, Steve Pinker, Jon Entine, and Peter Brimelow.
Second, Steve Sailer left the National Review to join the VDare internet publication. VDare is notorious for it's pro-fascist, anti-immigration stance and racist views to rid America of anyone who is not white. VDare's president, Peter Brimelow, declared the 1965 Immigration Act as "Hitler's revenge". As a note, VDare labels itself as a non-profit organization to avoid paying taxes and to give tax breaks to its contributors, but it profits anyway to employ exclusively right-wing biased journalists and racists so they can make a living.
Sailer's racist views and true colors became more prevalent after writing articles for VDare. Whether declaring that Latinos are no-good trash and Latino immigration must end, or that Blacks are genetically inferior in mental capability and do not deserve equal educational and economic opportunities, or that Asians are genetically inferior in physique and do not deserve opportunities in professional sports, Sailer has used VDare as his flagship to carry out his racist agenda of white supremacy and to trash on anyone who is not white like him.
Another less-than-plausible journalist achievement for Steve is joining the United Press International organization in 2001. Because writing articles under the VDare name was too conspicuous, the UPI seemed like a more neutral and acceptable logo at the time. However, a closer examination into UPI shows the same extreme right-wing bias.
The UPI, a subsidiary of the conservative Washington Times, is a 93-year-old agency which has been a financially troubled operation for the past three decades, with multiple ownership changes during the past 18 years. A major historical turning point of UPI was in 2000, when the Rev. Sun Myung Moon's media organization, News World Communications, purchased the Washington Times and UPI to extend his media regime to the international level. The Rev. Sun Myung Moon, who heads his Unification Church, is a cultist leader and extreme right-winger from Korea. He is known for starting an obsessive cult group, whom his followers are labeled Moonies, in America during the 1970s, and has been known to spread his ultra-conservative movement centered around him on an international level since then.
As you can infer, the UPI (also nicknamed the Unification Press International) exclusively employs right-wing biased journalists, including Steve Sailer.
Before you get offended with any of his writings, please keep in mind he is only a biased freelance writer. He is not a scientist or doctor from an accredited institution in the field of genetics or race. His livelihood depends on overexaggerating, even flat out lying, to create a stir among the public so he can profit and pay off his personal bills. Unfortunately, his countless writings on the internet has created much lies and discontent, and it is time to hold him accountable.
Posted: Wed 09 Nov 2005 17:27 Post subject: Steve Sailer's Atrocious Views
These article above have proved my point regarding Mr. Sailer. He's a racist pseudoscientist who use stereotypes to justify racism and classism of the US elites. He's more dangerous than any one of us know. We need the get the word out to other multiracial communities regarding the academic racists.
Posted: Wed 09 Nov 2005 19:05 Post subject: Academic Racists Make Mainstream Inroads
Quote:
Once of his most (in)famous works for the National Review which boosted his publicity was the 1997 article on interracial marriages, "Is Love Colorblind". In the article, he believes Asian males and Black females are so inherently inferior and unattractive by birthright, they will be at a significant disadvantage in finding relationships and will be breeded out of society. This overexaggerated article was known to create gender divides among the races. Knowing the stir initially created by this article, he wrote another article in 2003 where he flat out lied about the 2000 Census stats on interracial marriages to repeat the havoc initially created so he can profit.
This person is attacking straw men. None of this is substantiated by actual quotes from the article. He/she also exaggerates the impact of the article in creating gender divides among the races. Sailer was in fact offering an explanation as to why these divides exist (and existed long before he wrote that article). You may disagree with his explanation, but he didn’t create these divides.
Opposing Sailer is one thing, but anti-racist types often distort what people say for their own purposes.
My own take on Sailer is he is a racialist and a bit of a bigot, but in some of his writings-especially with the article "Is Love Colorblind"- he raises some important issues for discussion.
Delving into what he is really saying requires the ability to grasp nuance; something many ideologues have difficulty doing. As far as many of them are concerned, if you are not 100% against what he writes then you must be 100% in his camp.
But then many people who oppose him are opposed to any discussion of why there are differences among people regardless of the nature of discussion, especially when the discussions venture outside of what they feel are acceptable explanations.
I suggest people read his article and come to their own conclusions: Is Love Color Blind
Sailer’s views are very heterodox. He is not opposed to interracial marriage, but he’s attracted to some of the writings of White Nationalist, Samuel Francis. He’s rejected White Nationalism and embraced citizenism, but has argued that black Americans have average lower IQs than whites and this is partly genetic.
I will also add that people exaggerate his influence. He’s a person with a web blog who writes for publications that have minimal readership.
I have read Sailer's articles and even quotethem quite frequently. You just have to know to separate the facts, as he does throw out a lot of good info, and the fancy, which are his racial interpretations of many of those facts.
Considering how many readers the web has, i would say, being a web personality that has a lot of readings and repostings, I would say he has influence.
he also actively seeks to countermand anti racial publishings, such that if you go to buy a book from Sforza or Diamond, for example, you will inevitably bump into Sailer's reviews of the books.
Just do a Search for "Steve Sailer'
Results 11 - 20 of about 354,000 for steve-sailer.
Sadly, I agree that Sailer is having an impact; just look on this board. His works litter this place. Why? Because some multiracials latch on to his anti-black rhetoric. Given his well documented bias, why else would anyone use his work to prove his/her arguments. All data that come from him are tainted.
but has argued that black Americans have average lower IQs than whites and this is partly genetic.
By definition, that is racist. The quoted articles from Katrina show this bias clearly. Labeling him as racialist ameliorates the racism behind his words. Just because some dresses his racism in psuedoscience should diminish it still being perceived as racist. In past centuries, arguments like Sailer's were used as grounds to prove white supremacy and justify slavery.
Science in the wrong hands is just as deadly as loaded pistol.
but has argued that black Americans have average lower IQs than whites and this is partly genetic.
By definition, that is racist. The quoted articles from Katrina show this bias clearly. Labeling him as racialist ameliorates the racism behind his words. Just because some dresses his racism in psuedoscience should diminish it still being perceived as racist. In past centuries, arguments like Sailer's were used as grounds to prove white supremacy and justify slavery.
Science in the wrong hands is just as deadly as loaded pistol.
Sadly, I agree that Sailer is having an impact; just look on this board. His works litter this place. Why? Because some multiracials latch on to his anti-black rhetoric. Given his well documented bias, why else would anyone use his work to prove his/her arguments. All data that come from him are tainted.
People post his articles here for discussion not because some people here latch onto his anti-black rhetoric. And as Salassin said, you have to seperate the facts, which often come from reputable secondary sources, from his own bias. Not all data that come from him are tainted. His interpretation of the data often is.
[Sailer] has argued that black Americans have average lower IQs than whites and this is partly genetic.
By definition, that is racist.
I disagree. Not as to whether Sailer is “racist” or not, I have no opinion on that, since the term “racist” has lost objective meaning in the U.S. Most Americans use it to mean simply “that which I dislike.” [For example, some members of this discussion group consider intermarriage to be the ultimate act of genocidal “racism.”] And so, to call someone a “racist” in this forum, without specifying what you mean by it, is a waste of bandwidth.
What I disagree with is the definition of racism given above—that “racist” is defined as anyone who has ever argued that the Black/White test score gap is partly genetic. I disagree because it smacks of the attitude that some matters are best left unstudied; that scientists should steer clear of politically incorrect topics. Such vilifying of investigators because you dislike their findings is culturally dangerous and nationally suicidal hogwash.
Let us make three points absolutely clear:
1. The Black-White test score gap is real. It does not merely appear in one specific test nor in just a few particular tests. On the contrary, the gap appears in every test of those mental abilities that are important to success in Western culture. It appears in simple tests like counting backwards and in complex tests like the SAT. It appears in K-12 grades and in college graduation rates. It even appears in employers’ objective appraisals of on-the-job performance. The gap cannot be argued away by saying that it is culturally biased in that it measures only mental skills that are important in White society. Those skills are precisely the ones intended to be measured. Some people are misled because the media calls them “IQ” tests or “aptitude” tests as if they measured something innate. They do nothing of the sort. They measure mental skills, nothing more.
2. The test gap has serious social consequences. It imposes a crushing burden of incompetence, ignorance, and consequent poverty on the Black community. It also imposes a burden on U.S. society as a whole, which must deal with a host of social problems, from violent crime to child neglect, that spring from Black inability to fully contribute or produce.
3. Until about ten years ago, the gap looked partly genetic. A similar test score gap appears in teenagers from rich Black families as well as from poor ones. It is the same in Black teenagers from educated homes as well as those from ignorant homes. It is the same in economically deprived high schools with no books and barely literate teachers, and in high schools lavished with the most costly facilities and advanced-degree teachers that money can buy. It is the same among Black teenagers raised by Black parents, among those raised by interracial parents, and among those raised by two adoptive White parents. It appears in teenagers whose ancestors have been in North American since colonial times and in those whose grandparents immigrated to the United States from Ghana, Nigeria, Jamaica, or Barbados. The only common thread, the only factor apparently connecting these under-achieving highschoolers was their genetic African heritage.
To accuse scientists who studied this important and urgent phenomenon and who then honestly reported on what they measured of being “racists” is worse than ignorant. It is socially suicidal because it substitutes political coercion for intellectual honesty, a policy that would reduce the United States to third-world status under techno-economic domination by Europe and the Far East within a few generations.
As it turns out, it was those very findings of an apparent genetic connection that drove scientists to seek the genetic link to “intelligence” (whatever that means), and so led them to discover that genes have nothing to do with the test-score gap. The additional findings of the past ten years are:
4. The gap appears at age 3 at the latest. It may well appear earlier but this has not been tested yet.
5. The gap does not appear in unassimilated immigrant grade-school children from sub-Saharan Africa.
6. The gap does not appear in unassimilated British West Indian immigrant grade-school children of predominantly African ancestry.
7. The gap does not appear in unassimilated Latin American immigrant grade-school children of predominantly African ancestry.
8. There is a slight correlation between high school gap width and skin tone.
9. There is no correlation between high school gap width and actual underlying African genetic admixture (as opposed to Black ethnic self-identity)
10. First-generation biracial grade-school children of a Black mother and White father have the same gap as children with two Black parents.
11. First-generation biracial grade-school children of a White mother and Black father have a slightly less severe gap.
12. Black grade-school children raised by two White adoptive parents have no gap at all. (That is, not until adolescence, when their mental skills plunge to the same level as Black children raised by Black parents.)
13. There is some weak evidence of a “grandmother effect.” Although grade-school children of Black parents have the same gap, regardless of those parents’ wealth or education, grade-school children with educated grandparents seem to have a significantly smaller gap.
14. Reducing class sizes for Black grade-school children reduces the gap, but not by much. Increasing class sizes for White grade-school children has no effect on White children’s mental skills.
15. Increasing teacher skill level for Black grade-school children reduces the gap, but not by much. Reducing teacher skill level for White children has no effect on White children’s mental skills.
16. Having only White teachers teach Black grade-school children reduces the gap, but not by much. Having only Black teachers teach White children has no effect on White children’s mental skills.
17. Pouring massive funding into grade-school resources for Black children (facilities, libraries, lunches, art, music) reduces the gap, but not by much. Withholding grade-school resources from White children has no effect on White children’s mental skills.
18. Black children raised by White adoptive parents do not show any gap through grade school. But upon reaching adolescence their mental skills quickly deteriorate to the level of Black children raised by Black parents.
What causes the early childhood Black/White test-score gap? Nobody can yet say for sure, but it is clearly not related to peer pressure (3 years old is too early developmentally for peer pressure) nor to genetics (it is independent of actual admixture). Equally clearly, it is caused by a cultural difference that is unique to U.S. Blacks (but not to Africans, West Indians, nor Hispanics) that happens before age three. The best guess is that many U.S. Black mothers lack the parenting skill to interact with their babies (talk to them, play with them) between birth and 18 months, when cognitive and reasoning skills are developed by precisely such parental interaction. The answer will depend on studies now being done with very young children (0-18 months).
What causes the sudden adolescent plunge in test scores among Black-looking (but not socially "Black") high-schoolers? Again, nobody yet knows for sure, but it cannot be genetic since it happens too late in life. The best guess is peer-pressure, but the answer will depend on studies now being done to somehow objectively measure “peer-pressure.” For more on this topic see the first 47 pages of Christopher Jencks and Meredith Phillips, The Black-White Test Score Gap (Washington DC: Brookings Institution, 1998). Also, see Mary Lee's opinion (her postgraduate degree is in early childhood development) at http://backintyme.com/ODR/viewtopic.php?p=3044#3044.
In any case, calling someone a “racist” by definition merely because they have the intellectual honesty to follow evidence to a conclusion that you dislike is nihilistic.
Last edited by fwsweet on Mon 07 Aug 2006 03:33; edited 8 times in total
Joined: 30 Mar 2005 {Posts: 1057 } Location: New Jersey
Posted: Mon 14 Nov 2005 17:27 Post subject:
Excellent post, Frank, as always. And I agree with your conclusions about researchers' conclusions not being racist. Somewhat similar situations often occurred on the old Racial Myths message board. When a study was presented that found sub-Saharan mtDNA in Italians, the researchers were labeled "Anti-Italian" by the forum owner. Gee, I wonder what his ethnicity was?? (Of course, racism in the truest sense by the forum owner may be at work here.) And when sub-Saharan HLA genetic material was found in Greeks, the forum owner's Greek cronie cried that it was Macedonian propaganda, and pleaded with posters to not believe what the "evil researchers" were saying.
Absolute drivel! Results are results, period. And conclusions are drawn by examining the results. Even in the rare occurrences of conclusions being wide of the mark, this doesn't change the results of the DNA tests.
As you once said, debating with someone who has an idealogical interest in a study's outcome is utterly pointless, as they, sadly, can never be convinced of its validity.
I disagree. Unbiased research in those arenas is great, but the funding of such people as Rushton shows where there allegiances are. And Sailer does have allegiances with people like Rushton. When there is an agenda to prove a group as less instead of just an open research that shows a disparity, then it is racist. There are plenty of theories that explain the ethnic gap amogn groups in aptitude tests. Sailer only focuses on racial ones. He never mentions little known facts like Black unitiarians scoring higher than the average population on SAT scores, another type of aptitude test, for example.
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