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Question 1: The Race and IQ Controversy
Lets talk about race, but lets focus on the thorniest issue of
all: Race and IQ.
Can you summarize the issue so that readers understand what were
talking about and explain why it is such a prickly topic?
Ron UnzFor various reasons, there are few topics more taboo in
modern American society than the notion of racial differences.
Meanwhile, intelligence testingthe use of IQ exams to measure
mental abilityis also extremely taboo these days. Therefore, the
combination of race and IQ is a particularly dangerous subject,
almost completely avoided by those unwilling to risk a firestorm of
attacks on social media or the destruction of their careers.
As a consequence, the vast majority of Americans, including our
educated elites, never get any serious or neutral exposure to
Race/IQ issues, even if the forbidden fruit aspect of the topic
might occasionally draw some of them to the fringes of the Internet
where the subject is still sometimes discussed.
The landmark Civil Rights Act was passed nearly six decades ago,
and since then the notion of racial equality in ability has been
enshrined as an absolutely fundamental assumption of our society.
Rather than merely being a scientific conclusion based upon
empirical research, it has become a central ideological belief,
more like a moral axiom or the basic tenet of a religious faith,
whose truth transcends any evidence. If particular racial or ethnic
minority groups are under-represented in elite university
admissions or over-represented in crime and poverty, the only
possible explanation is the failure or malice of the larger society
rather than the intrinsic characteristics of the groups themselves.
More and more American institutions, including those responsible
for education and law enforcement, now operate under this
fundamental assumption of racial equality and the recent tidal wave
of wokeness merely represents the latest manifestations. This
situation may produce insurmountable difficulties if that
assumption happens to be misaligned with reality. Back in 2013 I
closed a long article on some of these issues with the following
paragraph:
During the Cold War, the enormous governmental investments of
the Soviet regime in many fields produced nothing, since they were
based on a model of reality that was both unquestionable and also
false. The growing divergence between that ideological model and
the real world eventually doomed the USSR, whose vast and permanent
bulk blew away in a sudden gust of wind two decades ago. American
leaders should take care that they do not stubbornly adhere to
scientifically false doctrines that will lead our own country to
risk a similar fate.
How Social Darwinism Made Modern China
A thousand years of meritocracy shaped the Middle Kingdom
Ron Unz The American Conservative March 11, 2013 8,300
Words
In todays Western world, any individuals who suggest the existence
of large and innate racial differences in IQ and other measures of
intellectual ability are utterly marginalized, with their words
confined to isolated corners of the Internet. Such theories are
widely condemned as hate speech, with their adherents likely to
see their careers destroyed, while facing serious risk of
deplatforming from social media or even criminal prosecution in
many Western countries.
Given this climate of serious intellectual repression, it is hardly
surprising that only a tiny sliver of our population would publicly
espouse such heretical ideas, and even many of those hardy souls
have gradually drifted away from explicitly proclaiming those views
in recent years.
Question 2: Research Findings and Censorship
Has there been extensive research on this topic and do you think
the research is reliable? Is there research that counters the
findings that we are discussing?
There has been a systematic purge of anyone who dares to research
or write about this topic. And I can certainly understand why. Even
so, while I may not agree with the racialist perspective, I think
that people should be free to think and write about anything they
choose. We should never turn to censorship as a way to defend our
ideals, but that, in fact, is what has happened. So, my question to
you is this: Who are these people whose ideas (and research) are so
threatening that they have had to be censored?
Ron UnzBack in 2020 I published a very long and comprehensive
intellectual survey of American white racialism and it included
extensive coverage of the Race/IQ debate. I noted that although
promoting such ideas were forbidden and utter transgressive today,
just a generation or two ago they had been treated quite
respectfully in many of our most prestigious and influential media
organs and academic institutions, or even directly endorsed in
those elite venues. The presentation of controversial theories
about Race and IQ began appearing soon after the passage of the
Civil Rights laws and the Great Society legislation, and the
proponents were top academic scholars, some of them highly-regarded
liberals. My account summarized the decades of this rancorous
public debate.
An important basis for the Brown decision had been the argument
that desegregation would substantially reduce the wide educational
achievement gap between black and white students, which was also a
central goal of many of Lyndon Johnsons new Great Society
programs, such as Head Start. But in February 1969, the prestigious
Harvard Educational Review gave over its entire issue to a massive
123 page article by Prof. Arthur Jensen of Berkeley, a leading
psychometrician, bearing the provocative title How Much Can We
Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement? Jensen argued that there was
overwhelming scientific evidence that IQ scores and other measures
of scholastic ability were determined by nature rather than nurture
and that the wide black-white performance gap was mostly biological
in origin. Jensens scientific claims provoked a national firestorm
of controversy, subjecting Jensen to massive vilification,
including physical assaults and very serious threats against the
lives of himself and his family.
Despite these ferocious attacks, Jensen never wavered in his
scientific positions during the decades that followed, and in 1998
he published his magnum opus The g Factor: The Science of Mental
Ability, reiterating his findings. By 2005, he was widely regarded
as the Grand Old Man of psychometrics, and he published an article
summarizing the previous thirty years of research on racial
differences in intelligence, with his co-author being Prof. J.
Philippe Rushton, an evolutionary theorist who held explicitly
White Nationalist beliefs.
Jensen seems to have been largely apolitical, and although his
original article had ignited the controversy, he hardly desired the
resulting media spotlight, which soon shifted away, allowing him to
spend the next four decades in his scholarly research prior to his
death in 2012 at age 89. Instead, a much more eager lightning-rod
appeared in the person of physicist William Shockley, who years
earlier had won a Nobel Prize for inventing the transistor.
Shockley seemed to relish public attention, which he soon attracted
by wholeheartedly endorsing Jensens views and then spending years
promoting them in the media and various public forums, along with
other racially-charged policy proposals such as government-paid
sterilization for low-IQ individuals and similar eugenic measures.
The physicist soon became a household name, attracting massive
public vilification up until his death in 1989 and even long
afterward.
Shockley was a Palo Alto native, and in 1956 after inventing the
transistor he had founded Shockley Semiconductor in neighboring
Mountain View to commercialize his invention, choosing to relocate
back from the East Coast in order to be closer to his aged and
ailing mother. His difficult personality and poor management skills
eventually produced an exodus of his early employees, who went on
to spawn many of the most important technology companies in the
region, arguably making Shockley the father of the modern Silicon
Valley, which otherwise might never have come into existence. But
although he is probably the most important Palo Altan in history,
his controversial racialist views have prevented any appropriate
recognition. For years I have driven past his simple clapboard home
on Waverley Ave., which is unmarked by any plaque or historic
designation, and his name has never graced any building, monument,
or award.
Lacking any such public honors and with his name now largely
forgotten, Shockley presented no target for the recent Black Lives
Matter protest movement to attack, and he was simply ignored. By
contrast, a similar campaign a few years ago forced our local
school district to rename Terman Middle School, which had honored
famed Stanford Electrical Engineering Prof. Frederick Terman. In
the 1930s, Terman had encouraged his students William Hewlett and
David Packard to found their eponymous company, which also played a
huge role in creating Americas powerful technology industry.
Termans name was scraped from the school because he shared it with
that of his father, Stanford Psychology Prof. Lewis Terman, who had
pioneered American IQ testing a century ago, now considered a toxic
figure despite almost no focus on race.
Jensen had done his own doctoral work at University College London
under Hans Eysenck, a renowned professor of psychology and expert
in psychometrics. A couple of years after the appearance of
Jensens controversial article on the heredity basis of IQ, Eysenck
published Race, Intelligence, and Education, a short book taking
much the same position. Once again, a massive wave of controversy
and media vilification erupted, with Eysenck being physically
attacked and having his life threatened. Although he never
retracted his views, henceforth he focused almost entirely on other
topics, and by the time of his death in 1997 was a figure of
enormous eminence in the field of psychology, ranking first in the
world in the number of his peer-reviewed academic citations.
Despite such scholarly achievements, he had never been made a
member of the British Psychological Society, apparently because of
the controversial nature of his writings on race and IQ three
decades earlier.
The same year that Eysenck had released his controversial book, the
parallel views of a much younger Harvard psychology professor named
Richard Herrnstein attracted similar attention in our own country.
Founded in 1857, The Atlantic had for more than a century been one
of Americas most prestigious national magazines, and Herrnsteins
20,000 word article on IQ was one of the longest ever to run in
that publication, providing a comprehensive account of the origins
and accuracy of IQ tests as a measure of human intelligence, along
with the enormous implications for the future of our society.
Herrnstein strongly endorsed the arguments of Jensen and others
that IQ was overwhelmingly determined by innate factors, but tread
rather carefully on the related evidence of a large difference in
intelligence between racial groups.
Given its venue, Herrnsteins massive article reached a large
national audience, including many of Americas intellectual elites,
and soon provoked the usual wave of attacks and hostile criticism,
though his caution on racial issues probably insulated him from the
level of vitriol that Jensen and Eysenck had encountered. Rather
than being expelled from respectable media circles, Herrnstein went
on to publish additional major articles on related IQ issues over
the next couple of decades in The Public Interest, National Review,
Commentary, and even socialistic Dissent.
In 1982, The Atlantic carried another one of his long articles
describing the overwhelming consensus of academic researchers on IQ
issues and the severe distortions of the scientific facts regularly
promoted by leading mainstream media organs such as The New York
Times and CBS News. So although the positions of Herrnstein and his
allies were largely excluded from outlets with the largest national
audiences, they continually reached smaller but more intellectually
elite circles. In 1985 he co-authored Crime and Human Nature with
eminent political scientist James Q. Wilson, an influential and
well-received text arguing for a strong innate component to
criminal behavior, including discussion of the very wide
differences in crime rates between racial and ethnic groups.
Herrnstein died of lung cancer at the age of 64 in September 1994,
having devoted the final years of his life to a project that
directly addressed the large racial differences in intelligence
which most of his previous writings had usually sidestepped.
Teaming up with prominent social scientist Charles Murray, he
produced The Bell Curve, a massive volume that weighed in at 845
pages and over 400,000 words.
The book was released just weeks after his death and immediately
became a national sensation, probably attracting more controversy
and media coverage than anything published in decades. Almost three
generations had passed since a major American press had published a
book heavily arguing for the mostly innate nature of human
intelligence and the wide racial differences in such traits, and
although the latter issue constituted only small portion of the
text, those incendiary claims attracted nearly all the attention.
At that time, The New Republic was Americas most influential
liberal opinion magazine, and both owner Martin Peretz and editor
Andrew Sullivan together gave their strong support to the launch of
The Bell Curve, allocating much of an issue to a 10,000 word cover-
story entitled Race, Genes, and IQ: An Apologia, which largely
consisted of extended extracts from the book. But that decision
sparked a huge revolt by most of the magazines outraged staff and
regular contributors, who demanded space for rebuttal, so that the
same issue also carried some 19 separate attacks on the book and
its theories, many of them extremely harsh, with epithets such as
neo-Nazi tossed around. According to Sullivan, the incident
marked a turning point in his relationships with his TNR
colleagues, which never recovered, and he eventually left the
magazine.
From the distance of a quarter century, I had mostly forgotten the overwhelming media coverage at the time, but spending a couple of
days reading fifty or sixty of the contemporaneous reviews, many of
them quite lengthy, refreshed my memory, and also underscored the
tremendously disparate reactions by usual ideological soulmates.
For example, just within the pages of the New York Times, the
Sunday Book Review allocated The Bell Curve and two other books on
similar racial issues an almost unprecedented three pages of
discussion, with Malcolm Browne, the papers Pulitzer Prize-winning
science journalist taking 4,200 words to portray the works in a
substantially favorable light, emphasizing the need to confront
long-suppressed taboos. But a week later the same newspaper ran a
very long editorial denouncing The Bell Curve Agenda in the
harshest possible terms, and an 8,300 word cover-story in the
Sunday Magazine had vilified Murray as The Most Dangerous
Conservative in America.
National Review, the leading conservative magazine, had already run
a long and favorable review, but soon devoted most of an entire
issue to a remarkable symposium by 14 separate contributors, many
of them prominent journalists or academics, who provided a very
wide range of both positive and negative perspectives. Although TNR
was then my favorite magazine and I didnt hold NR in high regard,
the flood of attacks in the former seemed absolutely hysterical,
while I thought that the latter had provided the best and most
balanced discussion.
The coincidental timing of larger political events probably helped
explain this enormous media coverage. Just a couple of weeks after
the books release, Newt Gingrich and the Republicans had
unexpectedly swept to power in Congressional elections, ending
nearly a half-century of unbroken Democratic control by seizing
majorities in both the House and the Senate, an event just as
traumatic to the liberals of that day as Donald Trumps upset
victory was to prove in 2016. Racial controversies had been a
significant contributing factor to the Republican landslide, and
appalled liberals now saw their familiar political and ideological
world crumbling about them, with the frightening possibility that
the white racism of the buried past would suddenly regain control
of American society.
The result was an exceptionally bitter wave of liberal media
attacks on the book, which was demonized to an unprecedented
extent. As mentioned, much of the early media discussion of The
Bell Curve and its ideas had been favorable or at least respectful,
but an enormous public campaign of vilification was now unleashed,
with many timorous Republicans and conservatives soon wilting under
the attacks and abandoning any support. A couple of years earlier,
I had been invited to a private meeting in DC at which Murray had confidentially circulated portions of his work-in-progress and the neoconservative organizers strategized with him about the best
approach for successfully launching the book; but now I heard word
that Bill Kristol was seeking conservatives to sign a public
statement condemning the racist tract.
The book continued to sell very well, but the tide of elite public
opinion soon turned sharply against it, and Herrnsteins death just
a month before publication was surely a contributing factor. Until
just a few years earlier, Murray had been totally unaware of these
scientific issues involving race and IQ, and indeed had regularly
dismissed the possible role of racial differences as a factor in
black social problems in his previous writings denouncing the
welfare state. By contrast, Herrnstein had spent more than two
decades researching the topic as a leading Harvard professor, and
was also partially immunized against attacks because of his strong
liberal credentials. Thus, the disappearance of the senior liberal
co-author removed a crucial defender of the contents, leaving the
conservative Murray much more vulnerable and exposed, and forcing
him to publicly defend psychometric issues that were outside his
primary area of expertise. I remember thinking at the time that
when faced with sharp technical questioning by hostile journalists
some of his media responses were not as effective as they might
have been.
Americas leading psychometricians, whose professional expertise on
race and IQ had long been ignored or mischaracterized in the public
arena, quickly mobilized in support, using the media firestorm as
an opportunity to get their longstanding opinions into print. In
December, the Wall Street Journal gave over most of a full
editorial page to a public declaration that The Bell Curve
represented the scholarly consensus of the mainstream science on intelligence, a statement organized by Prof. Linda Gottfredson and
signed by 52 academic experts, including such eminent scholars as
Eysenck and Jensen.
Despite these counter-attacks, the intellectual tide continued to
turn against the work, and within less than a year, the ideological
status quo had reasserted itself, with the remaining defenders
finding themselves severely beleaguered in the mainstream media.
When the firestorm had originally erupted, famed paleolibertarian
Murray Rothbard had been gleeful that the long-suppressed truths
about racial matters had finally broken through, suggesting that
powerful political elements had apparently decided to reverse their
decades of scientific suppression. But at the ten year anniversary,
longtime writers on race and IQ such as Steve Sailer and Chris
Brand delivered lengthy and despairing verdicts, concluding that
the ideas in the book had been successfully suppressed, and any
favorable mention of it in respectable circles would render someone
an immediate outcast. Sailer even suggested that the Bell Curve
Wars represented a crucial turning point for both the
neoconservative and neoliberal intellectual movements, which soon
abandoned any lingering candor on racially-charged issues. Indeed,
other frequent writers on racial matters such as John Derbyshire
and Peter Brimelow have sometimes described the period 1995-2005 as
a brief interglacial during which controversial racial topics
could sometimes be discussed in the mainstream media, but that the
subsequent clamp-down had been even more severe than anything
before.
Basically, all niggers are stupid and can never be intelligent.
https://www.unz.com/runz/the-forbidden-topic-race-and-iq/#question- 1-the-race-and-iq-controversy
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