A major interest of mine is the things you are not allowed to believe. For instance, why don’t we just accept that blacks, as a race or group or whatever, just don’t perform on most things as well as whites and South and East Asians?
Steve Sailer is celebrating the 50th anniversary of Richard Herrnstein’s Atlantic article on “I.Q.” The article became a book, The Bell Curve by Herrnstein and Charles Murray, that warned us that the future job market would privilege people with high cognitive skills and that blacks were on the short end of that. RAACIST! rang from the four corners of the universe.
Sailer reprints The Atlantic’s intro to the I.Q. article, and it beautifully tells us what is wrong with our ruling class. It cannot deal with the fact that blacks are about a standard deviation lower that white on IQ. Says The Atlantic:
Because there are statistically reliable differences in I.Q. between whites and blacks, between the privileged and the underprivileged, and among various ethnic minorities, some influential people argue that the tests retard the liberalization of American society.
And so the ruling class determined to Do Something about it.
[In 1965 President] Lyndon B. Johnson warned that mere legislation, no matter how bold, was incapable of evening the score for American blacks… [H]e promised renewed efforts to redress the inequities[.]
That’s because of the Moynihan report that blamed, not slavery directly, but the “matriarchal culture” of the black family. But black civil rights leaders didn’t agree. Not at all.
The trouble, said civil rights spokesmen, was not in the black family but in white racism. Give $100 billion to clear up the city slums, said A. Philip Randolph, and the black problem will take care of itself. The Moynihan report… was scorned as a new, “subtle” form of racism.
Yeah. White racism. Slam dunk. What else could it be?
What’s a ruling class to do then? Oh sure, racism and segregation were mostly to blame, but it seemed that “something within the black community itself was holding back its economic and educational advance.” Could it be IQ? That’s what a Berkeley professor, Arthur R. Jensen, proposed. But he was immediately shouted down by mostly peaceful protesters. The Atlantic concludes:
The subject of intelligence is such an issue—important because social legislation must come to terms with actual human potentialities, painful because the actualities are sometimes not what we vainly hope.
You know what we could do? We could just just forget about the whole question of race, and just not talk about it and not worry about racial disparities. We could say, hey, look: right now the highest income group in America is South Asians. And white Americans are down in the middle and blacks are way below that. This table of annual household income in 2019 and 2020 shows Asians on top as $99,400, then whites at $77,007, then Hispanics at $56,814, then blacks at $46,005. So blacks clock in at below 50 percent of Asians.
I wonder what is really going on here? Is it because blacks are the most loyal of Democrats? Is it because “influential people” then and now believe in the “liberalization of American society” no matter the cost? Is it because our ruling class cannot admit that it has been wrong about race for the last 50 years and cannot admit it? Is it because calling people “racist” is the easiest way to win an argument?
And then there is the awful possibility that cannot be admitted, cannot even be allowed to be uttered, that all the government programs of the last century, from government schooling to government welfare Makes Things Worse for blacks.
I think that the only sensible judgement is that there is something wrong with our ruling class, something cultural, something intellectual, something religious, something moral, that has led them on a path of error and injustice, and has blinded them to the awful crime they have committed.
For I believe that Frederick Douglass’s words in 1865 still apply:
Do nothing with us! Your doing with us has already played the mischief with us. Do nothing with us! If the apples will not remain on the tree of their own strength, if they are worm eaten at the core, if they are early ripe and disposed to fall, let them fall!
Your mileage may vary.