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We Are Not a Post-Racism Society: Saletan’s Racism
Posted by Kevin

I really wan’t going to post on anything today, but I see that the “oh I am so brave for pointing out that blacks are genetically inferio to whites!” brigade is back. This time it is Saletan over at Slate espousing this most racist of opinions. I just want to make a couple of points:

1. “g” is not good science.
2. I.Q. is a lousy measure of anything.
3. They aren’t brave truth tellers railing against the ignorant masses. They are racist assholes. The science is decidedly not on their side, despite Saletan’s weird obsession with head sizes

I’ll just quote a post I wrote the first time this nonsense reared its head:

This weekend saw a plethora of posts about The Bell Curve and the genetic basis for “intelligence”. Atrios, Calpundit, Digby, and Matthew Ygelesias, among others, all discussed it, and had lively discussions in their comments regarding the validity of the Bell Curve in particular, and the validity of genetics and race in intelligence in general. (Blogspot is down right now, so I could not get the permalinks)

I will not bother to dismantle The Bell Curve. I have read the book, and found I to be laughable. Even a basic understanding of statistics is enough to show the work to be seriously flawed. If you are interested, Brad DeLong has a link to the one of the many, many refutations of the book’s “science”.

The larger point is that it does not matter. Even if there was a strong correlation between race and “intelligence” (defined as you wish), it does not matter. It has no practical effect, other than the spread of racism. Why? Because the individual range is so obviously great.

Try it this way. Duke Ellington is a genius. Dr. Carver is a genius. John Rocker is a moron. History demonstrates that all races are capable of producing genius, and all races are capable of producing people so stupid you wonder if they will forget how to breathe, and of producing both in large numbers. In both “races”, history shows us that genius is rare but not unknown, stupidity is less rare, and the vast majority muddle along in the middle. From a practical stand point, it does not matter if the median white is dumber than the median black. As a society, you must allow for the geniuses of both groups to flower, and build institutions to contain the damage the morons of both groups could do. To do otherwise would be to doom your society, in the long run.

Since a work like The Bell Curve cannot honestly speak to broad social policy, for the reasons above, the only effect can be to spread racism - to convince one group that they are genetically superior to another. (Which, as already shown, is utter nonsense. Since the range of outcomes is essentially the same (genius and moron rare, majority in the middle), no one individual can assume that he/she is superior to another individual based on their respective races.) It can serve no other purpose but to present the illusion of meaningful differences, and to use that illusion as the basis of discrimination.

The utter ridiculousness of the “science” Saletan relies upon is not hard to determine. A few minutes with the sociology and genetics department at your local university would have given you enough information and primary sources to put to rest the notion that the work Saletan is relying upon is anything close to convincing. Either Saletan did not do that leg work or he ignored it. In either case he is either a completely incompetent journalist — something that I do not think the evidence supports — or he he wanted to believe tht blacks are genetically inferior to whites. Thee is a word for that last option.

November 22nd, 2007 General | 3 comments