Charles Murray’s ‘Facing Reality’—A Review

Quillette ^ | July 29, 2021 | Razib Khan

[karpov]

A review of Facing Reality: Two Truths about Race in America by Charles Murray. Encounter Books, 168 pages. (June, 2021)

I’ve known about Charles Murray since 1994, when I was a voracious and unsupervised teen reader in rural Oregon grabbing the library’s latest issue of the New Republic the instant it was shelved. It was here that I stumbled upon the shocking views Murray and Richard J. Herrnstein expressed in The Bell Curve about race, class, and inequality in America. I didn’t give those views much deep thought at the time, and so my perception of Murray and his ideas hewed more or less to the dismissive conventional wisdom. It wasn’t until I read a 1998 essay in Commentary magazine by Christopher Chabris that I began to reconsider. Chabris argued that the media furor around The Bell Curve obscured more than it illuminated, and that the consensus among psychologists on the importance of intelligence to life outcomes was indeed close to what Murray and Herrnstein had asserted. To my surprise, in the 21st century, my relationship with Murray and his ideas took a different turn, as I had the pleasure and honor of becoming his friend. And rather like Murray, I am now the sort of public figure that certain types of people feel they have to publicly denounce in order to establish their own group bona fides.

Given this personal history, you might reasonably ask why I agreed to write about Murray’s latest book, Facing Reality: Two Truths about Race in America. The answer is simply that I am one of the few people willing to write about it. The book’s thesis is that American society faces disaster if it is not prepared to confront certain politically uncomfortable facts about race—Murray has described it as a cri de coeur.

[SauronOfMordor]

That’s because there are only two big ideas being forwarded: that different races in America “have different violent crime rates and different means and distributions of cognitive ability.” That’s it. Though there is more reasoning and analysis between the covers, the whole work rests on these two pillars.

Proof of the two points is readily available, but talking about it will have the woke burning you at the stake

[Mr. Blond]

13/50

[nicollo]

yep

Those already familiar with the data on racial differences in cognitive tests and crime rates, and therefore predisposed to take Murray’s book seriously, will most likely give up on engagement due to intellectual exhaustion with today’s punitive and spiteful political climate. And those who might benefit from Murray’s book will not read it because it was written by someone who transmits ritual pollution to all those who acknowledge him. Additionally, judging by the choices of most Americans, who live broadly racially segregated lives, the solution to the problem of race as expressed in their revealed preferences is clear. Murray need not worry about the emergence of resentful white identity politics, since the empirical data suggests that places like Hyde Park, in Chicago, can maintain cheerful whitopias in the midst of diversity. All that’s needed is a wall of lies about “good schools” and “safe neighborhoods” that omit the salient and visible facts. It’s not the clusters of whiteness we need to worry about; it’s the economic desperation, marginalization, and segregation.

[griswold3]

Rev Jeremiah Wright has spoken about differences of the races

[Fury]

I can imagine that even walking on a college campus with this book will subject the holder incredible abuse, threats, and the like.

[Fury]

In Chapter Three of Facing Reality, Murray reports that African Americans score a bit less than one standard deviation below European Americans on cognitive tests. With a note of hope, he reports that the gap steadily narrowed between 1970 and 1980. But he also asks us to notice that the gap has, from 1990 onwards, stubbornly refused to diminish further no matter what policy interventions have been brought to bear. Asian Americans, meanwhile, have been widening the gap over European Americans. In 2020, the Asian American advantage on math and reading tests was about 0.40 standard deviations above European Americans.

Match meet gasoline.

[Honest Nigerian]

I read that book in 1994 or 1995. It was spellbinding. Seriously. He had all this data, and he explained it, how it was obtained. Provided correlating facts and data.
And he was totally respectful. No claims of “these are better”, or “the evil (insert color) ones caused the vast majority of today’s ills” like we hear from the racists and race-baiters of today.
Highly recommend The Bell Curve.