Posted on 06/25/2021 4:45:51 AM PDT by Kaslin
Give Charles Murray, longtime scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, credit for courage. Again and again, despite outrageously unfair attacks, he has returned to the public arena and persisted in telling unwelcome truths. In his meticulous prose, with charts and tables so elegant as to betray an aesthetic bent, he makes his points with precision and clarity.
Murray's 1994 book "The Bell Curve," co-authored with Harvard psychologist Richard Herrnstein, evoked furious and undeserved denunciation. It will be interesting to see whether there is a similar reaction to his latest and much shorter book, "Facing Reality: Two Truths About Race in America."
His first truth is that "American Whites, Blacks, Latinos, and Asians, as groups, have different means and distributions of cognitive abilities." Murray makes mincemeat of arguments against IQ tests and shows that they're highly correlated with achievement in schools and in later life. Asians have the highest average scores, followed by Whites, Latinos and Blacks.
Murray's second truth is that "American Whites, Blacks, Latinos, and Asians, as groups, have different rates of violent crime." Murray deftly extrapolates from the best available crime rates and shows that average violent crime rates are far above average among Blacks, somewhat above average among Latinos, somewhat below average among Whites and almost negligible among Asians.
For many Americans, these are uncomfortable (I have often used the word "unhappy") truths. Blacks are about eight times more likely than Whites (I use Murray's capitalization practice) to commit violent crimes. And I feel a twinge of discomfort in the below-average cognitive ability scores of some of my ancestral ethnicities.
Conventional media and academic elites routinely suppress these truths, apparently for fear that ordinary Americans would take them as a warrant for racial discrimination against individuals. To that argument, I reply, as I did in National Review in 1994 and in a Washington Examiner blog post in 2013, that ordinary Americans know better.
"They have learned, from school, from work, from everyday life, that there is wider variation within each measured group than between measured groups." They understand that averages don't reliably describe individuals, "that it is irrational to discriminate according to race or religion or ethnic group, and that it is rational to judge individuals on their own merits."
Voters who knew that Blacks on average score lower on tests had no difficulty seeing that Barack Obama had the above-average intelligence required for the presidency.
Group differences don't undermine the case against racial discrimination. They undermine the case for racial quotas and preferences made by advocates of identity politics, who make the absurd argument that in a fair society, all groups would be represented in all categories in exactly identical proportions.
Those in need of facing the reality of Charles Murray's two truths are not ordinary Americans, but elites -- the corporate leaders, gentry liberal voters and human resources department lifers who cling desperately to the identity politics of Black Lives Matter organizers and the critical race theory hucksters.
They see individuals as inescapably defined by the groups in which they're born, and they argue that any statistical disparity is evidence of a systemic racism that can never be eradicated but must constantly be denounced. The result is the replacement of merit by racial quotas and preferences and the de-policing of high-crime areas and the nonprosecution of crimes until statistical differences disappear.
We're seeing these processes in operation already. The sharp rise in violent crime since George Floyd's death in May 2020 has ended about 2,000 additional Black lives. And the unprecedented increase in violent crime results in many more disadvantaged Black and Latino neighborhoods where, as Murray points out, high crime has made "many policy solutions inherently unrealistic."
Murray's own solutions may seem similarly unrealistic: Eliminate all racial quotas and preferences and their odious enforcement apparatuses, and reverse the increasingly unpopular de-policing policies imposed in so many cities during the past 13 months.
But as Murray warns the elites and others who resist facing reality and acknowledging his two truths about race in America, the alternative could be more fearsome: the spread of identity politics to the 60% of Americans defined as White. "If working-class and middle-class Whites adopt identity politics, disaster follows."
To prevent that, he urges liberals to embrace explicitly, and conservatives not claim a monopoly of, what he calls "the American creed" -- the idea that people are "the equals of anyone else -- equal before the law and possessing the same inherent dignity as anyone else," to be "judged on who they were as individuals, not by what social class they came from or how they worshipped God."
Not bad advice.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beyond_Freedom_and_Dignity
R we ‘rats in a skinner box or should we put ‘rats in a skinner box to find their cheese?
Inconvenient truths that are true. And that few dare to mutter.
I had some difficulty.
The emperor has no clothes -
Acknowledging this doesn’t mean you hate anyone. As a society I think we would be bettered served working within these parameters instead of playing pretend which leads us to where we are right now and worse. We need to quit trying to cram square pegs into round holes and then time and time again over years scratching our heads as to why they don’t fit.
But what if they don't? Their inevitable extinction. Isn't THAT a disaster, worse by orders of magnitude than whites adopting a common defense?
<< Murray’s own solutions may seem similarly unrealistic: Eliminate all racial quotas and preferences and their odious enforcement apparatuses, and reverse the increasingly unpopular de-policing policies imposed in so many cities during the past 13 months. >>
Seems sane and realistic to me.
I just ordered it. I navigated past the “pride” ads, the “pride” books to click on it and buy it, thus angering the the bezos individual who seems to be trying to change the world into his own image.
I disagree with this assertion; obama is a skillful mimic with dull normal IQ.
So the “economic disparity” is due to lower intelligence, extremely high rates of crime, and blaming the failures on Whitey?
Not Whitey’s fault.
Obama isn’t Black.
What we’re enduring now is the response from those at the losing end of the bell curve: They accept it as truth and simply won’t accept the ramifications of it (a lower standard of living, even behind recent immigrants to the US).
If Murray is correct, there is no way for these groups to coexist in peace; the different outcomes make the envy, hatred, and related crime inevitable.
Buildings mysteriously collapse. Affirmative action catching up with us?
The problem is worsened because those on the low end have few resident fathers to guicd them. 78% of black families have no father present. A stable family even if poor can develop good citizens.
Whites now are where blacks were when Moynihan sounded the no-father alarm back in the 60’s. The same thing will happen, or is happening, to white kids even if they have higher average intelligence.
Oh I think Obama has above average intelligence. But considering the average IQ is 100, that’s not saying much.
Anyone who's heard him speak without his teleprompter knows this isn't true.
“If working-class and middle-class Whites adopt identity politics, disaster follows.”
I’d like to ask Mr. Murray why identity politics is A-OK for every racial group except for Whites.
Do we Whites not have self-interests as well that need to be protected and defended - as is allowed for every other racial group?
CRT being forced down our children’s throats is a prime example of something that needs to be defended against in the interests of ourselves and our children.
Truer words never spoken.
As expected from an affirmative action beneficiary
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