“Facing Reality: Two Truths about Race in America” is a new book by Charles Murray. Book review by Steve Sailer.
The two realities that are fundamental to understanding the headlines of 2021 are that, on average, blacks and (to a lesser extent) Hispanics are more crime-prone and less smart than whites (much less Asians).
Lately, though, these facts seem inconceivable to most conformist Americans. Still, lying is bad for the soul. So is losing because you are too cowardly to tell the truth. Murray explains:
I am also aware of a paradox: I want America to return to the ideal of treating people as individuals, so I have to write a book that treats Americans as groups. But there’s no way around it. Those of us who want to defend the American creed have been unwilling to say openly that races have significant group differences. Since we have been unwilling to say that, we have been defenseless against claims that racism is to blame for unequal outcomes. What else could it be? We have been afraid to answer candidly.
In his section on IQ trends since The Bell Curve 27 years ago, Murray briefly notes the decline of the once-dominant centrists who assumed that any gaps between whites and blacks could be eliminated with whatever their favorite one weird trick was. In his 1984 book, Losing Ground, the libertarian Murray himself wrote:
I suggest that when we give such parents vouchers, we will observe substantial convergence of black and white test scores in a single generation.
But by The Bell Curve a decade later, Murray and coauthor Richard J. Herrnstein had concluded that IQ gaps were “intractable.”
More than a quarter of a century afterward, not much evidence has since emerged against that conclusion. Although Murray argues in Facing Reality that the white-black IQ difference might have fallen from over fifteen points in the past to just twelve points during the thirty years (he estimates from federal NAEP test scores over the last decade that on an IQ scale with the national average at 100, blacks average 91, Latinos 94, whites 103, and Asians 108), the narrowing seems to have stopped in the later 1980s.
Where the debate is now:
Today, after 55 years of vast spending to eliminate the race gap on tests, the optimistic centrist education reformers of the “All We Have To Do Is Implement My Favorite Panacea” school are finally out of fashion, leaving Ibram X. Kendi and Charles Murray as the last men standing.
One or the other must be right: either Murray (blacks, unfortunately, have problems because they tend to be less smart and more violent) or Kendi (any disparities demonstrate that whites are evil and therefore must pay).
To you or me, this might seem like an unfair fight: Murray is one of the great public intellectuals of my lifetime, while Kendi barely broke 1000 on his SAT.
But, The Establishment no longer really believes that race gaps can be reduced. Instead, the new conventional wisdom is Kendi’s: Tests must be abolished. This will make the problems caused by lower black intelligence go away for Underpants Gnomes reasons. As Murray explains:
The activists say that the tests are worthless — products of White privilege, designed to perpetuate White privilege. In their minds, they don’t need evidence of bias; the existence of lower mean scores for Africans and Latins is in itself irrefutable evidence of bias because everyone knows there are no race differences in intelligence. This is argued with all the passion and conviction that true believers bring to their evangelism. It does not reflect reality.
Violence by race in the US:
Hispanics were arrested for violence about 2.7 times as often as whites, while blacks were arrested almost ten times as much.
How about murder, the most diligently investigated of all crimes?
Latinos are arrested for murder about five times more often per capita than whites, while blacks are about twenty times more likely than whites to be arrested for murder.
Could this extraordinary ratio be due to police bias? Hardly. The cops arresting an innocent black man for a murder actually committed by an evil white sounds to reporters like a Pulitzer Prize-winning story and a seven-figure deal for the movie rights.
The Hispanic murder rate is atrocious, but, despite roughly equal levels of poverty, the black murder rate is still four times worse. It seems reasonable to me to ask blacks to cut their murder rate by 75 percent, down to the Latino level. Yet, apparently, nobody else does. Instead, The Establishment has taken to apologizing to blacks for their not being above the law.
Keep in mind that the actual black-to-white murder ratio is likely somewhat worse than 20 to 1 because blacks have more of a culture of “snitches get stitches,” and thus in the black parts of town a lower percentage of murders are cleared by the cops.
Systematic racism, explained. The geneticists are on the verge of figuring it all out. The left’s going to have some explaining to do in a decade or two.
