On the old theories and the new ones - Patricia J. Williams in TLS:

‘In 1853, Joseph-Arthur, Comte de Gobineau published a tract entitled “Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races”, in which he argued that “history springs only from contact with the white races” and that miscegenation with “commoners” as well as with “yellow” and “black” races leads to the “demise of civilization”. Widely credited with popularizing the concept of the Aryan master race, Gobineau’s thoughts found purchase among pro-slavery Americans and, eventually, became an ideological cornerstone for the American Breeder’s Association, the American Eugenics Society and the Nazi party. His royalist assertions of elite white “bloodlines” have been enduringly influential in the United States.’

(…)

‘Hard scientific evidence contradicts the narrative. Yet the reason I find myself writing this review in 2021 is that lots of people still believe it, want to believe it, and remain committed to the disparagements such colonial conceptions invite. Little for them has changed since Gobineau’s day, and since the Victorian Francis Galton, who invented the word “eugenics” in the late 1880s, postulated that “there exists a sentiment, for the most part quite unreasonable, against the gradual extinction of an inferior race”.
The Bell Curve: Intelligence and class structure in American life, co-authored by Murray and Herrnstein, ignited an infamously bitter round of the so-called culture wars when it first appeared in 1994. While Herrnstein died shortly after publication, Murray continued to carry the torch, despite his theories being repeatedly debunked. (The most well-known refutation is probably Stephen Jay Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man, 1996.) Still Murray rises, every few years a new book, a new version of the same old narrative. He is a potent pundit whose convictions are spread gleefully by the Wall Street Journal and Fox News.
But Murray’s latest rehash, Facing Reality: Two truths about race in America, drops into the conversation at a particularly flammable moment. In brief, the American “reality” Murray presents is a construct of “race” as a category of unyielding genetic difference, a sealed box of capability, disposition and destiny. The first “truth” he abstracts from the box is that “American Whites, Blacks, Latinos, and Asians, as groups, have different means and distributions of cognitive ability”.’

(…)

‘Murray’s work is not really about biology and does not withstand scrutiny as such. His adventure began as an attack on the post-civil-rights era remedy of what he calls “aggressive affirmative action” in the US and his persistent aim has been to devalue the inclusion of African Americans in mainstream American society, whether in higher education, the professions or government service. His ideas have also been underwritten and promoted by right-wing and ultra-libertarian foundations such as the Manhattan Institute, the American Enterprise Institute and the Hoover Institution, which generally advocate shrinking all public spending, including in education. But Murray is not largely concerned with belt-tightening. He is specifically intent on proving differences between those received as white in American society and those perceived to be Black. In some of his books, he ranks Jews, women and “model minorities” as well, but there is always a singular drumbeat: that African Americans suffer from mental deficiencies that simply can’t be fixed. Be nice on an individual basis, he says, but collectively “they” are “different”.’

(…)

‘When I was first asked to write this review, I declined. I was reminded of Bertrand Russell’s eloquent response to an invitation to debate Oswald Mosley, the founder of the British Union of Fascists: It is not that I take exception to the general points made by you but that every ounce of my energy has been devoted to an active opposition to cruel bigotry, compulsive violence, and the sadistic persecution which has characterized the philosophy and practice of fascism. I feel obliged to say that the emotional universes we inhabit are so distinct, and in deepest ways opposed, that nothing fruitful or sincere could ever emerge from association between us … It is not out of any attempt to be rude that I say this but because of all that I value in human experience and human achievement.
I thought, too, of the Princeton genomics professor David Botstein’s denunciation of The Bell Curve as “so stupid that it is not rebuttable”. To decline seemed the better path to sanity.
My mind was changed by the florescence, especially after January’s attack on the Capitol, of references to “fear of white replacement”. The idea, a favourite of the ultra-right, has re-entered the mainstream, as expressed by Republican members of Congress, such as Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene and Scott Perry, and by popular television pundits including Tucker Carlson; it has been used to justify border walls and cages for migrants, as well as hate crimes and mass shootings. While the demographics of the US are indeed changing – forty years from now, those who are thought of as white today may be outnumbered by those who are thought not to be – we have been here before. In the first half of the twentieth century, “White Anglo-Saxons” felt at risk of being outnumbered by Italian, Greek, Armenian, Jewish, Russian, Latvian, Estonian and other Eastern European immigrants, who were not considered “white”. Then too people spoke of a “crisis”. But the siege mentality has taken a decidedly dark turn of late, focused on minority voters, imagined hordes of unsavoury “critical race theorists”, migrants and refugees.’ (…)

‘I decided to write the review because today the US is close to a kind of free enterprise civil war in which the very definition of criminality has been raced, as in the casually reiterated defamation that “blacks commit all the crimes”. This assertion often contrasts with wild rationalizations about a broad range of white criminality. According to a recent Reuters poll, for example, nearly half of Republicans believe that the attack on the Capitol was “largely a non-violent protest or the handiwork of left-wing activists ‘trying to make Trump look bad’”. Although she was later censured, Virginia State Senator Amanda Chase described the people who stormed the Capitol – and who beat and injured at least 140 police officers, defecated in the halls, broke into offices and stole files and computers – as “patriots”. While conceding “some acts of vandalism”, Representative Andrew Clyde minimized the siege which cost five people their lives: “You know, if you didn’t know the TV footage was from January the 6th, you would actually think it was a normal tourist visit”.
My goal here is not to attempt yet another refutation of Murray’s theories. (For that, there’s Troy Duster’s Backdoor to Eugenics, 2003; as well as Harriet Washington’s A Terrible Thing to Waste: Environmental racism and its assault on the American mind, 2019.) Instead, I will point out the most dangerous bits of Murray’s political agenda, while providing more grounded bibliographical sources – before they disappear, given the sudden proliferation of state laws suppressing the teaching of anti-racism or other “controversial” topics. Since January this year, twenty-nine states have proposed bills to restrict or ban such teaching; nine have enacted legislation to that effect.’

(…)

‘Under slavery it was illegal to teach slaves to read. Under Jim Crow, Black students were legally segregated with little access to public resources. Under today’s “colour-blind” regimes, de facto segregation is frequently enforced by ostensibly “race-neutral” laws against “boundary-hopping” between school districts. One of the saddest uses of the legal system in our post-civil rights era is in cases where poor, almost always Black, parents are sued or jailed for lying about their address in order to send their child to a well-resourced school in a better (almost always whiter) neighbourhood. The charge is called “theft of education”. Consider the case of Kelley Williams-Bolar, who used her father’s address in a nearby suburb to move her children from a dilapidated school in Akron that met only four of Ohio’s educational standards to one that exceeded all twenty-six of the guidelines. The school hired investigators and found that the children were living with their grandfather only five days a week, returning to their mother on weekends. In 2011, Williams-Bolar and her father were charged with felonies: falsification of records and theft of public education. She was given two five-year jail terms, suspended; she ended up serving nine days in jail, plus three years of probation and eighty hours of community service.’

(…)

‘He ignores how culturally specific IQ tests are, yet also how ungoverned and methodologically incommensurable. (This incoherence is the topic of Aaron Panofsky’s detailed study, Misbehaving Science: Controversy and the development of behavior genetics, 2014.) He ignores the way that international comparisons unsettle some of his geneticized stereotypes. In 2010, for example, Israel’s national IQ, not including the West Bank, was lower than that of the state of Mississippi, and as of 2019, Mongolia’s was higher than Sweden’s. He ignores the fact that “European” Americans score lower than most Europeans in Europe. He does not consider that high-scoring China tests only a well-chosen 500,000 of its billion plus citizens, while the much smaller US tests 1.5 million. Finally, he dismisses the documented effects of early childhood enrichment programmes and scoffs at the disempowering effects of stigma.
Murray invokes data: “Africans, at 13 percent of the population accounted for only 3.6 percent of CEOs, 3.7 percent of physical scientists, 4.4 percent of civil engineers, 5.1 percent of physicians and 5.2 percent of lawyers”. But, contemplating these figures, “your inferences could be completely wrong” unless you take into account how much dumber Blacks are: in Murray’s opinion, the numbers showoverrepresentation because minorities only “get through” – he always uses the language of contaminants – the educational pipeline because of “preferential treatment”. Hence, there ought, really, to be fewer. (For more about how wrong, and politically subsidized, Murray’s manipulation of such data is, there is Angela Saini’s excellent Superior: The return of race science, 2020.)’

(…)

‘Lest there be any doubt about what Murray is vaunting, consider the recent lawsuit against the National Football League for damages suffered by players because of the NFL’s active denial and suppression of data linking concussion and long-term brain damage, including dementia. Because the lawsuit joined the claims of thousands of former players, the litigation resulted in a billion-dollar settlement. But, as recently reported by the Associated Press, distribution of the award has run into problems: the NFL “has insisted on using a scoring algorithm on the dementia testing that assumes Black men start with lower cognitive skills. They must therefore score much lower than whites to show enough mental decline to win an award”. The practice, overlooked until 2018, has rendered Black former players less likely to qualify for compensation. In May this year, a petition signed by more than 50,000 former players and supporters asked the court to make public the metrics by which payouts were being allocated. Most importantly, the petition demanded an end to the practice of “race norming”, a broad medical practice in America (and elsewhere), where some treatments continue to rely on uninterrogated, centuries-old assumptions. (For a dissection of one such myth, see Lundy Braun’s recent Breathing Race into the Machine: The surprising career of the spirometer, from plantation to genetics, which shows how beliefs about the superior lung capacity of white people have led to the automated “race correction” of pulmonary readings.)’

(…)

‘For one thing, the US is still a majority white nation in which most crimes are committed by whites, even if there are disproportions in rates of who is arrested and convicted. But let’s begin with the frame: an invitation into a normative “White” brain imaginatively constructed as floating through a “typical” “lived” “multiracial” experience. The scene is, in fact, atypical for most white Americans. According to the Brookings Institute, the average white resident of metropolitan America lives in a neighbourhood that is 71 per cent white, 8 per cent Black, 12 per cent Latino or Hispanic, with a statistically unclear percentage of Asians and “others”. Even this is misleading when one takes into consideration the further lack of contact imposed by racial separations that are trackable block by block, job by job, school by school and building by building.
But Murray resents any suggestion that he has misapprehended things: “Blacks, constituting 13 percent of the population, are telling Whites, 60 percent of the population, that they are racist, bad people, the cause of Blacks’ problems, and they had better change their ways or else”. He casts as “victims” those journalists and academics who (like himself) have been criticized for racist or sexist commentary. To those mirrors of himself, he counsels “bravery” in resisting “woke culture” while warning that “new ideologies of the far left are akin to the Red Guards of Mao’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, and they are coming for all of us”. The culture wars into which we have all been co-opted are unwinnable when apostasy is at stake rather than good faith. As David Botstein warned, beliefs that are profoundly wrong yet widely held may add up to an “unrebuttable” stupidity.

For one thing, the US is still a majority white nation in which most crimes are committed by whites, even if there are disproportions in rates of who is arrested and convicted. But let’s begin with the frame: an invitation into a normative “White” brain imaginatively constructed as floating through a “typical” “lived” “multiracial” experience. The scene is, in fact, atypical for most white Americans. According to the Brookings Institute, the average white resident of metropolitan America lives in a neighbourhood that is 71 per cent white, 8 per cent Black, 12 per cent Latino or Hispanic, with a statistically unclear percentage of Asians and “others”. Even this is misleading when one takes into consideration the further lack of contact imposed by racial separations that are trackable block by block, job by job, school by school and building by building.
But Murray resents any suggestion that he has misapprehended things: “Blacks, constituting 13 percent of the population, are telling Whites, 60 percent of the population, that they are racist, bad people, the cause of Blacks’ problems, and they had better change their ways or else”. He casts as “victims” those journalists and academics who (like himself) have been criticized for racist or sexist commentary. To those mirrors of himself, he counsels “bravery” in resisting “woke culture” while warning that “new ideologies of the far left are akin to the Red Guards of Mao’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, and they are coming for all of us”. The culture wars into which we have all been co-opted are unwinnable when apostasy is at stake rather than good faith. As David Botstein warned, beliefs that are profoundly wrong yet widely held may add up to an “unrebuttable” stupidity.
So here we have it: a book, published in 2021 that could have been written in 1921, or 1821. A book that forces the reader to confront the basics of white supremacy and take a stand.’

Read the article here.

So much for progress, it could have been written in 1821.

In countries like the Netherlands more or less the same theories --- although usually aired less eloquently – can be heard about Moroccans or Muslims, add some terrorism accusations to spice it up, and add the religion. ‘I have nothing against the individual, it’s their religion.’

This review is another proof how stupid magic tricks with data are, to make your point.
This group is overrepresented there, they must extremely intelligent.
That group is overrepresented there, they must be extremely criminal.

The popularity of these outdated and ugly theories has two major grounds.
The desire to get rid of shame and guilt because of abhorrent injustice in the past and the present. (It’s their own fault.)

The desire to camouflage the nothingness of the own existence, ‘I’m nothing but at least I’m part of the chosen ones, the whites, the Europeans.’

There is only thing that can be said about the so-called chosen people: they are related to Jesus Christ. It’s no fun to be a grandniece of the Lord.