Saturday, July 3, 2021

Why do so Many White Intellectuals Infantilize Black People?

John McWhorter, "WHY CHARLES MURRAY'S NEW BOOK IS HIS WEAKEST
.. despite that he is 1) brilliant and 2) not a bigot.
"
I come not to bury Charles Murray, but not to praise him, either.

He has a new book out, Facing Reality. It’s a doozy.

His books have a way of being doozies, going up against ideas sacred to the American intelligentsia on race as well as class.

He is also one of America’s most brilliant thinkers.

To many familiar with Murray’s work, I have already revealed myself as a “racist” in engaging his work at all, and/or not calling him one.

However, Murray’s work is too carefully reasoned and too deeply founded on scholarly sources to be dismissed as “racist,” except by people whose definition of “racist” is “That which people of the black American race don’t like for any reason.”

Rather: I salute Murray’s brilliance while being disturbed by many of his arguments. What many will call racism is what I call being able to walk and chew gum at the same time.

* * *

Yet Facing Reality is seriously disturbing. Murray gives a great deal of evidence for two points. One is that black people aren’t, on the average, as intelligent as other people. The other is that black people in America are more violent than others.

Those who on some level celebrate the latter as black people getting back at the white man in the only way they can, should know that the facts don’t lend themselves to that vigilante justice analysis. More specifically, black people kill each other more than members of other groups kill each other.

I find the violence point relatively unsurprising. Murray stays agnostic as to what the cause of it is; he proposes no genetic analysis, for example. And really, let’s try this. In the 1960s, a new and powerful fashion in black thought, inherited from the general countercultural mood, rejects championing assimilation to proposing that opposition to whiteness is the soul of blackness. Meanwhile, white leftists encourage as many poor black women as possible to go on welfare, hoping to bankrupt the government and inaugurate a fairer America. Soon, being on welfare in poor black communities is a new normal – hardly the usual, but so common that people grow up seeing not working for a living as ordinary. Then at this same time, a new War on Drugs gave poor black men a way of making half of a living by selling drugs on the black market, amidst a violent culture of gangland turf-policing. This feels more natural to them than it would have to their fathers because 1) the new mood sanctions dismissing traditional values as those of a “chump,” 2) it no longer feels alien to eschew legal employment, and 3) the Drug War helps make it that most boys in such neighborhoods grow up without fathers anyway.

The question might be just how black men amidst these changes would not have embraced violence in a new way.

* * *

The point about intelligence, however, is tough reading. Many will try the usual arguments – that race is a fiction (but while there are gray zones, humans do divide into delineable races genetically), that all races have a range from genuises on down (but the issue is that some races have more geniuses than others), that intelligence tests are “biased” somehow (but no one will specify just how, and this sort of bias is decades gone now).

The data, unless Murray is holding back reams of data with opposite results, cut brutally through all of this. It isn’t that black people are on the bottom on one big test in one big study, but that a certain order of achievement manifests itself in one study after another with relentless and depressing regularity. Asians on top, then come the whites, then Latinos, and then black people.

People will insist that none of this has anything to do with intelligence, but one thing cannot be denied – whatever it signifies, black people have a big problem performing on intelligence tests. The consistency of the results, if it is unconnected to intelligence, is clearly connected to something, or the results wouldn’t be so damnedly consistent.

I suspect, in my gut, that the issue is cultural, for reasons I discussed here. Abstract tests are a highly artificial thing, requiring a truly weird – or WEIRD, in the sense of Professor Henrich – way of thinking. Black American culture may be less consonant with that way of approaching things than white or Asian culture, and a fundamental sense of that way of approaching things as “not us,” which would have been encouraged amidst that oppositional mood I mentioned, could subtly discourage black kids from mastering the knack of jumping through the hoop.

I openly admit, though, that this is also the way I hope it is, and that’s not science. And Murray’s point is that this lower performance on tests suggests lesser cognitive ability, with all intraracial variation acknowledged.

Here is where most who are likely to know of Murray and the book will just sniff “racist” and walk on. But whether black people’s consistently lower placement on these tests is due to the intelligence factor g or to subtle cultural resistance to demonstrating it, the idea that it makes you a bigot to spell out this data is incoherent.

That is, many will suppose that either the data must be wrong – but without showing how – or that Murray shouldn’t have aired it because airing something that shows black people in a bad light “is racist.” As if we are the only group of humans in the world with only positive cultural traits? If the answer to all of this is an eye-roll and a cluck of the tongue, then there has been no answer.

* * *

Yet it’s reasonable to ask of Murray: Why are you airing this information? To what end? And it’s here that I find Facing Reality weak.

Charles Murray knows how to make a point. Anyone in the line of fire to the extent that he has been makes sure to argue on a lawyerly level – he anticipates every possible counterargument, refuses to raise his voice, acknowledges historical factors. Facing Reality’s footnotes are almost a book in themselves, for example – and yet, only cover the six chapters laying out the data.

Murray explains why the data he has given us are significant in the final chapter, but it is a mere hiccup compared to the others, and is backed by no footnotes at all. We read the first six chapters and internally ask, “Okay. Let’s say these things are true. What now?” and Murray has exactly three observations. None are up to his standard.

One is that Affirmative Action too often puts semicompetent people in government jobs. However, I have a hard time seeing this as precisely a national tragedy, and would be more moved to consider otherwise if Murray provided any data. Instead, he tosses off the point as if he were answering a question after a talk.

Another point is that identity politics – as in racial set-asides and a tacit media conspiracy to keep disproportionate rates of black crime under wraps – is about to create a revolutionarily inclined white identity that will plunge America into a race war. I know that many find that easy to imagine after what happened at the Capitol last January and reading about groups like QAnon. It also makes for a good editorial. But again, here Murray is just guessing. We must eliminate Affirmative Action to ward off a transnational mob of yahoos of a sort we have been warned about endlessly for the past twenty years – anybody remember this book making the same argument and the attention it got for bit 15-plus years ago? -- whipped up into a bizarre stunt by an unprecedentedly unqualified brute of a President who is now safely out of office? This is an argument to which one must bring one’s proverbial A-game. Murray brings his C-game here at best, despite having brought his A-game for the past 100 pages.

Finally, Murray urges that we open up to thinking of black people as less intelligent – on the average, mind you, but still – but approach each black person as an individual. To wit, one is to be as ready for a black person to be brilliant as we are for an Asian or white one to be, despite a baseline assumption that black people are generally less intell…

See how this doesn’t work? It’s a homily – the way we would like it to be even though it never will. “Black people aren’t as smart. But this one might be a genius!” A brave new world indeed. Of course, the idea is that there are other ways of being valuable to a society than braininess, and our job is to remember – perhaps on the other side of that doily with Black People Can Be Geniuses! on it – that people can also be brilliant artists, athletes, and such, that empathy is valuable, that maybe we can even start celebrating not just grit but “spunk” … (?). Smart’s Not The Only Good Thing!

Aw. I have known good people who truly believe in this argument, but it doesn’t go through for me. This is why: in the end, Murray avoids stating too directly what the obvious implication of his argument is. He thinks that we need to accept an America in which black people are rarely encountered in jobs requiring serious smarts. We need to accept an America in which almost no black people are physicists or other practitioners in STEM, have top-level jobs in government, or are admitted to top-level graduate programs at all. Black people will invent little, there will be many fewer black doctors and lawyers, and many fewer black experts in, well, anything considered really intellectually challenging.

In other words, Murray thinks – although I doubt he conceives of it in just this way – that beyond entertainment and sports, we need to go back to the level of achievement that American society allowed black people in roughly 1960 — except now, we are to consider this level of participation the best black people can do anyway.

We don’t need to consider only how this sounds as the counsel of a white person. This article interviews a black valedictorian recounting being told by black kids that advanced placement classes are “for white kids.” Or, watch here how gruesome it is to see a black schoolteacher openly espousing the idea that black people aren’t analytical thinkers as her colleagues nod warmly.

Now, her idea is that black people are “communal” or “holistic” thinkers and that this is the equal of being an analytic thinker. But most of us know damned well that “analytic” thought – as in abstraction, detachment, separating the head from the heart – is, well, intelligence. This black person, in her soul-deep suspicion of “whiteness,” buys in to the idea that black people aren’t supposed to be smart in the way that those white people are.

Murray’s book is arguing that we need to agree with her.


Even as someone who tries very hard to put myself into other people’s heads, to imagine ways of seeing things beyond what is congenial to me, I would have to work very hard to come up with a way of accepting that world as the one we need to seek. I’m also afraid that Murray has not worked terribly hard to convince someone like me of the wisdom of his counsel.

Maybe he just feels that the facts are what they are, that their implications for society are what they are, that strong people face unpleasant truths, and that having done his job, he wishes us our best.

Okay. But while I will not join the bandwagon of people who can see nothing but “racism” in his presentation, neither will I join the other bandwagon cheering that “somebody needed to finally say it” and leaving it there.

If “it” is that black people should be satisfied with getting little further than being America’s middle managers, grunt workers, athletes and singers, then I’m not with it. I dearly hope we can do better.
The question McWhorter asks, "What are Murray's motives?" is answered in the video above (@5:42).

The real problem with Murray's book is that it needs reframing as a discussion between the virtues and defects of IQ AND AQ (Athletic Quotient) measures... because the probability of Human Survival (pS) pS=IQ*AQ. 

32 comments:

  1. Infantilization of white supremacists needs to stop. (excerpt) America does not take its white supremacy seriously enough. And it is destroying us. America does not take its white supremacy seriously enough. And it is destroying us. ... We have been taught over the last four years to ridicule the Trump administration. And rightfully so, because it, at times, has been downright hilarious. But in the process, we have forgotten one crucial thing: just because someone appears dumb does not mean they're stupid. By incessantly mocking Trump, America has come to infantilize his supporters. "If bumbling orange man with tiny hands and toupee so dumb, then how his supporters commit domestic terrorism?"

    The dismissal of Trump supporters and the white supremacy that fuels them is not everyday Twitter comedians' fault, though. It is the very system of ideals we are all a part of. It must change, and quickly. Otherwise, who knows what our next January 6 event could be.

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  2. The same idiots seem to infantilize everyone! I wonder why....must be a psych thing. :)

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  3. Charles Murray (in addition to believing Black people are genetically less intelligent) also downplays the Capitol insurrection by claiming they were just playing (LARPers)?

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  4. Charles Murray also believes Black people are athletically and physically genetically superior to whites. Can he join your New Black Panther Movement?

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  5. I'm not the leader of the New Black Panthers. Also, "Members of the original Black Panther Party have insisted that the newer party is not legitimate and there is no new Black Panther Party". In any case, I very seriously doubt they'd accept (as a member) a White man who uses scientific racism to promote the brute caricature.

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  6. The heritability of IQ and AQ is scientific racism? Somebody better tell the Scientists so that they can shut these studies down in the true neo-liberal cancel culture traditions of "free speech" and "scientific inquiry".

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  7. ...for there are no "real" brutes, predators, or parasites in nature and any genetic linkage to such behaviours are reductionistic scientific caricatures. ;)

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  8. Yes. When the purpose of a "study" is to "support or justify racism (racial discrimination), racial inferiority, or racial superiority". Which clearly is the case re Charles Murray. Hence your defense of the totally racist brute caricature.

    Modern scientific consensus rejects this view as being irreconcilable with modern genetic research ... Since the second half of the 20th century, scientific racism has been criticized as obsolete and discredited, yet has persistently been used to support or validate racist world-views, based upon belief in the existence and significance of racial categories and a hierarchy of superior and inferior races.

    After the end of World War II, scientific racism in theory and action was formally denounced, especially in UNESCO's early antiracist statement "The Race Question" (1950): "The biological fact of race and the myth of 'race' should be distinguished. For all practical social purposes 'race' is not so much a biological phenomenon as a social myth.

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  9. "The biological "fact" of race" has no genetic origins? Who knew?

    So where do "biological facts" originate? Language?

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  10. You're problem is that your trying to assert false motives to Murray, not that Murray's even slightly wrong. And your self-mind imparted motives are false.

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  11. The biological "fact" of race isn't a fact. That is why "fact" is in quotes.

    Do Races Differ? Not Really, Genes Show. (excerpt) Scientists have long suspected that the racial categories recognized by society are not reflected on the genetic level. But the more closely that researchers examine the human genome ... the more most of them are convinced that the standard labels used to distinguish people by "race" have little or no biological meaning. ...

    "Race is a social concept, not a scientific one", said Dr. J. Craig Venter, head of the Celera Genomics Corporation in Rockville MD. ... Dr. Venter and scientists at the National Institutes of Health recently announced that they had put together a draft of the entire sequence of the human genome, and the researchers had unanimously declared, there is only one race -- the human race. [NYT 8/22/2000].

    I ascribe to Murray his true motives. Which are Conservatism (government should only help rich people get richer) and racism. Murray isn't slightly wrong. He's bigly wrong.

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  12. lol! You Lefties do love your semantics. It's too bad that regardless of the semantics used, "race" or "ethnicity", the genealogical hereditary implications and consequences are all still very real. Whether it applies to diseases like breast cancer or sickle cell anemia, it matters not. It's all in the genes. :)

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  13. ...else the wouldn't be advised... "People who carry the sickle cell gene can seek genetic counseling before pregnancy to discuss options."

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  14. Your linguistic "essentialism" is really quite entertaining.

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  15. No, I dearly detest the new reactionary racism of the practitioners of Identity politics (see my new post today).

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  16. There are only two groups that Trump appeals to? Are you saying that there are only two groups that LBGTQ+ appeal to? Men and Women? lol!

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  17. Only the Left plays Identity politics. The Right doesn't know the rules, which is why the Left needs to invent their categories for them (as the Atlantic article's author does).

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  18. LOL! The Right is the MASTER of White Identity politics. Why republicans still support Dotard. Also why the right supports the bigly lie re election theft. They're using it to suppress the minority vote :P

    White Identity Politics: In 1998, political scientists Jeffrey Kaplan and Leonard Weinberg predicted that, by the late 20th-century, a "Euro-American radical right" would promote a trans-national white identity politics, which would invoke populist grievance narratives and encourage hostility against non-white peoples and multiculturalism. In the United States, mainstream news has identified Donald Trump's presidency as a signal of increasing and widespread utilization of white identity politics within the Republican Party and political landscape. Journalists Michael Scherer and David Smith have reported on its development since the mid-2010s.

    ... During the Democratic primaries, presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg publicly warned that the president and his administration were using white identity politics, which he said was the most divisive form of identity politics. ... Columnist Ross Douthat has argued that it has been important to American politics since the Richard Nixon-era of the Republican Party, and historian Nell Irvin Painter has analyzed Eric Kaufmann's thesis that the phenomenon is caused by immigration-derived racial diversity, which reduces the white majority, and an "anti-majority adversary culture". Writing in Vox, political commentator Ezra Klein believes that demographic change has fueled the emergence of white identity politics.

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  19. The republican party is the White Identity party. The White Identity candidate in the last two elections, Donald tRump, ran as a republican. The Democratic Party embraces racial diversity. You belong to the party that says the president and VP have to be White males. Kamala Harris is getting a lot of the same racist hate that was directed at Barack Obama. As well as much of the same misogynistic hate that was directed at Hillary Clinton.

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  20. ...invented by Democrats. lol! Alan Keyes for President in 2024!

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  21. Democrats didn't invent republican hate. It's your culture. As you admit (re your baloney re the "cultural genocide" of the White working class). Alan Keyes wasn't a choice in the CPAC straw poll. Dotard Donald came in first with Ron DeSantis a distant second (two White males). Alan Keyes got no votes. Alan Keyes will not run in 2024.

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  22. Says you. I voted for him in for the US Senate once. I'd vote him for President in a heartbeat. Alan Keyes is the biggest White Nationalist going! He's much whiter than el Donaldo.

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  23. Alan Keyes will never be the republican presidential nominee. And you voted for Dotard in a heartbeat. Because he shares your White Supremacist worldview. Keyes is obviously "one of the good ones"... in your opinion. FYI, thinking there are some "good ones" doesn't mean you aren't a racist. It means you absolutely are a racist.

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  24. lol! Remember what Biden said about Obama...

    "I mean, you've got the first sort of mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy. I mean, that's a story-book, man," Biden said.

    That's a story book, man!

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  25. Tell your racist White Supremacist *presnit to "bite me"!

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  26. Joe Biden "This is a guy who's come along in a way that's captured the imagination of the country in a way that no one else has. That was the point of everything I was saying".

    Jesse Jackson: "It was a gaffe. It was not an intentional racially pejorative statement. It could be interpreted that way, but that's not what he meant". Link.

    A White Supremacist would agree to 4 years as second fiddle to a Black man? A White Supremacist would select a Black woman as his VP? Dotard Donald couldn't even select a Black man as the winner of his reality teevee show competition.

    The president allegedly refused to let Kwame Jackson win the show because of his race and sexual orientation. (excerpt) "There's no way I can let this Black f*g win", Trump is alleged to have said. Jackson, who has since gone on to be a commentator for CNN and MSNBC, confirmed to Vanity Fair that he overheard such comments.

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  27. Jesse Jackson is your designated "Magical Negro" handing out "Get out of Racism" cards today? LOL!

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