America Is Not a Racist Country
Editor's Note
Charles Murray has been one of this country’s most controversial public intellectuals ever since the publication of The Bell Curve in 1994. For his open discussion of apparent differences across population groups, Murray has been dismissed as a ‘racist’ and a ‘pseudoscientist’ by much of polite society. He argues, however, that these conversations are essential to debunking the left-wing narrative that America is “systemically racist” — at once the explanation for any difference in group outcomes and the justification for correction by group quotas. Whatever one thinks of Murray’s position, it is a carefully considered and potentially valuable insight into one of the most pressing challenges facing our country today: how we respond to the charge of “systemic racism.” For that alone, he is well worth listening to. Tom recently spoke with Dr. Murray about college admissions, merit vs. quotas, the future of America, and more. A transcript of their conversation follows; it has been edited for length and clarity.
Tom Klingenstein: Charles Murray is a public policy analyst who has written more than a dozen books on welfare policy, education, libertarianism, the history of great human accomplishment, and, most famously (or infamously), the role that IQ has played in reshaping America’s social structure. Facing Reality is his most recent book. In Facing Reality Dr. Murray argues that we must face up to two inconvenient facts: that black Americans commit much more crime than other groups; and that, as a group, they score lower IQs, which leads to under-performance in school and the workplace.
Today, we shall discuss this second claim, which is by far the most controversial aspect of Facing Reality. Dr. Murray believes that the black-white IQ gap is caused by a combination of environmental and genetic factors, but he argues that knowing the exact cause is irrelevant since genes (and, in this case, culture) are intractable. The gap has endured for at least the last 40 years, and we have no reason to think that will change in the near future. He says we must accept the fact that black Americans will be underrepresented in roles that require high levels of cognitive ability. And he believes that this must be talked about, for reasons we shall discuss. His bottom line: If we don’t talk about IQ differences, we risk losing America as we know it.
Welcome, Charles. I am pleased to be able to talk with you.
Charles Murray: It is my pleasure.
Tom: Let’s begin by running through a few technical objections to your work. First, some of your critics say that IQ doesn’t really measure anything meaningful.
Charles: Patently untrue. Of all the psychological constructs we have there is only one that has been demonstrated to have predictive validity for a range of important outcomes over and over and over again. IQ has important relationships to employment, to welfare, the likelihood of having a baby out of wedlock. And I could keep going.
Tom: Another objection: Some say there is no such thing as race, that it is merely a social construct.
Charles: Ever since the genome has been sequenced, we’ve learned a couple of things. Yes, there are admixtures among people who are self-defined as black and white and Asian. Yes, there are, but overwhelmingly people are in one of the major five continental groups: Asian, European, Sub-Saharan African, and so forth. And furthermore, we have learned that these populations are genetically distinctive, such that using nothing but genetic material you can predict with 99.95% accuracy what their self-identified race is. Now, if you can do that, you have something biological going on that transcends any kind of social construct.
Tom: You talk about “populations,” not races.
Charles: It’s the word that’s used now by geneticists, and I’m sympathetic with the idea that “race” does carry a lot of baggage. Now, is it true that the major continental population groups do correspond to common understandings of race? Yes, they do. But it is also true that population is a much more flexible term. Using the word “population” is a lot easier than trying to distinguish between ethnicity and race. So population is a convenience. Is it a euphemism? Yes, but it’s a benign euphemism.
Tom: Another common objection is that IQ tests are biased against black people, either because the tests use terms with which they are not familiar or because they subtly resist the test.
Charles: Yes, some people claim that blacks don’t want to do well in the test because they’ll be doing what “The Man” wants them to do. There’s actually a very interesting way to test that. It turns out that reaction time is significantly related to IQ. You have a button on a panel and another button beside a light a foot or so away. When the light blinks you move your finger from one button to the other. Now you have two measures: the time it takes for your finger to leave the home button, which is the reaction time, and then the time it takes you to reach the other button, which is the movement time. There’s usually no race difference in movement time. Sometimes blacks do it faster than whites. Insofar as there is a racial difference it favors blacks. Reaction time, on the other hand, favors whites.
So if you’re talking about blacks’ resistance to taking the test, how can it be that they are slower on reaction time but do well on movement time? That’s an example, but the main point is that the whole issue of test bias has been subjected to exhaustive examination. The acid test here is whether the black-white difference is smaller on items that have no cultural content versus items that do have cultural content. The answer is “no.” The black-white difference is actually greater on a test that consists of non-cultural content.
Tom: Does black IQ over-predict performance?
Charles: That’s another reason for believing the tests are not biased against blacks. If a test is, in fact, biased against a group, the test will under-predict the performance of that group. That never, ever happens with blacks.. Over-prediction happens sometimes.
Tom: So, if the tests over-predict black performance, say, in freshman year GPA, that sounds like black students are not performing up to their capacity. If so, then the gap between what the SAT predicts and the actual performance could be closed.
Charles: Yes. But I should emphasize that SAT scores sometimes over-predict black performance, but not always. There is still considerable doubt about whether over-prediction should be considered the norm. And I would say that overprediction on the SAT is very possibly attributable to the ways in which black students are treated differently from white ones by the professors.
Tom: You mean less is demanded of the black students?
Charles: Yes.
How to Speak About the Unspeakable
Tom: Now back to your book. Conservatives, with the exception of a handful of black conservative intellectuals, have not engaged with Facing Reality.
Charles: Conservatives are just as unhappy talking about race as people on the Left. Even when we talk in private, they really hate the idea of talking about race and IQ because they worry whether acknowledging a difference means they are racist. It amounts to a kind of psychological disorder.
Tom: White guilt?
Charles: That’s a great deal of it.
Tom: Now, why do you think you don’t have white guilt—assuming you don’t?
Charles: What may distinguish me from others is that I don’t think talking about race and IQ need be a big deal. If we treat people as individuals, then we don’t have to think about group means or averages. All you have to do is evaluate a black person, or any person, as an individual. There are brilliant black intellectuals in every challenging field. The problem is that people find it very difficult to think in terms of overlapping frequency distributions instead of differences in means.
Tom: That’s, of course, one of the reasons people use for not wanting to talk about race and IQ at all. Most people stereotype, they say. If you tell people that blacks as a group are not as intelligent as whites, then they interpret this to mean that all blacks are less intelligent than all whites.
Charles: But it does not have to be this way. When I applied to Harvard in 1961, we were forbidden to attach pictures to our application, and we were told not to mention our race or ethnicity in our essays. Harvard was trying to admit everybody under the same standards. There weren’t a lot of black students in Harvard in 1961, but they were an extremely smart set of kids. And in fact, my initial assumption when I ran into one of the black students was, He’s probably smarter than I am, because I figured he’d had a tougher road than I had to get there.
Tom: Today, if Harvard accepted applicants on a strictly meritocratic basis, black students would be less than 1% of Harvard’s student body. (It was probably something like that in your day as well.) But today, unlike then, the elite — conservatives included — can’t abide such a low percentage.
Charles: True, but I think that ordinary Americans are far less sensitive to black-white differences than overeducated intellectuals like you and me.
Tom: As I understand it, you really stopped speaking about race and IQ after The Bell Curve. Now you’ve returned to the subject. How come?
Charles: The reason I stopped was very simple. The Bell Curve’s subtitle was “intelligence and class structure in American life.” My co-author Richard Herrnstein and I argued that a profound change had occurred in America’s social structure because of the increasing value of IQ in the marketplace and the concentration of high-IQ people in relatively few elite colleges. I stopped talking about race and IQ because I didn’t want to lend any more fire to the accusation that The Bell Curve is the book that tries to prove that blacks are genetically inferior to whites.
It’s also the case that in the early 2000s and the last half of the 1990s black-white relationships were relatively good, and I didn’t feel that I had to talk about it. But in 2020 there came the Black Lives Matter movement, and wokism exploded. I said to myself at this point, Come on, you cannot call us a systemically racist society. Blacks were a large portion of the prison population not because of racism but because blacks commit violent crimes at 10 or 12 times the rate that whites do. So too, the lack of representation of blacks in, say, high tech companies is not a function of white racism and white privilege, but merely the expression of patterns in cognitive ability among different populations.
America was undergoing a major attempt to ignore reality, which was devastating the country. This, of course, is why the book is called Facing Reality.
Tom: What changed? Why do you now think we must talk about race and IQ?
Charles: Because of the charge, of recent vintage, that America is systemically racist. If we do not answer this charge we shall be led directly to government interventions to ensure equality in group outcomes and from there to race wars and totalitarianism. To answer the charge that America is systemically racist means establishing that the cause of outcome differences is not racism, but something else.
Tom: And that something else is IQ?
Charles: In the case of differences in academic and job performance, group differences in IQ is the major explanation. In the case of group differences in criminal activity, it’s a combination of group differences in IQ along with group differences in personality characteristics such as impulsiveness.
Tom: Please explain how allowing the charge of systemic racism to remain unanswered leads to quotas and in turn to race wars and totalitarianism.
Charles: Short answer: White anger leading to white identity politics. I wrote Facing Reality when the Biden administration was about a year old. And Biden himself, who I don’t think is a radical, appointed very radical people to a lot of very important positions involving race and gender. And so all this DEI rhetoric now has devoted advocates across the administration. That has made a lot of things worse.
What’s the evidence that they’ve gotten worse? I don’t have the concrete evidence I would like to have, because guess what: If you go out and try to do a public opinion poll about these issues, you are not going to get honest answers. I am confident that an awful lot of white people out there are saying to themselves, I’m not a racist. I’ve never acted racist. I’ve done my best to be fair minded, and now they’re calling me a racist. That’s wrong. And they’re beginning to think something even more portentous: The United States has become a systematically racist country, but racist toward whites.
And they’re not wrong. Early on, whites felt uneasy about admitting black kids to elite colleges with SAT scores 200 points lower than their white competitors. Whites sensed that was not a good idea, but saw it as a temporary make-up remedy. But what the woke are saying now is different. The narrative is that blacks are owed, and whites are evil. Admitting black kids to Harvard with lower qualifications than rejected white and Asian kids is socially just. Promoting a black police officer over a white police officer with objectively stronger qualifications is socially just. It’s not racism if blacks discriminate against whites. Only whites can be racist.
And so, if, if you are from outer space and you’ve come down to observe America, and you’re looking at the laws and the enforcement of the laws and the practices, your conclusion would be that in the United States there are two groups that seem to get the short end of the stick: whites and, to a lesser degree, Asians.
Tom: How close are we to the end?
Charles: If the Democrats win the presidency and both houses of Congress this fall, I think we’ll see significant racial conflict during the next four years. But don’t ask me to define “significant.” My crystal ball isn’t that good.
Tom: So you think we have to talk about it because not talking about it has dire consequences. But how can we talk about it? Any ideas?
Charles: Not very good ones. And I have thought about the question for at least 30 years. Dick Herrnstein and I had this on our minds when we wrote Chapter 13 in The Bell Curve, the infamous chapter on race. And I thought at the time that we solved the problem of how to write about this difficult topic, but I was wrong. All of our carefully chosen wording didn’t do us a damn bit of good.
We wanted to convince our readers that we did not think that this topic was one that they needed to be afraid of. Yes, the differences in black and white IQs were real. Did they have any implications at all? Sure. Should they make us think that whites are superior to blacks? Obviously, no. But then the firestorm occurred. It was based on one sentence in which we said that environment and genes probably both had something to with the group difference in IQ. That one sentence was used to claim that we were attempting to prove that blacks are genetically inferior to whites. After that firestorm, I would go back and reread Chapter 13, and would ask myself, What could we have done differently? I think that this topic is one that you cannot write about except for an audience that is already sympathetic to your position. For the others, the vast majority, I don’t think it’s possible.
Tom: I watched an interview of yours with Coleman Hughes, and he, like a number of other black intellectuals, more or less accepts your thesis, but he thinks talking about group IQ differences would do more harm than good. He worries about the impact on black children. When a black child comes to his parents and says, “I’ve heard that black kids are not as smart,” what do the parents say?
Charles: I was reluctant to give the answer that first came to mind, but I will give it to you now. I was reluctant because I thought I was going to feed into the stereotype of blacks in sports. Suppose I am white, and I have a little boy aged six or seven who loves playing basketball. And he comes to me and he says, “Daddy, I just heard that blacks are better at basketball than whites are.” The honest thing to say to him is, “Yeah, that may be true. But that doesn’t say anything about how good you are. You love basketball and you are good at it. So keep trying as hard as you can and don’t worry about what others do.” It should be the same with black parents asked by their children about IQ. But I didn’t want to say that to Coleman. I probably should have.
Tom: If people cannot talk about race and IQ, why did you write Facing Reality?
Charles: Desperation. In 2020, after George Floyd’s death, the rhetoric about a systemically racist America spiked, and very few people were out there saying “That’s ridiculous. There are other causes of these problems that have nothing to do with racism.” But I was being quiet too. Somebody who I like a lot and respect said, “You people at the think tanks are not doing what you’re supposed to do. You are not getting out there on the front lines in the way you need to be.” And I said to myself, He’s right. I am in a position to get something published that hardly anybody else can. And I know things about the data that I can say better than anybody else, and I have an obligation to do it. I know that sounds very self-congratulatory, but that’s the way I felt. I had an obligation to my country.
I started Facing Reality thinking it would cause another firestorm like The Bell Curve. There was no dedication or acknowledgment section in the book, because I didn’t want any friend or colleague to be tainted by association with me. I told my agent, who I’d worked with since 1984, that I didn’t want her to represent me so that she wouldn’t be associated with it. But I was completely wrong about the firestorm. The book got virtually no attention.
Tom: Let’s say, America was in good shape. There was no systemic racism charge. Would you still feel an obligation to talk about race and IQ?
Charles: Absolutely not. I talk about it now only because there is this charge of systemic racism and if we leave it unanswered, we may well lose America as we know it. As I have said, I believe the country is in dire straits and I have an obligation to sound the alarm.
Tom: It seems most people are even more fearful of discussing these subjects than they were at the time The Bell Curve was released. You say we should be able to talk about this; there is no reason to fear it. But we do fear it. Is there not a better way to deal with the subject, perhaps indirectly.
Charles: What kind of thing do you have in mind?
Tom: I think there are a bunch of ways to address this. One is simply to say, “Look, do we want to live in a regime based on merit or one based on group quotas?” I think the average American will choose merit.
Charles: That works fine if you are talking about people like us. I mean, those of us who can be quite successful in a competitive environment. And it works if you’re talking about 1950. But a couple of important things make “merit” sound different in 2024. In 1950, it meant mostly industriousness and perseverance, with IQ playing a supplemental role. Now, high IQ has a lot more weight in deciding who gets rich, and nobody “merits” a high IQ. Neither you nor I did one damn thing to deserve the enormous luck we had. And what I see in America’s current elites, and I don’t think it breaks along political lines, is that the elites do not have a proper sense of humility about how lucky they have been.
Another thing that has changed since 1950 is the contempt with which a great deal of elite America views ordinary Americans. When you and I were young, it was still considered slightly un-American for people who were affluent and well-educated to act as if they were better than anybody else. If you did, people said you were getting too big for your britches or you were being a snob. And so you had a very nice kind of pretense on the part of a lot of extremely successful Americans: Hey, I’m just one of the guys. And you also had a society in which a lot of affluent and powerful Americans lived in neighborhoods that had lots of different kinds of people. The Upper East Side of Manhattan in 1960 was an upper-middle-class neighborhood but with lots of working-class people. We have lost that.
Tom: Do you know your own IQ?
Charles: No, but I have a pretty good idea because I know what the relationship of the SAT is to IQ, and I know what SAT scores I had. I also remember my weaknesses, because in those days when you were in eighth grade in Iowa, you got pulled out of class one day and told you were going to take a test. You weren’t told what it was about. You just took it. Well, it was an IQ test, and you never learned your scores. But I was breezing through the test, no problem, and then I came to a question that asked me to look at an object and then imagine what it looked like if it were turned in three dimensions. And I had a hard time with that. So I know that I have a high overall IQ but nothing to write home about, and also that I have pedestrian visuospatial skills.
Tom: Only recently I learned my IQ, and I wish I didn’t. I now think to myself, Gee, am I smart enough to do XYZ? I wouldn’t have done this in the past.
Charles: By the way, if you tested recently, you probably got a substantially lower score than you would’ve when you were 30 years old. Because our cognitive function, especially in what’s called fluid intelligence as opposed to crystallized intelligence, goes down. I read things that I wrote in my forties, and I say, I couldn’t do that today. I don’t have the sustained mental energy to do what I could do then. And you’re in the same position.
Tom: Oh, good. I feel better already. By the way, have your views on race and IQ affected your relationships with family and friends? I ask because I’ve lost friends.
Charles: I have not lost any close friends. I was, however, labeled, which negatively affected a lot of interactions, although it did not affect anything involving my family, except that my poor children have had to put up with their father being called a pseudoscientist, a racist and white supremacist. And in the last three or four years, I’ve had to stop participating in a little book club with some high-profile people because I did not wish to taint the other participants. But all in all, it hasn’t been terrible.
Tom: How about the American Enterprise Institute, where you work. Does it continue to support you?
Charles: AEI has been splendid. AEI could not have been more supportive.
Seeking Political Solutions
Tom: I gather you support President Trump.
Charles: I’ve made no secret of the fact that I think as a human being Donald Trump represents everything that I find deplorable. I am one of those people who think that character is destiny, and that’s a real problem in the case of Trump. Also, I have to acknowledge Trump did some good things.
Tom: I think that maybe Trump ought to make quotas an issue in his campaign. And people know perfectly well that quotas in the military, quotas in flight training, schools, medicine etc., are bad. But they do not know how widespread they are. The question is whether Trump could make hay calling attention to the prevalence of these quotas?
Charles: One thing I really am bad at is assessing what would be politically astute. I think that the main upside of a Trump victory is that all of those woke people in the EEOC and in other sensitive positions would be gone. And white America would not have this drumbeat of “you’re evil and racist and bad,” and so forth.
That would be a good thing in and of itself because if you have four more years of this DEI drumbeat, it seems reasonable to expect that red states will assert themselves. In the recent past, blue states have disregarded the federal government when they felt like it. Examples include the marijuana laws and sanctuary cities. But now red states are getting into the act. There is a realization that the federal government is, to some degree, a paper tiger, and that red states can do things the federal government says we shouldn’t. They really aren’t in a position to enforce their edicts. And, as a stalwart limited-government person, I am all in favor of more federalism and more independence. I’d like that to happen under the rule of law as opposed to ad hoc. Because if it is ad hoc, it looks more and more like the disintegration of a regime. But unfortunately, that kind of ad hoc refusal to follow federal law is what we’re likely to see.
Tom: Do you still consider yourself a libertarian?
Charles: I call myself a Madisonian now, and the reason I call myself a Madisonian is that some libertarians are too indifferent to a lot of the values of the Founding that I hold dear. I think the original Constitution was, by and large, a brilliant compromise between limiting government and providing enough power to make the government function. So I’m “libertarian-adjacent” at this point.
Tom: Let’s return to the subject of IQ. Can someone’s IQ change over time?
Charles: It happens occasionally, but it’s something of an aberration. So it shouldn’t be treated as a general phenomenon, but it can happen.
Tom: If that is true, then can a group’s average IQ not change over time as well?
Charles: Unless there’s a lot of intermarriage between groups, the only way group IQ can really change is if there is an extreme change in the environment. Thus, group differences in IQ can narrow if there is an environmental component to the IQ score and the environment gets way, way better for one group. And this has been known to happen in a variety of circumstances. Better nutrition makes a difference. So does the introduction of universal schooling. The change from no schooling at all to even basic, mediocre schooling raises the mean IQ of a population. Changes thereafter, say from mediocre schooling to excellent schooling, don’t make much of a difference in mean IQ. Though it’s a good thing in itself, of course.
Tom: A generation ago, black IQ improved markedly. Presumably, that was because of environmental factors.
Charles: Yes. If you go back and take a look at the best test data from the early 20th century, you find the black-white difference was about one and a half standard deviations. Then the white-black gap began to narrow, especially from World War II through the 1970s. And it seems to me that the explanation is very easy: The educational environment for blacks in the South, which had been abysmal, improved a lot — and not just education, but nutrition and health as well. But by the end of the 1970s, we had gotten all the improvements we’re going to get from changes in the environment.
Tom: Many schools in the inner city are still awful, though. If we improved these schools, might not that gap narrow further?
Charles: Probably not, because the first eight grades are where the heart of the educational contribution comes from, and K-8 education for blacks in the South prior to the civil rights movement was dreadful. And even though K-8 education is not great now, you don’t have anything like the same disciplinary problems, the same truancy problems, and the rest of the problems that beset middle school and high school, especially in urban areas.
That’s one point. The second point is that while many middle schools and high schools in urban areas are dreadful now, not a big proportion of the total black population goes to those schools. A very large proportion of the black population goes to schools like the schools my kids went to—in mixed-race areas where the schools are, say, 10 or 20 percent black. They aren’t dreadful schools. They aren’t wonderful, but they aren’t dreadful.
Tom: We’ve spent trillions, tried every program we can think of, but with nothing to show for it. Most people, myself included, conclude, as you do, that more government programs are not the answer. But how about private philanthropy, might that be helpful?
Charles: I sometimes ask myself, Suppose I had $5 billion, $10 billion. What would I give my money to? And I have not been able to come up with an initiative that would address something like single parent families, whether black or white, which is such a big source of environmental disadvantage.
Tom: A hundred years ago, the out-of-wedlock birth rate for blacks was not really that much different than that of whites. Can’t we get back to those days?
Charles: You can’t get back to that because of systemic reasons that are not susceptible to change. In the working class, it used to be that a man might hold a menial job, but if he put food on the table and a roof over the head of his wife and his two kids, he was a man with status in his neighborhood who was looked up to. A combination of welfare changes, the sexual revolution, feminism, and a variety of other things have pretty much demolished the status of the working-class male. Now you have a lot of demoralized males who can get all the sex that they want without being married and will get none of the old status rewards if they do marry.
Tom, ask yourself: How did we have such incredibly low out-of-wedlock birth rates when we were saying to males in their early twenties, “it’s time for you to get married and settle down with one woman and have kids”? The answer is that if you did so, you would be treated as a real man. Why did women so successfully avoid getting pregnant by a man who wouldn’t marry her? Because if an unmarried woman got pregnant her life was ruined. So there was a big carrot for the male and a big stick for the woman. I don’t see how you get that back.
Tom: In your interview with Coleman Hughes, he said to there must be a way to improve the cultural depravities of the underclass. And you responded, quite sensibly, “Well, what is that way?” And of course, he didn’t have the answer — any answer, for that matter. Even so, he remains convinced that there is a way, even if he doesn’t know what it is. John McWhorter expresses a similar confidence.
Charles: But here’s the brutal reality that I think is increasingly understood by people who are up to speed on genetics: We know that there are substantial genetic differences between blacks, whites, and East Asians and other groups—for cognitive ability, for mental disorders, for personality characteristics, for physiological characteristics. It’s not that the races differ on some of them; they differ on all of them to some degree. As our knowledge matures, I think we shall find that the black-white difference in IQ is simply not going to get smaller, or much smaller, because (as I said earlier) we’ve soaked up most of the narrowing that we can get from improving the environment. We’re stuck with what we have. And to go back to the sports analogy, just as white people are never going to be proportionally represented in the NBA, black people are never going to be proportionally represented among theoretical physicists. That’s just the way the world is.
Tom: In Facing Reality, you really didn’t talk about genes. You talk all about the environment.
Charles: I say it doesn’t really make much difference whether the IQ gap is due to genes or culture, because both are intractable.
Tom: If you say the IQ gap is due to the environment, then you hold out the hope that IQ could change. I realize you don’t think it will change, but others disagree. Such people would continue to hold out hope that black IQs would improve, and having hope is incredibly important.
Charles: We can’t wish differences away. I don’t think that false hope is a good idea. The problems here are hardly limited to those facing black Americans. They involve the entire population, especially working-class Americans who will never be rich or famous. We need to have a society in which such people can grow old, satisfied with who they have been and what they have done. Legitimately satisfied, not satisfied because we say so, but satisfied because they spent their lives doing significant, meaningful things such as raising families and being good neighbors.
And for that, we, the lucky ones, have an obligation to devote our energies to making sure that we live in a society that honors a very wide range of people, of all kinds and levels of talent. And at the same time, we can’t act as if we are the masters of the universe. I think that this is not a political issue. I would like to see a secular Great Awakening with the elites of this country that effectively says to all of us who are part of the elite, You have been acting like entitled people who not only have more money and power than everybody else, but act as if you’re better than everybody else. And you have to stop that, because it’s not true.
Tom: Trump could say that.
Charles: Could, but won’t. Don’t get me started on all the things I would like to say to Trump, but one of them is that if he lived next door to working class people and behaved the way he does — boastful, vainglorious, blaming other people, never admitting he’s wrong — they would despise him. They would not want him as a neighbor, because he violates all the personal virtues they traditionally valued.
Tom: I have often thought about a different kind of solution. Today we pretend we don’t have quotas, and everyone goes along with the charade. Why don’t we stop pretending? Why not agree to accept black Americans based on quotas for a set period of time, and everyone else based on merit? In this case, everything would be transparent, and we wouldn’t have to destroy our culture to maintain the pretense that we are not employing quotas.
Charles: No black person would be in favor of it. Today, people often say that any successful black person is an affirmative-action admission or hire. But this is done behind his back. Under your system, people would be saying this out front. It would expose the hypocrisy — which actually is a point in your plan’s favor, but it will never happen.
Tom: Turning to a more immediate political question: Any sense of the effect of the recent Supreme Court affirmative action cases?
Charles: Oh, I can’t wait to find out. I suspect that you’ll see a very small reduction in the size of the black and Latino entering classes, but nothing approaching true color-blindness in admission. And of course, if Biden wins and appoints, say, two new Supreme Court Justices, you won’t even get that.
Looking Forward
Tom: I share the belief that what we want to do is make race less important. So, if I tell you Ashkenazi Jews are smarter than Sephardic Jews, who cares? Because except for a few Jews, it’s not the way we group people. We don’t think that way. And the problem with all this talk about race is that you’ve made people more conscious of race, right?
Charles: I didn’t make us more conscious of race. The Civil Rights Act of 1964, and its enforcement, made us more conscious of race.
Tom: Thomas Sowell, he thinks IQ gaps can narrow. He uses the example of the Polish Jews as a population that made huge gains in IQ during the early part of the 20th century. What’s your response to Dr. Sowell?
Charles: If IQs for Polish Jews improved — I don’t remember reading Sowell’s discussion of that specific example, but let’s assume it’s true — it was probably for much the same reason I think the black-white gap narrowed in the 1940s and ’50s and ’60s: major improvements in the environment. But I’m afraid that the improvement in the environment has already occurred, and there isn’t a whole lot of improvement left that will have much effect.
Just to make my pessimism more acute: Think ahead for 10, 15 years, when Asian-Americans have grown from their current 5% of the population to 10% or 15%. Given their success, the elite neighborhoods in the United States will be overwhelmingly white and Asian. Where does that put the average white American when you now have a second racial group that is doing great and rising to positions of power and influence, and blacks and Latinos are still about where they always were? How is that dynamic going to play out? I am not optimistic.
Tom: I ask myself now, what has to happen for us to begin to see the deleterious consequences of quotas. Perhaps an external event like Sputnik, which galvanized scientists, or a disastrous war against the Chinese who weren’t practicing all this woke stuff.
Charles: I think you’re right. It has to be something that we can’t ignore. And there might be one coming down the road in the form of Chinese advances in the genetics of intelligence. The Chinese are proceeding as fast as they can go in genetics with very few restraints. They will work out the genetics of IQ faster than we will and could plausibly start to jack up Chinese IQ genetically. I’m not talking about tomorrow, but some years down the road.
Here’s just one example. It is technically possible to make unlimited female eggs from stem cells. Suppose you have IVF in which a hundred eggs can be screened for the one with the highest polygenic score for IQ. In this case, we’re not talking about the possibility of augmenting IQ by three points or four points through IVF, but 15, 20, 30 points. Imagine the Chinese doing this while we aren’t. And don’t talk to me about all the real moral hazards involved. I’m saying that whatever can be done genetically to enhance human performance will be done eventually by someone, and we have to think through the implications.
Tom: You were in the Peace Corps.
Charles: As I know you were.
Tom: What did you learn?
Charles: I was a history major who was supposed to advise the Thai health and village sanitation service how to go about its business. And I at least was smart enough to realize that I didn’t know what I was doing. And so I simply tried to be as unobtrusive as I could. I was in deep culture shock when I hit Thailand—so much so that I envied another volunteer who was in an accident and so had an honorable excuse to quit.
And then over the course of the two years, I grew to love the place. I learned the language. That’s one thing the Peace Corps did pretty well, teaching the local language. And so I went from this deep culture shock to being able to walk down a village street or a Bangkok street and know exactly what was going on around me, know what all the social cues were. That was an experience in testing my limits that Harvard never provided for me. I had never before been put to such a personal test; it was invaluable. It’s the kind of test I would’ve gotten had I gone into the military.
Tom: As a libertarian — or, as you put it, “libertarian-adjacent” — I assume you would not be in favor of required military service, or an alternative such as the Peace Corps.
Charles: No, I would be for it, but it has to be the military. Because in the Peace Corps and similar organizations it is too easy to quit.
Tom: To change direction: As a man who knows something about free speech on college campuses, do you have any ideas as to how to improve free speech?
Charles: I want to go back to what it was like between 1961 and 1965 when I was in college. Then people would say, “I disagree with what you say, but I will defend your right to say it to the death.” That was the way we were taught to think. No more.
Tom: Is there no way back?
Charles: It sure doesn’t look that way, does it? There has been a profound change in the universities. They no longer believe that their central role is to search for the truth; today it’s all about social justice.
Tom: Well, they think they already know the truth.
Charles: And then you add onto that the reaction to October 7, and I say, “What is going on in American higher education?” The corruption is way deeper than I thought, and I already thought it was quite corrupt. I’m glad I’m 81. I don’t have to put up with this much longer.
Tom: Thank you, Charles.
Charles: Thank you.