‘Race Realism’ Won’t Save America
Editor's Note
That all differences in outcome are attributable to the “systemic racism” of the American way of life is the central premise of the destructive left. Faced with this increasingly apparent and increasingly dangerous belief, some have retreated to the opposite position: that all differences in social outcomes are merely the result of biological disparities between populations. David Azerrad argues that this position, called “race realism” by its proponents, is both a strategic and a philosophic error — one that will fail to counteract the real roots of the woke regime while drawing conservatives’ attention away from more viable paths forward.
Many who have lately come to grasp the ever-clearer tyrannical implications of social justice leftism, also known as wokeness, have been drawn to so-called “race realism.” Race realism, also known as human biodiversity, argues that race is not, as we have been repeatedly told, a social construct but a real biological category produced by evolution. As such, race realists maintain that some of the very well documented differences among the races — in particular, the IQ gap — have a genetic basis.
This scientific claim, they tell us, has far-reaching political implications. It supposedly deals a devastating blow to the core social justice tenet that all disparities that cut against our fellow black citizens are evidence of racism. By making an allowance for hereditary factors, race realism supplements mainstream conservatism’s focus on culture to explain disparities. In fact, it claims to improve upon it by crushing any hopes of attaining the promised land of equal racial outcomes simply by reforming black culture. Race realism appeals not to the malleable concept of culture, but to the more immutable idea of nature. (Darwinian nature is not really immutable, but it can’t be readily manipulated by humans since evolution plays out over such long periods of time.)
According to its leading advocates, race realism is, in fact, the only way to defeat social justice leftism. “Any realistic path to victory over wokeism requires widespread acceptance of [racial] hereditarianism among the elites,” argues Nathan Cofnas, a former research fellow at the University of Cambridge terminated for his writing on the subject. Without it, “the fight against wokeism is futile.” All other approaches to fighting the leftist scourge are supposedly doomed because they fail to dislodge from the mind the expectation that a just America would be one in which blacks and whites were more or less equally represented in all realms (at least in theory, since no one seems to care about disparities that cut against whites or benefit blacks).
Since race realism makes an allowance for environmental factors (like discrimination) and does not claim that hereditarianism explains all racial disparities, it seems hard to object to it on scientific grounds. Human beings are more than their genes, but no account of man in the 21st century can omit genetics. Science will never be able to fully pinpoint what percentage of who we end up becoming as individual members of a particular race is due to inheritable factors, but it seems that it should be allowed to pursue this question. From a strictly scientific point of view, this does not seem controversial.
Then again, from a strictly scientific point of view, no question is controversial. Science is amoral. That is why it needs to be subordinated to moral considerations, and thus to political considerations since politics, in the highest sense, adjudicates moral claims. All serious political thinkers understand that not all scientific truths are salutary. Even Francis Bacon, that great apostle of modern scientific progress, keeps some scientific discoveries secret in his utopian tale The New Atlantis.
Conservatives who oppose race realism view it as one such dangerous truth. In a thoughtful review of The Bell Curve published in 1995, Leon Kass defends the wisdom of the “taboo about race, genes, and IQ.” To speak openly and bluntly about these matters, he warns, would threaten social harmony. As he explains:
Precisely because most people do not—and probably cannot and will not—refrain from stereotypical thinking, and precisely because intelligence is so central to our humanity, it cannot be good for living together to go around broadcasting the low group IQ of blacks or Hispanics, or of Poles or Slovaks, for that matter.
It is hard enough to make a multi-racial, multi-ethnic democracy work as is. Race realism only makes it harder by hardening the bases of our differences and providing a seemingly objective foundation for divisive prejudices.
Liberals and leftists go even further. For them, race realism is dangerous pseudo-science that will lead to the mistreatment of our fellow black citizens. In light of the country’s ugly history of racism, the persistence of anti-black prejudice, and the long shadow still cast on the West by Nazism, race realism is a dangerous idea that should be censored.
Across the ideological spectrum, almost all agree that the scientific study of race and intelligence should remain verboten (although conservatives seem more open to the possibility that there is a genetic connection between the two). Conservatives may not call for the cancellation of race realists, but they surely will not come to their defense or associate with them (the one great exception being Charles Murray).
Rawlsian Race Realism
At the root of the controversy are, in fact, two distinct questions. The first centers on whether we should discuss the well-documented average differences in IQ among the races. The second builds on the first and centers on whether we should study the extent to which these differences are genetic. Each question is controversial as it vexes our egalitarian sensibilities, but the second is obviously more controversial as it points to innate, ineradicable inequalities.
If we as a country were permitted to openly discuss racial differences in IQ without taking a position on whether these differences are genetic, it is not clear what the Right would gain. We are currently permitted openly to discuss racial differences in test scores, which are essentially a proxy for intelligence. While it is important to continue to do so to give the Right a basis for denying the leftist imputation of all inequalities to racism, I do not see how more evidence from different tests would deal any kind of a devastating blow to the Left or the woke underpinnings of our civil rights regime.
The Left and civil rights bureaucrats will respond to IQ data the way they respond to all testing data. The more radical ones will dismiss the tests as racist, while the rest will ascribe the disparities to systemic racism and call for more educational spending to boost test scores. Conservative cries that the tests are not biased, that Asians consistently outperform whites, and that we already spend a fortune on education will continue to fall on deaf ears.
At the height of woke madness, Charles Murray published a short book entitled Facing Reality: Two Truths About Race in America in which he calls on America to accept that the races have different rates of violent crime and different distributions of cognitive ability. Murray discusses not just test results, but also IQ scores. He refutes the charge that they are racist and reminds us that we “know how to improve education for children at every cognitive level, but we don’t know how to change their cognitive levels.” The book was mostly ignored.
Then again, Murray, in that book at least, did not discuss genetics. Should the Right then invest resources into researching racial hereditarianism and publicizing its findings?
For the sake of argument, let us assume two things that are categorically false: science can precisely measure what percentage of the racial intelligence gap is genetic, and that number will turn out to be 100%. Let us call this complete biological determinism. To the best of my knowledge, no one actually believes this or thinks it will ever become true as science progresses. But even if it were indisputably true, would this change anything?
I suspect it would not. Our elites, with some support from the American people, would simply adopt a Rawlsian justification to maintain the current system of widespread pro-black racial preferences. Contrary to the bold pronouncements of race realists, the widespread acceptance of racial hereditarianism will not defeat social justice leftism. It will simply be incorporated into the dominant Rawlsian outlook.
Americans generally believe that people ought to be treated fairly, regardless of the accidents of their birth. Americans, in fact, love nothing more than to see people rise from humble origins and achieve a measure of success. That is why the American Dream remains our national myth.
This core American belief that the accidents of our birth should not determine our fate was given a particular spin by the influential liberal political theorist John Rawls. Because none of us chose the particulars of our birth, they cannot, properly said to be deserved and, as such, these “undeserved inequalities call for redress.” In other words, it is not simply unfair to allow the birth lottery to determine our lot in life; justice demands that we compensate those who got unlucky.
Rawls’ Theory of Justice thus leads him to conclude that those “who have been favored by nature, whoever they are, may gain from their good fortune only on terms that improve the situation of those who have lost out.” Nature’s favor, in the Rawlsian worldview, includes not just the class into which people are born but also their “native endowments,” i.e., whatever genes they so happen to inherit from their parents. Those who got unlucky in the genetic lottery should be compensated just like those who got unlucky in the parental lottery. Life isn’t fair, but it should be.
Libertarians may well object that it is not the job of the government to make life fair, but they are and will remain a fringe movement in America. The rest of the country, including most conservatives, simply do not have the stomach to accept that one segment of the population — which just happens to be the one that has been treated most unjustly throughout our history — should resign itself to lower aggregate life outcomes because of genetics.
There may well have been a time in our history when Americans would not have cared, but that America is long gone. Today, even conservatives have a bad conscience about racial disparities. More data won’t change this.
Ever since the publication of the Moynihan report in 1965, conservatives have been pointing the finger at culture, in particular the collapsing black family, to explain disparities. What do we have to show for it? The black family is now in even worse shape than it was then, the Left has become more fanatical on race, and the civil rights regime more totalitarian. If six decades of talking about culture have failed to fend off social justice egalitarianism, why would several more decades of talking about IQ succeed?
When it comes to the natural basis of sexual differences, the taboo in America is much weaker and the differences much more pronounced. And yet, the fact that we can talk about hormones, muscle mass, and anatomy has done little to abate the egalitarian demands of our feminist age. All disparities that cut against women are still taken as evidence of sexism. And all the leading institutions in the country are obsessed with closing gender gaps (unless, of course, they cut against men, in which case they are ignored).
Democracy and Inequality
The fundamental mistake of the race realists is to assume that the widespread demand for equal racial outcomes — which goes well beyond the woke Left to encompass mainstream liberals, as well as many conservatives — is subject to scientific refutation with better data.
At root, the racial problem in America today is a psychological one, a particularly powerful manifestation of the democratic discomfort with inequalities. As Tocqueville rightly saw, because inequalities weigh on the democratic conscience in a way they do not on the aristocratic conscience, the more equal we become, the more bothered we are by inequalities, and the more equal we want to become. As he writes in one of the many prescient passages of Democracy in America:
It is not that peoples whose social state is democratic naturally scorn freedom; on the contrary, they have an instinctive taste for it. But freedom is not the principal and continuous object of their desire; what they love with an eternal love is equality; they dash toward freedom with a rapid impulse and sudden efforts, and if they miss the goal they resign themselves; but nothing can satisfy them without equality, and they would sooner consent to perish than to lose it.
Race is only the most powerful instantiation of this general democratic problem. As such, it is largely impervious to facts. Or, to be more precise, the dominant egalitarian outlook decides which facts count and which can be ignored or dismissed as pseudo-science. Their egalitarian feelings don’t care about your “realist” facts.
Murray’s own book testifies to this. He cites the 1966 Coleman report, a massive study of 645,000 students in 4,000 schools, which not only found racial differences in cognitive test scores but also concluded that “the quality of a school played almost no role in explaining the performance of African students.” Murray calls the study “a pivotal event in social science, representing the first important use of multivariate regression, a technique that has since become the workhorse of quantitative economic and sociological analysis.” And yet, as he admits, it “had no effect on policy” since its central finding upset our egalitarian sensibilities. Countless other studies since then have not dampened our obsessive efforts to equalize almost all life outcomes between white and black Americans.
The Right should not, therefore, invest its hopes in race realism. If wokeness is ever to be defeated, it will not be with IQ data, but by taming the democratic longing for equality and liberating the post-sixties American mind from its obsession with atoning for the past, flattering our fellow black citizens, and endlessly making excuses for them. Nothing will change until white Americans stop worshiping at the altar of black victimhood.
Americans of all races must accept the reality that equal rights under the law do not translate into equal life outcomes, but that these differences, in turn, do not detract from the fact that we are all Americans who share a common history and country and are bound together by ties of civic friendship.
Natural Equality and Inequalities
It is important to stress that the Right should not either join in any leftist efforts to cancel race realists. There is no need to ostracize the handful of people interested in such questions, so long as they are not calling for curtailing the inalienable rights of some members of the human race.
In any case, we may not really have a choice. The science of genetics continues to grow by leaps and bounds and while its focus is not on racial differences, such discoveries will inevitably be made along the way. The Harvard geneticist David Reich has warned that we must “prepare for the likelihood that in the coming years, genetic studies will show that many traits are influenced by genetic variations, and that these traits will differ on average across human populations.” As the evidence accumulates, it will become “impossible—indeed, anti-scientific, foolish and absurd—to deny those differences.” Burying our heads in the sand “will only invite the racist misuse of genetics that we wish to avoid.” Better to discuss matters honestly and carefully in the open.
By keeping the subject of race and intelligence taboo, we also make it into a bigger deal than it really is. What, after all, are we so afraid science might discover? The factual claims of race realism, should they prove to be true, do not refute the core American belief that “all men are created equal.”
Properly understood, equality is not premised on the idea that natural endowments are equally distributed across all parts of the human race. Equality is a moral claim that can accommodate great differences between humans. On this point, it is worth quoting at length James Wilson, one of the six men who signed both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution:
In civil society, previously to the institution of civil government, all men are equal. Of one blood all nations are made; from one source the whole human race has sprung.
When we say, that all men are equal; we mean not to apply this equality to their virtues, their talents, their dispositions, or their acquirements. In all these respects, there is, and it is fit for the great purposes of society that there should be, great inequality among men. In the moral and political as well as in the natural world, diversity forms an important part of beauty; and as of beauty, so of utility likewise…
But however great the variety and inequality of men may be with regard to virtue, talents, taste, and acquirements; there is still one aspect, in which all men in society, previous to civil government, are equal. With regard to all, there is an equality in rights and in obligations; there is that “jus aequum,” that equal law, in which the Romans placed true freedom. The natural rights and duties of man belong equally to all.
Each forms a part of that great system, whose greatest interest and happiness are intended by all the laws of God and nature. These laws prohibit the wisest and the most powerful from inflicting misery on the meanest and most ignorant; and from depriving them of their rights or just acquisitions. By these laws, rights, natural or acquired, are confirmed, in the same manner, to all; to the weak and artless, their small acquisitions, as well as to the strong and artful, their large ones…
As in civil society, previous to civil government, all men are equal; so, in the same state, all men are free. In such a state, no one can claim, in preference to another, superior right: in the same state, no one can claim over another superior authority.
A higher natural IQ is no more a title to rule or a claim to more rights than are more wealth, a more distinguished lineage, or greater prowess on the battlefield. If it turns out that, on average, people of European descent have fewer genes associated with abstract reasoning than people of Ashkenazi descent, that will not mean that Jews are in fact the master race that may do with whites what they please.
For the purposes of qualifying for equality, so to speak, what matters is not who is the smartest, but whether individuals, regardless of race, are smart enough to understand the laws that they must obey. As Locke explains in the Second Treatise of Government, the founding text of classical liberalism:
The freedom then of man, and liberty of acting according to his own will, is grounded on his having reason, which is able to instruct him in that law he is to govern himself by, and make him know how far he is left to the freedom of his own will.
It does not take an IQ of 135 to follow the law (at least, it shouldn’t, but given the monstrous complexity of modern laws, it now takes highly specialized and technical knowledge to understand many laws).
A very small group of people, it is true, are not capable of understanding laws. Locke calls them “lunatics and idiots.” Their rights to political participation may obviously be restricted, and they may be ruled without their consent for their own good (preferably by their parents). Otherwise, all normal adult citizens are entitled to the same civil rights and subject to the same civic duties.
That, at least, is the theory of natural rights. But most Americans have likely never heard of either James Wilson or John Locke. Given the propensity of the human mind to generalize — as Kass puts it, “most people do not—and probably cannot and will not—refrain from stereotypical thinking” — is there no danger in publicizing data about which races are smarter, on average, than others?
The same objection could, however, be raised to breaking down any sociological data by race. Should we not publicize data about the rates of violent crime by population out of fear that it will inspire prejudice against black people? Should we not discuss the extraordinary contributions of Ashkenazi Jews to scientific progress in the 20th century out of fear that it will provoke antisemitic envy in some? Clearly, that is not tenable in a free society.
Rather than forbid people from stating what in many cases is obvious — the black crime rate is, on average, higher than the Asian rate and Asian test scores are, on average, higher than white test scores — I think we can trust in the basic decency of the American people to treat people politely and fairly, regardless of their skin color. This was obviously not the case for most of our history, but 60 years after the civil rights revolution, we need not be on high alert for the slightest sign that the Ku Klux Klan might be making a comeback.
Today, anti-racism is America’s de facto state religion. Anti-black racism is condemned more severely in the court of public opinion than pretty much any real crime. Elites are more forgiving of murderers on death row than they are of frat boys who text the n-word. The looming Fourth Reich exists only in the Left’s fevered imagination.
That is not to say — and yet it must be said in a futile quest to ward off the anti-racist hordes — that we should celebrate racism. But we can surely tolerate the handful of scientists who want to study the genetic basis of aggregate differences between human populations and the handful of public intellectuals who want to discuss their findings. The maintenance of a cordon sanitaire around such discussions may well have been warranted in the past, but it no longer is.
These discussions must be permitted in a free society, even though some may find them uncomfortable. It would, however, be foolish to think that they will rid us of the woke scourge.