George Rebane
[This piece was rejected by The Union as unfit for their readers. I must admit that I was surprised at that response, and the reasons given by publisher Don Rogers. I will have more to say later about my new understanding of the newspaper’s ideological coloring and journalistic demeanor. The following is an addended version of what was submitted.]
Our public policies, including those now seeking equity, have denied reality for decades, so argues nationally prominent, quantitative sociologist and political scientist Charles Murray in Facing Reality: Two Truths about Race in America (2021). In his latest scholarly researched and richly referenced book, Dr Murray brings to light data that government collected and our media muffled on the intellectual metrics that characterize race in America. As with his past dissertations (e.g. Bell Curve, Coming Apart), his politically and profusely incorrect Facing Reality is destined for the same opprobrium from progressives that graced his previous volumes. However, his presentation of information and socially impactive conclusions are supported by databases assembled over the decades by our Dept of Education, FBI, and various accredited testing services.
What motivated Murray to produce this illuminating work is today’s broadly held contention that America’s fundamental creed is in peril. The creed is from our Declaration of Independence – “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights….” And the danger to our way of life comes from a total misapprehension of how our multi-racial culture is viewed through the perspectives of cognitive capability and criminality, and how this gives rise to today’s misguided, and even insane public policies through which government misinforms, mis-enables, and misdirects Americans as we seek our places in the sun.
The long-taught but erroneous common wisdom is that cognitive capabilities are equally distributed across races. Using census data Murray presents his analysis of our four main racial groups and percentages making up our 330M population. Murray labels these European (60%), Latin (17.9%), African (12.8%), Asian (5.7%), Other (3.6%). Volumes of data over the years demonstrate that in the aggregate these groups have measurably different distributions of closely correlating scores in IQ, SAT, ACT, and other skill-based tests which have been meticulously controlled to eliminate the usual sources of non-racial bias. To illustrate this broad-based reality, Murray presents the proxy IQ distributions which are annotated in the nearby figure.
The racial distributions are the familiar ‘bell curves’, the size (area under the curve) of each being proportional to its population. As usual, the data has been adjusted (normed) so that the country’s overall average IQ = 100, with a 15-point standard deviation. The average IQs for each racial group are indicated in the figure. At this point we remind ourselves that such basic measures of cognitive ability are embedded characteristics of people and not subject to rapid change through education and/or training. The importance of such measures are that they reliably predict aggregate abilities to acquire and apply different levels of skill sets.
Today most of our political leaders promote equity as the litmus for proper public policies both in inception and execution. Outcome focused equity requires proportionate participation of all racial groups in all areas of government controlled human endeavors – in sum it’s the return to a legislated affirmative action cum quota system. However, the reason for the low numbers of Africans in high-prestige occupations is that there are so few of them with cognitive credentials required for such jobs, NOT racial discrimination.
This is illustrated by the miniscule areas under the respective Latin and African bell curves to the right of the dotted line at, say, IQ = 120, a nominally required minimum for some professions. While there are many African-Americans and Latins at all occupational levels in America, enforcing equity by fiat in high-prestige occupations would result in performance decrements in the affected fields that would cause tremendous damage in our nation – consider medicine, law, and the STEM professions.
Stating this aspect of reality launches our leftwing neighbors into a righteously religious rage for daring to openly state such a penultimately incorrect political conclusion. Their alternative in the policy arena is to lower standards for matriculation and certification so that the dotted line can be moved leftwards to increase the African and Latin populations under their respective bell curves. Such policies have demonstrated time and again to be damaging to the concerned individuals, professional standards, and the quality of service provided society. Data shows that such fiat-promoted individuals know how they stack up in the classrooms, offices, and job sites.
In the face of these realities Murray points out “it is fair to conclude that the American job market is indeed racially biased. A detached observer might even call it systemic racism. The American job market systemically discriminates in favor of racial minorities other than Asians.” His recommendation for a better America is that public policies should be made to recognize aggregate racial statistics. However, all people should be considered on the basis of individual merit, contribution to purpose of relationship, and the content of their character.
[Addendum1] To understand the points Murray makes, it is important to address the Left’s rejection of what is illustrated in the figure. The progressives’ argument remains unchanged over the years, and continues to maintain that all such measured cognitive differences are due to “cultural values and educational levels of families, along with the stronger correlation to poverty”. Their presentation, therefore, is a scurrilous and racist ploy by the Right to denigrate our minorities because “there’s no preponderance of research showing cognitive lacking by race”.
Of course, there is no such preponderance of research, simply because such research in academe and government has been politically off limits at least since the Great Society days. However, rejecting something lacking ‘preponderance of research’ is an extremely anti-scientific argument. All new findings in human affairs, and especially in science, were introduced with no preponderance of supporting research. In fact, the received wisdom of the times was always exactly the opposite. Over the last few decades Charles Murray and a few others have been the first to do this politically incorrect and therefore pioneering research, and present their results.
When we consider the variability in ALL attributes of the variously evolved branches of our species, then modern science has shown that people are almost infinitely varied. Moreover, with modern technology, specific marker attributes have been identified for the races and isolated ethnicities that permits them to be reliably identified without any foreknowledge to which cohort a sample or even individuals belong. And these differentiating attributes range from the obvious to all (e.g. the blacks’ preponderance of talents in sports and succumbing to sickle cell anemia), to the sublime that require a more sophisticated approach to isolate and discover.
Considering this, it is simply beyond the pale for any serious thinker to accept the unsupported proposition that cognitive ability is the only human attribute that is so identically distributed across the racial cohorts that it cannot be used as a discriminant for identifying the membership of any sufficiently sized sample WHEN CONTROLLED for all the variables that have been traditionally summoned to deny race-based cognitive ability.
[Addendum2, 8jul21] Expanding on the arguments in Addendum1, Murray goes to great lengths to explain how the resulting distributions in the figure were obtained, AFTER controlling for all the usual factors that ‘homogeneous IQ’ (HIQ) believers cite and fiercely uphold. The illustrated distributions are strongly correlated to distributions for the same population subgroups obtained from data on various testing programs carried out by industry, the military, civil service testing, academic testing services, academic success data, and, of course, IQ testing which continues to be done by many institutions during a person’s journey from grade school to retirement.
For a student of science and practitioner of various scientific and engineering disciplines, there is overwhelming evidence from everything known about our universe, from galaxies to microbiomes, that the cosmos specializes in variability. The closest we come to homogeneity is in the quantum realm of subatomic particles – e.g. today we still cannot distinguish between two electrons (leptons), save, perhaps, from their ever-changing energy levels. For all practical purposes in the realworld, nothing in nature is homogenous.
In order to understand our world and the universe, humans have developed the cognitive power to taxonomize (structure knowledge about things) and to abstract systems (structure bounded dynamics among and between things). To facilitate the study and use of such structures, we impose the fiction that items in similar places in a taxonomy or a system are identical. We do this knowing that they really aren’t, and, if required, we could discriminate between such items. But abstractions involving certain levels of homogeneity are useful for communicating knowledge and building things that will work tolerably well as predicted by their cognitive abstractions.
As a first cut, it was acceptable to test for cognitive ability and aggregate the data into one distribution for all kinds of critters including humans, who then happened to be almost all Europeans. But as knowledge (some of it racially prejudicial) expanded about human abilities, people started testing various tribal, ethnic, and racially distinct cohorts, and, applying statistics, they noted marked differences. After some mix of scientific cum political wrangling, the psychologists, sociologists, and ‘educators’ learned how to identify and control for the most obvious dependers that affected the IQ distributions for the various cohorts.
For the more technically comfortable readers, I will mention that it is possible to taxonomize our racial cohorts down to even finer levels and discover how their cognition distributions vary. But there is little sense in doing that kind of research cataloging racial divisions to a finer degree than that used by governments to make public policies. The four identified by Murray are good enough for government work – that is, in everything save assigning race-based quotas for equity. There such fine gradations (as shown in the figure) are themselves deemed racist and seen by progressives to serve white supremacist ends.
So, around the advent of the Great Society, civil rights politics took over such inquiries about the intelligence levels of our minorities. The result was that the new narrative called for extra-scientific homogeneity in order to minimize residual obstructions to African-Americans and Latinos achieving parity with whites (Murray’s Europeans) in our schools and workplaces. Studies seeking to advance knowledge and understanding in this area of human performance were proscribed in the increasingly leftwing academe. The knowledge denied would have been used to structure public education curricula so that minorities would derive maximum instructional benefit for the tax dollars we spend on schools. That was not to be unto this day.
As a result, today we deny that there are insufficient numbers of Latins and Africans to satisfy the strictures of equity at present levels of performance standards for a number of high-level/reward jobs. Denial in this area join with a plethora of other civilization-promoting attributes, traits, and characteristics – e.g. perfectionism, merit-based reasoning, objectivity, accuracy, correctness, precision, timeliness, sense of urgency, rewarding skill, individualism, progress, … – all now deemed to be prima facie evidence of “white supremacy culture” and systemic racism that continues to be practiced in America by whites, who by their skin color alone are helplessly racists and white supremacists.
The politically correct answer to the ‘insufficient numbers’ problem is to lower previously-adopted, long-serving standards for qualification into schools and the professions. According to the woke progressives, it is this approach, to veer away from white supremacy (aka European) culture, that will finally establish racial justice in our land. And it all begins with rejecting any assertion that distributions of cognitive abilities, along with so many other human attributes, can also be race-based – HIQ über alles!
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