Alina Stefanescu explores the age-old debate, and carves out some new angles.

I’ve always thought the either/or approach to the two was a bit off — and unproductive. There’s much too much we don’t yet know about learning, genetics and heritability to make the kinds of definitive assertions made by the likes of Charles Murray or Steve Sailer.

I realize this is straying a bit from Alina’s post, but my main interest — or beef — in the debate concerns race, and the way paleo-libertarians and some conservatives are quick to make broad assumptions about black and white. In an odd way, they align themselves with leftist identity groups, in that both insist on perpetuating the construct we call race, despite the growing concensus among scientists (even more so now that the human genome’s been decoded) that there’s really no biological foundation for it.

At one time, the NAACP wanted to end an America in black and white. They in fact moved to remove the “race” data from the U.S. Census in 1960. Today, they realize that an end to race also means an end to race-tied federal funding, and so they fight like hell to ensure we’re continually separated into color-coded stacks of social security numbers. That’s why they’re so adamantly opposed to Ward Connerly’s “Racial Privacy Initiative,” which would end race-based demography in California state government.

The race-baiters on the right who continue to throw out the jive (pun fully intended) that there’s an inherent racial intellectuall hierarchy (black-white-Asian) only add fuel to the NAACP and like interest groups’ fire.

My own intuition suggests that academic achievement and IQ score disparities between the races are almost entirely cultural. But I’ll readily admit there are people on both sides of the debate who are far smarter than I am.

I guess my point is that it doesn’t do any of us much good to continue to trumpet the idea that white people are smarter than black people, and that Asians are smartest of the three. Even if that’s true, so what? Then what?

People usually don’t make such assertions without harbored agendas. Mr. Sailer, for example, happens to be vehemently anti-immigration – a position that nicely coincides with his views on where Hispanics fit into the IQ hierarchy.

Such positions, when pushed to their outter extremes, yield the eugenicist positions of, say, Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, who infamously wrote of “human weeds” — the blacks and Eastern Europeans she thought to be of lesser human stock than Anglos. She sought to limit their numbers — what she saw as her contribution to better humanity — through birth control, strategically placed abortion clinics, and propaganda about the benefits of “small familes” — the latter targeted at blacks through the church.

Another outcome of “racial hierarchy” thinking is affirmative action, which not only unjustly punishes qualified whites and Asians in higher education, but attaches a lifelong scarlet “AA” to blacks in the white collar world — even those who never needed affirmative action. AA proponents today of course assert that the programs are needed because of discrimination, not inferiority. But dig deep into the heart of lots of white liberals. I think you’ll find many of them support affirmative action out of secretive doubts about blacks’ ability to compete on an equal playing field.

My point? I can’t see any inherent value in this obsession we have with race — or with notions that certain traits, predispositions or intelligence quotients are somehow tied to it. Everything our society measures, it seems, is at some point broken down by race. We then look at the numbers, notice the differences, carry the two, borrow from the nine, and, VOILA! — the press releases write themselves. Interest groups decry the obvious discrimination that led to the disparities — paleos secretly take comfort that the disparities are more evidence of inferiority/superiority theories.

My suspicion is that most all the disparities we find aren’t race issues at all — they’re class issues. And by defining them in terms of race, we only perpetuate the problems we’re trying to solve.

George Will wrote a while back that black America’s problems wouldn’t be solved if we were to wave a magic wand that made them white. He’s right. Most all of black America’s social maladies aren’t “black” problems at all. They’re “poor” problems. And to the extent that they are black problems, it’s only because social programs and activists have insisted they’re black problems (I should add here that the GOP is partly responsible here, too, for it’s infamous “welfare queen” propaganda and “southern strategy” implemented in the 1970s and 1980s, a (successful) political ploy aimed at winning over low-to-mid income southern whites).

More evidence? The recent influx of immigrants from Western Africa who have adapted marvelously well to American society. They’ve made the leap in one generation that “African-American” blacks haven’t made in four or five. I’d suggest it’s because more recent black immigrants haven’t settled into the victim-culture that dominates and oppresses “black America.” Indeed, the most recent African immigrants — Somalis, Nigerians and West Africans — are actually shunned from “black” culture — many times precisely because of a cultural emaphasis on education and learning (see this recent Washington Post article on Somali immgrants to the town of Lewiston, Maine for an example).

I guess what I’m getting at here is that race is too insignificant for smart people to continue to dwell on it. Its biological roots barely break earth. Obviously, I fall far more to the “nurture” side of things than to “nature.” And I’m deeply suscipicious of people who insist on propagating the “nature” views that some of us are handicapped from the start. Because the only policy rammifcations one can draw from such assertions are 1) those people then need some help from the state to compensate for their “back of the pack” start, or, 2) those people then should be ignored, backshelved, or, God forbid, phased out.

The first option is what we’re doing now. And it’s not working. The second option should frighten the hell out of you.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 17th, 2002 at 8:42 pm by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.