That discussion sparked an outcry from Penn students and professors, and on March 13, Penn Law dean Theodore Ruger said in a statement that Wax would no longer be teaching first-year law students.
I can think of one or two students who scored in the top half of my required first-year course. If college admissions were purely merit-based, employers would have no reason to discount an impressive degree just because it is held by a black or Hispanic applicant.
Under our system of racial preferences, however, it is not merely understandable but rational to suspect that minority applicants are less qualified than their paper credentials imply. In fact, Penn Law keeps its grading policies a closely guarded secret and does not publicly rank its students.
And his belief that black students would naturally fall to the bottom of a law school class would fit with his own academic history, which cost him a job at one of the most influential conservative think tanks in the country — the Heritage Foundation — and got him published by a major white nationalist website. Richwine has long espoused a view that non-Europeans have lower IQs than European immigrants, making the latter more desirable immigrants.
His remarks and work got significant attention from white nationalists online , including from Richard Spencer, whom Richwine met at AEI. In , Richwine wrote two articles for the website AltRight. The statistical construct known as IQ can reliably estimate general mental ability, or intelligence. The average IQ of immigrants in the United States is substantially lower than that of the white native population, and the difference is likely to persist over several generations.
The consequences are a lack of socioeconomic assimilation among low-IQ immigrant groups, more underclass behavior, less social trust, and an increase in the proportion of unskilled workers in the American labor market. Selecting high-IQ immigrants would ameliorate these problems in the U. His final argument? Of course, there was a time when such views and background might have gotten one summarily removed from National Review a publication for which I have written , which has long positioned itself as a leading conservative publication and was outspoken in its criticism of the white nationalist alt-right during the election.
The mean intelligence of blacks is much lower than for whites. The least intelligent ten percent of whites have IQs below 81; forty percent of blacks have IQs that low. Only one black in six is more intelligent than the average white; five whites out of six are more intelligent than the average black. These differences show in every test of general cognitive ability that anyone, of any race or nationality, has yet been able to devise.
They are reflected in countless everyday situations. Six years later, similar views are being espoused by another National Review contributor, who has previously written for a site dedicating to promoting the views of the alt-right and whose views were too extreme for the very conservative Heritage Foundation. Cooke for comment and will update if I receive a response. Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment: to empower through understanding.
That is, racism arose as a result of the contradiction between egalitarian principles coupled with the exclusionary treatment of specific ethnic groups: the rejection of organically hierarchical societies brought with it the implied necessity to account for the fact that some groups were subjected to servitude, enforced separation from the rest of society, or ghettoization.
Beginning around the end of the eighteenth century, as Enlightenment rationalism replaced faith and superstition as the source of authority, the pronouncements of science became the preferred method for reconciling the difference between principle and practice. In societies in which there has been systematic discrimination against specific racial groups, inevitably it has been accompanied by attempts to justify such policies on scientific grounds.
Broadly speaking, there have been three types of scientific explanations offered in putative support for racial discrimination, each of them having a lengthy history. One approach has been to claim that there are biological dangers involved in racial interbreeding. Indeed, it was precisely on the basis of this belief that in the United States and South Africa for many years there were statutory prohibitions against intermarriage. The first supposed evidence for this conclusion was provided in the mid-nineteenth century primarily by physicians, who claimed that, as a result of their mixed blood, "mulattoes" were considerably more susceptible to disease than either of their parents and thus exceptionally short-lived.
In addition, were persons of mixed race to intermarry, according to leading anthropologists at the time, they became progressively less fertile, eventually becoming completely sterile. In the early twentieth century, shortly after the scientific community's discovery of Gregor Mendel's work led to a new, exciting branch of biology, geneticists warned that the intermarriage of "far apart" races could produce what they called genetic "disharmonies". Charles Benedict Davenport, a world renowned researcher at the time, observed, for example, that if a member of a tall race, such as the Scots, should mate with a member of a small race, such as the Southern Italians, their offspring could inherit the genes for large internal organs from one parent and for small stature from the other, resulting in viscera that would be too large for the frame.
Naturally these claims were not tenable for long, but they were soon replaced by assertions less easily disprovable, as some social scientists insisted that the children of mixed race parentage were morally and intellectually inferior to either of the parents. Although belief in such genetic mismatches was once fairly widespread within the scientific community and cited specifically to rationalize various racially oppressive policies, this notion now enjoys far less credibility.
However, while there has been absolutely no evidence that racial interbreeding can produce a disharmony of any kind, warnings of some kind of genetic discord are still far from entirely extinct. Only a few years ago, Glayde Whitney, a prominent geneticist and former President of the Behavior Genetics Association, claimed that the intermarriage of "distant races" could produce a harmful genetic mixture in offspring, citing the wide range of health problems afflicting African Americans and their high infant death rate as examples of the effects of "hybrid incompatibilities" caused by white genes that were undetected due to the "one drop" convention defining all "hybrids" as blacks.
Unsurprisingly, he was also a regular speaker before neo-Nazi groups and, in an address to a convention of holocaust deniers, blamed Jews for a conspiracy to weaken whites by persuading them to extend political equality to blacks. Another trend in the scientific justification of racial discrimination has been the claim that prejudice is a natural and indeed an essential phenomenon necessary for the evolutionary process to be effective by ensuring the integrity of gene pools.
In this view, evolution exerts its selective effect not on individuals but on groups, which makes it necessary for races to be kept separate from each other and relatively homogeneous if there is to be evolutionary progress. One anthropologist who adheres to this belief refers to the tendency to "distrust and repel" members of other races as a natural part of the human personality and one of the basic pillars of civilization.
Finally, the most common way in which science has been used to support racial discrimination is through pronouncements that some groups are systematically less well endowed than others in important cognitive or behavioural traits. This is not to say that there may be no group differences in these traits, but rather that at this point there are no clear conclusions, which in any event would be irrelevant to issues of social and political equality.
Nevertheless, there is again a long history of the use of such claims for oppressive purposes. For the first quarter of the twentieth century, there was particular concern over the results of early intelligence tests, which supposedly demonstrated that Southern and Eastern Europeans were not only intellectually inferior to their Northern counterparts, but were also unfit for self-rule. Some of the most important scientists of the time explained that Nordics, characterized as they were by greater self-assertiveness and determination, as well as intelligence, were destined by their genetic nature to rule over other races.
0コメント