Let's be clear: Karl Pearson was not a statistician and a eugenicist. He was the statistician, and a eugenicist. It's hard to name a figure who has had more impact on his or her particular field than Pearson had on statistics. It's similar to the impact of Newton on physics or Chomsky on linguistics. If you've ever used the word "correlate," you are working in Pearson's lineage. If you've taken any statistics classes, whether a freshman intro or a doctoral seminar, you've worked in frames that were developed by Karl Pearson. In a very real way, if you are a modern human who understands the world, in part, through quantitative or statistical means, you are in the lineage of Karl Pearson. From educational research to climatology to baseball to economics, Pearson's influence is everywhere.
Now the simplest thing to say in regards to that is, Wagner wrote some good tunes. It's a banal matter of human life: brilliance and morality are separate attributes, and I'm afraid that the former does not require the latter. The reality is that you cannot pursue any intellectual lineage very far before you find that the progenitors of necessary ideas held some other views that were deeply wrong and deeply morally problematic as well. Do we toss out the good along with the bad? No. We utilize the good for the good and we rebut and reject the bad. Pearson advocated for white supremacy, and now we can use his techniques to show why we should work harder to solve racial inequalities that produce injustice. Be honest about the ugly stuff while you utilize the positive stuff. That goes for Karl Pearson and for Thomas Jefferson and for Jesus and for Aristotle. You don't need to reject bad lineages entirely because you can rebut bad ideas.
When I look to the comments of that Ta-Nehisi Coates post, I feel a little despair. Because you have good, well-meaning people who appear to be working furiously to confirm the frame that the "race scientists" prefer.
Here's a typical example, from commenter Barry_D:
The idea that certain immigrant groups have lower IQ's and that this is inherent/genetic and won't change is, as anybody should know, very old and very wrong in US history. And so far it's been dead f-ing wrong.
There are three separate claims here, that should be considered separately. That IQ is inherent or genetic is deeply controversial, and asserting it as fact simply does not bear scrutiny. To say that it won't change is to be even more wrong. To say that certain groups have scored lower on IQ tests is not wrong. It is actually a fact acknowledge as true in a broad range of scholarly disciplines by a broad collection of researchers, many of whom are political leftists, some of whom are nonwhite themselves, and almost none of whom think that these differences mean that races are inherently superior or inferior to each other.
Let's look at a different intellectual lineage, that of the APA report I cited the other day. I really want to endorse it again, because it say a lot of smart things: about how group tendencies can never be determinative of individual outcomes when statistics are involved; about how race is at once an artificial construct which we nevertheless identify socially (including the way in which people self-identify into racial categories); about outcome bias; and about the evidence that (at the time the report was published, I'm afraid it's quite old) the racial IQ gap was shrinking. All of that is interesting and important and, I think, a model for those like me who dispute the notion of scientific racial inferiority. But the report also speaks plainly and straightforwardly: the results of IQ tests across several decades, in many forms, conducted by many researchers on many groups and in many contexts, have found consistent and statistically significant difference between racial groups in IQ. That's not what I'm saying, that's what the APA's literature review is saying. It could not come as a surprise to anyone who has studied these issues for any length of time.
Once again: this is not an endorsement of the conclusions of those who call themselves race scientists. Quite the opposite. As I have said, I find that IQ is not a reasonable or useful proxy for what we casually think of as intelligence, that intelligence is a multivariate and complex phenomenon that exists along many different axes which do not scale adequately onto simply metrics, that these tests exist in a sociocultural and economic landscape which cannot be corrected for through simplistic stratification of income level.... But none of that changes the accuracy in reporting the findings.
So that lineage. The report, which was commissioned by the APA's specifically as a response to The Bell Curve and its surrounding controversy, has eleven authors. They came from Emory University, the Educational Testing Service, the University of Minnesota, Howard University, Wesleyan University, Cornell University, California State University, the University of Pittsburgh, the University of Texas, the University of North Florida, and Yale University. My question to the people commenting at Coates's blog is simple: are the authors racist for reporting that finding? Is the APA a racist organization? Is Howard a hothouse of racism? Is Wesleyan a fever swamp of conservatism? Remember, this was not original research. This was a literature review, one that looked at the broad swath of research on this topic. It's not an exaggeration to say that if the opinion that there are observable racial differences in IQ test results is racist, then essentially the fields of modern psychology, education, anthropology, and assorted others are racist.
All of that is precisely why the space must exist to spell out why the simplistic assertion of racial inferiority via IQ tests is wrong, to explain how much difference there is between reporting the observed scores and accepting them as dispositive evidence for the relative intelligence of individual members of difference races. It is precisely because the research is not being undertaken merely by fringe cranks that its findings must be discussed and criticized carefully.
We have no problem with this when it comes to educational statistics. Nobody mistakes the fact that Hispanic students drop out of high school at far higher rates than white students as evidence of inherent and genetic inferiority, and nobody mistakes social scientists accurately reporting that statistic as somehow being indicative of fringe views and cryptoracism. I don't know why IQ provokes such profound misunderstanding on either side.
We have no problem with this when it comes to educational statistics. Nobody mistakes the fact that Hispanic students drop out of high school at far higher rates than white students as evidence of inherent and genetic inferiority, and nobody mistakes social scientists accurately reporting that statistic as somehow being indicative of fringe views and cryptoracism. I don't know why IQ provokes such profound misunderstanding on either side.
One commenter seems to have a straightforward take. MindOverMatter writes, "Agreed. It make one wonder the kind of literature review that goes into the 'scientific research' conducted by these 'academics' (racist hacks)". I wonder if s/he is aware of how many people s/he is indicted with that comment. Others endorse Stephen Jay Gould's The Mismeasure of Man, which has been thoroughly dismantled. Also, there's an interesting exchange between commenters John Strider, Justin van Wormer, and DoctorJay. Van Wormer says, "Is anyone making the argument that the data doesn't "say what is says?" The correlation is there. My understanding is that the discredit comes from the fact that the variables being measured are not rigorously defined and that the correlation is therefore essentially meaningless as an empirical finding." That is more or less my own position. But it is strange to see van Wormer saying that; there are many people in the comments who plainly don't think that the correlation is there, and who find merely discussing it racist. Like MindOverMatter above. The distinction is hugely important, and yet there is no indication among most of the people commenting that they are willing to consider it.
Most discouraging for me, though, is the moderator Sandy Young. She has deleted some comments and admonished others with threats of banning. Maybe those actions were perfectly correct, I don't know, what with the comments being gone. But when she says stuff like this, "This is my line - it may or may not be the party line. To steal a phrase from a writer I admire: we will not debate people's humanity. There's a whole big internet where you can do that. And you are right, I have no intention of being 'neutral' about this," she is directly contributing to the cause of race scientists. She simply could not do a better job of fulfilling all of their presumptions, could not do more to work within their frame.
I will repeat: the biggest effort that people like Charles Murray and Richwine undertake is not to prove that black and Hispanic people are inferior. The biggest effort they undertake is to claim that liberals are incapable of defending their views on the merits, that they forbid discussion rather than win debate, and that the "PC police" squelches dissent it can't rebut. Indeed, that frame is precisely what Coates is trying to fight against. When Young says that she does not want to hear these arguments and that she cannot be neutral about it, she is saying precisely what her opponents want her to say.
Coates and his commenters have often invoked their perfectly reasonable right to not engage with arguments they don't want to. It's part of the burden of racism that people of color are constantly in a position where they are asked to represent their races, and constantly in a position where they have to either rebut racism or let it go. I cannot imagine how aggravating and annoying it is, or how tiring it must be to constantly have to make the same fucking arguments to the same fucking idiots. Coates (and The Atlantic) can have whatever commenting policy they want. Neither Coates nor Young has a responsibility to undertake the kind of rebuttal I'm calling for.
What I am saying, though, is that someone has to make that rebuttal. Because as much as I might want to side with Young in saying that there are some arguments which shouldn't have to be rebutted neutrally or dispassionately, I'm afraid those standards are so deeply ingrained in our society that to refuse to respond to the social scientific arguments for racial inferiority with social scientific rebuttal is to forfeit and hand them the appearance of victory. And whoever does make the case has to make it as strong as possible. Don't do things like reference The Mismeasure of Man, which is the lowest of low-hanging fruit, the rebuttal of which just gives ammunition to the people who are wrong on the merits.
I believe that the case for scientific racial inferiority is wrong, and I think that the only way to ensure that it doesn't spread is to argue against it, and I think that the only way to argue against it is to be willing to look at the arguments in favor of it, without fear of what you might find.
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