Thoughts on Things You Cannot Say
I am not going to comment directly on l’affaire Derb, the case of my friend John Derbyshire, who was ostracized from the pages of National Review for writing a column elsewhere that expressed unacceptable opinions about race. I would, however, like to register my admiration for what Mark Steyn had to say about the incident, in particular what he has to say about the condition of free speech in the public square. “The Left,” Mark notes:
is pretty clear about its objectives on everything from climate change to immigration to gay marriage: Rather than win the debate, they’d just as soon shut it down. They’ve had great success in shrinking the bounds of public discourse, and rendering whole areas of public policy all but undiscussable. In such a climate, my default position is that I’d rather put up with whatever racist/sexist/homophobic/Islamophobic/whateverphobic excess everybody’s got the vapors about this week than accept ever tighter constraints on “acceptable” opinion.
Indeed. As I wrote to another friend, it used to be that if someone expressed an opinion you didn’t like, the proper response was to endeavor to refute it. What happened to that ambition? Mark, I fear, is correct: “The net result of Derb’s summary execution by NR will be further to shrivel the parameters, and confine debate in this area to ever more unreal fatuities.”
I find the aroma of unreality that hovers, miasma-like, around this whole non-debate dismaying but also puzzling. Our attorney general said he wanted to have a frank national conversation about race. What that seems to have meant is national sermonizing about race. Is it the case that certain questions about race are simply unmentionable? You might point to what happened to John Derbyshire and say: “You dope, of course they are. Look what happened to him!”
That’s not the whole answer, though. “There is nothing more painful to me … than to walk down the street and hear footsteps and start thinking about robbery, then look around and see somebody white and feel relieved.” That was Jesse Jackson. What John wrote was an elaboration of that observation. I do not happen to agree with many of his conclusions in that column, but what I find curious is the nature of his tort. In Christian theology, blasphemy against the Holy Spirit is said to be the one unforgivable sin. Exactly what such blasphemy might consist of kept theologians employed for centuries. That guild has been on its way out for some time, of course, but the impulse to discover unforgivable sins (the vaguer the better) remains alive and well.
“Racism” is one of the new cardinal sins, and it’s sometimes forgotten just how new it is. Nowadays you can’t set foot on a college campus, or write for an opinion magazine, without running into accusations of racism. But the word “racism” is so recent a neologism that it wasn’t in the Oxford English Dictionary in 1971. To be sure, what we would describe as racist attitudes have a long history, but the crystallization of this “ism,” and its elevation to being the sin of sins, is of recent vintage. What does that tell us? Maybe, as some commentators seem to believe, maybe it tells us that we are made of finer moral stuff than our forbears. Maybe it tells us something else. I don’t have the answer to that.
But the spectacle of John Derbyshire’s ostracism reminded me of an article by John Fletcher Moulton, an English attorney and politician, who back in the 1920s wrote an article called “Law and Manners.” All social life, Moulton observed, takes place on a spectrum between pure whim at one end and positive law at the other. In between is the realm of manners, morals, prejudice, “the whole realm which recognizes the sway of duty, fairness, sympathy, taste, and all the other things that make life beautiful and society possible.”
Why read more from that sour Brit? There’s very little of interest from the sclerotic mind of Derbyshire. At last, NRO showed good judgement in dumping this nasty, small minded Brit twit. Oh, was that racist against Brits?
A case in point.
Frankly Brits are some of the best speakers against reverse racism. Not coming from a deeply felt heritage of race guilt, they can both see and speak clearly when they see nonsense on stilts.
As for mental sclerosis, I’m sure he’s at least twice as intelligent as you. Try reading his math papers. Then imagine yourself writing them. It is to laugh!
Charity requires that I assume MrBored was attempting satire.
Well, were you at all interested in mathematics, you might not find his mind so “sclerotic.”
Mr. Bored, I presume you have never read Derb’s essays compiled on his web site, or his book reviews. he is a superior writer, with an outstanding style. Try reading his book on the Riemann hypothesis. I had to re-read some of the math chapters 3 times to get the gist of them, but it is a superb book.
You don’t want to read about about a guy eating a sandwich? Derb is a better fit with with the Goth Nazis (aka gay Nazis) of the webzine.
It’s too bad that guy walking in a black neighborhood in Baltimore didn’t have Derb’s advice on his mind presciently on St. Patrick’s day. We do have savages in our midst; some of them are black.
You say ” .. Racism” is one of the new cardinal sins, and it’s sometimes forgotten just how new it is. Nowadays you can’t set foot on a college campus, or write for an opinion magazine, without running into accusations of racism”
The simple fact is, these days, simply existing as white male automatically puts you in the wrong in ANY debate. In any debate about racism, I am wrong for even participating..why? I am white. No further reason needed.
Sadly, I read Derbyshire’s post…and I found little I could disagree with. He has his citations to support his arguements, and I find little to oppose them with. My feelings on it are mixed, as I have been conditioned to reject the whole premise of difference based on skin color, but I am a numbers type person..and the numbers do not lie (note that I recognize they are statistics, and there are lies, Da*n lies, and statistics…).
You point out that he has trod on the toes of polite society…what of those in the Black community that have given the same, mirror image talk to their children? Where is the decrying of them, and their mores? you state your love of equality of justice, so should that not be given equal weight in this article?
Can said polite society refute his points? I doubt it, and ignoring it so it goes away doesn’t mean it will. It will only metastasize and become far far worse.
The main point was not lost on me, despite my grouching above. I agree that more open and honest debate is needed, but as long as I am pre-convicted to being a white male, there is no debate..there cannot be one because a debate must include more than on monolithic voice.
Very well said, Random Passerby.
Amen Brother. I am a white male, I care less about the color of the skin, the sex, or the political view point of the people I work with. I just want the best. I am so tired of those who are “disadvantaged” who claim discrimination when the real issue is with the individual.
Your comment is one example, prime? of what has happened.
HOW did it happen? Among free Americans protected in their Constitution, the pre-eminent Law in the USA a “Country of Law”. with unquestionable protection of the RIGHT – nasty word that no? – of freedom of speech and expression of opinion in the private AND public squares.
As America is a nation with a government representative only – mark the word representative – of the citizens can we suppose that:
l. the citizens did not know their natural rights from the Declaration of Independence protected in the laws of their nation? If not, why not?
2 Did not know those rights were abrogated, i.e. removed from them without consent – by defintion unlawful: taking something belonging to someone else without permission of the owners is theft isn’t it? Even when the thieves are an “exclusive “gentlemens’ club” of professional politicians as in Congress and Judiciary. In the main lawyers so supposedly conversant with the principles and laws of the USA. Even when they have personal distaste or reservations for and about those laws.
3. The abrogations were done by and at the service of the representatives enjoined by freely taken oath to “uphold and defend the Constitution”, i.e. the law protecting the Rights of Americans guaranteed in the Declaration of Independence. The powers of the government and representatives ARE LIMITED, see Amendments IX and X among others. Despite which limits the representatives acted far beyond their purview in limiting rights of Americans over many decades, “for the good of the people”.
4. That the self-governing citizens in America/USA since its inception the model of governance “of the people, by the people and for the people” accepted without protest this theft? Freedom from arbitrary control by THEIR government LIMITED in the pre-eminent, the foundational law of that nation, the Constitution. No matter what self-appointed, self-propagating groups of “betters” are representative in that government and its agencies/shills.
5. The citizens were far too busy in their personal ambit to care enough for their freedoms to guard them? America is a juicy creature very tempting for predators, foreign and/or domestic. Or domestic at the service of foreign philosophies see Marcus T. Cicero. Self-appointed, self-propagating “elite”, the “best and brightest” dismiss as beneath notice, sneer at and display their absolute contempt in all their public utterances for those self-governing citizens – the “commoners”. Those commoners, that’s you and me!
Odd that otherwise wise and proudly independent Americans were receptive to the blandishments, the incitements to readily permit the thefts of their freedoms. Beginning with and progressing from limits on freedom of speech and opinion and finishing with inequality in law by preferential treatement of their preferred groups, ever expanding. Equality in and under law is a bedrock of American Law. Inducements to self-destruction of that hated America. Embraced eagerly by those hated Americans.
Do Americans now care enough to avoid being dismembered and swallowed up by the predators – who call themselve democrats, liberals and feel your pain compassionates. To take time and energy to take back their nation? To declare their independence from this royal court of self appointed elite??
Or, as you suggest in your comment, are they waiting and “hoping” that some hero, some New Kennedy/Clinton/Obama, some Messiah shall do it for them?
Self-governing Americans with the emergency option to “Change” their nation back to the one that bore them, nurtured them, and provided them their freedoms. Now in danger of being forever destroyed and taken from them by destructive and hateful “heroes”.
A line from the musical 1776 – before your time – George Washington attempting to get Congress to provide his soldiers – citizen soldiers – materiell to further their independence from the royal court in Westminster – progeny of “Camelot” ,
” Is anybody there, does anybody care”?
The funny thing is, PJM has several writers and editors who conduct themselves in the exact same squelching manner by curtailing commenters at this site. If Byran Preston edits any particular comment thread, I can be assured that no matter what I say, critical of PJM or full of praise, my comment will never see the light of day. The thin skinned Michael J Totten was exactly the same. Post one too many critical comments of him and get instantly and forever banned and accused of nazism etc..
As I see many posts where commenters express similar experiences at PJM, such tactics have definitely harmed the integrity of this PJM site. Why employ people who resort to this kind of crushing totalitarian editorial approach? Is PJM mainly a place of ideas or a propaganda megaphone where dissent will not be tolerated? According to the Prestons and the Tottens and several others, clearly it’s the latter.
Yes, I experienced the same kind of reaction from Michael Totten, when I posted what I thought was a calm, reasonable defense of the Serbs, with evidence to back it up.
There are some very good writers at PJMedia, including Roger Kimball, but some of the others are guilty of PC. And as Kathy Shaidle has mentioned, some pundits who are supposedly conservative try to outdo the Left in bestowing haloes upon the likes of Martin Luther King, Mandela, etc.
Mark Steyn has made the important point that the Left wants to completely shut down debate. We already know that many so-called liberals today are not at all liberal in their allowance of different opinions. And its a shame that some supposed conservatives are guilty of that too.
Gosh I thought this comment censorship was something personal…yea I know the world revolves around me. heh. I guess I am glad to know it isn’t personal but goofy…PJM needs to fix this comment policy.
fine work, Roger.
i would only add, if i may, that Orwell’s larger point in “1984″, i think, is that by shrinking what can be said and written, what can be even thought likewise thereby shrinks.
When I was young we would snigger at sexual taboos like those of the Victorians or of other cultural conservatives or even of the FCC’s, and complain about censorship and hypocrisy. Now my contemporaries have become what they hated.
I think Derbyshire did go over the edge. Criticizing the part of black culture where young men’s style of dress is based half on being in prison and half on robbing convenience stores is fine, as is the larger issue of intentionally not doing well as a defense against the charge of “acting white” or being labeled an “oreo,” a term I’ve heard a professional woman, who is black, say about a law professor who’s black and conservative. But then he goes into IQ, which is supposed to measure inherent, i.e. genetic, intelligence. I think there are other reasons, from poorer nutrition, subculture pressure to not do well, and the breakdown of the black family (how often do these kids get read to at night? I learned to read very early because my dad would read to me every night, after a long day at work. How many black kids have a dad who’s even around.) If that’s what John was talking about, he needed to make it clearer.
Unpleasant as it is to confront that statistic, Derbyshire’s comments on race and IQ are entirely consistent with what I have read. Admitting — even to oneself — that IQ varies and varies significantly by race, is to dispare that our problems with the black underclass will ever be solved. But reality is what it is and the problems will certainly remain and intensify if we cannot even candidly describe what we are trying to deal with.
It is not hard to understand, however, why American blacks and those who sympathize with their plight would fight any public perception of lower IQ status. Sad, difficult, unpleasant issues.
Whether true or not, the points Derbyshire made about intelligence struck me as particularly tangental to his argument. I’ve never heard much argument suggesting that one should be cautious in the presence of dumb people. Now, tack on that the fact that they are incredibly incendiary. He shouldn’t have been fired. But, he was certainly sticking in bomb in the article with that “point”.
The problem with stupid people is that they do stupid things that are so irrational that the more intelligent are unable to predict the outcomes of encounters with them. If you cannot predict the outcome of an encounter it is irrational and dumb to voluntarily have such an encounter.
Walked into a new job as GM and while I was meeting a couple of the folks that worked for me one particular young man struck me as dangerous. Not because he was sinister, he wasn’t in fact he was the opposite, he had a big smile, not a crazy one, but a smile of a person anxious to please, but I distinctly remember getting the feeling that he could shoot me and not remember it 10 minutes later.
In fact about 1 year later he called and spoke with my AManager confessing to having just shot two people. One died as a result of being shot in the head. Pleasant enough young man but simply not smart enough to know exactly what he was doing. Zero planning ahead.
I don’t think that IQ is necessarily genetic, though there is certainly a genetic component.
We don’t have many identical twin studies wherein one is raised “black” and one is raised “white”. Twin studies are the gold standard for discovering genetic vs. environmental difference.
I think he made the required obeisance to the notion that the difference between population means is smaller than the difference within the population, but came back to the idea that the population mean is sufficiently different that large fractions are lower than a given value for one race, and small fractions are lower than the same value for another race.
Accordingly, when considering people you don’t know, you don’t know about one person, and it may be ‘good citizenship’ to give them the benefit of the doubt. When you see a group of people, their mean characteristic is much less variable, and therefor, you have much less doubt, whether that characteristic is IQ, weight, height, or net worth. For a group of 16 people, the expected variation is the reciprocal of the square root of the number of people or 1/4th the variation expected for a single person, no matter the distribution of the characteristic. Law of Large Numbers.
Another idea is the “Law of Small Numbers” wherein the number of people you encounter is distributed by the Poisson Distribution around the mean. That is partly under your control by how you act, where you go, and what you do.
It makes sense to make the Law of Small Numbers work for you, to keep the Law of Large Numbers from working against you.
All the things that you mention about IQ have been controlled for and thoroughly researched. The statistics are robust. Dismissing it out of hand because you don’t like the implication is itself narrow-minded. Ignoring differences and expecting uniform results is a recipe for disaster. The destruction of the family and horrible culture is a direct result.
In fact recent research blows up your statement about parents effects on IQ. It has been shown, through twin studies, that differences due to being raised by parents disappear over time.
That’s the point of Steyn’s and Kimball’s criticism: refutation is a means of dialogue. Ostracism is a means of ending dialogue.
I too had problems with some of Derbyshire’s flimsy IQ assertions, but he did provide data. The data could be correct or not; the proper response is to examine the veracity of the data, as well as the logical steps taken to infer conclusions from it.
IQ matters because whites are blamed for blacks not participating equally in society due to systemic discrimination. If a higher portion of blacks are dumber than systemic discrimination probably isn’t the reason for a disproportionate amount of blacks at the lower end of the spectrum. I’d be more than willing to forget about IQ if every single problem in the black community wasn’t blamed on white people. Unfortunately, that won’t happen and we’ll actually have to use facts and statistics to defend non-stop accusations of keeping black people down.
John Derbyshire was correct on almost all counts. Your comment about IQ indicates you don’t have a clue as to what you’re talking about. Psychometrists have proven over and over that Blacks have a median I@ one mean deviation or 15 points lower than Whites.
Blacks also are not improving their I@ by allowing their environment and mental “thoughts” to lower rather than increase it.
I agree strongly with your point. It should have been argued vigorously at the first appearance of “The Bell Curve”. An entire subsection of the Bell Curve debate should have been framed: IF the stats as presented are accurate, WHY are they? But there was (and still is) too much deafening posturing for that debate to be heard.
Here’s one reason I like to play with, but don’t really believe (though it may just be so). We European-descended folks cross-mated with Neanderthals. Asians cross-mated with Denisovans. Africans did neither. This hypothesis tends to weaken a teensy bit when I continue: “That explains why Whites are so physically robust, whereas Africans are wimps — like Mohammed Ali”. It’s a theory that still needs a little work.
IQ tests, as I understand them, measure expressed intelligence, not inherent / potential intelligence. The intelligence that one’s culture allows one to express is what shows up in the test results. If the parents don’t read to the children, or don’t read at all, the children won’t see any good in reading. If reading is just something that the oppressor does, what decent person would aspire to it?
A culture that demands its members be intellectually crippled never lets the potential of its genetic component be achieved. And it should be no surprise that a culture of mentally gelded racial identity finds kinship with similarly maimed religion which allows no thought but that which its prophet has revealed.
Sorry that is not true… environment has very little to do with intelligence.
http://www.lrainc.com/swtaboo/taboos/wsj_main.html
Check that link out…
There is an inteersting ‘control experiment’: the (mostly) white British ‘chav’ (Council Housing And Violent, although this may be a backronym) subculture. It has many of the same social pathologies as Derbyshire decries, and is a prime counterexample to his radically genetic-determinist position.
If you raise an entire generation on glorifying thuggishness, violence, idleness, and immediate gratification and ridiculing their opposites, don’t be expect that’s what you get — especially in those groups most exposed to that kind of dreck.
To the extent that you see a victimology rhetoric with white British ‘chav’s, it centers on class rather than race. And of course there too the self-[deleted] chattering class acts as enablers so they can feel good about how ‘tolerant’ they are.
I hardly need to say that some black people — some very prominent black people — say the most disgustingly racist things about white people almost daily. And with impunity. These people are allowed to be racist simply because they are black.
For example, Barack Obama’s grandmother is “a typical white person.”
It also turns out that some black people would give white people a similar “talk” about how whites can indeed be in danger in some black neighborhoods and some black crowds.
But that doesn’t matter. We’re wholly given over to identity politics: “authenticity” trumps fact or truth.
Old white dude says that he’s afraid of crowds of unknown black folk? UNCLEAN!
Black cop tells white guy not to wander into that neighborhood? Friendly advice.
Derbyshire wasn’t suppressed or given the “death penalty.” (He apparently has a gig with this other website, so he’s not even completely out of a job.) He wrote something which a lot of people found offensive because, let’s face it, it *was* offensive. When someone you know says something grossly offensive, you might stop associating with that person, if only so others don’t start thinking you agree with the sentiment. That’s what National Review did–the people running the magazine decided that they didn’t want to be associated with the sentiments being expressed. It’s their right to have their magazine reflect their values, and Derbyshire has no moral or legal claim that someone else should give over their forum to him if they don’t want to.
It’s called freedom of association, and we all get to do it.
Baby M, just because NRO has the right to associate with whom they please, and the flipside right to shun whom they please, doesn’t mean we can’t criticize them for their choice. The point is not that it’s wrong to deny your association to someone you can’t get along with, the point is that NO ONE is actually refuting anything Derb wrote – they’re sticking their fingers in their ears and turning their backs rather than face facts. Cover-your-a$$ cowardice SHOULD be criticized. If what Derb wrote is wrong, prove it by refuting his data.
Being offensive doesn’t mean being untrue. If what Derb spoke was true, at what are you offended? Do you find reality offensive and fantasy preferable?
I’m reminded of Patrick Buchanan and his similar expulsion from NR. They devoted an entire issue to airing out the issue and it would be tragic if NR did any less with Derbyshire. I haven’t had the time to properly go over his piece but PB got his day where his issues were thoroughly examined and the Derb deserves the same. If NR does any less, the spirit of William F Buckley at that magazine is dead.
The proper response to Derb’s article would have been, “WTF, dude? You’re making some awfully racist-sounding (SOUNDING, at this point) arguments here. Care to explain yourself?”
If his answers amounted to “Hey, white folks aren’t safe around black folks. Besides, they’re too stupid to live,” then they could be justified in “unfriending” Derb, both publicly and privately.
But what Rich Lowry and Jonah Goldberg and many others did was throw their skirts up over their heads and scream “UNCLEAN! UNCLEAN!” and hasten to strike their door posts with lamb’s blood, lest the spectre of OMG UR A RACIST take their firstborn.
That’s Amanda Marcotte behavior, not the behavior of those who run a magazine that’s ostensibly dedicated to tearing down the lies and fallacies of the left. And for those who especially like irony, watch for Jonah Goldberg’s next tome, “The Tyranny of Cliches: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas.”
Yes, Jonah. You’re behaving exactly like those who clutched their pearls at “Liberal Fascism.” Not even so much as a thorough, sardonic, scathing fisking of Derb’s article from you, which is what he should rate. Just the smug and hasty shun of those eager to be “one of the good ones” in the eyes of the Left.
Jonah Goldberg, now that he has a family to support (wife and kid) is finding that there just isn’t a lot of money to be made as a conservative pundit and author. He knows that switching his politics won’t help much either because now that the great media empires are starting to fail there isn’t a lot of money to be made in word-smithing of any type. Too bad.
Again, that’s what I mean. Brits and I imagine Euros generally have the refreshing ability to say their piece without miles of prefatory apologias. This comes across as candor which we Americans apparently lack. While tedious it has its upsides.
Derb prescribed modes of behavior for his children that are doubtless followed by the execrable Rich Lowry and his sanctimonious cohort at NR, not to mention by well-to-do blacks themselves.
He committed the unpardonable sin – speaking truthfully – and had to be punished.
rbj – you really need to reread Derb’s article, follow the links, and do a bit of research. Your notions, although widely held, are naive, almost quaint.
In today’s society, you can tell any lie you want — but come within a mile of speaking a truth, and you’re toast.
My gut instinct is increasingly one that says one hard firefight delivered with a hammerhead blow and the age of political correctness ends. As I am against the demonization of a race so am I against the sanctification of a race–even one that has parts which might have earned the title.
All anybody in this country gets to be is equal. Nothing less, nothing more.
Speaking of thoughts on things one cannot say, when do men get equal rights Horatius?
Item the First: Derbyshire did not tread on the toes of “our society’s racial sensitivities;” he violated a taboo the Left enforces by denunciation alone. In doing so, he paid a price — one he had to have anticipated, given the pusillanimity of National Review in these latter years — and demonstrated a significant degree of courage.
Item the Second: “Good manners,” regardless of how they’re defined, are a standard that applies to everyone (excepting the youngest minor children) or to no one. Inasmuch as the Leftist enforcers of censorious racial hypersensitivity refuse to hew to any standard of conduct, no standard, at least in political discourse, can validly be said to exist.
Item the Third and Final: “What can be said and what must be left unsaid” cannot embrace the sphere of fact. Derbyshire’s assertions of fact are all verifiable, yet none of his detractors has attempted to refute even one of them. It is unacceptable for facts critical to the functioning of an advanced civilization to be deemed unspeakable, and I for one will not have it.
National Review, to which I’ve subscribed for some years, will no longer be welcome in my home. Truth, courage enough to speak it, and the willingness to hear and acknowledge it, are too important to tolerate arrant cowardice.
I essentially dumped National Review after Bill Buckley left. I stuck my nose in here and there but it just wasn’t the same.
I agree with: “It is unacceptable for facts critical to the functioning of an advanced civilization to be deemed unspeakable, and I for one will not have it.”
And I saw it start there after he no longer wrote for them.
Only one quibble Fran and I suspect it’s just a word choice issue, I do not accept that the idea that the relative intelligence of blacks and whites and asians is critical to the functioning of an advanced civilization. I think that it is only important when you adopt the retrograde notion of counting by color instead of quality and that counting effort, in itself, is somewhat disqualifying for the term “an advanced civilization”.
Let the cream of every nation, race, geographic region, and sex rise to the top in an actual meritocracy. That’s the America I want to have. I strongly suspect you do too.
Of course Derbyshire should be allowed to write this stuff. And people who want to criticize his writings are morally and intellectually obligated to specify just what is wrong with them. But National Review is not a government, but a private journal that exists for certain reasons and not for others. It exists to promulgate a particular point of view, or a particular range of views. And if someone’s writings fall outside that range, it makes sense that they choose not to associate themselves with that person.
No one disputes what you say. The problem is that NR fired Derb not for any of the usual journalistic sins (lying, slander, plagiarism, spinning opinions as facts) but for stating inconvenient truths about a sensitive subject in our public life. Moreover what he said is what many people — of all religions, political persuasions and races — evidently believe, although they would never admit it publicly (even Jeremiah Wright lives in a gated community!). This is what I find curious, and troubling.
“Our attorney general said he wanted to have a frank national conversation about race. What that seems to have meant is national sermonizing about race. ”
I am glad you exposed this statement of Holders for the BS that it is. Holder never wanted a 2 way conversation, where both sides listen to the other, and respond to the others criticisms and concerns. He wanted to be able to tell white america how evil they were, and how we owed black america for our sins, and have white america agree, apoligize for their sins, and fork over the reperations.
It became pretty obvious to me when Holder punted on the Black panther voter intimidation case. It has become even more obvious in the zimmerman/martin case, which should have had 2 teachable moments. One lesson, that black kids in hoodies are not autmatically criminals, and the local police may have dismissed the case without arrest too soon, without adequate investigation. Obama/holder were more than willing to discuss that teachable moment. But the 2nd teachable moment, that zimmerman might have a legit self defense case, and publically branding him guilty and racist before the facts are in, as the media, the black panthers, Spike Lee, and all too many black political figures have done, is just as wrong. Well Obama/Holder didn’t do much teaching there, and in fact their comments made things worse. I almost think that Obama wanted to inflame the situation, as a way of motivating his black base.
Obama campaigned in 2008 as a racial healer, but he has turned out to be much closer to Al Sharpton than MLK.
In Christian theology, blasphemy against the Holy Spirit is said to be the one unforgivable sin. Exactly what such blasphemy might consist of kept theologians employed for centuries.
Theology break time!
The best explanation for it that I’ve ever seen (the one that made the most sense internally given the other assumptions of Christian theology, that is – and the one that, while they perhaps argued about it for centuries, has been considered Solved for perhaps a thousand years) was that “blasphemy against the Holy Spirit” was in all cases, one way or another, refusal to accept salvation.
Thus the only “eternal sin” is refusing to repent; as perhaps most thoroughly presented in the Summa Theologica and upheld to this day by the Catholics, the Calvinists, and as far as I can tell almost all the other Protestants.
Thus it is “unforgivable” while it endures, but the moment one repents of it, it is forgivable. (Naturally; one can’t be forgiven while being obdurate in sin, can one?)
(Ain’t theology grand? This atheist thinks so. It’s a good mental exercise in any case.)
I think the debate should be less about race than about culture. There are subcultures in America and some promote poverty and crime while others promote successful attitudes. The line between the culture and race can be close but they are not the same as can be shown by the military which mostly rewrites your subculture into their own military culture despite race.
Forget the race stuff. Aren’t smart people supposed to become friends with dumb people or what?
Roger,
Your link to the 1920s article is a mailto.
2) no one I have read has refuted anything Derb said; it is all point and shout. I did not disagree with much that he said, but he could have left out the IQ comparisons. It was not germane to his point, needlessly provocative, and probably what got him canned. That said, the $20 bucks I used to spend on an NR subscription is now going to Derb.
“Our attorney general said he wanted to have a frank national conversation about race. What that seems to have meant is national sermonizing about race. ”
I am glad you exposed that Holder statement for the BS that it is. Holder was never interested in a 2 way conversation, where both sides could exchange problems and concerns, and strive for concensus. He wanted to be able to tell white people how evil they are, have us listen and apoligize, and let the reperations begin. And also say that any policy criticism of Obama was racist.
I realized this after he punted the Black Panther voter intimidation case. It has now become obvious in the zimmerman/martin case. That case had 2 potential teachable moments. One was that all black kids in hoodies are not necessarily criminals, zimmerman might have been too quick to suspect him, and the police/prosecutors might have been too quick to drop the investigation without arrest. Obama/Holder have been very eager for that teachable moment, and I would have eagerly accepted that if they had also pushed the other teachable moment. The 2nd teachable moment is that zimmerman might have a legit self defense case, and be completely innocent, and not the racist murderer he is portrayed as being, and it was wrong for the media, black panthers, Spike Lee, Al Sharpton, and numerous black politicians to portray him as a racist intentional murderer before all the facts are in and the investigation is completed. I haven’t heard much from Obama/Holder on that teachable moment. It has gotten so bad that I suspect he purposely wanted to inflame the situation, to motivate the black base to vote.
Obama campaigned as a racial healer, but he has turned out to be much closer to Al Sharpton than MLK.
The constraint of free speech in the name of political correctness will result in what I call the David Duke effect. David Duke, as you recall, was a grand dragon of the KKK. Yet, despite that resume entry, he had some success in almost winning as governor of Louisiana. He did so by talking about certain taboo subject, taboo at the time, namely welfare costs. Which at the time would label you racist. Yet, he caught fire, because there were many hard working tax payers sick of having their paychecks pay for welfare. These folks were totally discounted and shut out until David Duke talked about those concerns.
The point is that when free speech is constrained in the mainstream of the political spectrum, others will, nonetheless, talk about it because many of these subjects are of great concern to a great number of people. So, rather than having middle-of-the-road politicians and fellow travelers trying to make sense of it, it become a vehicle and entree to legitimize an extremist who would otherwise not be given the time of day.
Derbyshire, despite the prose, hits on some very uncomfortable issues that plague race relationships in this country. Issues and discrepancies that are routinely being hijacked by the likes of Jessie Jackson and Sharpton in issues such as the Treyvon Martin case. You may not like the fact the Derbyshire just rubbed some very uncomfortable issues in your face in a very uncomfortable way. But, what’s the alternative, NBC distorting transcripts to further fan the flames? The new Black Panthers issuing fatwas (sorry bounties) for people that have yet to be charged of any wrong-doing?
I hoping the shock effect of Derbyshire may wake up some people that all political correctness does is allow the David Dukes to run the political agenda.
You are starting to touch on something that I haven’t seen mentioned elsewhere — John Derbyshire could be used to fill a gaping hole in the ecology of present-day media. Just as Lord Monckton has become the media’s go-to expert for an intelligent attack on global-warming orthodoxy, so also could Derbyshire become the go-to expert for an intelligent and mildly racist view on today’s race-relations orthodoxy. He could take the place of all those racist strawmen that are forever being denounced. He can be fired from TV panel discussions to show institutional disapproval — or advertisers could refuse to advertise on shows where he appears — but only if he is hired to discuss his views or appear on those shows in the first place. All that harsh and disapproving language you hear could just be the sound of opportunity knocking on his door …
I found it hard to take any serious exception to JD’s brief essay. It is an attempt to address some very real problems and threats to personal safety.
I’d have left out the stuff about intelligence, mainly because most of the work on this topic necessarily involves aggregates of large populations, and even if it’s all true and means exactly what we think it means, it’s of little value when we are dealing with individuals. It could be important when evaluating public policy, but that’s not what the essay is about.
And I have to draw the line at JD’s admonishment to avoid acting the Good Samaritan when that involves blacks in apparent distress. The advice may or may not be wise, but personally I’ll run what risk there may be. Maybe I’m just a daredevil.
NRO’s actions strike me as a serious, perhaps even cowardly, regression. Of course NR had no obligation to print the essay. And it did not print it. But when the essay was printed elsewhere – which would seem to be none of NR’s goddamn business – NR went all PC. A rather shabby, and, I think, unwise move.
Those who listen to “Radio Derb” or have perused his web site are aware that Derb has a lovely wife, two teenage kids (the son about to graduate HS and enter the Army), and — alas — a nasty chronic disease. He is also now unemployed. If you have enjoyed his writings and would like to express your gratitude in a tangible way, this would be a good time to purchase one or more of his books.
#13 — I beat you to it. Lowry’s done for National Review what George Bush did for Reaganism. Diminished intellectual vigor and courage. Pathetic neediness in place of bold independence.
The problem isn’t that a comedy movie called “White Men Can’t Jump” CAN be made. The problem is that a comedy movie called “Black Men Can’t Think” CAN’T be made.
Good article, Roger.
For what I think is an important take on the readers of John Derbyshire’s piece, I recommend Eric Raymond’s An Intelligence Test, at http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=4270.
Spot on, Roger. Particularly the comment on the ‘national conversation/dialogue on race’ that closet racists call for ad nauseam. National lecture on race…the ‘conversation’, such that it is, always consists of black race pimps and their white liberal enablers demanding that everyone else simply admit to being racist, closet or otherwise, attaching racial meaning to nearly every adjective or noun in the King’s English, and ultimately using it as rationalization for reparations, financial or otherwise.
This whole argument about IQ and Genetics is so vague and fraught with problems. As Steyn points out, compare Pakistan with India; or Haiti with the Dominican Republic; or descendents of “House N…rs” versus those of “Gang N…rs”; or today’s immigrants from West Africa with those who are descended from American plantation slaves.
Like what does culture and history stop and genetic inheritance start??
My own ‘bible’ on this matter is Thomas Sowell’s “Ethnic America”. This is a great book. One thought, based on his comments is that today’s Black Community acts much like the Irish of the 18th century (ie, probably some of R Lowry’s ancestors)..
NRO exercised its’ freedom of association, and I have exercised mine. Nixed my NR subscription some months ago, removed myself from all of their mailing lists, removed the Corner from my bookmarks. I can always access articles from their less sheltered writers (Steyn, VDH) without having to support the rest of their CS stable…win-win.
Uncomfortable or not, the facts Derbyshire cited are just that, facts. And any honest discussion of race in this country would have to address those facts. Unfortunately, the very events transpiring under this Martin/Zimmerman case – threatening mobs, bounties on a man’s head, publishing addresses for mob retribution, media incitement – demonstrate the impossibility of having that conversation. And the irony of the DOJ’s silence in the face of this gangster mentality – especially from an AG who reprimanded America for its ‘cowardice’ in dealing with race issues – is rich beyond words.
I have been a subscriber to National Review since I was in college over 30 years ago. I am seriously considering ending my relationship with them over this. A line has to be drawn somewhere and I am getting fed up with the left’s ability to shut down discourse in this country.
I’m a liberal. I totally agree with LTEC (above) that the National Review can discharge any writer it wishes not to have. Derbyshire himself has said as much.
I do think there is a lot of confusion both on Mr. Kimball’s part and in some commentators about where Derbyshire’s writing constituted a contribution to debate (however much one might disagree with it) and where it went to a categorically different place.
A proposition about FACTS can be debated. And one aspect of racism sometimes includes a component that is “up” for debate. However pernicious I find these assertions to be, they generally include Murray-like assertions that “group A” is “inferior to” “group B” by virtue of a statistical comparison of one attribute or another.
But the far more important and ultimately odious part of racism is the assertion that proposed inferiority of group A to group B requires systematic and discriminatory treatment of group A.
And that is precisely where Derbyshire went, and that’s why (I imagine) the NRO editors could not retain him.
Re-read one of the many moral conclusions drawn by Derbyshire, about how to treat people based on their skin pigmentation:
“Do not act the Good Samaritan to blacks in apparent distress, e.g., on the highway.”
Derbyshire did not say “don’t be a Good Samaritan on highways when you think it might be dangerous” (and when that’s the case is of course tricky to sort out; perhaps he would worry more if the stranded driver was a tall, tough-looking black man and worry a lot less with a little old lady, black or white)
What he wrote was: “don’t be a Good Samaritan” to “blacks” in distress.
A categorical injunction not to be the “Good Samaritan” to people who have more skin pigmentation is not a proposition open to debate. It is neither true nor false. It is a moral statement. Ultimately the only comment we can make on it is whether we wish to be associated with it. I know a few conservatives and treasure their friendship. But I would vouch that none of them would decline to help people solely on the basis of skin color.
the National Review can discharge any writer it wishes not to have.
Of course this is true. The problem that many people are having is not that he misrepresented the data or was dishonest. The problem is that he faithfully represented the data and was honest. But being honest about race is taboo. No one attempted to argue the facts. Instead of thinking factually and logically, people simply emoted.
No where have you refuted what Derbyshire said, either. You appeal to emotion, though you claim you are talking about facts. In NY, blacks are under stopped compared to the rates of felonies committed by blacks. In other words, blacks are not discriminated against, but in favor of. Yet, you fall back on the claims of “systematic and discriminatory treatment” without providing any evidence to that affect. This claim is contradicted by the facts.
Fact: blacks commit crime at higher rates than any of the other groups, thus are over represented in the group of criminals. Non-Hispanic whites commit crime rates at such a low rate they are under represented in the group of criminals.
The gist of Derbyshire’s article was to keep this in mind, act accordingly and avoid potentially dangerous situations.
Whatever you are trying to say, I bet you’re white, live in a safe predominately white neighborhood, and if you have kids send them to a safe predominately white school. In other words, you believe Derbyshire and have acted accordingly. But of course, in order to feel like you’re a bona fide “liberal”, you have to put forth the PC narrative.
What I was trying to say is that Derbyshire wrote an article that recommended to his children that they treat blacks in a discriminatory fashion. Some conservatives are defending him because he wrote “the truth” or “facts”, about which a debate might be had. But that’s not what got the National Review to fire Derbyshire. It’s his ethical recommendations, not his facts, that are the most troubling of all.
There is no argument to be had about facts once a father sits his kids down and spells out a set of behavioral recommendations based on the pigmentation of fellow human beings. Did you notice that he writes: Don’t be a good Samaritan when the person in need is Black. This is not a “fact”. It’s not an alleged fact. It’s not a debatable fact. It’s an ethical injunction. You either affirm it as one you wish to follow, or you dissociate yourself from it.
Incidentally, I am White, and my kid goes to a school that is predominantly mixed. I honestly don’t know the numbers but the blacks, whites, hispanics and asians are all there in large numbers. I work with people of all colors. I go into so-called “bad” neighborhoods all the time to do my work, and I do it with appropriate thoughtfulness about time of day, and watchfulness about who is around. But a pigment-based strategy for life has not been useful to me in my life.
That “pigment-based strategy” is founded on truth: those with higher levels of pigments in their skin are on average more dangerous than those with less pigment in their skin. That those higher levels of pigments don’t cause the higher level of violence is irrelevant. That higher levels of pigments correlates with a lot of undesirable traits is.
Don’t be a good Samaritan when the person in need is Black. This is not a “fact”. It’s not an alleged fact. It’s not a debatable fact. It’s an ethical injunction.
It’s a common sense conclusion to draw and act upon when you realize that blacks are more dangerous than whites. You can claim it’s racist all you want, but it’s a rational response to personal and statistical observations.
Ken : That “pigment-based strategy” is founded on truth: those with higher levels of pigments in their skin are on average more dangerous than those with less pigment in their skin.
Setting aside the controversy about each one of Derbyshire’s proposed statistics is measuring, there are significant logic flaws with using statistical averages to sort out how to treat the person right in front of you. You have a statistical average and then you have a reality of what you observe with the actual human being. Separately, if “avoidance of danger” were the key concern, and one wanted to do this solely on the basis of statistical means, who says that a lower IQ (on average) is somehow relevant to danger determinations? No evidence! (nice commentary on this is here: http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/04/race_iq_and_derbyshires_kids.html
If for some reason you find statistics about populations to be the best guide to figuring out how to treat the person in front of you (instead of, for example, assessing the person’s demeanor, behavior, etc), I would still depart from the notion that it would be “common sense” to not offer assistance to a person in need. There are a number of ethical injunctions that most people have to work through and they are often in tension with one another.
On the one hand: You should not endanger yourself.
But also: you should help others. Don’t forget Matthew 25:40 (And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.)
I’ve commented on this elsewhere in PJM. I agree with Steyn and Kimball, but I’m not unhappy with the fate of this jackass.
Mr. Kimball,
Terrific piece. Thank you as well for responding by highlighting Mark Steyn’s comment which I would not otherwise have seen. Discourse is being shut down. NR didn’t even find a single piece of evidence to argue with. The piece, measured in every way, was called a screed. His piece was called outlandish–apparently for the thoughts in it.
People should not be entitled to their own facts. but we have already lost that battle. to lose discourse is to lose the war.
Conservatives have so many better cards to play in the national debate than a dessicated litany of reasons blacks are inferior and why they should be avoided, not helped when in distress, etc. If that guy were Conservatives’ actual standard-bearer, doling out such utterly constrictive advice (“avoid” “don’t assist” “stay away from”….), then the Right would have lost in American politics years ago.
I write this as a liberal, by the way. But it seems to me that conservatives have far more resonant concerns, themes and strengths than the shriveled-up, fearful, stereotypical “flight to safety” being articulated by Derbyshire. If i had to guess, Derbyshire’s kids are more likely than not to hear dad’s advice and say “thanks Dad. Now I’ve got stuff to do.” And by “stuff” I mean “live a life that is not predicated on a set of racial avoidance messages”.
It would be wise if the entirety of the American right would follow that example.
Who said blacks were “inferior”? I don’t see the word in JD’s little essay. The only one saying that here is YOU.
JD said a number of things, among them the mathematical truism that in America skin color tends to correlate with some things but not with others, and the big one it correlates with is violent crime rate. This is not an opinion, it is a fact. Exactly WHY that correlation exists is not discussed by JD, nor did he elaborate on further refinement of that correlation. But he’s not claiming his to be an exhaustive treatment, it’s an advice column.
Derbyshire’s round of statistical comparisons on criminality, intelligence quotients, etc are fairly surmised as advancing a perspective of black “inferiority” on his part. That’s the common-sense inference from the words he has offered. If his view really is not that, ie he really has a fundamentally egalitarian view, just point me to where he says that and I’ll take the correction.
Hogwash. Liberal sophistry. Your unwarranted assumptions have led you to a logical faux pas. In other words, you dropped a clanger.
Derbyshire didn’t say blacks are inferior. He said that they can be dangerous. The two are NOT equivalent.
A couple of years ago I read a piece by Derbyshire in National Review that incredibly argued that women should not have the right to vote. I don’t remember the details but do remember rereading to make sure I actually read what I thought. I stopped reading him after that because he just struck me as a nut. And I never understood why he was allowed to continue.
Now let me be clear, he has every right to write those things but I don’t care to read a publication that promotes those ideas.
So I didn’t read this story and have not desire to. NR had every right to dump him and frankly should have done it long ago.
bb
That makes him a “nut”, eh?
I haven’t seen that particular JD item. Nevertheless, the dismal history of the 20th century provides some serious evidence that women’s suffrage, far from being an alloyed good, correlates with some serious public policy disasters in a number of countries, such as flirtation with draconian (and ultimately very destructive) prohibition laws, and the rise of a few notorious fascists and national socialists (all of whom, recall, were elected – but by who? SOMEBODY voted for them… ). This is correlation; it may not be causality. More (and more serious) study would be needed to demonstrate that. But were these trends the fault of women voters? Maybe, maybe not. It seems grossly anti-intellectual to simply dismiss the possibility out-of-hand.
Liberal Commentator says, “But the far more important and ultimately odious part of racism is the assertion that proposed inferiority of group A to group B requires systematic and discriminatory treatment of Group A.” Damn right. That would be like affirmative action, right?
Given the definition of discrimination I offered in my comment, affirmative action would not fall in that category.
i.e.
You may disapprove of affirmative action as a policy matter or as an ethical matter, but technically it doesn’t really involve an assertion that one group should be treated worse based on that group’s inferiority. To me Derbyshire really met both criteria cleanly. He provided an elaborate set of arguments for the inferiority, on average, of Blacks with regard to intelligence and proclivity to violent behavior. And on that basis, he provided a set of guidances to his child that involved elements of dissociation from Blacks and refusing assistance to Blacks in need. That’s the definition of discrimination in its most odious form.
In the context of affirmative action within employers or schools, whatever differential treatment is proposed for blacks, or other minority groups, it typically is predicated on the arguments that entail (a) remediation of past wrongs or (b) promotion of diversity. Neither of these justifications constitute an argument for the inferiority of the people who are receiving the “affirmative action” assistance.
One can certainly debate the merits of affirmative action and one can argue that it’s a different kind of discrimination, potentially against the majority race members who are not presumed “inferior” in any way but who nonetheless bear some burden if there are, for example, racial quotas. That’s a criticism we can understand. But there really is no assumption that the whites or the minority group members are fundamentally “inferior” in any of the affirmative action scenarios I know of. The claim of a group’s inferiority is common to American anti-Black racism, and to Nazi-ism, and to many kinds of tribal conflicts in tribal societies (“you can never trust the ____; stay away from them!”).
American pluralism generally draws its strength from avoiding that terrain.
You don’t have to give the topic of how to talk to kids about race to Derbyshires of this world. I don’t think Derbyshire ever had this conversation with his kid. It’s mean-spirited and gives little practical information (there is nothing there about spotting a thug, for instance). It presumes essential black behavior and advocates self-segregation. There are “normal” parts in his essay, but they don’t really matter because the author crossed the line.
Derbyshire wanted to go out with a bang and Lowry obliged. It looks to me like a calculated piece that will get him fired from NR but will leave enough room for people to jump to his defense. If Lowry wouldn’t fire him, Derbyshire would turn around and write the next worst thing.
I really agree that Derbyshire’s writing seems mostly to be a kind of public self-immolation and not really, in all seriousness, a piece of counsel that can be practically offered to a child or an adolescent.
It is certainly possible to tell one’s child “stay away from persons who are Black/White”, but it’s a rare human being in America who can structure their life to honor that kind of injunction, even if for some reason one felt it was really the wisest course of action (and I don’t). I mean, Derbyshire — if he really were serious about this— would be better off taking his Asian-Anglo family to rural Iowa, or perhaps Iceland and then the issue is kind of off the table. But if you are living in an American city then this business of trying to avoid people based on skin pigment, and avoiding being helpful to them (as he counsels) is actually quite impractical. I work for black supervisors and I supervise black people and I have black colleagues and I live in a city that is 40% black. I don’t actually find Derbyshire’s statistics to be particularly informative to me. I have to assess situations and people as they come, not based on racial categories. I think most people wind up having to do that.
This making of “the racist” into “the Other” – the Leper, that whom one must cast from one in order to prove one’s own Purity – is a (very deadly, unfortunately) sucker’s game, designed as such by the Left, who realize that any one at any time for any reason, can be so tagged if necessery. How much healthier for REAL rationality and human relations to have a Derbyshire and a Farrakhan (and a Steyn and a Kimball, and a Shelby Steele and an Jesse Jackson and a whole slew of citizen commenters) go at it debate by debate, article vs article, for the whole community of citizens to judge the legitimacy of the claims argued. THIS is what our Founders – those (now much mocked) believers in Reason and Liberty envisioned for our country. But the screaming, fainting skirts-over-ones head at a Doubleplusungood thought is what our increasingly successful Liberal Masters realize serves their own totalitarian vision for this country, and the world instead. Rest assured, left unchecked, we ALL will be “the racist” “the sexist” “the homophobe” and the “anti-government terrorist” in their rigged court of law someday. All because we could not answer things like Derbysghire’s bad speech with good speech, and sheepishly opted intead to allow him no speech in our exalted company — and we REALLY don’t see how we are laying the seeds of our future silencing someday?
I have to say that although I don’t think my own experiences lead me to exactly the same conclusions as Derbyshire’s, I wasn’t angry at him for expressing these sentiments. I have been in Black neighborhoods on several occasions, and although I DID feel more self-conscious and somewhat more on my guard, I did not feel threatened or particularly uncomfortable, else I would hardly have repeated the experience. Of the few dozen or so Black-Americans with whom I have been acquainted, some were very nice, most were unmemorable, and only one was the sort of person I would characterize as a Black racist pig. So I can’t say my feelings are entirely congruent with his. On the other hand, what I like about Derbyshire is what I came to like about conservative thought generally in contrast to the intellectually starved and utterly loathesome self-righteousness of the liberal Left. Derbyshire is the sort of man who acknowledges the moral obligation to show every individual, no matter his race, the same basic level of courtesy and consideration, as a requirement of simple human decency. However, and this is where he deserves the most applause, Derb understands that there is a huge distinction between being fair to Black people as a matter of general moral principle, and putting up with Black fools, bigots, morons and thugs. The liberal is not comfortable acknowledging this distinction because he is fundamentally a coward, enslaved by his suffocating political correctness and the need at all times to present an outward image of himself as morally superior. I think the truth about modern America is that even if every White-American followed MLK’s advice to the letter, and judged Black people strictly by the content of their character, even THEN an awful lot of Black people would flunk the test royally. The fundamental difference between conservatives and liberals on the issue of race is that the former understand the truth outlined in the above sentence, and act on their understanding by refusing to accept lame excuses and p.c. pabulum about “root causes” intended to exonerate Blacks of any responsibility for the unpleasant consequences of their sometimes self-destructive and stupid behavior. Liberals, either out of brainlessness do not understand that truth, or out of cowardice refuse to acknowledge it. Conservatives judge Black people by the content of their character and discover – quite correctly – that many Blacks are severely wanting. Liberals on some level clearly believe that because Blacks were treated in a systematically inhumane manner in the past simply because they WERE Black, therefore it is incumbent upon all Whites to treat Black people favorably SIMPLY because they are Black. Liberals have replaced a racism based on irrational fear with a racism based on a sickening condescension, all the while thinking they are fine, upstanding, sophisticated people. They are like the emperor in Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale, strutting about in the imaginary finery of their moral exaltation, completely oblivious to their buck-naked asininity.
Very well said Abdul. Hear, hear.
It’s fine to make a Volaire-esque defense of speech. However, if the Left is failing to engage what Derb actually said, so is the Right. Dancing around what Derbyshire wrote while pontificating about tolerance doesn’t make sense. If what he said is actually very bad, then condemning it is fine. I’m fine with marginalizing racists and anti-semites. So was William F. Buckley, actually.
If what Derbyshire wrote doesn’t sink to that level then explain why. The issue is what he wrote, not the reaction. If Derb is wrong, then say why he’s wrong. He can take it.
I think it was also a case of the straw that broke the camel’s back. Have you ever read through ‘soi-disant antisemite’ Taki’s Rag? Sadly, I have (yuck, unless Pat Pukecannon and various self-appointed ‘race realists’ and paleocons are your thing). They despise ‘neocons’ and the NR crowd as much as they hate liberals, and my guess is any NR writer choosing to have stuff published there is living on borrowed time at NR.
BTW, elsewhere on Taki’s Rag Derbyshire can be read singing the praises of Pat Pukecannon (as well known, [deservedly] persona non grata at NR), and similarly Whiskey-Tango-Foxtrot stuff.
I support Derbyshire’s right to write whatever he wants to write, as well as NR’s right to decide this is no longer somebody they wish to see tarnishing the name of their magazine.
PS to my previous comments: it goes without saying that Derbyshire is a formidable writer and that in that respect he is NR’s loss (and sadly, the shady site’s gain). I hope his clearly throwing all caution to the winds doesn’t mean he got such a bleak prognosis on his cancer that he decided to ‘go honey badger’ as a friend put it.
Thanks so much for taking this stand Roger, you’re ABSOLUTELY right!
The Derbyshire ‘incident’ illustrates the correctness of one aspect of Voegelin’s project analyzing modernity’s failed and deranged ‘dreamworld’ where any analysis of man’s existence is purposefully silenced. The good news is that there will always be those who are resisting the disordering forces. You just gotta chose the right side.
How stunningly, though quite typically unimpressive that you are ‘not going to comment directly on l’affaire Derb’. Why not? He’s not just your friend, he’s also someone you choose to ask to contribute to your magazine. By the way, I don’t feel the need to justify that throwaway ‘typically unimpressive’. You see what I did there? I did what you did there. Or rather, what you didn’t and mysteriously, oh so mysteriously won’t: I haven’t offered a reason why. So go on, comment, directly (you wearisome clichemonger) on John Derbyshire and his fragrant opinions. You’re quick enough to denounce their ilk in other circumstances, and, indeed, to anathematize others for not being swift enough in their disavowal of rhetorical ugliness.
And – or as dear Roger could hardly fail to say, in full awareness of the quality of l’esprit de l’escalier herein – may I also ask whoever subs this site, could Kimball’s absurdly unintentionally ironic headline please be tweaked to, “Things *I* Will Not Say”? Obviously, the New Criterion’s editor may yet surprise us all and comment, directly, on l’affaire Derb, or even, why he won’t comment, directly, upon it. There is world enough and time. [Ed - stick some labored C18th headquote at the top, poss 3, there's a good chap].
Is it racist to articulate any generalization about any race? Would you get fired from NRO for being a racist using the above definition?
Had a [white] relative who was a hospital nurse. When she began her career, one of her first observations was “the black nurses have a lot more empathy for the patients than the white nurses”.
Was she a racist? Would she be fired from NRO for articulating such a view?
Of course, the answer is probably “no”. But what if, which was not the case, the relative went on to also say “the black nurses are involved with more narcotics thefts than the white nurses”. Would that be viewed as a racist comment [probably yes]. Would she be fired from NRO for articulating such a view [probably yes].
So what the [expletive] are the rules?
People generalize about racial groups all the time. Some of those generalizations are funny, others involve serious scientific debate, some are insulting, and some are genuinely pernicious. It’s actually hard to draw a firm line, because these things are matters of degree and they are heavily influenced by the context in which they are offered and even by the facial expression, stated caveats and gestures of the person offering them. Very often, we draw conclusions about whether a racial comment is pernicious if it is linked to a recommendation to treat people of a racial group with less respect or consideration than others.
Probably, at one extreme end, is what Derbyshire did. He laid out a lengthy articulation of points of black inferiority (as he reads the data) in the areas of intelligence and in regard to violence. All that is quite debatable, by the way (I know no one on this blog will concede this, but things like IQ tests are open to quite a bit of psychometric debate)…..But, that’s not where he ended.
Then he followed up with a set of recommendations that involve shunning blacks and not helping them. If he was joking, we certainly don’t know it. If he was willing to lay out a similar indictment of himself, we don’t know it. So it’s kind of close to the worst version of racism.
On the other hand, if you say to a friend, “gosh, in my day to day life I feel like the blacks at my office are often less _____ than the whites”, you are opening a conversation in private. You are in a context where the comment is not going to be taken as a claim to scientific authority. And you are not claiming that a group needs to be shunned, avoided, or mistreated. Your friend might even turn back to you and say “look, I don’t agree and I think what you said is kind of racist”, but that is really not the same kind of racism as where Derbyshire took himself.
IQ tests became problematic not because they failed to predict how candidates would perform but because they didn’t deliver politically correct results. Pick a group, sexual, racial, ethnic, find different group results. This was “bad”. But employers weren’t calling the testing companies and saying “heh, you’re sending me a bunch of losers that your IQ tests say are geniuses”. It was people who see everything through sexual, racial or ethnic lenses who were unhappy.
One of some 35 chapters in “The Bell Curve” discussed race. For that, Murray was professionally crucified [Herrnstein had the wits to die before the book was published]. Murray never attempted to explain why certain racial groups did better [Oriental] and certain racial groups did worse [black, a full standard deviation worse]. Was it nature/genetic? Was it nurture/environment? No way to tell. But Murray did note that, given that blacks were only 13% of the population, and whites were most of the remaining 87%, even though whites as a group had a higher average IQ, there had to be far more whites with low IQs than blacks with low IQs, by sheer force of the size of the respective populations. And if problems with employment, in an increasingly technological society, were intelligence based, then you needed to direct remedial efforts on the basis of intelligence deficiencies not race. This of course does not suit those who wish to blame everything on racism, and direct all government intervention on the basis of race.
This is not academic or hypothetical. Murray noted that, assemble a room of 100 white women with an average IQ of 120, and a room of 100 black women with an average IQ of 120, and you will see very similar rates of college education, gainful employment, marriage, children inside marriage, and higher socio-economic status. Then assemble a room of 100 white women with an average IQ of 80, and a room of 100 black women with an average IQ of 80, and you will see very similar rates of dropping out of high school, unemployment, illegitimate children, narcotics use and low socio-economic status. It wasn’t race. It was intelligence.
Even more problematic was the different bell curve for men versus women. Men as a group had a flatter curve than women. That meant that there were significantly more highly intelligent men than highly intelligent women, and significantly more men of dull intelligence than women of dull intelligence. Once again, in a technological world, this has implications that are immensely politically incorrect.
I have read bits and pieces of Charles Murray’s Bell Curve. Not enough to offer a serious criticism.
As you describe it, Murray seems to avoid most of the terrain that Derbyshire seems to have embraced. Summarizing and analyzing statistical means, debating (seriously) about what they mean and what they measure, and whether they matter, and how they matter, is a serious exercise. There can be serious debate about that, but it doesn’t approach a facile, article like Derbyshire wrote, in the guise of counseling a child. I have heard Murray discuss his more recent work on the radio, and I just can’t imagine him saying “look, I would tell my children that when they don’t know much except that the people around them are Black, they should get away from the situation.” or “look, I would tell my child that offering help to black people as a ‘Good Samaritan’ is ill-advised”. It takes a lot of screwy leaps and jumps to get all the way to the ethical stance that Derbyshire adopted, and I don’t see that in what Charles Murray is doing, even if there is some similar interest in these race-based statistical comparisons.
I think everyone may be missing the single most fundamental point about this “Derbyshire Affair.”
The fact is: what could not be discussed in polite company is now being discussed in polite company. John Derbyshire is polite company, he is not David Duke or Aryan Nation. He’s not the first to do so, but we’re going to get more, not less, of this frank talk. The PC dam is springing numerous leaks, and there may well be an undertow driven by the exasperation of a “silent majority” of Americans, and Europeans, who understand that aggrieved minorities have been overplaying their hand for quite some time now. Many more ‘polite’ and tolerant people are starting to realize that the game is fixed, and will refuse to play by the ‘rules.’
Well, I just took the trouble to read Mr. Derbyshire’s article linked above. If I were a publisher, I wouldn’t have that prejudiced SOB work for me, either. I’m sure he has other nasty habits, as well.
Those of you that haven’t read the original article, please follow the link and read all the way to the end.
“I’m sure he has other nasty habits, as well.”
Nice going. You’ve just articulated the fundamental basis of most of the viler “isms” – racism, sexism, ethnicisism, etc.
Anyone can play. Step 1 – take a perfectly good fact, such as the shockingly high urban black homicide rate. Then, for Step 2, draw unwarranted generalizations from that fact, such as a conclusion that “all them blacks are thieves and murderers”. (Obviously, to a same person, 2 does NOT follow from 1.) And then, for extra credit, throw in something totally out of the blue, such as, say, a comment about “them and their smelly cooking”.
So, maybe JD has nasty habits, maybe he doesn’t. It is of no possible relevance to the current discussion. You are just trying to justify your nasty prejudice.
For all the claims that Derbyshire is full of hate for Black people, I suspect he is far more genuinely courteous and considerate of the Blacks with whom he comes into contact than many liberals would be with someone they knew to be conservative.
I am not sure I get the use of Moulton and manners here. I would have thought Kimball a promoter of this notion of an expanded scope of manners, and that that civil concept needs to constantly push back against law and chaos. Yet he acknowledges that Derb’s problem was that he offended a sense of manners, and goes on to fall back to a libertarianish position that people ought to say what they damn well please. Well, which is it? Or is it just that Kimball does not happen to approve of the current manners regime? Seems to me that there is a goose and ganders problem in there somewhere. If you like the ability of manners to call certain things off-limits for a good gentleman, you might have to put a sock in it yourself from time to time.
I have a feeling that John D. is being punished for what you might call ‘premature anti-anti-racism.’ The reality is that the country is becoming more, not less, divided into ethnic blocks. Politics are becoming more, not less, dependent on racial/ethnic identification with a faction. Needless to say the beneficiaries of this increasing balkanization have been upper class liberal whites, who have encouraged this stratification.
While the official ideology of America and apparently National Review is that its still the 1960′s and black people are still an oppressed class victimized by Southern whites, the reality is that time has moved on. The sixties is over actually. The reality is that time has moved on since then and that there is no white racist conspiracy to keep black people down as there was in the South at least. You know what, its not the 1980′s either when quite a few of the guys in charge of the country were young men in the 50′s and 60′s and might have residual attitudes from that time. We live in a totally different time now and its time to acknowledge that.
I’m commenting here as a liberal white person, and I think that whatever generalizations one wishes to draw about the time trends of racism (or anti-racism, or anti-anti-racism), they are far less important than the geographic realities of where one lives and works.
If you live and work among people of different races, then it’s hard to balkanize all that much, as a practical matter. To get my job done I supervise blacks and whites, and I report up the chain of command to blacks and whites. I am obligated to assess people on their merits and I have to demonstrate my merits and frankly it hardly matters to whom I am speaking.
Any kind of pigment-based strategies to short-circuit that would be extraordinarily counterproductive to getting actual work done.
Check again the statistics measuring “intelligence” in the public domain. Then ask yourselves why it is “racist” to state that “blacks” score lower on the same scale measures than “whites”.
Ask yourselves also whether for “equality”, in “fairness” and for “social justice”, “whites” can claim “racism” with the same measures in which Asiatics score higher than blacks AND whites or any other ethnic group? Do “whites” so claim? Have they so claimed? If not, why not?
Then ask yourselves just what is this “racism”? How did it became a measure of people’s behaviours in the public domain? WHO defined, and defines it? Do those who defined /define “racism” have interest? WHAT may observers deduce from their behaviours as their interest, ultimate aim/goal? Why are they permitted to claim racism, with penalties for those against whom claimed, WITHOUT evidence of their claim.
No evidence except their accusation. And WHAT could possiby be evidence of what is essentially Thought. Has Thought now become criminal in America?
Further ask yourselves why persons/groups who one might have supposed are intellectually honest cower before the claim even without evidence from the claimants. I repeat what evidence can they possibly advance for “racism”? Or any other of their isms which have become “hammers and tongs” over the heads of citizens of the USA. Is this then CHANGE from innocent until PROVEN guilty? Guilty OF WHAT?
HOW did such a change to the accepted moral/legal compass of America happen?
Even with persons who are guides, sometime leaders in public life? What happened to independence and freedom from a court of self-sppointed, self-propagating elite? Why so much knee-bending and cowering before these self appointed groups who HOPE, based on their successes to date to establish further CHANGE to the American ethos and social agreements? With it must be added further abrogations of Americans’ rights. Spelled out in the Declaration of Independence and Constitution e.g. as: “Congress shall make no law… abridgng freedom of speech…” Absent Congress social pressures as loss of jobs, sending to Coventry etc by those in charge of the civic institutions. Those social restrictions accepted and supported by penalty issued by Judges/lawyers in Courts of Law. An end-run around LAW, around the Constitution which those who founded this new social ethos consider an archaic document and therefore not relevant to the New Age.
Were it not more appropriate that “leaders” of the public discourse, instead of buckling before the onslaughts of these thieves of Americans’ rights address themselves to those who claim “racism”. Insist they comply with the laws and mores of America instead of cowering before them.
I repeat. What happened to American Independence?