Race Scientists Ask You Believe in Impossible Things

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The White Queen and Alice from Alice Through the Looking Glass
“I can’t believe that!” said Alice.
“Can’t you?” the Queen said in a pitying tone. “Try again: draw a long breath, and shut your eyes.”
Alice laughed. “There’s no use trying,” she said: “one can’t believe impossible things.”
“I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.

When racial hereditarian researchers tell you they are objective scientists only concerned with the rigorous scientific pursuit of truth, what else do you need to believe to accept that claim? What are the markers of an open-minded researcher who is completely nonpartisan politically? We would expect that person to be careful not to entangle themselves and their research with those who are pursuing political ends; those who seek to use the mask of science to advance specific policy options and social orders. We would not expect them to draw upon political writers as authorities for their scientific claims. We would not expect them to collaborate with people pushing a political agenda.

In a recent article, Michael Woodley, Matthew A. Sarraf & Mateo Peñaherrera-Aguirre write that they believe the Holocaust happened. They also want to make clear that They are “hereditarians” not racists. Nor are they eugenicists. Oh, and Woodley especially wants us to know that he had nothing to do with his work being cited by the Buffalo shooter who killed African Americans in the name of racial purity. (I know what you are thinking, “Where does Woodley stand on the existence of Bigfoot?” Well, he appears to think the jury’s still out on that question).

Of course, anyone who must take to print to deny they are Holocaust deniers, a scientific racist, a eugenicist an inspiration for a racist terrorist might want to stop and think about why they are so characterized by so many people. An obvious question is, “Maybe it is me?” It appears that the authors never ask themselves that question. They portray themselves as objective scientists and their many, many critics must simply misunderstand the nature of science and objective inquiry because they are so blinded by “leftist” ideology. To believe their claims, you must believe a host of other impossible claims they use to support it.

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Whitewashing Scientific Racism: Revisiting the Equalitarian Myth

Tom Sawyer whitewashing the fence

“Say, Tom, let me whitewash a little.”

It is one of the most famous scenes in literature: Aunt Polly commands Tom Sawyer to whitewash the front fence in punishment for some misdeed. Clever Tom pretends it is a joy to whitewash the fence and soon has tricked all his friends into whitewashing the fence for him, indeed, they pay him for the privilege. Similarly, Race Differences in Intelligence (RDI) researchers as well as outright racists often trick mainstream scholars into whitewashing the ugly history of their activities.

A perfect example is this article in the psychology journal, Intelligence where we are presented with an analysis of “controversies in the field of intelligence research.” It is a scientometric analysis meaning it is a quantitative account of such controversies as reported in the scientific literature. There is nothing wrong with that in principle but often such work needs supplementation by a detailed account of specific incidents in the database. As Lorraine Daston recently explained:

if you are looking for causal mechanisms, often only a detailed ethnography will reveal what exactly is the cause of some observed pattern in behavior. And it can work in the other direction — a hypothesis developed from ethnographic work may require statistical testing. These two modes of inquiry, so often opposed to each other, seem to me to work hand-in-glove, at least from the standpoint of the goals of scientific explanation.

Following Daston’s advice, it behooves us to look as some of the incidents in the article in order to get the clearest picture of the listed “controversies in the field of intelligence research” and what is missing from that picture.

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Arthur Jensen and His Nazi Friends

Drawing of a human brain.

Brains! Brains! Brains!

Arthur Jensen (1923-2012) was one of the most prolific psychologists of the twentieth-century. He’s so famous that there is a word named after him: “jensenism.” Jensen is remembered for arguing that black people are stupider than white people and there wasn’t much you could do about it. What distinguished Jensen from your racist uncle was that Jensen dressed up his argument in statistics and published it in psychological journals. Another thing that might distinguish Jensen from your racist uncle (unless your racist uncle is much worse than he’s ever let on at Thanksgiving) is that Jensen palled around with neo-Nazis and admirers of Nazi racial thought. People who’s views were basically recapitulations of Nazi race theorist Hans F.K. Günther.  The recent awful Quillette article cites Jensen as a reliable source as do many other “race realist” writers nonetheless.

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