Resurrecting Racism: The Modern Attack on Black People Using Phony Science

An attempt is being made once again to sell Americans an old idea that has had terrible consequences: the allegation that black people are supposedly inferior to whites.

The salespeople involved in this campaign deny that they are propagandists for racism. They are just trying to popularize the findings of science, they claim. Modern science has discovered, they allege, that many commonly held beliefs about race in general and the black ‘race’ in particular are accurate. They say that the only reason some people reject their supposed findings is political correctness.

If this reminds you of something, you are probably thinking of recent attempts to make antisemitism seem academically respectable. As historian Deborah Lipstadt has made clear, modern professional antisemites publish journals and books which mimic the style of argument and referencing used in academia.[1] With the pretense that they are making scholarly corrections of accepted views concerning the German Nazi treatment of Jews, these people publish lies and incoherencies to the effect that the Shoah (the WWII Holocaust) supposedly never happened or was nowhere near as bad as people think. Such lies are easily exposed by anybody who checks the references, as Lipstadt has demonstrated. The problem is that laypeople (those without academic degrees in the subject) don’t usually check references, which is why this strategy is effective in sowing doubt among laypeople. The biggest impact is on those who were already inclined to dislike Jews but who kept their antisemitism in check because they felt that the Jews had been victimized enough.

The phenomenon of pseudo-scholarly anti-black racism should be examined as carefully as its twin, Holocaust denial. Professional anti-black racists resort to fake-science tactics similar to those of antisemites, likewise parading themselves as innocent seekers of knowledge. Whereas Holocaust deniers do their work by peddling false History, modern anti-black racists peddle false biology and psychology. Just as the proper antidote to pseudo-historical antisemitism is accurate History, the proper antidote to modern, pseudo-biological anti-black racism is genuine biological and psychological science.

I am trained as a biological anthropologist, covering the areas of population biology and evolutionary theory—the very disciplines relevant to the claims of the ‘scientific’ racists. But I am also trained as a cultural anthropologist, that is to say, as an ethnographer, and I do my field work in western Mongolia (province of Hovd), studying the manner in which neighboring ethnic populations perceive and think about each other. Because my anthropological work has been heavily psychological, I have made a special focus of the issue of categorization: that is, I have sought to understand how and why people construct categories of ‘race’ which they incorrectly believe to be biologically real.[1a] As an Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, I have taught a course devoted to examining how racists convince ordinary people of their claims by exploiting certain cognitive susceptibilities that make humans relatively easy targets for racist appeals. The combination of my background and my interests, then, gives me a few advantages when it comes to evaluating the claims of today’s self-proclaimed ‘race scientists,’ something that I will do in Resurrecting Racism.

These modern ‘race scientists,’ as they call themselves, do not always present their ideas as clearly as they might, so I will make a special effort to render their arguments transparent. Then I will ask some questions of these arguments. Are they logical? Are they even coherent? Are they supported or in fact disproved by the data they themselves invoke?

No special requirement must be fulfilled to understand my book. It was written for the layperson, and no previous knowledge of evolutionary biology, psychology, anthropology, or genetics is necessary. Everything that is necessary from these disciplines will be explained in such a way that it is fun to read and easy to understand. Without sacrificing scholarly rigor (you will find in my footnotes the source material for all of my claims), I have nevertheless tried hard to keep my style friendly, conversational, and simple, and also to structure my story so that it produces an interesting voyage of discovery. But I cannot take credit for the main thrill, which has to do with the content of what I report: just as geographers now know that the world is not flat, biologists now know that the ideas about race commonly held by laypeople are wrong because the human species is too uniform to be divided into races. In other words, human races do not exist. There is therefore now another excellent reason for us not to be racists: it would be unscientific.

After explaining why there are no human races, I will examine the claim made by many psychologists that IQ tests supposedly prove that the black ‘race’ is less intelligent than the white and I will demonstrate again that this claim is a fraud. I say ‘again’ because showing that there is neither a black nor a white race already requires that IQ tests cannot show the ‘black race’ to be less intelligent than the ‘white’—since there is no black race, and there is no white race. My second demonstration that IQ tests do not support the arguments of racists is as follows: I will show that IQ tests do not even measure inborn ‘intelligence,’ as IQ-testing psychologists claim.

Because one purpose of my book is to show that there is a well-organized attack against blacks, pushed by the US Establishment, I have structured my book as a refutation of a work by journalist Jon Entine, which the US Establishment has promoted with great energy: Taboo: Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports and Why We Are Afraid to Talk About It.[2]

The ostensible purpose of Taboo is to show that black people supposedly have a biological advantage that makes them better in sports. I will argue, however, that Jon Entine has a broader purpose: to convince us that genetics has confirmed the validity of the common prejudice that black people are supposedly intellectually inferior. What I will show is that Jon Entine is a fraud, and that he ignores the findings of science to push the claims of racists who also have zero concern for science.

Right at the start, on page 8 of Taboo, Entine introduces his topic with the following choice of words:

“For the first time in history science promises a glimpse of how the world’s different populations—popularly called races—have evolved.”[3]

Notice first that Entine claims to have science on his side. And notice also that if the things “popularly called races” can be said to “have evolved” then it must be true that what laypeople think are human races not only exist but they must be genuine biological categories. In other words, science has confirmed what most laypeople already believed, says Entine.

This is a curious way to begin (the above appears on page 8). Entine is supposed to be making a defense of a controversial and hotly disputed claim, but he starts off as if he had already provided the demonstration. His prose appears designed to defeat skepticism by relying on the supposed authority of science: “science promises.” In fact, however, what population biologists have concluded is the opposite of what Entine states: human races, it turns out, do not exist.

Ever so casually, therefore, Entine has slipped us a falsehood about biological science. We are entitled to ask, Why?

“Although discussing racial differences is likely to provoke strong reactions, on balance and in proper context strong emotions are healthy. Issues of race left unexamined can do a lot of damage… It may not be easy to address some of the questions Taboo poses, but considering the path racial understanding has taken over the past quarter century, it is a risk worth taking.”[4]

But Entine says that his well-intentioned effort to combat racism has come under violent attack from an Establishment that supposedly tries to intimidate anyone from expressing ‘politically incorrect’ views on race. He blares this first and loudest in the subtitle of his book, which asserts that, supposedly, “We’re Afraid to Talk About It.” One can see the same stance in an article that Entine wrote defending Taboo, where he says:

“[I was]…stunned by the consistently negative response [my book] engendered from publishers, many of whom refused to even read it—on ‘principle.’ Again and again, I heard: ‘This is a racist subject. By even suggesting that blacks may have a genetic edge in sports, you are opening up the Pandora’s box of intellectual inferiority.’”[5]

Contrary to what Entine says, there was zero resistance to his book from the intellectual Establishment, as I will soon show you. But if there had been, this would have made perfect moral sense; it would not have been the aberration that Entine pretends. Why? Because traditionally, public praise for the physique of so-called black people—what Entine’s book loudly purveys—has been associated, precisely, with the claim that they are intellectually inferior.

What do white racists mean when they ‘praise’ black people for their physique?
_______________________

People are naturally compassionate, so racism against blacks requires a propaganda effort designed to dull, erase, and reverse the tendency of white people to empathize with their fellow men. So what these racist propagandists do is portray black people as less than human: ruled by emotion, bad at thinking, and strong. In other words, black people are represented as beasts of burden, which was traditionally convenient in a slave-owning society because the white racists needed to convince every new generation of whites that keeping their fellow human beings in chains was morally acceptable.

These days, however, thanks to what compassionate political movements have achieved in transforming American society for the better, the traditional prejudices cannot always be expressed nakedly. So racists now find it necessary in certain venues to deliver their prejudices hypocritically, in the form of praise. To see how this works, let us turn to the 1951 testimony of Henry Edward Garrett in a lawsuit called Davis v. County School Board.

At the time, the United States was still blighted by the injustices of segregation. The plaintiffs in this case were trying to defeat the system of segregation, but they themselves were defeated at the state level, so they appealed the case to the US Supreme Court. There, Davis v. County School Board was combined with four other desegregation cases in Brown v. Board of Education, which resulted in the landmark Supreme Court ruling that segregation in education was unconstitutional because it involved “a denial of the equal protection of the laws.”[5a]

In April 1951 students at Moton High in Farmville, Virginia, went on strike. Moton High, now a national landmark museum, was then a segregated black school. It was supposedly ‘separate but equal.’ However, while the nearby white-only high school was modern and well-equipped,

“Moton had no gymnasium, cafeteria, infirmary or teachers restrooms, and the overflow of students was housed in an old school bus and three buildings covered in tar paper. Local parents had repeatedly sought improvements from the local school board without success.”[6]

Realizing that their effort to seek redress through ordinary channels was getting them nowhere, the students took direct action:

“Barbara Johns was on her way to school on April 23, 1951 and we’ll never know exactly what she was thinking. One thing is for certain though; on that day she was full of courage and keenly aware that life was not fair for her and her fellow students…

Barbara lured the Principal from the school and rang the clock-bell in his office to summon her school mates. The student strike that followed would change the nature of race relations in America forever.

After conversations with the NAACP, the students and supporters …decided [t]otal integration should be their goal. After many law suits at the local and state levels… [Davis v. County School Board] joined four other cases from around the nation in the Supreme Court of the United States. The five law suits became the civil rights landmark case titled Brown vs. Board of Education.”[7]

In 1952, Henry Edward Garrett was a witness in Davis v. County School Board, testifying in favor of segregation. Against segregation was Robert Carter, one of the plaintiff’s attorneys, who, while cross-examining Garrett, asked a question that went to the heart of the plaintiffs’ case: Didn’t the very existence of segregated schools constitute an insult to black children, harming their sense of worth? Garrett answered that, no, quite the contrary, segregation could be a fine thing for black children:

CARTER: What I would like to ask you is, do you know of any situation involving racial segregation of Negroes in the schools, like that practiced in the United States, and in Virginia, where this stigmatism has not been put on the separation?

GARRETT: I think, in the high schools of Virginia, if the Negro child had equal facilities, his own teachers, his own friends, and a good feeling, he would be more likely to develop pride in himself as a Negro, which I think we would all like to see him do—to develop his own potentialities, his sense of duty, his sense of art, his sense of histrionics… They would develop their sense of dramatic art, and music, which they seem to have a talent for…[8]

Garrett’s testimony is a lesson in the etiquette of racist discourse. In the sensitive venue of a legal proceeding, he did not explicitly allege that black children were mentally inferior, although he implied it by saying their talents lay in art and music, histrionics (which can mean either ‘exaggerated emotional behavior calculated for effect’ or ‘a dramatic performance’) and duty. According to Garrett, duty was a one of the “potentialities” to be developed among black people.

To get a better sense for that, consider that Garrett was one of several people interviewed for a 1963 U.S. News & World Report feature entitled, “Intermarriage and the Race Problem.” In his interview, entitled, “Racial Mixing Could be Catastrophic,” Garrett said:

“[The Negro] has less of what I call ‘abstract intelligence’ than the white man. He functions at a lower level… he is not so able to think in terms of symbols—words, numbers, formulas, diagrams.”[9]

In 1966, Newsweek reported that Garrett had authored a booklet entitled, “How classroom desegregation will work.” According to Newsweek, the booklet was sent to half a million US school teachers. Newsweek quoted Garrett as writing:

“Those black Africans are fine muscular animals when they’re not diseased. . . . and I think they’re fine when they’re not frustrated. But when they’re frustrated they revert to primitive savages”[10]

This makes it obvious that, in the courtroom, Garrett was not praising black people; he was merely expressing those aspects of his prejudice that would sound less impolite in the courtroom, and leaving the rest implied.

Well, yes and no. Henry Edward Garrett was certainly an arch-racist, but he was not on the fringe. Garrett was a leading psychology Professor at Columbia University. Moreover, as he testified in 1952, in Davis v. County School Board:

GARRETT: “I am past President of the American Psychological Association, a national organization; past President of the Eastern Psychological Association; New York State Association; Psychometric Society; I was Vice Chairman of the National Research Council of the Division of Anthropology and Psychology, National Research Council; during World War II, I was a member of the Advisory Committee on Military Personnel, advisor to what was an Advisory Committee to the Adjutant General’s Office; and for five years, I was an expert consultant to the Secretary of War…”[11]

As I shall document in this book, during World War II, Prof. Henry Edward Garrett—a man who believed black people were at best “fine muscular animals” who were “not so able to think in terms of symbols -- words, numbers, formulas, diagrams”—was one of the principal designers of the IQ tests used to determine which soldiers were given the toughest, most life-threatening assignments during a war, and who would get to be officers. This already suggests a connection between racist ideology and IQ testing, doesn’t it?

So, given that in sensitive venues racists have traditionally ‘praised’ blacks in ways designed to imply the prejudice against them, as we see in the case of Garrett, we are entitled to suspect that when someone writes an entire book to defend his supposed admiration for the supposed physical advantages of blacks, this might be another way of saying that they are “fine muscular animals” who supposedly can’t think. The suspicion is reinforced when you find that Jon Entine, the author of the book in question, despite repeatedly protesting that he is not trying to suggest that black people are intellectually inferior, yet he devotes almost 10% of Taboo to defending IQ testing and praising psychology professor Arthur Jensen and other such ‘researchers,’ who have claimed that black people are intellectually inferior due to bad genes.

I will show in detail that ‘intelligence testing’ is a scientific fraud that has relied on the mishandling of tests, the use of phony statistics, and the invention of faked data. Moreover, I will show you that this fraud was created by the very people who were the main leaders and propagandists of the eugenics movement that also spawned German Nazism. The information showing this has been publicly available for decades (it is not exactly a secret), so a horrified reaction to Entine’s book would have been entirely appropriate.

The problem, however, is that—contrary to what Entine loudly claims—there was no such reaction.

If the Establishment had indeed tried to squash Entine’s book, as he claims, we would expect Taboo to have been negatively reviewed, or not to have been reviewed at all, in mainstream publications. But in fact the opposite happened. The book was widely reviewed. The non-scientists who reviewed Taboo wrote that Entine had been “forthright enough to present hard evidence,”[18] and had “done a brilliant job”[19] of giving us a “balanced, comprehensive presentation of a mountain of relevant data,”[20] which amounts to a “sophisticated argument that…cannot be dismissed.”[21] They warned that, although “There will be those who will refuse to listen,…his work will be difficult to refute, given the overwhelming nature of…the scientific evidence.”[22] They agreed that “Taboo convincingly argues that race does make a difference….”[23]

These are strong endorsements. And they are not from fringe publications openly associated with racism. They are from mainstream sources such as Kirkus Reviews, The Christian Science Monitor, The New York Times, and The Washington Post. Since most people find it difficult to believe that The New York Times would endorse a racist book, they will tend to believe that Taboo is a credible account of the latest scientific findings about ‘race.’

Gary Kamiya, executive editor of the well-known internet publication Salon.com, also wrote a glowing review of Taboo. (It goes on for several pages, reading like a sort of infomercial for Entine’s book.) Without a hint of irony, Kamiya said of Entine’s ‘facts’ that, “taken together, they are—to a layman—pretty convincing.”[24] Well yes, perhaps to a layman, the kind of person who also found it convincing that the Earth was flat until scientists showed otherwise; in other words, Taboo is convincing to the kind of person who does not have the tools to evaluate whether Entine is accurately presenting the findings of mainstream population biology.

Speaking as a layman, then, Kamiya tells his readers that he liked the book, as if he were reviewing a children’s story. But Entine’s Taboo is not a work of literature. His claims are allegedly based on scientific fact. The question is: Is he right? Has he faithfully represented the findings of mainstream science? How can non-biologists writing for Salon.com settle this for other non-biologists reading Salon.com?

But the same problem is to be found at The New York Times. As I will show in Resurrecting Racism, publications like the Times usually have science books reviewed by experts in the relevant field. Yet in the case of Entine’s book, the experts—people such as the much praised geographer, physiologist and evolutionary biologist Jared Diamond,[25] or the renowned population biologist, Luca Cavalli-Sforza[26]—were not asked to write reviews. That’s interesting because they both disagree with Entine. In fact, as we shall see, the data gleaned from direct studies of the human gene pool contradict Entine’s claims, so the failure of these highly influential media venues to get experts to review Entine’s book is most disturbing. People who have read Taboo can be numbered in perhaps the hundreds of thousands, but the potentially millions of people who read or heard about the favorable newspaper and TV reviews got the impression that the book made valid claims, and therefore that what they had come to consider prejudiced thinking was supposedly really good science.

This is serious business. The claim that racism is sound genetic science openly dominated social policy in the United States during the first half of the 20th century. Under the name ‘eugenics,’ it was endorsed by much of the US government and by pillars of the US Establishment and was exported abroad. For example, in the 1930s the Rockefeller Foundation financed eugenics ‘research’ in Germany, providing a pseudoscientific basis for the Nazis, a topic that will also be covered in this book.

Eugenics—the open application of a mixture of racial prejudice, class prejudice, and pseudo-scientific quackery to social policy—was publicly discredited by Hitler’s massive race murders during World War II. And the traditionally racist, and then also eugenic, allegation of black inferiority took a beating during the Civil Rights Movement, which showed black people acting with great moral courage against injustice, and more shrewdly organizing the working classes—of all colors—for moral enlightenment and common resistance than anybody had done before in the US. Martin Luther King was a giant fighting for all Americans, putting to shame the Founding Fathers, slave owners all.

Despite the moral advances of the twentieth century, a basic idea of eugenics—that social inequality is a natural reflection of supposed genetic inferiority—has lived on, and not just as an idea. It is deeply ingrained in our culture and provides silent political justification for social policy. This is perhaps the main reason why there is no great outcry in the more comfortable classes for the massive increase in the US prison population, and the massive overrepresentation of black people among those who are sent to jail for non-violent drug use or sales.

In the past, eugenic ideas were openly pushed by the Establishment. It is therefore chilling that the most powerful Establishment media refrained from having population biologists review Taboo, turning instead to laymen who praised it. We must ask the question: Is the Establishment trying to revive eugenics?

My book will show that Jon Entine and the ‘race scientists’ are wrong. Not just wrong because they offend the beliefs of some sociologists, or the values of the ‘politically correct,’ or whatever; but wrong because their arguments are illogical, incoherent, and flat-out contradict the findings of modern genetics—which discipline, ironically, is the worst enemy of so-called ‘race science.’

[1] Lipstadt, D. (1993). Denying the Holocaust: The growing assault on truth and memory. New York & Toronto: Free Press.

[1a] To see Francisco Gil-White's academic background and publications, visit:
http://www.hirhome.com/academic.htm

[2] Entine, Jon. 2000. Taboo: Why black athletes dominate sports and why we’re afraid to talk about it. New York: Public Affairs.

[5] “Breaking the Taboo: Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports And Why We’re No Longer So Afraid to Talk About It”; by Jon Entine; Special SKEPTIC Issue on Race & Sports; Summer 2000; vol 8 no.1
http://www.jonentine.com/skeptic/entine.htm

[5a] For the text of the landmark ruling, Brown v. Board of Edcucation, go to
http://www.nationalcenter.org/brown.html

[6] Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County at
http://www.nps.gov/brvb/pages/davis.htm

[7] Moton School: A National Historic Landmark Ending the “Separate But Equal” Doctrine
From: National Park Service, US Department of the Interior
http://www.nps.gov/chal/sp/p05new1.htm

[8] National Archives-Mid Atlantic Region (Center City Philadelphia); Records of the U.S. District and Other Courts in Virginia, 1793-1956; Records of the United States District Court for the Eastern District, Richmond Division; Case File: CV-1333 (1952) - Dorothy Davis et al. v. County School Board of Prince Edward County, VA, et al. (103 F. Supp. 337).

This case was one of the original five school desegregation cases joined in Brown (1954). This Virginia case grew out of a boycott by African American students who attended the segregated Moton High School in protest of the poor and inferior conditions of school facilities that included the use of tarpaper shacks as classrooms. The case was appealed twice to the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, and the title of the case was changed in the late 1950s to Griffin v. County

School Board of Prince Edward County (337 U.S. 218), when it again was heard by the United States Supreme Court in 1964.

[9] U.S. News & World Report, Nov 18, 1963, pp 92-93.

[10] Newsweek, ‘Lesson in bias.’ May 30, 1966, p. 63.

[11] National Archives-Mid Atlantic Region… etc. (see above)

[18] “Journalist and award-winning TV producer Entine writes lucidly about a forbidden topic. After O.J., it takes courage to discuss race science…Entine presents the evidence that makes his argument unusually ambitious and controversial…Courageous enough to ask tough questions about the uneven playing field, forthright enough to present hard evidence.” -- Kirkus Reviews, NONFICTION, 336 words, 1-891620-39-8.

[19] “Cultural differences play a role, but the evidence Entine assembles is overwhelming: at the sports in which they excel, blacks are superior… Entine has done a brilliant job of making his case. There will be those who will refuse to listen, but his work will be difficult to refute, given the overwhelming nature of both the anecdotal and the scientific evidence.” -- The Gazette (Montreal), February 12, 2000, Saturday, FINAL, 1051 words, Why black men rule the game: It’s time to admit the obvious, says author who traces the history of racism in sports, JACK TODD.

[20] “…Entine’s balanced, comprehensive presentation of a mountain of relevant data…” -- The Christian Science Monitor, June 15, 2000, Thursday, FEATURES; BOOKS; Pg. 16, 795 words, Race and sports not a black-and-white issue, Ross Atkin

[21] “Mr. Entine makes a careful and reasoned case for this point of view… Mr. Entine’s conclusion that racially distinctive features are an essential element of the picture is part of a sophisticated argument that, whether entirely persuasive or not, cannot be dismissed.” -- The New York Times, January 14, 2000, Friday, Late Edition - Final Correction Appended, Section E; Part 2; Page 55; Column 1; Leisure/Weekend Desk, 1139 words, BOOKS OF THE TIMES; The Race to the Swift. Or Is It the Swift to the Race?, By RICHARD BERNSTEIN

[22] Jack Todd in the Gazette, Montreal (see above)

[23] When Race Matters * Review by Paul Ruffins, Washington Post, February 6, 2000

[24] “The black edge: Are athletes of African descent genetically superior?”; By Gary Kamiya; Salon.com.
http://archive.salon.com/books/feature/2000/01/28/taboo/index.html