In discussing Williamson, Coates managed to do what he had done in each of his memoirs to date: to put the worst possible gloss on a situation from the great height at which he had himself been placed. Coates used the meeting to say that he had no expectations of Williamson beyond some flowery prose. No expectations other than the certain knowledge that Williamson – and here is an extraordinary claim – was not capable of ‘seeing me or, frankly, a lot of you as fully realized human beings’.57 The idea that Williamson did not view Coates – and indeed did not view any black person – as ‘fully realized human beings’, and that this was simply a sad reality, was a terrible statement by Coates and says a lot about what he has been allowed to get away with throughout his career. James Baldwin never spoke about white people as though they were as a whole unredeemable. Nor did he have any need to exaggerate offence. Coates not only exaggerates hurt, but does so knowing that all of the weaponry is now on his side. There is a gun loaded on the stage, but it is not the white men who are holding it, it is him. When students starting out on campuses across the US wonder whether making insincere claims and catastrophizing minute events can be rewarding, they can look to Coates and know that it is.
Nor in the modern information age is the heightening of race awareness in one country confined to that country. Coates’s success in the US was mirrored by Reni Eddo-Lodge in a country with a very different history of race relations. When her book Why I’m no Longer Talking to White People about Race was first published in 2017 it immediately raised not only the same issues as Coates’s but received a comparable amount of plaudits and awards. Eddo-Lodge mainstreamed into British public discourse concepts like ‘white privilege’, but she had to go looking harder than Coates for her complaints. The opening of Eddo-Lodge’s book recounts a number of terrible incidents from Britain’s past such as the racist murder of a black seaman called Charles Wooton in the docks of Liverpool in 1919.58 Eddo-Lodge recounts such unusual events as though they are not merely emblematic of a country but a hidden history. Crucially they are a history for which she needs to go searching, returning from her endeavours to tell us how much worse the past was than we had imagined and how much worse white people must be now as a result.
How are individuals meant to react to people in the present when they have returned from scouring the past in this retributive mood? One consequence would appear to be the normalization of vengefulness – a vengefulness which has spent recent years seeping into everyday language. So at the ‘Women’s March’ in London in January 2018 one of the placards waved by a young woman with pink hair read ‘No Country for Old White Men’.59 One irony was that one of the Socialist Worker banners beside her read ‘No to racism’. The sadness was that the young woman was waving her placard just beside the Cenotaph, which admittedly commemorates a lot of white men, but white men who never had a chance to grow old.
In this new era of retribution it has become perfectly acceptable to accuse white people in general – even white women in particular – of crimes which other people would not be guilty of. So The Guardian sees fit to publish a piece titled ‘How white women use strategic tears to avoid accountability’, in which the author complains that ‘Often, when I have attempted to speak to or confront a white woman about something she has said or done that has impacted me adversely, I am met with tearful denials and indignant accusations that I am hurting her.’60 ‘WhiteTears’ is a popular hashtag. And then there is the mainstreaming of the term ‘gammon’, a term that has become the mot juste for people of enlightened opinion online to refer to people with white skin which can flush pink. The term came into use around 2012 and by 2018 was being used freely on television shows as well as online to highlight not just the amusing skin tone of white people and their porcine appearance, but to imply that the flushedness masked some barely repressed outrage and likely xenophobia. So once again in pursuit of anti-racism the anti-racists resorted to racism. And what might be the negative consequences of such a posture?
IQ
Of all the foundations on which to base a diverse and civilized society, human equality must be the most important of all. Equality is the stated objective of every Western government, the stated aim of all mainstream civic organizations and the aspiration of anybody wishing to find a place in a polite society. But beneath this aspiration, presumption or hope, lies one of the most painful and unexploded bombs of all – and one of the best reasons why we need to be treading far more carefully than we are doing in the era of Twitter hashtaggery. That is the question of what equality means and whether it even exists.
Equality in the eyes of God is a core tenet of the Christian tradition. But it has translated in the era of secular humanism not into equality in the eyes of God but equality in the eyes of man. And here there is a problem, which is that many people realize, fear or intuit that people are not entirely equal. People are not equally beautiful, equally gifted, equally strong or equally sensible. They are certainly not equally wealthy. They are not even equally lovable. And while the political left talks constantly of the need for equality and even equity (arguing, as Eduardo Bonilla-Silva and others do, that equality of outcome is not just desirable but possible), the political right responds with a call for equality of opportunity, not equality of outcome. In fact both claims are almost certainly impossible locally and nationally, let alone globally.
A child of rich parents will have opportunities that a child of poor parents will not have, and this will almost certainly give that child advantages at the start of its life if not throughout it. Although everybody could go to better schools, not everybody will be able to go to the best schools, and though a lot of people may wish to go to Harvard not everybody in the world can do so. Around 40,000 people a year try to get in to Harvard but not all of them can. As it happens this is where the most recent and most devastating landmine of all was recently glimpsed and from where it may yet go off.
As we saw earlier, it was Harvard that gave the world the ‘Implicit Bias’ test. Or as one web headline puts it, ‘Are you a racist? This Harvard racism test will tell you.’61 If that is the case then it would appear that America’s oldest university ought to take the test itself. And if the implicit bias test was in fact accurate it would come back with the result that Harvard itself is very racist indeed.
In 2014 a group called ‘Students for Fair Admissions’ filed a lawsuit against Harvard. The group represented Asian-Americans who argued that the university’s admissions policies had shown a pattern of discrimination going back decades. Specifically they alleged that in the name of ‘affirmative action’ Harvard had been routinely and systematically biased against Asian-American applicants. The university fought hard to prevent the release of documents revealing information on its application criteria, arguing that these were effectively Harvard’s trade secrets. But the university – which claimed not to discriminate against applicants ‘from any group’ in its admissions process – was eventually forced to reveal these secrets.62 It is no wonder that they had tried to keep them hidden.
Since Harvard is only able to accept around 4.6 per cent of each year’s applicants, it is perhaps inevitable that some form of vetting was needed. But the vetting procedure that Harvard allowed itself could hardly have been more unpalatable. Like most other universities in America (and spreading out from there), Harvard wanted to eradicate the idea of racial bias in its selection process. But it turned out that if you attempt to eradicate the idea of racial bias you do not get a completely ethnically representative hierarchy, but a hierarchy which disproportionately favours certain groups. Harvard – being smart – realized this, and had to find some way to get around the problem, specifically in order to try to increase the number of African-Americans who were attending the university. And so it decided to find ways to bias its ostensibly colour-blind entrance policy against one of the groups which was dramatically over-performing. Harvard turned a process that presented itself as intended to be race-blind, but which was actually set up to im
prove the chances for some, into a process that was race-obsessed.
Although the university denied the allegations in court, its own records showed that over a period of years Harvard had been routinely downgrading Asian-American applicants. In particular it was downgrading them on personality traits including ‘positive personality’, kindness and likeability. Unfortunately for Harvard, during the disclosure stage it transpired that the downgrading of Asian-American students was happening without Harvard having necessarily had any interview or meeting with the applicants. It looked like a deliberate policy of downgrading Asian-Americans on their character scores without even meeting them. And why might Harvard or any other educational institution of excellence need to do that? For two reasons. The first is that Harvard like all other similar elite institutions has committed itself to presenting to the world not simply the best possible people, but the best possible people after they have been put through the selection strainer that is the institution’s commitment to diversity. The second is that if Harvard did not deliberately disadvantage certain groups and advantage others in its commitment to ‘affirmative action’ policies and diversity criteria in general, the products of Harvard might be worryingly non-diverse. Specifically they might have a student body which disproportionately or even largely consisted not of white Americans or black Americans, but of Asian-Americans and Ashkenazi Jews. Here we get a glimpse of the world’s ugliest landmine.
Research into IQ and genetics is among much competition probably the most dangerous and cordoned-off subject of all. When Charles Murray and Richard J. Herrnstein published The Bell Curve in 1994 they were believed to be setting off precisely this landmine. Even though few of their critics read the book, criticisms of its investigation into the hereditary aspect of genetics were widely attacked. A few publications realized that the subject was of such significance that it had to at least be discussed. But in the main the reaction to The Bell Curve was to try to shut it and its author down (‘author’ because Herrnstein had the misfortune, or luck, to die shortly before the book’s publication). Almost all publications that reviewed the book noted that its findings were ‘explosive’.63 But most critics decided to do a very specific job with those explosive findings. That was to cover them with as much soil as could be found and then pat it down as tightly as possible. One extreme, but not uncommon, piece about the book by a fellow academic was headlined ‘Academic Nazism’ and claimed that the book was ‘A vehicle of Nazi propaganda, wrapped in a cover of pseudoscientific respectability, an academic version of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf’.64 Not just any old Mein Kampf, but Adolf Hitler’s one.
The criticism of The Bell Curve demonstrated why almost nobody wanted to go over the evidence that suggests that intelligence test scores vary with ethnic group and that just as some groups score higher on intelligence tests, others must score lower. This of course is not to say that everybody in such groups does. As Murray and Herrnstein were at pains to point out repeatedly, the differences within racial groups were larger than the differences between them. Yet those who have surveyed the academic literature on IQ differentials across racial groups appreciate better than anyone that the literature in the area is – as Jordan Peterson has said – ‘an ethical nightmare’.65 And it was a nightmare which almost everybody seemed very keen to steer clear of.
They did it through a variety of methods. The first was simply to dismiss the authors as racists and, having covered them with sufficient ordure, rely on the resulting smell to do the rest. This worked so well that in 2017 when Charles Murray was invited to speak about a more recent book at Middlebury College in Vermont, students barracked him, prevented Murray from giving his speech in the hall and then chased him off the campus, in the process hospitalizing the female academic who was attempting to escort Murray out. Other techniques for pushing the Bell Curve controversy away included casting doubt on IQ predictors in general, or claiming that they favour certain racial groups over others because of inbuilt bias. These counter-claims have themselves been persuasively refuted, but after a quarter of a century it is perfectly clear that the Bell Curve controversy will never be fought on the basis of the facts. These are too uncomfortable to be allowed to roam freely in the intellectual air. And so the fall-back position for refusing to engage with the evidence on IQ differentials is to say that even if the facts are there, and even if they are very clear, it is morally suspicious to want to look into them and that they in any case present us with ethical and moral problems so vast and complex that there is nothing at all that can be done with them.
This retreat from ‘the facts are wrong’ to ‘the facts are unhelpful’ has become the signature retreat of opinion in the face of the growing literature on the subject. In 2018 one of the world’s leading experts in the field – David Reich of Harvard – published a piece to coincide with his new book on genetics. Among much else he charted the way in which the claim had been made of race (as with sex) that it was merely a ‘social construct’ with no basis in genetics. Reich explained how this view had become the orthodoxy, and why it had no hope of holding up against the evidence now flooding towards it. Reich knew the pitfalls, admitting in his piece that he had ‘deep sympathy for the concern that genetic discoveries could be misused to justify racism’. But he added that ‘As a geneticist I also know that it is simply no longer possible to ignore average genetic differences among “races”.’66 However, no amount of caveating works in the area, and the race and IQ debate flared up again. A fairly typical attack on him was to say ‘Did Reich really not see how racists and sexists could twist his thinking? Or does he in fact on some level share their prejudices?’67
Even today, just being seen to have communicated fairly with Murray is cause for this same manoeuvre to be played. The neuroscientist Sam Harris had, by his own admission, avoided any even remote contact either with Murray or his most famous book because of the slurry poured around the area. On reading the literature he said that he had come to realize that Murray was ‘perhaps the intellectual who was treated most unfairly in my lifetime’.68 Just for having him on his podcast and for having a respectful and insightful conversation (titled ‘Forbidden Knowledge’) about Murray’s work, various media attempted to tar Harris with the same brush. Vox declared that such enquiry was not ‘forbidden knowledge’ but merely ‘America’s most ancient justification for bigotry and racial inequality’.69 This ignores – among other troubling things – the possibility that it could be both.
For now this is where the enquiry and debate on IQ have stalled. Because the knowledge could be used by bad people the enquiry cannot proceed or it must be denied. And as Murray said in his conversation with Harris there is one possible obvious reason for all the fury that surrounds it. This is that from the top of government and through almost every institution in our societies today a commitment to a particular idea of ‘diversity’ and ‘equality’ is all-encompassing and all-consuming. It is written into all employment law and employment policies and embedded into all social policies that everybody is ‘the same above the neck’. Indeed, this assumption is so widespread that any subject which could be said to undermine it or run counter to it must be quashed with as much force as the Church at the height of its power was able to bring down on anybody who ran counter to its teachings. The teachings of our day are that everybody is equal and that race and gender and much else besides are mere social constructs; that given the right encouragement and opportunity everybody can be whatever they want to be; that life is entirely about environment, opportunity and privilege. This is why when even the tiniest fragment of the argument crops up – as with Asian admissions at Harvard – it causes such extraordinary pain, confusion, denial and rage. In general the denial is systemic, but occasionally it fixes its gaze on a particular object or person, and then everything that can be thrown is thrown against the person who has even raised (or threatens to raise) the heresy. The truth is that there are people (and they may well grow in number) who do welcome research into this
area with a deeply unpalatable glee. It is not hard to recognize the difference between those who look into this dark area with concern and those who look into it with positive delight.
In any case this is the worst hardware-software question of all. For a long and disreputable period race was believed to be a hardware issue – the most hardware issue of the lot. And then in the wake of World War II, and far from unconnected with the horrors of that conflict, the consensus ran the other way. Race became, perhaps out of necessity, a social construct like everything else. Because if it is a hardware issue then we may at some point be in serious trouble.
In March 2019 Professor Robin DiAngelo of the University of Washington gave a speech at Boston University. DiAngelo specialises in ‘whiteness studies’ and has written a book, White Fragility. Since DiAngelo is herself white she has to do a certain amount of self-abasement to earn the trust of her audiences. She does so by assuring them that she is aware that just by standing on a stage and speaking she is ‘reinforcing whiteness and the centrality of the white view’. She asks for forgiveness by stating, for instance, that, ‘I’d like to be a little less white, which means a little less oppressive, oblivious, defensive, ignorant and arrogant.’ To her audience in Boston she also explained how white people who see people as individuals rather than by their skin colour are in fact ‘dangerous’.70 Meaning that it took only half a century for Martin Luther King’s vision to be exactly inverted.
Today there appears to be a return to a heightened level of rhetoric on race and a great crescendo of claims about racial differences – just when most of us hoped that any such differences might be fading away. Some people in a spirit of resentment, others in a spirit of glee, are jumping up and down on this quietly ticking ground. They can have no idea what lies beneath them.
The Madness of Crowds Page 21
