theatlanticwire | Richwine says his passion for outlining the case for racial inferiority is rooted in his love of data not racism. At a 2008 panel,
Richwine ranked races by IQ: "Decades of psychometric testing has
indicated that at least in America, you have Jews with the highest
average IQ, usually followed by East Asians, then you have non-Jewish
whites, Hispanics, and then blacks." Now, he tells York, he's not sorry
for those comments. "I don't apologize for any of the things that I
said," he says. But he does wish he'd put an asterisk on the entire
sentence so it doesn't sound like he's endorsing the idea that some
ethnic groups are just biologically destined to be less intelligent than
others. He would have noted that "there is a nuance that goes along
with that: the extent to which IQ scores actually reflect intelligence,
the fact that it reflects averages and there is a lot of overlap in any
population, and that IQ scores say absolutely nothing about the causes
of the differences -- environmental, genetic, or some combination of
those things.
Richwine's argument that he is not a racist because he does not think of himself as a racist is not very persuasive, although it is common.
But even more problematic is that Richwine also admits to York that
he's not very good at spotting racism. In 2010, for example, he wrote
for two articles for the white nationalist site Alternative Right. One of his articles made
the argument that since "U.S.-born Hispanics are much more likely to be
incarcerated than foreign-born Hispanics" that "implies that Hispanic
crime will become more of a problem as time goes on, not less."
That fits well with the editorial agenda founder Richard B. Spencer, a
former editor of The American Conservative, who has a history of saying things like, "There are races who, on average, are going to be superior." People like blogger E.D. Kain have dubbed the site
"ugly white nationalism." Richwine said he didn't think anything was
problematic, telling York, "I thought it would be like a
paleo-conservative website. I had seen that [former National Review writer] John Derbyshire had also published something there." Derbyshire was left The National Review because
he wrote an essay about how he tells his kids to avoid groups of black
people but to have one black friend to inoculate against charges of
racism.
That was in 2012 — and Derbyshire had been writing racist things for years. As I argued at the time,
he "effectively demonstrates, year after year, exactly how racist you
can be and still get published by people who consider themselves
intellectuals." That line has since moved, which Richwine apparently
noticed too late.
