Wednesday, May 15, 2013

richwine says "he's no racist, and has a tough time spotting it, too"...,


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.

5 comments:

Tom said...

Yeah, he only published stuff with the white supremacists because a famous racist had done the same. You can see how the confusion arose.

CNu said...

I'll repeat what I wrote this morning at WARN: In the era of international cognitive genomics http://www.nature.com/news/chi...

Hardcore neurocriminology http://subrealism.blogspot.com...

And brain-mapping efforts going into overdrive http://www.livescience.com/319...

In a political economy defined by increasing resource scarcity and increasing austerity - exactly how much longer do you suppose that
cornucopian moral appeals to the "common good" will carry water?



Rearranging chairs on the deck of the titanic is now getting underway in earnest. Stephen Jay Gould isn't around anymore to passionately
argue against eugenics, and Stephen Pinker is a whole other sort of creature when it comes to this topic and the elite environs where policy
is formulated.Richwine got away with this at Harvard, the very same place that Pinker now holds forth.



though what I'm really wondering is how he got away with that greazy looking coiffure and sketchy goatee....,

Tom said...

Yeah it's scary.


I wonder if BD would, all theoretical BS about IQs of children raised in poverty aside, would BD hide a minority family from the Gestapo in a doomsday scenario where that was a life & death issue?

big4don said...

http://news.yahoo.com/suspending-kids-mouthing-off-defying-204038950.html

CNu said...

Not only would he not hide them, he would be as active an agent as possible in facilitating the purge of lives devoid of value.

(That's him creeping around now as "guest" posting a yahoo link about mouthiness)