Wickliffe Draper: The Philanthropic Wellspring Of American Race Science

undark  | The web woven by Wickliffe Draper in the 20th century, when he could count on august leaders of scientific institutions to support his segregationist and eugenicist causes, is far less distinguished today. But it hasn’t been wiped out completely. Stealthy back-scratching continues among The Mankind Quarterly contributors with scant academic credentials and those in mainstream academia and publishing.

‍In early 2018, I reported for The Guardian newspaper in the U.K. that there were at least two individuals sitting on the editorial board of the Elsevier journal Intelligence who failed to meet the publisher’s own professional benchmarks. One of them was editor for The Mankind Quarterly, Gerhard Meisenberg. The other was Richard Lynn, then assistant editor of The Mankind Quarterly, and the president of Draper’s Pioneer Fund. Lynn was an emeritus professor of psychology at Ulster University in Northern Ireland, but a few months into 2018 that title would be withdrawn, following a motion by its student union that his views were “racist and sexist in nature.” (Since 2015, The Mankind Quarterly has been published by the Ulster Institute for Social Research, a think tank headed by Lynn.)

At the time, Haier, the editor of Intelligence, defended Lynn and Meisenberg. “I have read some quotes, indirect quotes, that disturb me,” he told me, “but throwing people off an editorial board for expressing an opinion really kind of puts us in a dicey area.” Yet, by the end of 2018 — after the piece in The Guardian was published — the journal’s editorial board went through a dramatic reshuffle and Lynn and Meisenberg were both gone. 

A spokesperson for Elsevier told Undark that it is policy “to rotate Editorial Board members from time to time” and that “Elsevier’s journals operate under the guidance of an Editor-in-Chief and an Editorial Board. Editors-in-Chief are established researchers with a broad interest in their field and are well connected and respected in their subject community.”

Publishing is one side of the research coin. The other is funding. And following a temporary hiatus, Wickliffe Draper’s Pioneer Fund is still in business. In 2013, following the death of its president Jean-Philippe Rushton, only a small fraction of the fund’s assets remained. By 2020, though, they had risen again to almost $300,000 — suggesting that money was coming in from somewhere.

The Pioneer Fund’s U.S. tax records show that its most recent grant was given in 2019, totalling $15,000 to support an organization known as the Human Phenome Diversity Foundation, based in Ohio. This foundation’s president was listed as Bryan Pesta, then a tenured business professor at Cleveland State University in Ohio. In 2016, Pesta published a paper in which he predicted that as the IQ level required to do a job increases, “the percent of White and Asian workers will increase, while the percent of Black workers will decrease.” This was published in Open Differential Psychology, an open-access online journal edited by a right-wing blogger with no known reputable academic affiliations, who is — like Pesta — a contributor to The Mankind Quarterly.

In 2020, Pesta also published research in Intelligence on racial and ethnic group differences in the heritability of intelligence. Roughly a year later, the University of Virginia psychologists Evan Giangrande and Eric Turkheimer responded, stating that the work of Pesta and his colleagues in this paper served “as an example of how racially motivated and poorly executed work can find its way into a mainstream scientific journal, underscoring the importance of robust peer review and rigorous editorial judgment.”

In 2021, Pesta worked on another paper, this time trying to look for correlations between race and behavioral traits using data from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development database, a long-term study of brain development in American children supported by the National Institutes of Health. The paper analyzed the DNA of almost 10,000 of the children in the study to calculate the percentage of five broad population groups each one might statistically belong to, in a similar way to modern-day genetic ancestry tests. Children were labelled as 10 percent or less African, for example, or 90 percent or less European. The goal was to see if differences in rates of depression, educational attainment, and other factors could be linked proportionately to a child’s race.

In 2021, after losing all respectable academic affiliations, Lynn went on to co-author a paper in another Elsevier journal, Personality and Individual Differences, comparing the processing speeds of people in the United States and Taiwan. He made the unverified claim that part of any gap could be attributed to genetic differences between population groups. Lynn sat on the editorial advisory board of Personality and Individual Differences as recently as 2018. The journal’s editor published a review of his memoirs in 2021.

Jews Weren't White Until They Were

usatoday |  If race were real – in a biological sense – it would stay the same across history. But it doesn't. It changes.

That's how people like me became white. Yes, you read that right. Jews weren't white … until we were.

 The horror of the Holocaust thoroughly discredited the idea of Jews as a race. But race itself – as a concept – was still going strong. Slowly, and unevenly, white Americans welcomed Jews into theirs.

Tensions between Jewish and Black people

That has been a source of tension between Jews and African Americans ever since. James Baldwin wrote in 1967 that Black people were tired of Jews claiming that their own experience of prejudice was “as great as the American Negro’s suffering.” That was false, Baldwin wrote, and it fueled Black antisemitism.

“The most ironical thing,” Baldwin added, “is that the Negro is really condemning the Jew for having become an American white man.”

You could hear echoes of that frustration in Whoopi Goldberg’s comments on Monday, when she denied the racial dimensions of the Nazi genocide against Jews.

“This is white people doing it to white people,” she said, when challenged on the claim, “so y’all going to fight amongst yourselves.”

She was wrong about that, and – to her credit – she apologized for it. But she was right that most Jews have changed their race since that time, which has never been an option for African Americans.

Race makes us imagine that our differences are inherent. And from there, it's just a short step to the idea that some people are inherently superior – or inferior – to each other. We need a new language to talk about all of this, openly and honestly. Jews aren’t a separate race, biologically speaking. But neither is anyone else.

ADL Deeply Disturbed By Characterizations Of Jews As A Race

ADL  |  New Orleans, LA, February 26, 2018 … Anti-Defamation League (ADL) South Central Regional Director Aaron Ahlquist issued the following statement regarding Joshua Bonadona’s employment discrimination lawsuit against Louisiana College:

“ADL is deeply offended by the perception of Jews as a race found in both allegations against the College and the plaintiff’s assertions in the lawsuit.  According to a court filing, the administration was motivated in its actions because of Mr. Bonadona’s “Jewish blood” and Mr. Bonadona is attempting to circumvent the 1964 Civil Rights Act’s religious employer exemption by characterizing his “Jewish heritage” as racial.

The notion of the Jewish “race” originated from the 19^th Century concept of “racial science,” which took root in Western Europe.  In response to the decline of the influence of traditional Christianity, as well as the rise of Jewish assimilation and social mobility, anti-Semites adopted racial arguments as a new rationalization for their hatred of Jews.

The idea that Jews are not only a religious group, but also a racial group, was a centerpiece of Nazi policy, and was the justification for killing any Jewish person who came under Nazi occupation –– regardless of whether he or she practiced Judaism. In fact, even the children and the grandchildren of Jews who had converted to Christianity were murdered as members of the Jewish “race” during the Holocaust.

Based on Congress’ 19^th Century conception of race, the U.S. Supreme Court in the 1980s ruled that the definition of “non-white races” found in post-Civil War anti-discrimination laws, includes Arabs, Chinese, Jews and Italians.  The 1964 Civil Rights Act, which explicitly covers national origin and religion, does not embody these antiquated views.  Although Mr. Bonadona’s attorney certainly could try to bring claims under these 19^th century laws, we believe that attempting to create similar legal precedent under the Civil Rights Act perpetuates harmful stereotypes and views about Jews.

What unites Jews as a people, whether they come from Europe, Asia, Africa, or the Americas, is a common culture, rooted in a common religion. Jews throughout the world are joined by a religious and cultural heritage rather than a racial sameness.  The allegations against Louisiana College, if true, would indicate a very troubling and deeply offensive view by the institution that it perceives and discriminates against Jews as a race.”

"Behavioral Genetics" "Social Science Genomics" - By Any Name - Race "Science" Still Turd-Frosting

newyorker |  Last summer, an anonymous intermediary proposed to Harris and Harden that they address their unresolved issues. Harden appeared on Harris’s podcast, and patiently explained why Murray’s speculation was dangerously out in front of the science. At the moment, technical and methodological challenges, as well as the persistent effects of an unequal environment, would make it impossible to conduct an experiment to test Murray’s idly incendiary hypotheses. She refused to grant that his provocations were innocent: “I don’t disagree with you about insisting on intellectual honesty, but I think of it as ‘both/and’—I think that that value is very important, but I also find it very important to listen to people when they say, ‘I’m worried about how this idea might be used to harm me or my family or my neighborhood or my group.’ ” (Harris declined to comment on the record for this piece.) As she once put it in an essay, “There is a middle ground between ‘let’s never talk about genes and pretend cognitive ability doesn’t exist’ and ‘let’s just ask some questions that pander to a virulent on-line community populated by racists with swastikas in their Twitter bios.’ ”

Harden is not alone in her drive to fulfill Turkheimer’s dream of a “psychometric left.” Dalton Conley and Jason Fletcher’s book, “The Genome Factor,” from 2017, outlines similar arguments, as does the sociologist Jeremy Freese. Last year, Fredrik deBoer published “The Cult of Smart,” which argues that the education-reform movement has been trammelled by its willful ignorance of genetic variation. Views associated with the “hereditarian left” have also been articulated by the psychiatrist and essayist Scott Alexander and the philosopher Peter Singer. Singer told me, of Harden, “Her ethical arguments are ones that I have held for quite a long time. If you ignore these things that contribute to inequality, or pretend they don’t exist, you make it more difficult to achieve the kind of society that you value.” He added, “There’s a politically correct left that’s still not open to these things.” Stuart Ritchie, an intelligence researcher, told me he thinks that Harden’s book might create its own audience: “There’s so much toxicity in this debate that it’ll take a long time to change people’s minds on it, if at all, but I think Paige’s book is just so clear in its explanation of the science.”

The nomenclature has given Harden pause, depending on the definition of “hereditarian,” which can connote more biodeterminist views, and the definition of “left”—deBoer is a communist, Alexander leans libertarian, and Harden described herself to me as a “Matthew 25:40 empiricist” (“The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me’ ”). The political sensitivity of the subject has convinced many sympathetic economists, psychologists, and geneticists to keep their heads below the parapets of academia. As the population geneticist I spoke to put it to me, “Geneticists know how to talk about this stuff to each other, in part because we understand terms like ‘heritability,’ which we use in technical ways that don’t always fully overlap with their colloquial meanings, and in part because we’re charitable with each other, assume each other’s good faith—we know that our colleagues aren’t eugenicists. But we have no idea how to talk about it in public, and, while I don’t agree with everything she said, sometimes it feels like we’ve all been sitting around waiting for a book like Paige’s.”

Harden’s outspokenness has generated significant blowback from the left. On Twitter, she has been caricatured as a kind of ditzy bourgeois dilettante who gives succor to the viciousness of the alt-right. This March, after she expressed support for standardized testing—which she argues predicts student success above and beyond G.P.A. and can help increase low-income and minority representation—a parody account appeared under the handle @EugenicInc, with the name “Dr. Harden, Social Justice Through Eugenics!” and the bio “Not a determinist, but yes, genes cause everything. I just want to breed more Hilary Clinton’s for higher quality future people.” One tweet read, “In This House We Believe, Science is Real, Womens Rights are Human Rights, Black Lives Matter, News Isnt Fake, Some Kids Have Dumb-Dumb Genes!!!”

In 2018, she wrote an Op-Ed in the Times, arguing that progressives should embrace the potential of genetics to inform education policy. Dorothy Roberts, a professor of law, sociology, and Africana studies at the University of Pennsylvania, strongly disagreed: “There’s just no way that genetic testing is going to lead to a restructuring of society in a just way in the future—we have a hundred years of evidence for what happens when social outcomes are attributed to genetic differences, and it is always to stigmatize, control, and punish the people predicted to have socially devalued traits.” Darity, the economist, told me that he doesn’t see how Harden can insist that differences within groups are genetic but that differences between them are not: “It’s a feint and a dodge for her to say, ‘Well, I’m only looking at variations across individuals.’ ”

There is a good precedent for this kind of concern. In “Blueprint,” Robert Plomin wrote that polygenic scores should be understood as “fortune tellers” that can “foretell our futures from birth.” Jared Taylor, a white-supremacist leader, argued that Plomin’s book should “destroy the basis for the entire egalitarian enterprise of the last 60 or so years.” He seized on Plomin’s claim that, for many outcomes, “environmental levers for change are not within our grasp.” Taylor wrote, “This is a devastating finding for the armies of academics and uplift artists who think every difference in outcome is society’s fault.” He continued, “And, although Blueprint includes nothing about race, the implications for ‘racial justice’ are just as colossal.” Harden has been merciless in her response to behavior geneticists whose disciplinary salesmanship—and perhaps worse—inadvertently indulges the extreme right. In her own review of Plomin’s book, she wrote, “Insisting that DNA matters is scientifically accurate; insisting that it is the only thing that matters is scientifically outlandish.” ​(Plomin told me that Harden misrepresented his intent. He added, “Good luck to Paige in convincing people who are engaged in the culture wars about this middle path she’s suggesting. . . . My view is it isn’t worth confronting people and arguing with them.”)

With the first review of Harden’s book, these dynamics played out on cue. Razib Khan, a conservative science blogger identified with the “human biodiversity” movement, wrote that he admired her presentation of the science but was put off by the book’s politics; though he notes that a colleague of his once heard Harden described as “Charles Murray in a skirt,” he clearly thinks the honorific was misplaced. “Alas, if you do not come to this work with Harden’s commitment to social justice, much of the non-scientific content will strike you as misguided, gratuitous and at times even unfair.” This did not prevent some on the Twitter left from expressing immediate disgust. Kevin Bird, who describes himself in his Twitter bio as a “radical scientist,” tweeted, “Personally, I wouldn’t be very happy if a race science guy thought my book was good.” Harden sighed when she recounted the exchange: “It’s always from both flanks. It felt like another miniature version of Harris on one side and Darity on the other.”