12/17/2020
See also Raymond Wolters — A Good Friend Of VDARE.com And AMERICAN RENAISSANCE — Has Died
As Jared Taylor writes below, Raymond Wolters was brave enough to write, in The Burden Of Brown, [1984] that Thirty Years Of School Desegregation weren’t working. Sam Francis quoted Wolters here in his 2004 article Fifty Years Of Brown Blunder: Ruling Class Learns Nothing.
Now both Francis and Wolters are dead, Brown v Board Of Education is 66. If it were a human being, it would be looking a retirement, but it isn’t.
Here are some of the things writed by and about Wolters on VDARE.com.
A 2009 interview:
Lamb: There is a body of research in the social and behavioral sciences, such as behavioral genetics, that rarely penetrates the public domain or informs public policy [The controversy that engulfed The Bell Curve is one exception, see here and here.] Will this taboo ever be lifted?
Wolters: I believe it has been a mistake to quarantine research on IQ and racial differences. In Race and Education I made a point of discussing these subjects. I think the research on IQ is one of the most important bodies of work that must be pondered in order to understand the history of American education
Race and Education: An Interview With Professor Raymond Wolters, by Kevin Lamb, March 25, 2009
A John Derbyshire review of Wolters' The Long Crusade: Profiles in Education Reform, 1967-2014:
A naïve inquirer might ask why, after a century of effort, we still haven’t got schools right. A cynical responder might reply that there are many careers, much prestige, and boxcar-loads of public and private money in education reform, along with endless opportunities for politicians to pose as champions of some completely new approach! — for the sake of our children, you know.
Ray Wolters is not that cynical responder. He is a historian by trade — Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Delaware — and writes as a historian should, proceeding through these decades with a straightforward account built around profiles of the main reformers and their critics.
John Derbyshire: Ray Wolters' THE LONG CRUSADE And VDARE.com, April 15, 2015.
A Steve Sailer review of the same book:
My old friend Raymond Wolters, a professor of history at the U. of Delaware for 50 years, has come back from five months in the hospital waiting for his lung transplant to write the first narrative account to make sense of the fads and fashions that have roiled K–12 public schools since the failure of forced busing to prove a panacea for racial disparities in school achievement: The Long Crusade: Profiles in Education Reform, 1967–2014.
I’m biased in favor of The Long Crusade, in part because I didn’t have much hope that Professor Wolters would live through his health woes to write it, in part because I am quoted a few dozen times in it.
(By the way, seeing myself quoted alongside more respectable figures, I have to admit that I really do come across as a sarcastic bastard.)
Sailer Review Of THE LONG CRUSADE: A Magisterial HBD-aware History Of Education Reform,November 4, 2015
A report of the time a review by Wolters of a book on educations was memory-holed (deleted and depublished) by the American Historical Review.
Now I see from one of Steve’s commenters that Prof. Wolters has come to the attention of the CultMarx ideological enforcers.
What happened was that the American Historical Review, which is an academic journal, commissioned a book review from Prof. Wolters (who is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Delaware).
The book to be reviewed was Ansley Erickson’s Making the Unequal Metropolis: School Desegregation and Its Limits, published last year. Prof. Erickson is Assistant Professor of History and Education at Columbia University Teachers College.
I haven’t read Prof. Erickson’s book; but the promotional blurb at Amazon.com gives off a strong odor of sunbeams from cucumbers.
Be that as it may, the fact of American Historical Review having assigned this book to Prof. Wolters caused historians nationwide to take to the fainting couch.
One of their complaints:
I reviewed [Prof. Wolters'] book Race and Education in Teachers College Record in 2009. At that time I pointed out that … he had granted a personal interview to a website called vdare.com, which is classified as a “white nationalist hate website” by the Southern Poverty Law Center … (Zoe Burkholder, Montclair State University).
CultMarx Witch-Hunters Go For Ray Wolters,April 18, 2017
Wolters responded to that attack with an article published on VDARE.com:
We are living in a new Dark Age, Scholars are expected to stay away from sociobiology, not because E. O. Wilson and Carl Degler were mistaken but because modern egalitarians are reacting badly to a challenge similar to the one that evolution once posed for Christian fundamentalists. At first, most Christians denounced Darwin’s theory of evolution as, in the words of William Jennings Bryan, jeopardizing “the doctrine of brotherhood,” undermining “the sympathetic activities of a civilized society,” and “paralyzing the hope of reform.” And now sociobiology is under attack by Social Justice Warriors who are concerned about the implications that racial genetics may have for racial policies.
I do not wish to minimize the sensitivity of this situation. There may be good reasons for public leaders to avoid discussion of sociobiology. A recently released tape recording of a 1971 conversation reveals that President Richard Nixon and his advisor, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, understood the implications of evolution but nevertheless insisted that it was not their responsibility to disseminate this knowledge.
But the obligations of scientists and scholars (and journalists) differ from those of politicians. Academics should pursue the truth. They should not conspire to suppress it — not by “historicizing,” not by “problematizing,” not by any means at all.
Whatever the implications for social policy may be, it will never do for scholars, for reasons of expedience, to lie to the world as Galileo once lied when his mind held the truth.
"We Are Living In A New Dark Age" — Raymond Wolters On His Blacklisting By AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW, June 5, 2017
We also published a talk Wolters gave at the H. L. Mencken Club, November 7, 2015:
My father fought in the First World War, and my paternal grandfather farmed virgin land in Kansas. They were not disciples of Charles Darwin, but they believed that racial differences were obvious and important. They disapproved of bigots and told me to treat everyone with respect. But they also knew there was a difference between equality of opportunity for individuals and equality of results for groups. They recognized something that, until recent decades, seemed obvious to most people: that the different races of mankind inherently differ statistically in the distribution of certain traits.
My own generation was taught the opposite; that any statistical differences were the result of privilege, discrimination, or lack of opportunity. But what about my grandchildren and their progeny? What will they think?
Raymond Wolters On Three Race Theories: White Culpability, Interracial Contact, Human BioDiversity, February 14, 2016.
Read the whole thing, there isn’t going to be any more.
James Fulford has been a writer and editor for VDARE.com for almost 20 years.
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.