02/25/2016
Yesterday Steve Sailer helpfully drew our attention to a study from the University of Virginia An Unintentional, Robust, and Replicable Pro-Black Bias in Social Judgment (PDF)in which three Academics jeopardize their future careers by demonstratingWhen making multiple admissions decisions for an academic honor society, participants from undergraduate and online samples had a more relaxed acceptance criterion for Black than White candidates… This pro-Black criterion bias persisted among subsamples that wanted to be unbiased and believed they were unbiased.This prejudice is of course what keeps afflicting us with the Magic Negro phenomenon in Public life of which Ben Carson is just the most recent example.
The most obvious cause of this favoring of Blacks is the emotional condition described by John Derbyshire (also yesterday) in Anti-Racism As A Religion.
But the late, great J.P. Rushton gave us a complementary reason in his 2004 VDARE.com essay Solving The African IQ Conundrum: “Winning Personality” Masks Low Scores
…the low African IQ of 70 remains hard for many to accept. One reason for the disbelief: Africans — and African Americans — display high levels of social competence… Psychometrically speaking, they score high on the Extraversion personality dimension. They are also much less anxious, shy, and fearful than Whites — they are low in the Neuroticism dimension. This combination of high Extraversion and low Neuroticism results in a socially dominant personality profile.Combined with Affirmative Action, this has caused many institutions in this country to be burdened with much dead wood.A typical academic story comes from professors who, on first exposure to African students, express their delight in the high levels of classroom performance. The students are described as engaged, offering lively opinions, and giving a clear impression of brightness. Only when the students took objectively measured essay or multiple-choice examinations did it become painfully obvious to even the most well-wishing faculty members that their grasp of abstract material failed to live up to their classroom rhetoric.
America cannot afford this nonsense.
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.