The "R" Word

12/06/2006

Malcolm Gladwell asserts a viewpoint that I think is pretty common among the media elite today:

Defining A Racist

… I propose three criteria:

Content. What is said clearly makes a difference. I think, for example, that hate speech is more hateful the more specific it is. To call someone a [n*****] is not as a bad as arguing that black people have lower intelligence than whites. To make a targetted [sic] claim is worse than calling a name.

Let me propose two criteria. You are more likely to get smeared as a "racist," the more your statement is:

True.
Important.

As you know, the white-black intelligence gap has been studied to death over the last several generations. Legitimate questions remain about whether it’s changing in size, and how big a role, if any, genetics plays in it. But there is no scientific question whatsoever about its existence.

The most comprehensive investigation of the size of the white-black IQ gap was carried out by Philip L. Roth of Clemson and colleagues in a 2001 article, "Ethnic Group Differences in Cognitive Ability in Employment and Educational Settings: A Meta-Analysis," in the academic journal Personnel Psychology. They looked at 105 different studies covering 6,246,729 individuals and found an overall average difference between whites and blacks of 16.5 IQ points, or 1.1 standard deviations. The 95 percent confidence interval runs merely from 1.06 to 1.15 standard deviations (in other words, there is strong agreement among the 105 studies).

As for its importance, the white-black IQ gap is highly relevant to a broad range of social issues, such as education, voting, and much else that you aren’t supposed to think about.

There is a lot of hate in this world, and, increasingly, much of that hate is getting directed at people who tell the truth.

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