Race Realism

Americans can’t stop talking about race and racism. Why? Because black people don’t do as well as white people. They are poorer, more likely to be in jail, they are fatter, more likely to have illegitimate children, and the black part of town is always the worst. There is only one official explanation for this. It’s the fault of white people.

But racial discrimination has been illegal for more than half a century. There are now built-in advantages for black people called affirmative action and diversity goals. That’s why Critical Race Theory now says white people are oppressing black people whether we want to or not. It’s our nature.

Is that really believable? Are we unconsciously oppressing black people? Isn’t it plausible to ask whether, on average, the different races might not have the same abilities? Couldn’t it be that most of the time in America, people of all races rise and fall according to their abilities?

At some level, almost everyone knows that races are different. The Tokyo Olympics are going on now, and I can make a prediction with complete confidence. Blacks who come originally from West Africa will dominate the sprints, and blacks who come from East Africa will dominate the long distances. It’s been that way for at a long time....

Blacks dominate professional basketball.... This book is about the physical differences that explain why blacks are tops in some sports – and not so good in others. It’s risky to talk about these physical differences, and that’s why the book is called Taboo.

It’s much more taboo to talk about race differences in intelligence, but the evidence for differences is overwhelming. You don’t have to be an expert to understand this. For example, there is no black country anywhere in the world – whether in Africa or in the Caribbean, like Haiti – that isn’t poor....

Before Europeans or Arabs showed up in black Africa, no one there had invented the wheel or any kind of mechanical device or had domesticated an animal or figured out a calendar or built a two-story building...

Here’s another pattern: There are 13,800 school districts in the United States. I don’t know of a single one that doesn’t fit the pattern on standardized tests: Black students get the worst grades. Hispanics do better than blacks. Whites do better than Hispanics. And Asians do best of all...

You may think tests of any kind – especially IQ tests – are racist, but specialists overwhelmingly agree that they are not. This book, for example, [The Nature of Human Intelligence] by Robert J. Sternberg published by Cambridge University press, is a collection of 20 chapters written by the most eminent people in the field of intelligence. Tests accurately measure the intelligence of people of all races. You are basically born with a certain level of intelligence. It’s also clear that, on average, Asians score higher than whites on every kind of test. In America, they make more money than whites, live longer, and have much lower crime rates. How does that happen if America is a white supremacist country?...

The best estimates are that genes account for 50 to 80 percent of individual differences in IQ. That means the environment accounts for the rest, but despite tremendous efforts, no one has figured out how to change the environment in ways that raise IQ permanently...

Someday, we will find the genes associated with intelligence, and I think the chances that they are equally distributed among the different races is zero. In the meantime, scientists are finding the genetic patterns associated with level of education, which is a good indirect indicator of intelligence. As you can see on this graph, those genetic patterns are distributed as we would expect: Lowest in Africans, highest in Asians....

There is even more direct evidence. People with bigger brains tend to be smarter; there is a correlation between brain size and IQ of 0.3 to 0.4....

The media hate these findings and almost never report on them. Most academics hate them.... A lot of people don’t want the truth to be known. But the truth appears to be that by and large “racism” doesn’t hold back blacks or Hispanics any more than “racism” pushes Asians ahead....

Michael Shellenberger and I wrote “Woke Religion: A Taxonomy” to help people understand the woke religion.

I want to be crystal clear about something: bigotry and racial discrimination are real and they have no place in society. Yes, there is ongoing racism. Yes, there is ongoing homophobia. Yes, there is ongoing hatred of trans people. These are morally abhorrent and we all need to work together to bring about their end. The woke religion, however, is not the way to stop these moral horrors. It is making our shared problems more difficult to solve.

This is the spirit in which we offer this taxonomy.