In recent days we’ve linked to an assortment of comments on the public flaying and excommunication of Jason Richwine. (The linked items have all been supportive; had I found anything from the other side that I thought was intellectually respectable enough to offer our readers, I would have done so. If you readers have anything you consider fit to present, by all means send it along for scrutiny.)
Now, here is Jason Richwine himself, defending both his dissertation and the Heritage Foundation’s immigration report.
An excerpt (emphasis mine):
If the dissertation were taken seriously, its real contribution would be to open a forthright debate about the assimilation challenge posed by the post-1965 immigration wave. Because regardless of what one believes IQ scores really measure, or what determines them, they are undeniably predictive of a wide variety of socioeconomic outcomes that people care about.
We’re still waiting for that assimilation debate to start. I am not aware of a single major news outlet that acted as if my results merited real discussion. The reporters scanned the text for damning pull-quotes, giddily pasted them into stories about “extremism’ on the right, and presented my statements as self-evidently wrong. Liberal bloggers piled on with ignorant condemnations. Even some conservative supporters of the Schumer-Rubio amnesty eagerly joined the hatefest. At no time did the critics seem to wonder whether what I was saying might be true.
The reason for that is simple. The media were never interested in me or in the substance of my dissertation. They wanted only to use my work to embarrass the Heritage Foundation and, by extension, all opponents of amnesty. It’s a familiar formula for “gotcha’ journalism: Uncover an “extremist’ associated with a mainstream organization, then demand to know how the organization could possibly associate itself with him. Keep turning up the pressure, hour after hour, with “shocking’ new revelations.
To see how the furor over my dissertation is so inextricably linked to today’s heated debate over immigration, consider that no less a mainstream-media institution than the New York Times reported on some of my dissertation’s ideas in 2009. The newspaper’s Idea of the Day blog discussed my proposal for IQ selection in neutral terms. No moral panic ensued. What’s different now is that immigration reform is at stake, and the whole conversation is hopelessly politicized.
Also:
In my judgment, the initial criticisms of the Heritage study were not enough to sink it, so the media latched on to my dissertation as a convenient distraction. Better to shoot the messengers than to deal seriously with what they are saying.
Some students at Harvard are now using the same strategy to denounce my dissertation findings. An open letter signed by 23 ethnic student groups contains this gem: “Even if such claims had merit, the Kennedy School cannot ethically stand by this dissertation whose end result can only be furthering discrimination under the guise of academic discourse.’ It would be difficult to find a more explicit embrace of censorship.
Earlier today a commenter at Foseti made a similar remark:
I take lefties at their word when they say that they are worried about belief in racial differences in this or that being taken to justify discrimination or hatred.
I’m sure they are. But what ‘lefties’ never seem to grasp, and should learn to worry about as well, is that the counterfactual denial of statistical differences between human groups is also used to justify discrimination (race-based initiatives based on the assumption that disproportion in group outcome must therefore be based on institutionalized racism) and hatred (of pallid “racists’).
Moreover, in their ardor to eliminate, for all time, every form of discrimination — which righteous Quest, infinite and unbounded, is the holiest sacrament of our new secular religion — it seems that many on the multiculturalist Left are more than willing to bring Truth itself to die on the altar. Which is bad.
Read Dr. Richwine’s remarks here.
5 Comments
Hey that was me that made that comment. All I was trying to say was that while there are certainly some cynical lefties who are only using racism as a stick to beat conservatives with, there are many more who are genuinely concerned about racial discrimination. It would be beneficial for the right to address the concerns rather than just write them off as “that’ll never happen”.
[Lets take a cue from Alinsky and hold liberals responsible for their own beliefs.]
On the occasion of Darwin’s anniversary, Harvard published “The Annotated Origin of Species”. We demand to know why this racist work was published and what steps Harvard will make to see to it that nothing like it is ever published again.
Darwin is known to have said: “There is, however, no doubt that the various races, when carefully compared and measured, differ much from each other, as in the texture of the hair, the relative proportions of all parts of the body … Their mental characteristics are likewise very distinct; chiefly as it would appear in their emotional, but partly in their intellectual faculties …”
He has created a cottage industry of the most offesive racists on earth, such as Crick: “… I think it likely that more than half the difference between the average I.Q. of American whites and Negroes is due to genetic reasons, and will not be eliminated by any foreseeable change in the environment. Moreover I think the social consequences of this are likely to be rather serious unless steps are taken to recognize the situation.”
And so on. Harvard is responsible for this self-evident nonsense. We demand that this book be banned, that no book similar to it ever be published again, and that all courses based on it be removed from the curiculum.
Signed — The reality-based community.
Hi Matt,
I think that’s an important point. It does seem, though, that most of the actual racism in public life, in terms of concrete policy, comes from the Left.
The Right generally seems perfectly happy to focus attention on the individual person. Richwine’s pointing out of the lower average IQ of Hispanic immigrants was to make the case that we should filter prospective immigrants on the basis of individual IQ, without regard to race.
This of course ignores another consideration, namely the preservation of the traditional ethnic and cultural makeup of the nation, but it cannot fairly be seen as racist.
Careful what you wish for, Dom!
Lefties mostly see their version of racism as legitimate, to correct for past racism. On the other hand, they fear that focusing on the individual would lead back to white racism under the guise of meritocracy, via IQ scores or whatever metric is used.
The response of the right, IMO, should be that this is really unlikely. The actions of colleges/corporations show that they’ve totally bought the “diversity” line, and if anything will discriminate against whites. As much as people are bothered by AA, it really doesn’t do much of anything anymore, if it ever did. AA is now almost entirely a private initiative.
Unfortunately, this case is never made, with most rightists simply dismissing the possibility without comment or claiming that it doesn’t matter because who cares if people are racist.
Agreed on Richwine in particular though, it was clearly a politically motivated assassination. He didn’t even conduct any new research/testing for his dissertation, merely relying on what already existed. Was he supposed to make new test scores up? The idea of filtering by IQ is obviously not racist, unless (ironically) IQ is an innate characteristic of racial groups. Richwine himself left that question open. But the Heritage study was not good for the coming amnesty, so it had to be destroyed. But of course they did the deed themselves by folding entirely without resistance.