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A short thread on hereditarianism and ("not seeing") racism. Hereditarians do not just happen to downplay how racist our society is, and how much damage past racism did, they need to do so, for two distinct but related reasons 1/
(For how absurd their claims regarding the lack of importance of racism in the U.S. can get, see for example my https://altrightorigins.com/2020/06/28/intellectual-dishonestly-hereditarian-papers-1/">https://altrightorigins.com/2020/06/2... and https://muse.jhu.edu/article/552769/pdf)">https://muse.jhu.edu/article/5... 2/
On the one hand, if they admit how serious racism is & was, the obvious explanation for the observed differences to which they point would be... racism. So they need to downplay this. 3/
This is a long-standing issue: Jensen 1969 suggested backhandedly that racism in the 1940s really couldn& #39;t have been that bad, when he suggested that the average environment of blacks growing up then couldn& #39;t be all that much worse than that of whites... 4/
But there is another, more important reason. The point of hereditarianism has always been to justify the terrible status quo of black Americans - to make it seem like the disadvantages blacks face are really just "natural" differences playing out in a mostly fair system 5/
If one acknowledged how racist society was and remains, there would be no *point* in arguing for the hereditarian positions - we would still, as a society, be morally obligated to deal with the horrible racism first and foremost, whatever else happened to be true 6/
So hereditarians need to pretend that racism isn& #39;t a huge problem, both because that is what underwrites their arguments for their position, & what makes arguing for their position tempting - the hope that everything is mostly OK, & we don& #39;t need to address racism after all 7/
They are sometimes explicit about this - accepting the hereditarian hypothesis means that we can stop worrying about racism. And that, they think, is a good thing. 8/
And this isn& #39;t "just" about performance on IQ tests, or educational attainment. It extends to other morally salient realms. Most dramatically in Rushton, but their are hints throughout even contemporary literature that the authors have their sights on other targets 9/
Winegard^2 & Anomaly 2020 make offhand comments that lead in this direction ("collectivism" as an "Asian" trait). The point is to "explain" the distribution of outcomes as "natural" and therefore not at particularly worrying. 10/
So the claim that this is just neutral research is rather undermined by the apparent requirement that researchers involved in it systematically deny the importance of racism, both past and present. 11/
There is a *point* to taking these positions, and justifying the status quo is, and has always been, a big part of that. 12/12
