There’s No Taboo Against Studying Race and IQ

There never was a taboo!

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I’m very happy to announce that the taboo against talking about race differences in IQ is gone. In fact, there never was a taboo. This recent article, “The Mythical Taboo on Race and Intelligence,” sets us all straight.

There have been “extensive publications, citations, and discussions of such work since 1969.” The authors concede that it may be hard, lately, to get studies of race and IQ published, but there’s an innocent explanation: “Editors or publishers have judged the work to be scientifically deficient.”

So, there is unlimited inquiry, free-wheeling discussion, and sound, scientific work on race and IQ would easily find a publisher. The authors appear to believe this.

Fortunately, self-styled “contrarian scientist” Emil Kirkegaard has taken a look at how things really stand.

In this paper, he and co-authors Bryan Pesta and Joseph Bronski did a poll to test just how taboo different ideas really are.

The results are fascinating and sometimes surprising. Here is a graph of the main findings.

That’s a list of 33 ideas, ranked, top to bottom, from most taboo to least taboo. On the right are colored bars that represent the percentage of people who ranked the ideas as “extremely taboo,” in yellow, to “not at all taboo,” in dark purple. What’s the most terrifying question, the one at the very top with the most yellow? “Whether European Whites are smarter than African Blacks for genetic reasons.” That’s the most taboo question of all 33, and some of the rest are pretty spicy. The next most taboo is “whether brother-sister sex is harmful for consenting adults.”

That means, theoretically, I could go to a dinner party and say, “Yeah, my sister and I went at it like rabbits when we were teenagers. It was great. I recommend it.” That would be less shocking than saying, “Well you know, the reason Africa is such a mess is because blacks have lower IQs — and it’s because of genes.” That’s taboo number one.

It’s considered more taboo than saying pedophilia might be OK, that transsexualism could be a mental illness, or wondering if men are smarter than women.

As you get to the bottom, you won’t get in trouble for wondering whether organic food is better for you or whether people are more depressed on rainy days.

The authors of the paper found that this rank order of tabooness, so to speak, is pretty stable, no matter whom you ask. Here are results by sex; men are orange, women are blue.

There are some small differences. Men thought it’s more taboo than women do to raise the race/IQ question. Women are slightly more disturbed than men by the idea that incest could be OK. Women seem to be a little more willing than men to consider whether pedophilia might be OK. Remember, though, that the question was whether something is considered taboo, not what you yourself think, although the answers would probably be similar.

There were more results that surprised me. Here are how people of different races answered.

For the really taboo questions at the top, Asians — they’re the orange dots — were pretty consistently less likely to think certain ideas were off limits. Maybe I am wrong to think Asians would generally be more intellectually timid than whites. Blacks, in green, were almost always more likely to think things were taboo.

Republicans, in blue, are less likely than Democrats to think that the most taboo subjects are quite so taboo.

I can understand that they would be less horrified by the race/IQ question and be more willing to consider that transsexualism is a mental illness or to be open to the idea that giving women the vote leads to higher taxes. But Republicans are also less likely to think the idea that pedophilia might not be harmful would shock people. Republicans are more likely to think it’s taboo to wonder whether humans evolved from lower animals, but all-in-all — and contrary to popular stereotype — they appear to be more intellectually accepting than Democrats.

This may be the grimmest graph of all.

Young people are more likely than old people to think things are highly taboo, including the things that make people most indignant: race/IQ, whether transsexualism is a mental illness, humans are degenerating in quality, predicting intelligence from genes, and whether men are smarter than women.

Universities are where the next generation of our rulers is being trained, so the race/IQ question could become even more taboo than it is today. Many students have minds closed as tight as an oyster. Last year, the University of Washington did a massive survey of 10,500 undergraduates to find out what they thought about freedom of speech.

Here are percentages of different group who think “quite a bit” or “a great deal” that “expressing views perceived as offensive can be seen as an act of violence toward vulnerable people.”

Starting from the left, that’s nearly 18 percent of men and nearly 38 percent of women. That expressing views can be seen as violence. As you keep heading to the right, sexually abnormal people are more likely to think that, as are non-whites and liberals. Over on the right, in purple, 58.1 percent of “very liberal” students think saying something merely perceived as offensive can be seen as violence.

Here are the percentages of the same groups who think universities should ban views that some students think could harm certain groups.

From the left, that’s 27 percent of women and over in green, 30 percent of non-whites, and then on the right in purple, 40 percent of students who call themselves “very liberal.” Like it or not, women as a group are almost as diligent censors as non-whites.

But back to the race/IQ taboo, and two bits of news from just this month. Last week, in City Journal, Heather Mac Donald wrote about Peter Groeneveld of U Penn Medical School.

He used to be codirector of a Master of Science program, but not anymore. He wrote a private message to a fellow doctor, pointing out that many “underrepresented minorities” were struggling and might drop out. He suggested they may have been aggressively recruited into the program rather than enroll out of real passion. The message was leaked, and BIPOCs bellowed that this was precisely the kind of “institutional and interpersonal racism” that holds them down. Senior Vice Dean Emma Meagher emailed students to assure them that Dr. Groeneveld’s comments were “alarming and understandably distressing.”

A group of medical-school faculty piled on, claiming Dr. Groeneveld’s ideas had “tremendous negative impacts” on student BIPOCs. And so, for one email message, the doc got the ax.

He didn’t even say anything about race and IQ. He said only that certain groups were struggling and likely to drop out. It doesn’t even matter if that’s true. Bam. He was gone.

And, just last week, “Cambridge in free-speech row over researcher’s ‘race realism’ blog.”

Nathan Cofnas, an American, teaches at Oxford. One of its colleges, Emmanuel, quickly dropped him as a research associate. He had written that if admissions to Harvard were based on merit alone, the number of blacks would “approach zero.”

Lord Simon Woolley, the first black man ever to be appointed to head a college at Cambridge, explained to students that free speech must be protected, but that doesn’t cover what he called “abhorrent racism.”

You can read for yourself if what Mr. Cofnas writes is “abhorrent racism.”

And, so, the taboo is just as strong as ever. I would still have an X account and a YouTube channel if I had not cheerfully and consistently violated that taboo.

But the Left is right to do everything it can to keep any discussion of race locked up in the closet. Just about everything the Left stands for — open borders, miscegenation, race preferences, destruction of standards, CRT, fighting white supremacy, reparations, disrupting whiteness, hatred of America and of Western Civilization — the progressive platform is built on the assumption that, on average, the races are equal, right down to the tenth decimal point. Blow up that key idea and everything else comes tumbling down.

Remember the article I mentioned at the beginning? “The Mythical Taboo on Race and Intelligence”?

Here is another one of its claims: “The study of race and IQ has always been embedded in American social, especially educational, policies, and never driven by purely scientific objectives.”

It’s never been pure science. Not once in 100 years. Every single person who ever looked into it was a bigot. How can the authors of this paper write that and expect to be taken seriously They claim to know the hearts of hundreds of people they never met.

This is the kind of fanatic arrogance dissidents deal with every day. People set up a taboo and guard it as if their lives depended on it — well their livelihoods may depend on it — and then claim there’s no taboo at all.

We’ve got a long fight ahead of us, boys and girls. You can help by subscribing to this video channel, sending the link to a lot of people, and by looking up Emil Kirkegaard’s excellent website.

Original Article