At Fardels Bear: On the intellectual dishonestly of recent hereditarian papers

Fardels Bear's John Jackson has a guest blogger this week, Jonathan Kaplan, who wrote a three part series about recent hereditarian papers.

Part One addresses a paper by the Winegards and Jonny Anomaly.

Part Two is about a paper by Nathan Cofnas

Part Three is about a paper by Jonny Anomaly (sans Winegards)

All four authors have Quillette bylines.

Part three contains this section, which I think is a great summation of the hereditarian strategy: deny the existence of institutional racism. I quoted one of the co-authors of the NHAI paper, Henry Harpending, apparently agreeing with the statement that a belief in institutional racism and white privilege is the equivalent of believing in witchcraft.

...modern “Jensenism” has always been about justifying the (terrible) status quo for Black Americans, by claiming that it is not the result of the gross racism and discrimination faced by Black Americans, but just the ‘natural’ result of genetically mediated cognitive sorting in a (mostly) fair environment (or something like that). (As in the previous post, note well that reasonable people do not think that the best evidence we have for the continued existence of racism, and profound effects of past racism, is differences in outcomes, but rather direct evidence of continued racism itself, and clear historical evidence of past racism and its effects. One reason, as I suggested in my paper “Ignorance, Lies, and Ways of Being a Racist,” to believe that many hereditarians are in fact racist is their apparent inability or unwillingness to perceive racism, and its importance, even when the evidence is staring them in face, and their willingness to outright lie about the existence of equal opportunities in cases where it is blindingly obvious that none in fact exist or have existed.)

Hereditarians push the notion that because African Americans failed to achieve socio-economic parity one hundred and fifty years after the end of slavery it proves that Black people are a "group" with lower intelligence and higher innate propensity for crime than other "groups."

The question of course is who are the controls? How are race science hawkers so certain that only Black Americans, of all "groups" would fail to achieve parity with the ethnic majority in a country, after a history that includes slavery, lynching, community destruction, segregation, suppression of voting and the "war on drugs"?

Well I have asked them, and they have offered what they consider comparable group experiences, which I will address in a future post.