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| Khan trashes the World Health Organization. It's interesting in view of his patron, the Insitome Institute. More on this below. |
I hate to have to think about Razib Khan and his race-obsessed career, which I have had the displeasure of following for at least fifteen years now.
But then he went and wrote a review of Charles Murray's latest race-baiting travesty, "Facing Reality" for Quillette, the leading source of race pseudo-science this side of American Renaissance.
Fun fact: American Renaissance has reprinted lengthy excerpts from many of Quillette's race-related articles. Last I checked they'd reprinted twenty-five articles.
As I have mentioned on several occasions, Khan is a bad writer, on top of his idiotic race-obsessed beliefs. His poor style is compounded by his dishonesty, as when he writes:
...I had the pleasure and honor of becoming (Charles Murray's) friend. And rather like Murray, I am now the sort of public figure that certain types of people feel they have to publicly denounce in order to establish their own group bona fides.
Given this personal history, you might reasonably ask why I agreed to write about Murray’s latest book, Facing Reality: Two Truths about Race in America. The answer is simply that I am one of the few people willing to write about it. The book’s thesis is that American society faces disaster if it is not prepared to confront certain politically uncomfortable facts about race—Murray has described it as a cri de coeur. But the difficulty of finding someone willing to admit to even reading one of Murray’s books, let alone someone willing to review it, may doom the project before anyone turns the first page. After all, most of those willing to listen to Murray are already familiar with the data he presents here, and those who are unaware of the uncomfortable facts he wants us to confront would never admit to touching one of his books for fear of peer condemnation.
Such a drama queen:
"the difficulty of finding someone willing to admit to even reading one of Murray’s books, let alone someone willing to review it, may doom the project before anyone turns the first page"
This is easily demonstrated to be pure bullshit. I did a series looking at The Bell Curve on this blog. I haven't finished the series, unfortunately, but the fact remains I reviewed - in depth - some of the book and nobody had a word of complaint about it.
And of course it takes two seconds to Google and find reviews of "Facing Reality." But the mental midgets who read Quillette are not likely to check up on Khan.
Speaking of mental midgets, Claire Lehmann, founder of Quillette, is ultimately responsible for book review assignments, so of course race pseudo-science promoter Razib Khan was assigned to review a book written by his friend Charles Murray, another race pseudo-science promoter. Which is no surprise, Quillette assigned blatant racist Bo Winegard and race-monger Noah Carl to review "Superior" by Angela Saini exactly because "Superior" criticizes race science.
Lehmann joined the comments section of Khan's review.
But back to the lies of Razib Khan.
Contrary to Khan's claim that nobody would review Murray's book, it was reviewed in The Washington Post, The Times of London Literary Supplement, and National Review, to name the first big media platforms I found by Googling. And of course it was promoted by the usual race swillers from Unz to American Renaissance.
Although I am surprised the non-racist media outlets reviewed the book - not because reviewing it is a scandalous transgression - but because there's nothing new in it. It's the same old race pseudo-science that Murray has been yammering on about since "The Bell Curve," which was published in 1994. The "science" hasn't changed since 1994, since it was never actual science. Charles Murray, political scientist, has always been and remains a right-wing operative whose entire career has been funded by right-wing racist plutocrats, from William Hammett to Charles Koch.
Khan came to the United States from Bangladesh when he was five. He claims he experienced racism.
I'm sure Khan believes that racism against him was unjustified, but racism against Black people is justified, because it isn't really racism it's "facing reality."
My theory is that, like so many European immigrants over the past two centuries, Khan decided the quickest way to climb the social ladder and stake a claim as a true American was to express contempt for Black people. The US immigrant tradition: no matter how new you are to the US, you can always tell yourself you are superior to Black Americans.
The only difference is that Khan, like Murray and all other promoters of race pseudo-science, attempts to justify his contempt for Black people, as a group, by claiming Black people are inadequate human beings because they have bad genes.
Fun fact: as a teenager Charles Murray burned a cross. Then claimed he and his friends had no idea what it meant. Which means Murray was either an idiot when he was a teenager, or he is a shameless liar.
So what is the "reality" Khan and Murray claim Americans are not facing?
His review is painfully long and rambling as he dances around his hereditarian beliefs and focuses on the usual grievances of the Quillette/IDW industrial complex.
Khan comes closest to admitting his hereditarian views in this section:
Tables on SAT scores by race are available in the Journal of Blacks In Higher Education, which pointed out in 2005 that “whites were more than seven times as likely as blacks to score 700 or above on the verbal SAT.” Wikipedia, meanwhile, has an entry entitled “Race and Crime in the United States,” which plainly states that a bit over 50 percent of victims and offenders in homicides are African American. The same website tells us that African Americans are about 13 percent of America’s population. Would you also be surprised to face the reality that the perpetrators of homicides are overwhelmingly young and male as well? These dots are there for anyone to connect if they like.
And yet very few choose to do so. Indeed, the failure—refusal, even—to connect the dots has become a vaunted feature, not a bug, of 2021’s regnant culture.
He never explains what exactly would be the result of "connecting the dots" but he hints at his views by claiming racism and white supremacy are insufficient to explain Black failure to thrive. And if you are a Quillette reader, you don't need the dots connected for you, you know what Razib Khan believes is the real reason for Black failure to thrive.
I've mentioned before the plainly-stated desire of Khan and other race pseudo-science promoters to erase Black history. Because if you erase 400 years of slavery, oppression, bigotry, looting, redlining, etc. etc. you can then claim the only reason for Black failure to thrive is genetics. Khan's fellow race pseudo-science mongers, the Winegard brothers, did exactly the same thing in their Quillette article defending The Bell Curve. Except they used the word "hereditarian" to describe their belief. Khan is not nearly so honest.
The desire to erase Black history is why Khan & friends hate the 1619 Project so much.
But six years ago, Gawker noted that Khan was careful not to blatantly state his beliefs:
He merely treats what white racists taken for granted—that non-whites, and especially blacks, are intellectually inferior—as an open question worth exploring in the name of scientific inquiry. Still, Khan is careful with his actual words; he never says black people are less intelligent.
But his willingness to treat black intelligence as a matter of debate has not hampered his career in the slightest. He’s written for Slate, The Daily Telegraph, and The Guardian. Indeed, he’s already placed two op-eds, about the evolution of cats and abortion politics, in The New York Times.
We recently partnered with Unilever and the newly formed Unstereotype Alliance - a global alliance convened by UN Women (the United Nations entity dedicated to gender equality and the empowerment of women) and including Facebook, Google, Mattel, Microsoft, J&J, AT&T, and others - to banish stereotypical portrayals of gender in advertising and other promotional content.
