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| Pinker believes "race" classifications are biological, not "social constructions." |
I classify all promoters of race pseudoscience as racemongers. That includes many Quillette authors including Steve Pinker and members of the Intellectual Dark Web like Sam Harris.
They either claim outright that there is something different and inferior or superior about one or more "biological" races, or, in cases like Pinker, they support the careers of those who do, while making race pseudoscience-friendly statements.
Steve Sailer, Quillette author Bo Winegard and Charles Murray are also racemongers. Sailer and Murray have built their careers on racemongering. Bo Winegard seems headed in that direction.
But Winegard, Murray and Sailer are also racists.
Racemongers generally defend their race beliefs on the grounds that those beliefs are based on science.
Now the fact that their "science" is garbage, based on various combinations of careless categorizations, badly-done studies (some funded by hardcore racists) and 18th century beliefs doesn't matter. They cling to the claim that theirs is a science-based opinion.
But every now and then they slip up.
In his defense of The Bell Curve, for the American Enterprise Institute, Charles Murray wrote:I will focus on two sorts of differences: between men and women and between blacks and whites. Here are three crucial points to keep in mind as we go along:
The differences I discuss involve means and distributions. In all cases, the variation within groups is greater than the variation between groups. On psychological and cognitive dimensions, some members of both sexes and all races fall everywhere along the range. One implication of this is that genius does not come in one color or sex, and neither does any other human ability. Another is that a few minutes of conversation with individuals you meet will tell you much more about them than their group membership does.
That was in 2005. More recently, Murray contradicted that statement in a tweet, suggesting that it is appropriate - "economically rational" - to judge an individual's potential based on the individual's race.
Charles Murray is a racist, and probably has been ever since he was a cross-burning teenager.
Now in Bo Winegard's case, after years of promoting "human biodiversity," the mask slipped in his support for a Third Reich-style attitude towards racial demographics. Although he prefers the term "ethnoculturally conservative" and honesty about "group differences."
Steve Sailer has been revealing himself as a racist for decades. One of the more recent, blatant examples is when he implied that the exonerated "Central Park Five" accused of a crime that occurred in 1989, were guilty by comparing them to a non-white teenager accused of murder in Central Park in 2019. The two assaults occurred 30 years apart. Sailer's "logic" is classic racism: all those people are the same. If one of them commits murder it proves that they are all murderers.
But since Charles Murray is also a racist, the racism of Steve Sailer bothers him not at all.
Murray is such a racist now that even Andrew Sullivan backed away from him, in the recent 60 Minutes interview, although Sullivan was promoting Murray as recently as May 2021.
As Variety's Daniel D'Addario notes, Sullivan was treated deferentially on the issue. And I would add, almost as deferentially as Steven Pinker is treated by the establishment media (with rare exceptions.)
Sullivan’s musings, by contrast, lack a clear reason to be broadcast at this particular moment and deserve to be placed within context — something Pelley seems fundamentally uninterested in doing.I think it's likely that Sullivan is a racist. I haven't seen anything as clear-cut as in the cases of Winegard, Murray and Sailer, but until this 60 Minutes interview he has been a dedicated racemonger.
To wit: Pelley comes close to asking a tough question about Sullivan’s tin ear (at best) on race, noting the incident when, as then-editor of The New Republic, Sullivan published an excerpt of a book asserting genetic deficits in IQ among Black people. Pelley notes, though, that Sullivan published rebuttals, “but he’s criticized for airing the debate at all.”
Well, yes: Lending the institutional voice of a prestigious publication to a racist crackpot theory and then letting others write in to contest it is worthy of criticism. With an interviewer like Pelley, though, Sullivan barely needs defenders: Sullivan’s eventual admission that the “harm outweighs the good” of the “Bell Curve” publication “doesn’t mean he’s giving up on debate,” Pelley tells us. He then recites Sullivan’s claims that newsrooms “pander to the left and right and are intimidated by political correctness.”
I've been debating with myself for awhile whether or not Razib Khan is a racist rather than just a racemonger. He's certainly built his career on racemongering, and lately I've been leaning towards putting him in the racist category, since he agreed with racist Charles Murray that we need to "connect the dots" about Black Americans or "face disaster." It's apparent that Khan wants to promote the notion that Black Americans as a group are a serious threat and something needs to be done about that - unless you know, you're OK with disaster.
That's about as racist as you can get.
