LA Times: "Why do Asian students generally get higher marks than Latinos?"

Hector Becerra of the LA Times visits a high school near downtown LA that has basically no whites or blacks, and asks students and teachers "Why do Asian students generally get higher marks than Latinos?"

Lincoln Heights is mostly a working-class Mexican American area, but it's also a first stop for Asian immigrants, many of them ethnic Chinese who fled Vietnam.

With about 2,500 students, Lincoln High draws from parts of Boyle Heights, El Sereno and Chinatown.

Both the neighborhood and student body are about 15% Asian. And yet Asians make up 50% of students taking Advanced Placement classes. Staffers can't remember the last time a Latino was valedictorian.

"A lot of my friends say the achievement gap is directly attributable to the socioeconomic status of students, and that is not completely accurate," O'Connell said. "It is more than that."

But what is it? O'Connell called a summit in Sacramento that drew 4,000 educators, policymakers and experts to tackle the issue. Some teachers stomped out in frustration and anger.

No Lincoln students stomped out of their discussion. Neither did any teachers in a similar Lincoln meeting. But the observations were frank, and they clearly made some uncomfortable.

To begin with, the eight students agreed on a few generalities: Latino and Asian students came mostly from poor and working-class families.

According to a study of census data, 84% of the Asian and Latino families in the neighborhoods around Lincoln High have median annual household incomes below $50,000. And yet the Science Bowl team is 90% Asian, as is the Academic Decathlon team. ...

Asian parents are more likely to pressure their children to excel academically, the students agreed. ...

The journalist winds up with the usual George W. Bush-style postmodernist explanation -- the soft bigotry of low expectations. If only everybody would just assume the two groups are equal, then they would be.

Try and falsify that proposition!

Of course, the long article doesn't mention the two dread letters, but, on the other hand, there is a lot of evidence that Chinese tend to overachieve and Mexican-Americans tend to underachieve relative to their IQs. Family expectations and pressure are certainly a plausible explanation for over vs. underachievement.

The subtler question that I want to focus on, though, is whether it's better, all else being equal, for Hispanics to be in a school that's 85% Hispanic and 15% Chinese or in a school that is 100% Hispanic?

That's a tough problem for social science to crack since all else is never equal. If the school was really bad, it wouldn't be 15% Asian -- the Chinese parents would get their kids out. So you can assume that Lincoln isn't a really awful, dangerous school like, say, Jefferson, where there were brown vs. black race riots a few years ago. Not a lot of Chinese at Jefferson. (Here's Roger D. McGrath's 2005 American Conservative article on Jefferson High. By the way, I don't think there are many high schools that are perpetually 85% black and 15% Asian -- it sounds unstable -- but I could be wrong.)

I don't have much of a hunch what a good study would find. I could see it going either way. Having 15% Asians around might help the smart, nerdy Hispanics find friends, and might keep better teachers around the school. (Good teachers like to teach -- i.e., to impart learning -- so good teachers gravitate toward schools with good students -- i.e., those more able and willing to be taught.) Being 15% Asian means there are enough advanced students around to justify advanced classes.

On the other hand, having an "academic-dominant minority" of Asians in a high school may well further racialize attitudes toward studying. If your name ends in Z and you are a student at Lincoln, what's the point of setting out in 9th grade to be valedictorian? No Hispanic has been valedictorian at Lincoln H.S. since the mind of man runs not to the contrary. To study hard is to act Asian, to betray La Raza. If Mexican students tried to beat the Chinese at their own game, and failed, well, that would just prove the Chinese are smarter. So it's better for Mexican racial self-esteem to make sure nobody even tries, to proclaim that studying is just something Asians high school students do because they're, uh, no good at tagging and getting pregnant.

That's basically what the most respected institutions in our society -- the LA Times, the State Superintendent of Schools, etc. -- tell them to think, right? That there can't possibly be an innate intelligence gap between the Mexicans and the Chinese, because if there were, it would be the worst thing in the history of the world. It would mean that Hitler was right, that Nazis should rule America. So, to prevent a Nazi takeover, the Hispanic students will do their part by screwing off instead of studying. (It's not hard to persuade teens not to study.)

In contrast, at a 100% Hispanic school like Garfield or Roosevelt (nearby East LA schools that don't include Chinatown -- Jaime Escalante taught AP Calculus at Garfield), well, somebody Hispanic has to be valedictorian each year. So, trying to be valedictorian there, while nerdy and uncool, is likely to be less racially fraught than at an integrated school.

As I said, I don't really know which way it would go. People have similarly argued over this type of question concerning Historically Black Colleges for a long time -- is a black kid with an 1100 SAT score better off at Howard where he'd quite competitive academically or at Georgetown, where he'd feel like Michelle Obama did at Princeton and Harvard Law School?

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Sounding black

Steven Levitt's Freakonomics column points to a working paper, Speech Patterns and Racial Wage Inequality, by a U. of Chicago researcher who collected audio samples recorded recently of 402 participants in the 1997 National Longitudinal Study of Youth cohort (The Bell Curve was based on the earlier 1979 NLSY cohort). Jeffrey Grogger had five grad students guess whether each interviewee was white or black.

Among whites, 82% were said to be white by at least four of the five listeners. Grogger calls these the "distinctly white" group. The other 18% were grouped as "indistinctly white." ("Indistinctly White" reminds me of Onion Opinion essayist Amber Richardson, author of "Why Somebody Always Around Everytime I Drop my Baby?")

Among blacks, 67% were "distinctly black." Grogger has the U.S. Military's ASVAB scores for all NLSY participants (although of the 10 ASVAB subtests, the most interesting are the four that make up the very IQ-like AFQT, but he doesn't report those). Converted by me to a conventional IQ scale with the national average at 100 and a standard deviation of 15, here are the ASVAB scores:

Race	Accent	ASVAB	Sample
White	Distinctly White	105	227
White	Indistinctly White	103	51
Black	Indistinctly Black	99	41
Black	Distinctly Black	89	83

Grogger writes:

The final column indicates that the mean ASVAB score for blacks is 0.85 standard deviations lower than the mean for whites. This is similar to the racial differences that appear in many standardized tests (Jencks and Phillips, 1998).

Indistinctly identified whites score 0.16 standard deviations lower on the ASVAB than distinctly identified whites. The difference is greater for blacks. Distinctly identified blacks score .66 standard deviations lower than indistinctly identified blacks. It should come as little surprise that test scores differ between distinctly and indistinctly identified blacks, since test scores factored into the definition of the two groups.

What is surprising is the magnitude of the difference. To put it in perspective, the gap between distinctly and indistinctly identified blacks amounts to three quarters of the gap that exists between blacks and whites.

Similarly large differences appear in years of schooling. Mean highest grade completed among indistinctly identified whites is 12.49 years, compared to 13.22 years among distinctly identified whites. Again, the gap is larger for blacks. The difference in mean highest grade completed between distinctly and indistinctly identified blacks is 0.9 years. This is larger than the gap of 0.83 years between blacks and whites overall.

Keep in mind that the respondents are in their early to mid-20s, so many haven't finished schooling.

Table 7 presents the relationship between speech patterns and ASVAB scores somewhat differently. For each quartile of the ASVAB distribution (within the speech sample), it presents by race the share of speakers whose race was distinctly identified by listeners. The first column shows that the link between speech patterns and ASVAB scores is quite weak for whites. With the exception of the lowest ASVAB quartile, 81 to 84 percent of whites were distinctly identified as white. In contrast, the link between speech patterns and ASVAB scores is quite strong among blacks. In the lowest quartile, 82 percent of black speakers were distinctly identified. That share declines monotonically by quartile to a low of 25 percent among those at the top.

There are only 8 blacks in the top quartile of ASVAB scorers, but 6 of them didn't sound distinctly black. In contrast, of the 45 blacks in the bottom quartile of test scores, only 8 of them didn't sound distinctly black.

Together, Tables 6 and 7 show that skill and speech patterns are highly correlated among black speakers. At the same time, the correlations among white speakers are much weaker.

Levitt writes:

His main finding: blacks who “sound black” earn salaries that are 10 percent lower than blacks who do not “sound black,” even after controlling for measures of intelligence, experience in the work force, and other factors that influence how much people earn. (For what it is worth, whites who “sound black” earn 6 percent lower than other whites.) ...

In other words, Grogger has already adjusted for the big IQ gap between distinctly black and indistinctly black panelists, and there's still a wage gap.

(It turns out you don’t want to sound southern, either. Although pretty imprecisely estimated, it is almost as bad for your wages to sound southern as it is to sound black, even controlling for whether you live in the south.)

Unfortunately, Grogger appears to be lumping white and black Southerners together, which isn't that helpful.

And no, he doesn't tell us what the average IQ of whites who sound Southern is. I noticed when I was at Rice U. in Houston that a couple of my classmates had siblings attending local colleges who sounded much more Texan than they did.

Whether black or Southern, it's part of the homeboy phenomenon. Using a neutral national accent suggests you are willing to do what it takes to get ahead in this country, while using a subgroup accent suggests you are loyal to the values of your neighborhood and aren't as willing to make sacrifices.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Cheap gasoline was a social lubricant

In 1968, when my late father-in-law, a classical musician, had to sell his two-flat on the West Side of Chicago because his children were suddenly getting mugged on the sidewalk, getting only a fraction of what it had been worth two years before. He moved 63 miles out of town, but commuted daily to the Lyric Opera House downtown. Why not? Gas was $0.29 per gallon.

Inexpensive oil was a social lubricant in America.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Return of the New Mulatto Elite

Awhile back, a British TV talent show was won by a dumpy-looking guy named Paul Potts who wowed the crowd by singing Puccini's "Nessun Dorma" aria from Turandot.

Americans don't know anything about opera anymore, so they don't realize how thrilling it can be. (The British viewers were probably vaguely familiar with the aria from the connection between soccer and the Three Tenors, "Nessun Dorma" being more or less Pavarotti's theme song.) So it was only natural for the American Idol-style show "America's Got Talent" to have as the anchorman of their season premiere this week an American contestant singing "Nessun Dorma." Neil E. Boyd, an insurance salesman of Pavarotti-like girth, floored the audience, making him the frontrunner.

I imagine the producers of the show auditioned a lot of part-time opera singers to find the one they were going to anoint as the American Paul Potts. The fellow they came up with, Boyd, is (not too surprisingly) part black, with a white mom with whom he is very close.

A couple of years ago, my wife predicted early in the American Idol season that Jordin Sparks, the daughter of an NFL cornerback and a redhead, would win, since she could sing both black and white.

I think there's a general lesson emerging: whites like blacks, but black teens these days don't like much of anything they consider white. They like just hip-hop and basketball (and, okay, football, too). Almost everything else is considered a violation of keeping it real.

Even though blacks may tend to have a natural advantage at creating resonant vocal tones, the very idea of singing opera is totally off their radar. Sure, there were big time black opera singers like Marian Anderson as far back as between the Wars, but black youths aren't interested in that kind of acting white anymore.

So, the small number of mulattos who grew up with one non-black parent and thus get introduced to a wider range of cultural options beyond rap and hoops are disproportionately taking the plums that people a generation ago assumed blacks in general would be achieving.

Back in 1968, when the top American rock guitarist was Jimi Hendrix and top American tennis player was Arthur Ashe, everybody assumed that integration meant that blacks would continue to show up near the top in an ever wider variety of fields.

Today, though, superstar rock guitarist Tom Morello is the great-nephew of Jomo Kenyatta; and the second best American men's tennis player James Blake has a black father. But they both have white mothers. Similarly, five different black golfers won 23 PGA tournaments between 1961 and 1986, but since then Tiger Woods is the only player of any visible fraction of African ancestry to win a tournament.

There's somebody who's an even better example of this rise of the new mulatto elite, but I can't quite think of his name at the moment.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

The dynastic appeal of Barack Obama

In my new VDARE.com column, I respond to Kenan Malik's criticism in Prospect of my definition of race. His assumption that it's absurd to call the British royal family a racial group got me thinking about dynasticism again, and I finally figured out something about the essence of Barack Obama's appeal that should have been obvious to me a year ago.

It's absurd that in a huge country like America that a Bush or a Clinton has been on every national ticket since 1980. I viewed Obama's victory over the Clinton dynasty as a defeat for the forces of dynasticism, but now I realize I was being naive, that has brilliantly tapped into the public's dynastic logic, just on a larger and subtler scale.

Here's an excerpt, but you'll have to read the whole article to see how.

How to Think About Race — and Barack Obama

By Steve Sailer

A new but characteristically confused debate over whether race is a biological reality reminds me of the value of having a simple definition of "race" in mind.

Left-leaning British-Indian science journalist Kenan Malik's latest book, Strange Fruit: Why Both Sides are Wrong in the Race Debate, has so far only gone on sale in the U.K. But he argues online: "Race is not a real biological entity."

In a hostile review of Malik's book in Prospect, the fine British intellectual magazine, Mark Pagel, a British evolutionary biologist, lands a flurry of blows:

"Malik knows these facts about our genetics, but wants to insist that, unless 'race' corresponds to absolute boundaries, it is a useless and damaging concept. But to deny what everybody knows and to swap the word race for something less politically charged like ‘group’ is just an act of self-denial and certainly no more accurate than the dreaded ‘r’ word. It is also patronising—I would like to think we are all grown up enough to accept the facts and ready ourselves for the deluge to come. I say deluge because the more we measure, the more genetic differences we find among populations …"

Unfortunately, Pagel doesn't deliver a knockout punch because he lacks a definition of race. Like Supreme Court justice Potter Stewart wrote in his famous opinion in a pornography case, Pagel can't define race, but he knows it when he sees it.

Malik responded in Prospect by noting, with some justice, "The debate over race has moved on. To judge from his review of my book, Mark Pagel hasn't noticed."

To illustrate the state of the art thinking among the race realists he opposes, Malik writes:

"In the 19th and early 20th centuries, races were viewed as fixed groups, each with its own distinct behaviour patterns and physical characteristics. They could be ranked on an evolutionary hierarchy, with whites at the top and blacks at the bottom. Today, with a few exceptions, race realists reject the idea that there are essential, unbridgeable differences between human populations, or that differences signify inferiority or superiority. So how do they define a race? Usually as 'an extended family that is inbred to some degree' in the words of Steve Sailer of the Human Biodiversity Institute. ... But once everything from the British royal family to the entire human population can be considered a race (because each is an "extended family inbred to some degree"), then the category has little value."

[More]

Along these lines, here's an update of an update of Richmond's speech concluding Shakespeare's Richard III about the dynastic marriage to end the War of the Roses between the Yorks and Lancasters:

We will unite the white rose and the black:
Smile heaven upon this fair conjunction,
That long have frown'd upon their enmity!
What extremist hears me, and says not amen?
America hath long been mad, and scarr'd herself;
The rev'rend shouted his congregation's ire,
The consultant plotteth Will Horton ads
The undiverse fleeeth to the exurbs
All this divided White and Black
Divided in their dire division,

But then Barack Sr. and Stanley Ann
The true succeeders of each racial house,
By God's fair ordinance conjoin together!
And let their heir, God, if thy will be so.
Enrich the time to come with smooth-faced peace,
With smiling plenty and fair prosperous days!
Abate the edge of racists, gracious Lord,
That would demand both parties make borders secure,
And make America less inclusive
Let them not live to taste this land's increase
That would with insensitivity wound this fair land's peace!
Now civil wounds are stopp'd, peace lives again:
That she may long live here, God say amen!

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

A critique of my definition of race

From an anthropologist friend:

Steve Sailer's definition of race -- an extended family, inbred to some extent -- is as good as any, and better than many. But it's important to keep in mind that size makes a difference. Just as we see things going on in big lakes (noticeable tides, for example) that we don't see in small lakes, we also see important things going on in the large extended families known as races that we could get away with ignoring when looking at regular family-sized families.

One of the things that goes on at the scale of races is that selection affects gene frequencies over and above what you'd expect on the basis of genealogy. For example, if Al is Betty's uncle, then I can figure out right away the probability (1/4) that Al and Betty share a given allele (over and above the probability that it's shared by the population as a whole). On the other hand, if I know that Al and Betty belong to the same race, and know the average coefficient of inbreeding for that race (relative to some larger population, maybe humanity as a whole), then I can convert this coefficient of inbreeding into a coefficient of relatedness. But I have to be a lot more cautious in my guesses about how likely they are to share an allele by common descent. Because of selection, they may be much more likely to be similar at a locus for skin color, or lactose malabsorption than at, say, the ABO blood group locus.

One implication is that trying to apply Hamilton's theory of kin selection to make predictions about racial altruism is extremely dodgy. One of the assumptions that Hamilton and his successors make in deriving his famous equation B/C > 1/r is that there is no selection between the time a gene is present in a common ancestor and the time it expresses itself among two descendants. This assumption may be plausible enough in extended families -- probably not enough of Alan's siblings have died young while committing altruistic deeds to affect the probability of Betty getting an altruism allele. It's less plausible -- not really plausible at all -- that if Alan and Betty merely belong to the same race, and are genetically similar by virtue of a great many very distant genealogical connections, that selection hasn't had a big impact on any altruism genes.The implication is not that genes are irrelevant to large-scale altruism. Rather, the problem of altruism on large scales is like one of those physics problems where you relax some simplifying assumptions, and suddenly everything gets a lot messier, and you have to start running simulations, and so on.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Obama: "That's in my DNA, trying to promote mutual understanding."

Obama denounced Rev. Wright today for, in effect, exposing the basic lie upon which Obama's campaign is built: that Obama's genetic racial make-up, his "DNA," has meant that he has devoted his whole career to racial conciliation. His opening statement about "my DNA" speaks directly to the fantasy Obama has carefully nurtured:

"SENATOR BARACK OBAMA: Before I start taking questions I want to open it up with a couple of comments about what we saw and heard yesterday. I have spent my entire adult life trying to bridge the gap between different kinds of people. That's in my DNA, trying to promote mutual understanding to insist that we all share common hopes and common dreams as Americans and as human beings. That's who I am." ...

"The person I saw yesterday was not the person that I met 20 years ago. ... They certainly don't portray accurately my values and beliefs. And if Reverend Wright thinks that that's political posturing, as he put it, then he doesn't know me very well. And based on his remarks yesterday, well, I may not know him as well as I thought, either. ... It contradicts everything that I'm about and who I am. ...

And anybody who has worked with me, who knows my life, who has read my books, who has seen what this campaign's about, I think, will understand that it is completely opposed to what I stand for and where I want to take this country.

Of course, in reality, Obama's nature and (especially) nurture left him worried that he won't be perceived as "black enough," so he has devoted much of his career to working to extract money from whites and spend it on blacks (e.g., getting jobs as a community organizer, civil rights lawyer, and state legislator). That's why he joined Rev. Wright's church -- it made him feel black enough.

I'm always being denounced as "obsessed" about race, genetics, and the interplay of nature and nurture because I've learned a lot about them and think about them in a dispassionate manner. And yet, it keeps turning out that everybody else is obsessed, too. (That certainly includes Barack Obama, who subtitled his 442-page autobiography, A Story of Race and Inheritance.)

The problem is that everybody else keeps getting their thinking about race and inheritance wrong, because they only allow themselves to think ignorantly and emotionally about it. For example, Obama has, quite intentionally, elicited in the minds of tens of millions of white people a crude genetic-determinist fantasy that racial reconciliation is in his "DNA."

I'm sorry, but human beings are a lot more complicated than that. Obama is the product of a complex and unusual nurture -- to understand his life, you both have to put yourself in his shoes and pull way back and view him in context, knowing a lot about the sociology of race, including seemingly minor aspects like the Hawaiian view of race.

I was just about the first to put together a plausible story of who Obama is precisely because I'm interested in the same things that interest Obama about himself and so many of his fans about Obama -- the difference is that I allow myself to think logically, objectively, and empirically about "race and inheritance," while respectable people only allow themselves to think with non-rational and intentionally ill-informed parts of their brain.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

The black hole of American public policy discourse

A friend waxes metaphorical about the state of intellectual life in America:

The metaphor that's always come to my mind is that of living near some sort of singularity, gravitational or otherwise.

Basically, anything that gets too close to the singularity falls inside and disappears. People go around their daily lives, when suddenly someone accidentally gets too close---James Watson?---and Bam! He disappears.

The powerful tidal effects from the invisible singularity warp all sorts of social structures into bizarre shapes and behaviors. Gradually over time, more and more pieces of our world drop inside the singularity and disappear, until eventually the entire society collapses.

Back in the early 1970s, Larry Niven wrote a couple of short stories about the fact that if you just just took a tiny quantum black hole (that was before Hawking's evaporation theory came out) with the mass of a baseball or something and just dropped it into the ground it would fall to the center, swing back and forth through the core, and eventually gobble up the entire planet within a few years or centuries, becoming a somewhat bigger black hole in the process. Tiny black hole plus Earth equals bigger black hole plus no more Earth!

Officially believing in something that just isn't true has much the same impact, eventually gobbling up everything else in your society.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

"Is Brown the New Black?"

My full length article comparing Hispanics to blacks is now up at American Conservative:

Is Brown the New Black:
Assimilating Hispanics into the Politics of Victimhood

One reason the black-Hispanic relationship is poorly understood is that class intersects with ethnicity in complex ways. At the bottom of society, among prison and street gangs, race rules. In the Los Angeles County jail, which is 60 percent Hispanic and 30 percent black, the two groups fought murderous battles in 2006. Last October, federal prosecutors accused the Florencia 13 street gang of trying to ethnically cleanse blacks from its unincorporated neighborhood in LA County. (The political impact of this violence shouldn’t be exaggerated, though. The respectable folk who do most of the voting don’t approve of gangbangers feuding.)

In poorer neighborhoods, black residents feel uneasy about men speaking Spanish around them. Not being able to understand what is being said robs them of their street smarts. Are the two men next to you at the bus stop talking in Spanish about soccer or are they plotting to mug you? Who knows?

At the top of the power structure, in the House of Representatives and state legislatures, blacks and Latinos get along quite well, united by party (92 percent of elected Hispanics are Democrats) and a mutual desire to keep the affirmative action gravy train chugging along. Ward Connerly, a black opponent of ethnic quotas, has noted that when he was a regent of the University of California, the heaviest pressure on the regents to cheat on the anti-preference language written into the state constitution by Prop. 209 came not from the Black Caucus in the legislature but from the larger Latino Caucus. They threatened to cut UC’s budget unless more Hispanic applicants were admitted.

Black politicians tend to view Hispanics today much as Irish politicos once saw their fellow Catholic Poles: silent partners in their coalition who should be grateful for their natural leaders’ experience and charm. Not surprisingly, Hispanics don’t agree. In some of the formerly all-black slum municipalities just south of Los Angeles, where Hispanics now make up the great majority of residents but only half of voters, ethnic politics has gotten nasty. But overall, Hispanic politicians know that time is on their side, so they can be patient about the arrogance of black colleagues.

In the middle levels of society, blacks and Latinos do compete. Relations aren’t warm, but African-American men have tended to cede blue-collar jobs to immigrants without putting up massive resistance. Moreover, the swelling numbers and various dysfunctions of illegal immigrants generate numerous jobs for civil servants (who are typically required to be citizens). Therefore, many blacks are paid by taxpayers to teach, police, guard, administer, and otherwise deal with illegal aliens. It doesn’t make for trans-ethnic amity, but it’s a living. [More]

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Race and the race

The New York Times Magazine has an article by Matt Bai on race and the race:

The assumption has always been that a black candidate should perform worse among white voters in states with less racial diversity because those voters are supposedly less enlightened. In fact, the reverse has been true for Obama: in the overwhelmingly white states of Wisconsin and Vermont, for instance, he carried 54 and 60 percent of the white voters respectively, according to exit polls, while in New Jersey he won 31 percent and in Tennessee he won 26 percent. As some bloggers have shrewdly pointed out, Obama does best in areas that have either a large concentration of African-American voters or hardly any at all, but he struggles in places where the population is decidedly mixed.

What this suggests, perhaps, is that living in close proximity to other races — sharing industries and schools and sports arenas — actually makes Americans less sanguine about racial harmony rather than more so.

Half Sigma responds:

Steve Sailer was the first shrewd blogger that I know of to point this out.

Perhaps, although I think it's more likely that one or more of my commenters and emailers, or some of the bloggers I regularly read suggested the idea to me first. Here, for example, is Audacious Epigone's statistical analysis of this question from Feb. 6, 2008.

Collectively, however, the NYT's designation of us as "shrewd" is something I think we can live with.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

NYT: "Jews are best understood as a 'large extended family'"

In the NYT Magazine, Gershom Gorenberg has an article entitled "How Do You Prove You're a Jew" that echoes what I've been saying about the definition of what a racial group is for years:

Zvi Zohar, a professor of law and Jewish studies at Bar-Ilan University, told me that in Judaism’s classical view of itself, Jews are best understood as a “large extended family” that accepted a covenant with God. Those who didn’t practice the faith remained part of the family, even if traditionally they were regarded as black sheep. Converts were adopted members of the clan.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

The 15% and 50% rule of black politicians

A reader writes in regards to Obama's performance:

The late Alan Baron used to have the "15 and 50% rule" for cities. If a city was at least 50% black, it would almost certainly have a black mayor (Detroit, DC, Atlanta, etc.). If a city was less than 15% black, it MIGHT have a black mayor because a small minority wouldn't create all that much tension. (LA [where Tom Bradley won five elections from 1973 onward] and Seattle fit this mold).

On the other hand, if a city was between 16 and 49% black, they probably would NOT have a black mayor. The reasons were simple: at say, 30% black, the community was big to stir up a backlash, but not strong enough to win a majority. New York is the classic example of this at 30% black. David Dinkins has been their first and only black mayor. [Similarly, Harold Washington, who died 20 years ago, was Chicago's first and last black mayor.]

Obama is winning the white voters in states where no one is scared of blacks (North Dakota!). He's also winning the Deep South states where black Democrats outnumber white Democrats. But in the big states where blacks are mixed in competition with Catholic labor voters, Asians and Hispanics, he's struggling.

Alan Baron would have predicted this!

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Real Estate Week at iSteve

I've got a couple of big articles this week on how you can use your personal knowledge of what people look for when buying a house or renting an apartment to understand the big issues better than 99% of the pundits who don't act as if their private affairs has any relationship to everybody's public affairs.

First, now up on VDARE.com is my article "Real Estate, Race, and Immigration on Chicago's South Side" about Chicago neigbhorhoods inspired by sociologist William Julius Wilson's recent book There Goes the Neighborhood. Wilson's grad students spent three years studying four neighborhoods, which he referred to by pseudonyms. I explain what their real names are and then offer a theory to account for the complex relationship between real estate and race in big cities.

Then, in a day or two, the electronic version of the new issue of The American Conservative will contain my full-length exposition of my theory of how "affordable family formation" makes some states vote Republican in Presidential elections, while unaffordable family formation makes others vote Democratic.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Liberals doing what liberals do best

Namely, listening for the silent dog whistle sounds of racism and getting offended.

Is Hillary a racist? After years of the Clintons sticking the knife in other people, it's fun to watch them getting carved up over very little.

Liberal blogger Steven Benen is keeping a list:

Here’s a closer look at the most notable recent incidents, with my patented Willie Horton Rating System — 5 Hortons for the most offensive use of ugly, divisive rhetoric, 1 Horton for the most innocuous.

* Bill Clinton referred to Obama’s movement as a “fairly tale” — 1 Horton

This one has been misconstrued, repeatedly. Looking at the full context, the former president described Obama’s reputation as an opponent of the war in Iraq as a “fairly tale.” That, in and of itself, is a debatable point, but there was no racial subtext.

* Hillary Clinton downplayed the significance of Martin Luther King, Jr. — 4 Hortons

I realize the original quote has been taken from context in a variety of instances, but even in its full context, I think Clinton tried to make a point with some poorly-chosen words.

* Andrew Cuomo’s “shuck and jive” comments — 3 Hortons

It’s questionable, and the context helps make Cuomo look a little better, but he probably should have realized how comments like that could be construed.

* Bob Kerrey’s “Muslim” and “madrassa” comments — 5 Hortons

It’s hard to defend Kerrey on this.

* Billy Shaheen’s drug dealer comments — 5 Hortons

Dumb, dumb, dumb.

* Bob Johnson’s drug dealer comments — 5 Hortons

Dumb, dumb, dumb.

* Sergio Bendixen, a top Clinton pollster, on Latino and Black communities — 2 Hortons

Bendixen conceded the other day, “The Hispanic voter — and I want to say this very carefully — has not shown a lot of willingness or affinity to support black candidates.” He’s playing with fire, given the environment.

* Hillary referred to “spadework” on the Today show — 1 Horton

It’s a real stretch.

* Clinton aide on Obama as an “imaginary hip black friend” — Incomplete

An anonymous Clinton adviser explained what he/she sees as the difference between Hillary supporters and Obama supporters: “If you have a social need, you’re with Hillary,” the aide said. “If you want Obama to be your imaginary hip black friend and you’re young and you have no social needs, then he’s cool.” I’d give it the full 5 Hortons, but I have no idea whether the person is a close aide or a tangential “adviser.”

* Bill Clinton referred to Obama as a “kid” — 1 Horton

Donna Brazille was emphasizing this one last week, but I think the subtext dealt with youth and inexperience, not race. (Still, given that Obama is older now than Bill Clinton was in 1992, it’s an odd comment, but that’s another story for another day.)

By the way, I predict that somebody will get in serious trouble within the next ten years for using the word "linchpin" (also frequently spelled "lynchpin").

Also, by the way, did you know that Sir Francis Galton invented the silent dogwhistle? And you know what that means! So, within 20 years, the term "silent dogwhistle" will be considered racist.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

IQ-Race Crimethink Alert! Francis Crick, James Watson's DNA partner, also guilty

Besides Everest-conquerors Edmund Hillary and Tensing Norgay, another famous pair of names forever linked with the year 1953 are the discoverers of the structure of DNA, James Watson and Francis Crick. The Englishman Crick is usually considered the greater theoretical genius of the two, although Watson, before his recent firing for political incorrectness on the race-IQ issue, displayed an amazing knack for getting people to get important things done, despite (or perhaps because of) his irascible personality.

Watson has, of course, been in the news lately, getting dumped from his post as chancellor of the Cold Springs Harbor Laboratory. Now, a reader has pointed out to me that Watson's elder partner, Crick (1916-2004), was also guilty of holding the same views on race and IQ.

Some of the Francis Crick Papers are now online, and they are certainly illuminating. For example, during the controversy in 1969-1971 over IQ and race launched by Arthur Jensen's 1969 Harvard Education Review article and William Shockley's call for financial incentives and penalties to encourage higher IQ reproduction, Crick, a strong supporter of Jensen, threatened to resign as a Foreign Associate of the American National Academy of Sciences if steps were taken to "suppress reputable scientific research for political reasons."

In contrast, in 2007 almost nobody stood up for James Watson.

Really, isn't it about time that we dig up the bones of Crick and fire him? How can we live with ourselves knowing that there are thought criminals who escaped their just rewards by the trick of dying before we could properly humiliate them? Judging from these letters, it sounds like several other greats, such as Ernst Mayr and C.P. Snow, deserve posthumous show trials and exemplary punishment too. I'm sure there are others...

By the way, Francis Crick was, according to Nobel Laureate Peter Medawar, named after Darwin's cousin Sir Francis Galton, inventor of regression analysis and coiner of the term "eugenics." It is striking how many of the great biologists of the 20th Century, such as Crick, Ronald A. Fisher, and William D. Hamilton were part of the Galtonian tradition. Galton is constantly denounced these days as a pseudo-scientist, yet many of the great subsequent discoveries in genetics and statistics were made by Galton's enthusiasts.

Here are some letters from and to Francis Crick. The first exchange, in 1971, concerns an earlier letter signed by biochemist John T. Edsall, evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr, and five other members of the American National Academy of Sciences responding negatively to Shockley's call for research into the origins of average IQ differences among the races.

Crick replied to Edsall:

22 February 1971

Dr. John T, Edsall
Fogarty International Center
National Institutes of Health
Bethesda, Maryland 2 0014

Dear John,

I have been very distressed to see the letter to the President of the National Academy by you and six other Academy members regarding a Proposal by Dr. [William] Shockley [Nobel laureate in physics]. Like you I have not published anything on the population problem, but f have become fairly familiar with the literature of the subject. I have also talked to Dr, Jensen when he visited the Salk Institute recently.

Unlike you and your colleagues I have formed the opinion that there is much substance to [Berkeley psychologist Arthur] Jensen’s arguments. In brief I think it likely that more than half the difference between the average I.Q. of American whites and Negroes is due to genetic reasons, and will not be eliminated by any foreseeable change in the environment. Moreover I think the social consequences of this are likely to be rather serious unless steps are taken to recognize the situation.

While any present conclusions are tentative, it seems likely that the matter could be largely resolved if further research were carried out. I should thus like to know two things. Would you and your colleagues please state in detail why they think the arguments put forward by Jensen are either incorrect or misleading. Secondly, would they please indicate what research they think should be done to establish to what extent "intelligence" is inherited. This is surely the important point, and is equally valid for a country without a racially mixed population.

The most distressing feature of your letter is that it neither gives nor refers to any scientific arguments, but makes unsupported statements of opinion, This, I need hardly remind you, is politics, not science. The voice of established authority, unsupported by evidence or argument, should have no place in science, and I am surprised to find that you, of all people, should put your name to a letter of this character written to the Academy on a matter of scientific research. I am cure you will realize that if the Academy were to take active steps to suppress reputable scientific research for political reasons it would not be possible for me to remain a Foreign Associate.

I hope you will forgive me writing so frankly, but we have known each other now for a long time, and I have a great respect for your opinion on matters such as this. I am not, for the moment, sending a copy of this letter to anyone else.

Finally I should comment on the last paragraph in your letter. I cannot answer for Shockley, but I know that both Jensen and I would agree with you on that point. But this has no bearing on how intelligent, on the average, people’s children are likely to be.

I leave here tomorrow, and expect to be back in Cambridge on 1st March.

Yours sincerely,

F. H. C. Crick

FHCC :11

Edsall answered with a quite conciliatory letter, to which Crick replied:

29th March, 1971

Dr. John T. Edsall
Fogarty International Center
National Institutes of Health
Bethesda, Md. 20014

Dear John

I was very pleased to receive your letter of March 5, especially as it strikes a rather different note from your letter to the Academy. I agree with you that [Nobel physics laureate William] Shockley arouses a maximum of antagonism, but this I think is due to his manner rather than his matter. In fact, [Berkeley psychologist Arthur] Jensen pointed out to me that while he and Shockley say much the same thing, Shockley always manages to upset people!

I agree with you about Jensen’s paper, I’m afraid none of us is immune from bias on this subject, but his seems quite small. I do not agree with you about [Harvard geneticist Richard] Lewontin. He makes a useful point - that the difference between two populations may still be due to environment, even though within both populations the variance may be largely genetic but it is one that most people in the field are aware of. Otherwise his tone is to be deplored, although it shows how strongly people feel about this subject.

As to your point about the I. Q. results on American Indians being mainly due to their cultural tradition, this may be so, but personally I doubt it. How do you explain the relatively poor I. Q. performance of the children of middle-class American negroes?

I. Q. tests do seem to me to be useful, in spite of their obvious limitations, if only because people’s social aspirations are highly correlated with I. Q. That is, if the population as a whole is asked to rank occupations (most people would rank doctors higher than dustmen), then this ranking is almost perfectly correlated with the average I. Q. of the people in the occupational groups (i.e. doctors have, on average, a higher 1, Q. than dustmen). Naturally for comparing differences between two cultural groups an I. Q. test should be, as far as possible, culture-free.

I have not seen the report of the Academy Committee headed by [sociologist] Kingsley Davis, but I look forward to reading it in due course.

What I miss most is constructive approaches to this problem, Can the “environmentalists” set up in an experiment an environment which will make the I. Q. difference disappear? If they can’t do that, then the hope of doing anything on a large scale in a social context is remote. Can the “geneticists” produce an experimental test which will show definitively that more than half the difference is genetic? Incidentally, a reasonable- design for such an experiment exists, but nobody (except possibly Shockley) will fund it, mainly due, I suspect, to the attitude of people like yourself and your colleagues, and of [Oxford geneticist Walter] Bodmer and [Stanford population geneticist] Cavalli-Storza.

I still feel that if you and your colleagues do not agree with Jensen’s tentative conclusions, you would do a useful job by refuting his argument point by point. Also, I would like to see your plans for research in this field, so one can see how long a period is likely to be involved.

May I make a general suggestion, which I put forward in a lecture a year or so ago, which might be drawn to the Academy’s attention? A most powerful research tool is the study of identical twins separated at birth. Jensen has recently looked into all the cases for which I. Q. data are available and finds there are only about 125 of them. Why should not a Twins Institute be formed? This would encourage people who have twins to let one of them be adopted by another family. Both the rate of production . of twins and the rate of adoption are sufficiently high that worthwhile numbers would soon accumulate. It is essential to keep track of such cases, and examine them periodically, and this would be the job of the Institute. Let me emphasize that there would be no compulsion for people who have twins to let one (or both) be adopted, though they might be encouraged by a modest subsidy given in return for the right to examine the children periodically. Such a scheme seems to me so humane and useful (contrast it with military conscription) that once people had become used to the idea, I think it would be socially acceptable. What do you feel?

If you wish do please show our letters to your colleagues. I would be interested in their reactions.

Yours sincerely,

F.H.C. Crick

Edsall replied in a letter you can read here, suggesting that population growth was the crucial problem of the era.

Crick answered in a short letter that hasn't been fed through an optical character reader, so I will excerpt from it. After agreeing with Edsall on the importance of population limitation, Crick wrote:

I don't think the small amount of money which is needed to start eugenics research will in any way compete with this. The main difficulty is that people have to start thinking out eugenics in a different way. The Nazis gave it a bad name and I think it is time something was done to make it respectable again.

As far as I can see, we are in agreement on all this except perhaps for a slight difference of emphasis.

The "Twin Institute" proposed by Crick was eventually more or less brought into existence by University of Minnesota psychologist Thomas J. Bouchard, whose landmark "Minnesota Twins" study of twins raised apart began in 1979 and was published in 1990.

There proved to be enough twins raised apart due to personal reasons so that Crick's suggestion of paying parents to give their twins up for adoption separately was not part of Bouchard's study. Indeed, today, Crick's idea sounds cruel, but that realization, paradoxically enough, dates largely from Bouchard's study, which included many joyous scenes of identical twins being reunited for the first time since early childhood. At the time Crick wrote, before the "Minnesota Twins" project he advocated, people were less aware of the emotional power of genetic similarity.

During Crick's exchanges with Edsall, he received an April 14, 1971 reply from famed Harvard biologist Ernst Mayr, who was another signer of the anti-IQ research letter that Crick deplored. Mayr said, in part:

If I may summarize my own viewpoint, it is that positive eugenics is of great importance for the future of mankind and that all roadblocks must be removed that stand in the way of intensifying research in this area. Shockley with his racist views is unfortunately the worst roadblock at this time, at least in this country; hence, his sharp rejection by some of us who are very much in favor of positive eugenics.

To which, Crick replied:

21st April, 1971

Dr. Ernst Mayr
Harvard University
The Agassiz Museum
Cambridge, Mass. 02138
U.S.A.

Dear Ernst

I agree enthusiastically with practically everything you say, but I still feel that the present position which has arisen because of Shockley is unfortunate. What I would like to see is a good programme of research supported by people like yourself. You will have to reconcile yourself to the fact that whatever you do will have political implications and repercussion. Incidentally what do you think of my suggestion for a Twins Institute?

As to racism, what about negative racism? That is, the acceptance by Universities (like Harvard) of students with considerably lower standards merely because they are black. This policy is certainly going to lead to trouble. Either many of them will drop out, or they will have to be given degrees where white people would be failed. There was a recent article in Science about this.

I myself do not feel very strongly either way about the Black-White distinction. If I have a prejudice it is against the poor, and in favour of the rich, but such an attitude is almost equally unacceptable to most people.

Yours sincerely

F. H. C. Crick

Earlier, Crick had received a note from Lord C.P. Snow, the famous scientist and novelist, author of The Two Culture, asking him,

"Did you make some trenchant remarks recently on the radio about genetic factors in various kinds of individuals and groups destinies?"

Crick replied:

17 April 1969

Lord Snow
85 Gaton Terrace
London, S.W.l

Dear Charles

I gave a talk to University College on 'The Social Impact of Biology’ and the BBC subsequently broadcast a shortened version of it. As I covered a very broad range of topics I decided not to publish it, and no manuscript exists as I spoke from notes. As far as I remember I said that the biological evidence was that all men were not created equal, and it would not only be difficult to try to do this, but biologically undesirable. As an a[s]ide I said that the evidence for the equality of different races did not really exist. In fact, what little evidence there was suggested racial differences.

Had I enlarged on the subject I would have dwelt on the probable positive differences, such as, for example, the Jews and the Japs, rather than speak only about Negroes. From what I hear you have been saying something along these lines,, I would certainly love to see what you've written when you’re satisfied with it.

F.H.C. Crick

In a lengthy 1977 letter to Nobel Laureate Peter Medawar, Crick outlined his views on IQ and eugenics. He had this to say about one frequently cited figured on the anti-Jensen side

Lewontin, in particular, is known to be strongly politically biased and himself admits to being scientifically unscrupulous on these issues. That is, he takes them as political ones and therefore feels justified in the use of biased arguments.

My view on positive eugenics as a policy is that the Galtonians never had an answer to the challenge posed them in 1922 by G.K. Chesterton, in Eugenics and Other Evils. Chesterton pointed out that the "positive eugenics" of society arranging marriages among the most fit was self-defeating. If arranged marriages actually succeeded in breeding better men and women, the first thing these healthier, smarter, more robust individuals would do would be to tell society to butt out of arranging their marriages, and they'd go back to choosing their own mates!

Still, Chesterton's objection is far less valid, and Crick's concerns even more valid, when the question is the impact of immigration. Countries like Canada have a consciously positive selectionist immigration policy of trying to identify applicants who will most benefit the existing population while keeping out people who would be detrimental. In contrast, anybody who advocates that we Americans take a look at the Canadian perspective is likely to get called a Nazi.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

"The Truth about Jena"

The Atlantic Monthly sends Amy Waldman down to Jena, LA to uncover what was behind the vast civil rights brouhaha, and she comes up with the same thing I did back in September from my house: football.

The Truths About Jena:

Why America’s black-and-white narratives about race don’t reflect reality

In the fall of 2006, Mychal Bell was a football hero, and his hometown, Jena, Louisiana, loved him for it. As his high-school team posted its best season in six years, Bell scored 21 touchdowns, rushed for 1,006 yards, and was named player of the week three times by The Jena Times. The paper celebrated his triumphs in articles and photographs, including a dramatic one in which Bell, who’s black, stiff-arms a white defender by clutching his face guard. But within weeks after the season’s end, Bell was transformed into a villain, accused of knocking out a white student, Justin Barker, who was then beaten by a group of black students. The parish’s white district attorney charged Bell and five others with attempted second-degree murder. Six months later—after the DA had reduced the charges against Bell—a white jury convicted him, as an adult, of aggravated second-degree battery, a crime that carried a possible 22-year prison sentence. By then, he, along with his co-defendants, had been transformed yet again: together, they’d been dubbed the Jena Six and had become icons of a 21st-century civil-rights movement. [More]

As I wrote in The American Conservative:

Similarly, in September, when Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton led thousands of demonstrators in a march on the small town of Jena, Louisiana to protest supposed racism in the treatment of six black high-school students accused of beating unconscious then stomping the body of a white schoolmate, the assembled national media got the story almost 180 degrees backward. We weren’t witnessing a revival of the Emmett Till Era of lynchings, as the pundits insisted, but another example of the O.J. Simpson Age of stars athletes whose off-field misdeeds are excused until they finally go too far.

The Jena Six hadn’t been despised outcasts: they were the best football players in a gridiron-obsessed small town. Mychal Bell, the only one of the Six tried so far, was an All-State junior who scored 18 touchdowns in the 2006 season. A local minister, Eddie Thompson, explained, “For the most part, coaches and other adults have prevented them from being held accountable for the reign of terror they have presided over in Jena.” As Abbey Brown wrote in the Alexandria-Pineville Town Talk: “Bell was adjudicated—the juvenile equivalent to a conviction—of battery Sept. 2 [2006] and criminal damage to property Sept. 3. … A few days later, on Sept. 8, Bell rushed 12 times for 108 yards and scored three touchdowns.”

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

My Race FAQ

On VDARE.com, I offer a Frequently Asked Questions list about the the basic concept of race.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Famous people who actually were significantly black

It's easy to forget that two of the most famous European authors of the 19th Century were significantly black:

- Alexandre Dumas the Father, the colossally popular author of "The Three Musketeers" and "The Count of Monte Cristo" was the grandson of a Haitian slave woman. Here's a picture. (His not quite as famous, but still well-remembered illegitimate son of the same name, the author of "Camille," the inspiration for Verdi's "La Traviata," was therefore the great-grandson of a slave. Here's a picture.)

- Alexander Pushkin, the national poet of Russian, the first great writer in the Russian language, isn't that well-known in the West because he was a poet whose genius is notoriously lost in translation, but to Russians, he's The Man. Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, are all very fine, but Russians venerate Pushkin with an unparalleled passion. Pushkin was the great-grandson of an Ethiopian (or perhaps Cameroonian or Chadian -- it's all kind of murky) slave renamed Abram Petrovich Gannibal, who became, apparently, a godson of Peter the Great, then a general in the Czarist army, a military engineer, and the governor of a Russian province. (It's a wild story. Somebody ought to make a movie about this guy's life!) Voltaire supposedly called Gannibal "the dark star of the Enlightenment," although it's hard to nail down the facts about him. What we do know is that Pushkin identified closely with his African ancestor, and began a book about him called "The Blackamoor of Petersburg." Pushkin often played up his African ancestry, which just made him even more exotic and charismatic to Russians. Pushkin said, "The black African who had become a Russian noble lived out his life like a French philosophe."

By the way, a village on the Russian Black Sea coast was found in Czarist times to consist of 500 African-looking people, who became known as the "Batumi Negroes."

For a quick review of the charmingly comic opera-ish relations between Czarist Russia and Africa, including Russia's aid to Christian Ethiopia in fighting off Italian invasion in 1896 and the Cossack attempt to conquer Ethiopia in 1898, see here.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

James Watson and "passing"

The widely-repeated assertion by the Icelandic firm deCODE genetics that James Watson is 16% sub-Saharan black and 9% Asian (see, for instance, the new NY Times article "DNA Pioneer's Genome Blurs Race Lines") reminds me of one of the least understood contradictions in the conventional wisdom that Race Doesn't Exist:

- The existence of the One-Drop Rule shows that race is an arbitrary social construct.

- Therefore, lots of white Americans must have lots of black ancestors.

But when you stop and think about it, you realize the opposite is true: that the One-Drop Rule is the reason that so few self-identified white Americans have much black ancestry. As I wrote in 2001, when racial admixture testing via DNA was in its infancy:

Among self-identified whites in Shriver's sample, the average black admixture is only 0.7 percent. That's the equivalent of having among your 128 great-great-great-great-great-grandparents (who lived around two centuries ago), 127 whites and one black.

It appears that 70 percent of whites have no African ancest