Facing Reality: Two Truths about Race in America

In Facing Reality, Charles Murray argues that America’s most urgent problems stem from a widespread failure to confront two fundamental facts about race: (1) racial minorities like Blacks and Latinos score lower on cognitive tests (on average) than Whites, and (2) these same minorities commit more violent crimes (on average) than Whites. Ignoring these facts, says Murray, has led to “false accusations of systemic racism” (p. x). “special treatment” for minorities (p. 4), portrayal of Whites as “racist and hateful” people (p. x), and growing social unrest (pp. 119-20). The only hope, says Murray, is “facing reality” about race differences.

There are problems with this book, and they begin with Murray’s organizing conception. His main claim—that racial differences in test scores and crime are largely “ignored”—is a hard one to sustain. On the day I wrote this, I Googled the terms “intelligence” and “racial differences” (in quotes) together and got 349,000 hits. For comparison, combining the word “intelligence” with the phrase “social class differences” produced 251,000 hits. Substituting similar phrases for race like “ethnic differences” and similar comparison phrases like “socioeconomic differences” produced similar results. Likewise for comparisons regarding racial and other differences in crime (e.g., 594,000 vs. 288,000). Since Murray aims much of his criticism at academics, I repeated this experiment with the PsychINFO academic database, which, again, produced the same pattern (far more hits for racial than other kinds of differences, for both cognition and for crime). Wikipedia has articles on “Race and Intelligence” and “Race and Crime in the United States,” but no corresponding articles for other demographic groups; and an Amazon search produced numerous books with titles linking race with intelligence and with crime, and far fewer linking other demographic groups (and in the case of crime, the titles with other demographic groups often included race as well). Thus, racial differences in these areas can hardly be said to be “ignored” (p. ix).

Most of this book consists of statistics to support Murray’s claims about these differences, and the bulk of the statistics concern the results of IQ tests. There are also statistics on crime, but these are fewer and somewhat spotty. In what follows, I will point out some problems with Murray’s statistical analyses, and then then evaluate some of his conclusions. The sources I cite can be found by googling, in quotes, "references, psyche and sense".

A reviewer of Murray’s earlier work once observed that, like some naive psychometricians, Murray exhibits an “intoxication” with the IQ test as a device with almost mystical powers for reducing intellectual life to a single number (Gardner 2001, para. 13). In reality, as a measure of academic and cognitive ability, the IQ concept is limited in some significant and problematic respects (see, for example, Ceci, 1996; Richardson, 2017). Murray’s statistical analyses in Facing Reality are weakened by his glossing over these limitations and problems. Global IQ (the single number given by most IQ tests) is a statistical construction based on correlations among a variety of tests, It is not always clear what this construction signifies about the specific abilities of the individuals who take the test, or in which contexts. One cannot assume, for example, that IQ is the most accurate measure of the skills required for any particular task or job. Murray repeatedly treats IQ as the best predictor of job performance, but a number of studies have found that IQ is often a worse predictor of such performance than tests of specific job-related abilities, and sometimes has no predictive value at all (Thomas et al., 1996;Grobelny, 2018). Similarly, another reviewer of Murray’s earlier work discovered that Murray had excluded from his data on job earnings the strongest single predictor (a numerical operations test) because it correlated only weakly with global IQ scores (Heckman, 1995, para. 32). Nevertheless, Murray focuses on global IQ scores of White and non-White workers, emphasizing the superiority of the former over the latter across several job categories. But he fails to note that the gaps among professionals, his main focus, are more a function of above average skills of Whites than below average skills of minorities (this is obscured partly by Murray’s use of z-scores). This pattern is consistent with analyses of “White privilege” and with the evidence on causation (see below). Murray gives no recognition to this or to the ways in which global IQ scores conflate social and cultural factors with innate ability (Nisbett, et al., 2012; Suzuki & Aronson, 2005; see also Kaufman et al., 1997). And he says little or nothing about factors that may bias some of the measurements he cites as manifestations of IQ (e.g. licensing exam scores, performance evaluations, and records of complaints and suspensions). Some of these biasing factors include, but are not limited to, exam preparation opportunities and resources, preexisting social and cultural capital, discriminatory judgments, and the fact that minority employees often work in settings like inner-city schools and hospitals that face inordinate challenges coupled with insufficient resources.

In other parts of the book, Murray presents statistics demonstrating that violent crimes in the U.S. occur primarily among minority populations, especially in highly segregated portions of large cities. He focuses on the most violent crimes because statistics on these offenses are generally held to be more accurate than those regarding lesser, nonviolent crimes (pp. 49, 136). But like his decision to look only at IQ scores after the age of 12 (p. 26), his decision to focus mainly on the most violent crimes skews his analysis primarily toward social problems that are fully entrenched, while ignoring the long chains of events that precede them. Thus, while the majority of prisoners in state and federal facilities are violent felons, the number of nonviolent felons passing through the prison system is proportionately higher because of their greater turnover (Rutherford, 2015). This, in effect, makes prisons training grounds for younger, initially nonviolent, prisoners whose options are increasingly narrowed because of their criminal involvement. These younger prisoners are largely individuals of color who have moved through the “school-to-prison pipeline,” where minority youths are disproportionately targeted for punishment and suspension in schools (Skiba & Losen, 2015-2016), and are prosecuted for nonviolent crimes at higher rates than are their White counterparts, even when criminal record and severity of offense are controlled for (Kansal & Mauer, 2005; Bishop et al., 2020). For example, while Blacks and Whites use and sell drugs at about the same rate, Blacks are 12 times more likely to be imprisoned for a drug offense than Whites (Mauer & Cole, 2011). Murray gives no attention to dynamics like these, arguing instead for the even-handedness of the criminal justice system, sometimes ignoring obvious likely confounding factors. For example, he cites a study reporting higher arrest rates for Whites than for Blacks as evidence for lack of bias (pp. 52, 140-41), but seems never to have considered the possibility that these rates might reflect resource and case load disparities between police departments in White versus Black communities.

Murray claims to be a truth-teller, but he is consistently evasive about the reasons for the racial differences he reports. If the differences among the races are as important as Murray holds them to be, one would expect to see something from him about the causes of these differences. But Murray is emphatic: the causes are “irrelevant” (p. 47). Irrelevant? Even Murray’s most sympathetic readers have been puzzled by his indirectness on this point. For example, conservative writer Glenn Loury recently pressed this issue in an interview with Murray, and Murray would say only that the reasons for the differences were “intensely controversial” (The Glenn Show, 2021, 18:50). Since Murray himself did much to promote this controversy in 1994 by suggesting that racial differences in cognition were at least partly genetic (Herrnstein & Murray, 1994, p. 311), his response here seems strikingly disingenuous. Murray was similarly evasive when questioned in another recent interview by Tucker Carlson. Murray responded that “certain kinds of outcomes exist that are not explained by racism, let alone systemic racism. They are explained by differences that exist, for whatever reasons, between different ethnic groups” (MediaMatters, 2021, paras. 15-16). But this is tautological nonsense. The differences between ethnic groups are the very facts that need explaining, not the explanation themselves. And in refusing to supply an explanation, Murray has no grounds for his claim that racism and systemic factors can be ruled out.

Why would Murray be so evasive about a position for which he is already well-known? Evidently, because he wants to have it both ways: Murray’s inferences about genetic causation elevated him to notoriety in 1994. Over the next few years, his data were re-analyzed by a number of researchers, who repeatedly found that his analyses were wanting, that the most important social and environmental causes of racial differences had not been considered, and that the more thoroughly these social and environmental factors were included, the further Murray’s genetic explanation shrank toward implausibility (e.g., Dickens et al.,1994; Phillips et al., 1998; Fischer et al., 1996; Devlin et al., 1997). Similarly, the U.S. crime statistics that Murray reports are part of a larger worldwide pattern in which violent crimes regularly increase in contexts of income inequality and poverty; when these factors are held constant, race disappears as a correlate and a possible explanation (Neapolitan, 2008; Pridemore, 2011). Murray does not confront the implications of these findings, nor has he ever refuted—or even effectively disputed—the criticisms of his previous work. And why should he? The public remembers his genetic claims and is largely unaware of the subsequent research debunking them. So he’s better off avoiding this topic.

If the causes of racial differences are social, as indicated by the bulk of the research, then interventions at the social level would seem to be a reasonable response. But this is a reality that Murray himself does not want to face, because it clashes with his libertarian sensibilities (pp. 1-3, 8). In a particularly revealing section of the book (pp. 93-94), Murray acknowledges that many of the racial differences he has identified are potentially addressable, but that multiple issues would need to be confronted to do so (e.g., neighborhood dynamics, de facto segregation, family structures, employment opportunities, and political interference). He focuses instead on the “dismal record” of the limited governmental and other programs that have been attempted. Two things need to be said about this.

First, even these more limited programs have been impeded by determined resistance throughout their history. For example, in the mid-1960s, after 350 years of ignoring educational deprivation and inequality, the federal government made a commitment to raise the academic performance of minority and other children through elementary and preschool “compensatory education” programs like Head Start. Within five years of this decision, Arthur Jensen published an article in the Harvard Educational Review declaring, in the first sentence, that these efforts had “failed” (Jensen, 1969, p 2) and adding that genetics must be the cause (p. 82). Jensen had concluded this based on a mass of misinterpreted data, dubious studies (several apparently nonexistent), and a plethora of fallacious, untenable, and untestable assumptions. All of this was thoroughly critiqued, over the next few years, by a number of authors, including Cronbach (1969), Lewontin (1970), Coleman (1972), Moran (1973), Layzer (1976), and, especially, in a deep and painstakingly detailed analysis, by Kamin (1974). Nonetheless, Jensen immediately became a widely cited “authority” by those who opposed compensatory education for ideological reasons, including Charles Murray, whose 1994 book cited Jensen more than any other author. Thus, Jensen’s article reanimated a longstanding symbiosis between academic authors making bogus arguments about race and conservative politicians working tirelessly, especially after the election of 1980, to limit social programs designed to reduce inequality. Likewise, affirmative action, which initially had widespread public support, was targeted with intense opposition from resistant politicians, and was systematically curtailed by increasingly conservative court decisions after the late 1970s.

Second, despite this political resistance, these programs were more successful than Murray and other critics have acknowledged. For example, many early negative evaluations of compensatory education were seriously flawed methodologically (see Bauer, 2019), failed to recognize real gains (see Deming, 2009), and were overly focused on the augmentation of global IQ and other relatively abstract measures, which tend to stall when children are re-immersed into ordinary learning environments (see Protzko, 2015). When a wider range of outcome variables has been examined (e.g. educational attainment and income), compensatory education has been found to be significantly successful (e.g., De Haan & Leuven, 2020). Murray himself notes that the Black-White gap in test scores shrank throughout the 1970s and early 1980s, and then leveled off during the more conservative era that followed (pp. 33-35)—a trend which he seems to regard as a mystery of nature. Similarly, affirmative action produced a number of positive results in the earlier years. For example, the number of Black executives more than doubled for some positions (Glass Ceiling Commission, 1995), and Black students demonstrated levels of post-graduate success that were close to those of White students (Bowen and Bok, 1998). And even Murray implicitly acknowledges that relatively few White students lost opportunities due to affirmative action (pp. 69-71; 80-83—see also Menand, 2020, para. 18).

None of this dampens Murray’s conviction that a widespread “unwillingness” to face the “intractability” of racial differences (pp. ix, 7) is the driving force behind a national crisis that is tearing at the social fabric. While he acknowledges that polarization and extremism come from both sides of the political spectrum, this acknowledgement is perfunctory (p. 8), and nearly all of Murray’s concern is focused on the progressive theories of social constructionism and systemic racism, and on the “new ideology” of identity politics (pp. 10, 4-5). In doing so, Murray aligns himself with naïve leftists in interpreting these theories as claiming that individuals are “inescapably defined” by the groups into which they are born (p. 5) and that Whites are therefore “irredeemably racist” (p. 115). But these are serious distortions. The whole point of social constructionism is that personalities are not fixed, that group identities are constantly reconstructed by social interactions, and that identities are potentially open to change (for example, see Myers, 2021). Likewise, the concept of “systemic racism” refers not to racist individuals, but to institutionally embedded laws, standards, and procedures that unjustly reinforce and perpetuate existing inequalities. On p. 109, Murray himself acknowledges the power of such forces to create racial injustices, but he seems unable or unwilling to draw the obvious conclusion that they therefore constitute a form of structural—as opposed to personal or individual—racism. And far from being a “new ideology,” the practice of identity politics has existed throughout American history (e.g. in immigrant communities and political machines). In fact, White identity politics was probably the earliest variant, espoused by authors who praised the beauty and superiority of Caucasians (e.g. Blumenbach, 1795), justified slavery and segregation (e.g., Cartwright, 1851; Garrett, 1961), and, in recent decades, promoted White working class populism—sometimes overtly linked with white supremacy, sometimes not (see Jardina, 2019).

These dynamics do raise important issues that need to be considered in any thoughtful attempt to confront America’s race problems: How much responsibility can any one generation take for the injustices perpetrated by previous generations? How much initiative can those who inherited those injustices be fairly expected to take in attempting to counter them? When are societal interventions appropriate in this process, and how can the costs of such interventions be distributed in a just and reasonable manner? These are difficult questions to which there are no simple answers. Unfortunately, Murray’s analysis—which consists of nothing more than an inventory of racial differences and a willful refusal to examine the causes of these differences—is not a resource for approaching honest answers to any of them.

The media-declared racial reckoning has elicited from Charles Murray, coauthor of 1994’s epochal "The Bell Curve," an important rebuttal: a short, lucid book entitled "Facing Reality: Two Truths about Race in America."

In January 2020, Murray published a long, scholarly book, "Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class," a meta-meta-analysis of the latest meta-analyses in the human sciences. It received virtually zero publicity.

Now he’s back with a more polemical, less daunting read about the essential factors influencing society: intelligence and violence.

The two realities that are fundamental to understanding the headlines of 2021 are that, on average, blacks and (to a lesser extent) Hispanics are more crime-prone and less smart than whites (much less Asians).

Lately, though, these facts seem inconceivable to most conformist Americans. Still, lying is bad for the soul. So is losing because you are too cowardly to tell the truth. Murray explains:

"I am also aware of a paradox: I want America to return to the ideal of treating people as individuals, so I have to write a book that treats Americans as groups. But there’s no way around it. Those of us who want to defend the American creed have been unwilling to say openly that races have significant group differences. Since we have been unwilling to say that, we have been defenseless against claims that racism is to blame for unequal outcomes. What else could it be? We have been afraid to answer candidly."

In his section on IQ trends since The Bell Curve 27 years ago, Murray briefly notes the decline of the once-dominant centrists who assumed that any gaps between whites and blacks could be eliminated with whatever their favorite one weird trick was.

After "The Bell Curve," the great and good made immense efforts to Close The Gap, if only to prove Murray wrong. For example, the No Child Left Behind Act of 2002, pushed by George W. Bush and Ted Kennedy, mandated the Lake Wobegonization of America: Every single public school student must score “proficient” by 2014.

That didn’t happen.

Today, after 55 years of vast spending to eliminate the race gap on tests, the optimistic centrist education reformers of the “All We Have To Do Is Implement My Favorite Panacea” school are finally out of fashion, leaving Ibram X. Kendi and Charles Murray as the last men standing. One or the other must be right: either Murray (blacks, unfortunately, have problems because they tend to be less smart and more violent) or Kendi (any disparities demonstrate that whites are evil and therefore must pay).

The Establishment no longer really believes that race gaps can be reduced. Instead, the new conventional wisdom is Kendi’s: Tests must be abolished. This will make the problems caused by lower black intelligence go away for Underpants Gnomes reasons.

Blacks in thirteen cities were arrested for property offenses five times as often per capita as whites.

Are cops just racistly arresting blacks for ticky-tack property offenses like, say, taking an extra newspaper from the rack?

No. Hispanics were arrested for violence about 2.7 times as often as whites, while blacks were arrested almost ten times as much.

How about murder, the most diligently investigated of all crimes?

Latinos are arrested for murder about five times more often per capita than whites, while blacks are about twenty times more likely than whites to be arrested for murder.

In conclusion, like all of Murray’s works, this book is a thing of beauty, with superb graphs and text layout.

Whether "Facing Reality" will inspire a desperately needed national conversation on the reality of racial differences, or whether it will be deep-sixed like "Human Diversity," remains to be seen.

But Murray has given it his best shot.

In Facing Reality: Two Truths About Race in America (2021), Charles Murray argues that the rhetoric of "systemic racism" in America is mistaken for four reasons.

First, it ignores the facts of race differences in cognitive ability and in violent crime.

Second, the rhetoric of systemic racism promotes a group identity politics that denies the American founding ideal that all people are created equal as individuals before the law in their rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and that government should treat all people impartially as individuals and not as members of a group.

Third, this rhetoric of Black identity politics insults all Whites by condemning them as racists who benefit from White privilege, and this is likely to provoke a backlash by some Whites, who could adopt their own White identity politics, which would be disastrous for the whole country and certainly for Blacks.

Fourth, this rhetoric fails to see that while America suffers from the racism of some individuals, this racism is not systemic, because it contradicts the founding ideal of the American system. Martin Luther King recognized this in his "I have a dream" speech, in which his first dream was that "the nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.'"

Murray offers evidence and arguments supporting these claims, which I find largely persuasive. But I am not persuaded by his assertion that the "American Creed" affirms a form of government that is contrary to our evolved human nature, which favors tribalism and despotism rather than individualism and liberal democracy. This implies that the individual rights affirmed in the Declaration of Independence are not natural rights that belonged to human beings in the state of nature, prior to government, as John Locke said. This wrongly denies the Lockean naturalism of the American founding in the appeal to the "Laws of Nature and of Nature's God," which can now be confirmed by an evolutionary science of human nature.

TWO TRUTHS ABOUT RACE DIFFERENCES

Black Americans are more likely to be arrested and convicted of violent crimes than are White Americans. Black Americans are also less likely to have high-paying and high-status jobs than are White Americans. Proponents of Black identity politics see this as evidence of systemic racism, because they assume that racist discrimination against Blacks is the only possible explanation for why Blacks are on average less successful socially and economically than are Whites.

Murray argues that this ignores two facts about race differences that support an alternative explanation for this situation. On average, there are race differences in cognitive ability (the mental trait measured by IQ tests) for four racial groups: Whites (or Europeans), Blacks, Latinos, and Asians. The estimated mean IQ for Whites is 103, for Blacks 91, for Latinos 94, and for Asians 108. The mean of the bell-shaped distribution curve of IQ scores is skewed slightly to the right for Whites and Asians. It is inevitable therefore that the most prestigious and highest paying jobs will go mostly to Whites and Asians, because these jobs tend to be the most cognitively challenging jobs. And while it is common to say that IQ tests are racially biased, the fact that these tests accurately predict performance in the classroom or on the job clearly validates the tests.

The second fact is that across thirteen American cities (including New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago), the Black arrest rate for violent crime (murder, rape, robbery, and physical assault) is around 9 to 11 times the rate for Whites; the Latino arrest rate for violent crime is about 2 to 3 times the White rate; and the Asian arrest rate for violent crime is extremely low. It is unlikely that this arrest data shows the racism of the police, who might arrest Blacks and Latinos based on scant or fabricated evidence. This is particularly clear in arrests for murder, where it is usually clear that a crime has occurred. Moreover, when Blacks are murdered, the perpetrator is usually Black. In New York City, the dataset of all shootings from 2006 to 2017 show that of the 1,906 Black deaths, 89% were killed by Blacks, 10% were killed by Latinos, and only 0.6% were killed by Whites. It is hard to explain these higher arrest rates for Blacks as created by a racist criminal justice system.

And yet Murray stresses that these differences in the means (the averages) for racial groups tell us nothing about individuals. Most of the individuals in all racial groups never commit a violent crime. And many individuals in every racial group score high on IQ tests. That's why Murray can say that although racial group differences are important for understanding social problems, these racial differences should not influence how we treat individuals; and even as we recognize these racial differences, we can still affirm the American principle that all individuals are equal in their rights before the law.

GROUP IDENTITY EGALITARIANISM DENIES AMERICAN INDIVIDUALISM

Murray sees the American founding principles in the Declaration of Independence as affirming that government should ideally secure the equality of individual rights, with the understanding that this equality means equality of opportunity but not equality of outcome. People should be equal in their rights under the law. But they are unequal in their individual traits, so that some will be more successful than others in some sectors of social life. Even so, all should be equally free to find their places in life where they can pursue the happiness that comes from a lasting, deep, and justified satisfaction with life as a whole.

Murray laments, however, that these founding principles came under attack in 1964 (with the passage of the Civil Rights Act) and in 1965 (with Lyndon Johnson's policy of Affirmative Action). At this point, some leaders of the civil rights movement began to shift their focus from individual rights in the pursuit of equality of opportunity to group rights in the pursuit of equality of results. This created a conflict in American ideals between individualism and egalitarianism.

The new egalitarianism assumed that there was no natural human diversity, no differences between the races or the sexes, because all human beings were born with the same abilities and propensities that should produce equal outcomes in life as long as those abilities and propensities were properly cultivated by the social environment. And therefore any racial or sexual differences in social life must be the product of racist or sexist bigotry favoring White males over women and racial minorities.

To overcome this social injustice from racism and sexism, the American government should promote preferential treatment for Blacks and women--particularly, when they were applying for jobs or for admission to schools. Originally, affirmative action was a moderate policy of compensatory action to rectify past injustices against Blacks and women: if there were Black and female applicants for a job or a school who were as well qualified as the White male applicants, those Black and female applicants should be favored. But then affirmative action became an aggressive policy of preferential treatment in which even less qualified Blacks and women would have to be chosen. And so, for example, as Murray shows, the elite universities in America have accepted Black applicants whose admission test scores are far below those for White applicants who have been denied admission.

Murray identifies this aggressive affirmative action as "a poison leaking into the American experiment" (121). Government is no longer an impartial judge that treats all individuals as equal under the law. Now government gives preferential treatment to some minority racial groups over the White majority. All Whites are said to be racists who succeed in life only because of White privilege, and therefore they need to admit their guilt for systemic racism, while the government punishes them and rewards Blacks.

As Whites now see the success of Black identity politics, Murray worries, what's to stop the some of the Whites from playing White identity politics? And then it will be a battle between the White 60 percent of the population against the Black 13 percent. The catastrophe of a civil war like the American Civil War becomes a fearful possibility.

How do we escape this? Murray suggests two possible solutions. The "solution that is not within our grasp," because it is not politically possible, would be to eliminate all governmental preferential treatment by race (120-22).

The "partial solution that is within our grasp" would be for American political leaders to publicly embrace as the American creed the original American ideal of individual equality under the law (122-25). Murray recognizes that even if the leaders of the Democratic Party were to do this, beginning with President Biden, they would still want to pursue some policies of racial preferences. But they could at least say that these were only temporary policies, and that individual equality before the law was the ultimate goal. They would also have to reject the rhetoric of systemic racism. It seems unlikely that Biden would do this since he has already declared his commitment to policies to attack systemic racism.

IS THE AMERICAN CREED UNNATURAL?

Despite my agreement with most of what Murray has said here, I disagree with his argument that group identity politics could easily destroy the American founding regime since that regime has always been fragile, and it's fragile because it is "extremely unnatural" in the sense that it is "in conflict with human nature."

Murray's thinking that the American regime has no grounding in human nature seems to explain why he so often uses the term "American Creed": the word "creed" originally referred to the articles of belief for the Christian Church, as in the Apostles', Nicene, and Athanasian Creeds, and likewise Murray declares that "bearing witness to our true faith and allegiance in the American creed is something within our power to do" (125), as if American principles depended on some willful faith or belief in a transcendent reality beyond any natural human understanding. Now, I recognize that the Declaration of Independence does speak of our being created equal and endowed by our Creator with rights, which suggests some religious belief. But when the Declaration appeals to "the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God" (a phrase that Murray never mentions), this implies a Spinozistic conception of God as identical with Nature. Certainly, Jefferson and the founders were clear that the rights affirmed in the Declaration were natural rights, the rights that human beings had in the state of nature as governed by the law of nature. Here they followed John Locke, who often invoked the "principles of human nature" that should govern any just government.

Murray seems to think that Locke was wrong about this, because our human nature as shaped by evolution does not incline us to recognize or respect the equal rights of individuals. Here is the long passage where Murray explains this:

"Treating our fellow human beings as individuals instead of treating them as members of groups is unnatural. Our brains evolved to think of people as members of groups; to trust and care for people who are unlike us. Those traits had great survival value for human beings throughout millions of years of evolution. People who were trusting of outsiders were less likely to pass on their genes than people who were suspicious of them. People who were loyal to their tribe were more likely to pass on their genes than people who stood apart."

"The invention of agriculture and the consequent rise of complex societies exposed another aspect of human nature that had enjoyed less scope for expression in hunter-gatherer bands: acquisitiveness, whether of money, status, or power. . . ."

"The combination of acquisitiveness and loyalty to the interests of one's own group (be it defined by ethnicity or class) shaped human governments for the subsequent ten thousand years. The natural form of government was hierarchical, run by a dominant group that arranged affairs to its benefit and oppressed outsiders. . . ."

"America proved that a durable alternative to the natural form of government was possible--a constitutional republic combined with carefully circumscribed democracy. . . . If we decide that our system for tending the garden needs to be replaced, and if the replacement should prove to be even slightly less devoted to keeping nature at bay, the garden will be reclaimed by jungle within a few decades" (110-11).

I agree that tribalism is part of our evolved human nature. But that is only one side of our nature. We also have evolved natural propensities to resist exploitation and to punish those who would dominate us and deny our individual natural rights to equality and liberty. Locke's account of the state of nature as a state of natural equality and liberty can be confirmed by the Darwinian account of our evolution in ancient hunter-gatherer bands.

There is lots of scientific evidence that human beings evolved a dual nature as both the nastiest and the nicest species, which can be explained by an evolutionary process of human self-domestication in which natural selection favored the friendliest individuals who could cooperate with others in ways that set us apart from other species. The case for this "human self-domestication hypothesis" has been well argued in recent books by Richard Wrangham and Brian Hare.

This guy is good at pulling his punches. It's as if he doesn't want to say anything blacks would object to, so he beats around the bush. And that I can understand, given the suppression of free speech and the rise of feminism and critical race theory (CRT). But he does not illuminate more in this book than he and Herrnstein did in Bell Curve or than he did in Human Diversity. This book strikes me as an apology to Blacks. I find C. Philippe Rushton (Race, Evolution, and Behavior), Richard Lynn (Race Differences in Intelligence), Michael Levin (Making Sense of Race) and Edward Dutton (Making Sense of Race) more straightforward and illuminating in understanding race differences and what they mean. .

To get the bigger picture, I recommend them all. But they would make more sense if you first studied the literature on evolution. Amazon has a good sampling of related books. The more one reads the more perspective he or she may have. For instance, Rushton analysis of the IQ's of Murray's three races describes both IQ and EQ differences. Lynn's description of the spread of humans out of sub-Saharan Africa explains why the IQ's of Blacks, Whites, and North East Asians differ. Also Lynn distinguished more than the three races Rushton and Murray discuss, as so Asians are not all the same. The Northeast Asians differ from those further South. There are races among Africans. And what about the American Indians? And the far Pacific peoples?

Dutton goes Lynn one better. In his explanation of why the IQ of American blacks seemed to improve over the 1970s, Murray's reliance on statistics and occasional vague references to personality factors is did not, to my mind, solve the mystery. Dutton's explanation does. Sub-Saharan blacks have an average IQ of 65-70. How did American's blacks, ancestors of those sub-Saharan African Blacks wind with an average IQ of 85? Explains Dutton, a combination of interracial sex and an environment that pushed their IQ to its phenotype maximum. Moreover, on average, American Blacks have 25% White genes.

But the reader must read and interpret for him or her self. For me, the most interesting finding was the importance of the study of ethnocentrism for a more in depth understanding of race, what it is, how it evolved,, and what it all means. I was never a big fan of IQ tests either, but live, read, and learn.

In particular, I disagree with the passage on page 6: I am not talking about superiority or inferiority, but about differences in group averages and distributions. Differences in averages do not affect the abilities of any individual. They should not affect our approach, positively or negatively, to any individual we meet."

Okay, I give you a choice between two bags. One bag has an average of 6 poisonous beans and 4 harmless ones. The other bag, just the reverse. Which bag would you prefer to choose a bean from? But of course, the one with the highest probability of yielding a harmless bean.

Life is a gamble, but as the cost of error goes up in a particular gamble, so does our hesitancy to take the gamble, no matter the odds. Thus infants are afraid of spiders and snakes, regardless of whether they are harmful or not. Their brain says danger, and the scream.

Thus, other things being equal, we would expect a big employer to be more willing to hire a random Black than a small company where and error might be more costly.

In this regard, Michael Levin approaches the subject from a philosophical perspective in explaining why race matters, and matters not just in broad policy making but as well in random encounters. I like his argument for stereotypes -- typical cases. Our ancestors didn't have the curse or benefit of statistics, but they did have lore, a body of knowledge that included stereotypes. A stereotype may alert us to danger.

Sure, as Murray asserts, the probability of being murdered, robbed, raped, mugged. etc. by a Black may be very low, but so is the probability of being struck by lightening, yet we all avoid going out in a lightening storm. Ditto being attacked by a grizzly bear on a visit to a national forest in the Montana, so if you see a grizzly lumbering your way on a path thru the woods, you'd better change direction. Ditto your chances of getting the nasty corona virus.

Back in the 1960s, my sister-in-law was a died-in-the-wool Democrat and liberal, passionately so. Say something about Blacks and she'd come close to doing you bodily harm. Yet one night on a dark street in Washington DC, she was wheeling a baby carriage with her infant daughter down the sidewalk when she saw up ahead a boisterous group of young Black males approaching, she immediately crossed over and sought shelter in a Chinese laundry.

Police used to come into my workplace. A Black policeman who was a frequent visitor, announced he was moving. When asked why, since he had only lived in his present location for a year, he said young Black males were beginning to loiter around the entrance to his subdivision, pushing and shoving and making catty remarks to any young women entering or exiting the division on foot or bike, and he knew from experience that when young Black males began to hang around the entrance, it would only be a matter of time before his wife or daughter was attacked. When the cost is really high, we take proactive steps to prevent what we see as inevitable unless we do.

A Black coworker said he was going to hire roofer. One of the White guys said, "I guess you'll hire a Black roofer." He said, "Naw, man, I want a good professional job."

Life choices are sometimes a gamble, like Russian roulette, where losing may be so costly just about any probability of error is grounds for avoiding the gamble. I know how hard it can be to create a decision making engine because decisions are simply too complex, based on a universe of considerations that one just senses. And the decision makers willingness to take risks.

In grad school, I had one professor who developed a nifty decisioning making schema. One student asked him to apply it to a computer he was about to purchase. His model said buy an IBM; he bought an Apple Mackintosh. When asked why, he shrugged and said, I don't know, just something about the Apple.
Decision models have the advantage of being simple, but in being simple, they may omit too many important considerations that a global model in our minds somehow deems important and includes.

In politics, it is well known that statistics provide just a gambit, a sort of conversation piece. In his book, Thinking About Crime, James Q. Wilson, did not put on his Sgt. Joe Friday suit and say, "Just the facts, ma'am." That's where Michael Levin's philosophical approach in Why Race Matters comes in. Levin also has an excellent book on feminism: Feminism & Freedom. But I also like the evolutionary-biological theory that underlies the approach as found in Rushton, Lynn and Dutton.

Oh, good, you have to read them all -- and so much more! Then you merit one of those tees that says, "I read books, and I know things." The more you read the wiser you get. Wisdom might be described as the Big Picture. Just be careful not to get bogged down in factual trivia.

Isn't it wonderful that all of this knowledge is available right here on Amazon. Well, I am old enough to recall, only too vividly, having to go the the library, do searches, read a vast amount of material, and take notes, then sift thru the notes to write a term paper or dissertation.

This book is only controversial because some people just can’t handle the truth. We seem to be able to accept that 6% of our population (black males) make up over 70% of the NBA and over 60% of the NFL. What is the explanation for that other than genetic.
Why do European and some Asian countries score the highest in international academic tests and have lower crime rates than African and Latin American countries.
Why shouldn’t populations differ. Our species originated in Africa 300,000 or more years ago than spread out across most of the entire globe. These groups were often isolated with little or no contact with other groups for tens of thousands of years. Why wouldn’t different environmental influences create minor BUT SIGNIFICANT differences.

A summary of the book is:
Two known truths, long since documented beyond reasonable doubt need to be acknowledged and incorporated into the way we approach public policy: American Whites, Blacks, Latinos, and Asians have different rates of violent crime and different means and distributions of cognitive ability. These two truths drive the problems in policing, education, and the workplace that are now ascribed to systemic racism. This book lays out the evidence clinically and in detail, without apologies and without animus.
There are two ideas of social justice: One, judging people as individuals not by national origin, social class, race or religion. The ideology behind the charges of systemic racism repudiates this ideal and demands that the power of the state MUST be used to favor some groups of people over others to advance THEIR IDEA of social justice.

Why did Murray write this book? To incur obloquy because he enjoys being slandered? Seems doubtful.
It seems he felt the need to emphasize his two points that the Legacy media go to great lengths to pass over in silence: there are longstanding group differences in academic testing and, partly as a result,  in crime rates.For the past fifty years we have, as a society, funneled money and resources in an effort to correct these differences to no avail.African-Americans were doing better in the mid sixties than now. All of the statistics were ranging higher in the sixties until we as a society decided to 'help'. Before we congratulate ourselves on our bien pensants we should confront the results of our generosity, and according to Murray, the results are not good.However the results are ignored over and over in our culture. This is what the book is about, the brutal unvarnished truth.Too often we varnish the results with anecdotal stories and ignore the stats, here are the stats.

Lot's of good statistical data in this book, and some of it is enlightening to consider and know. However, it has little to do with the inherent agenda of this book. This is a great example of predetermined bias clouding scientific analysis, and would make for a more interesting case study on that topic than it's obvious intent.

Ginned up over exaggerates short sided

Murray told Tucker Carlson that he wrote the book out of frustration over the events of the last year or so. His hypothesis seems to be that the American Creed (make that Social Glue) that individuals in the United States are to be judged on individual actions and merit not race. Problems come, though, from the facts that Black IQ is about one standard deviation below the mean and that Black crime is way, way out of proportion to the ratio of the Black population to whites.

According to Murray much of this is hidden as people segregate themselves by social class, hence smart white folks look at the few Blacks in their neighborhoods and think everyone is just the same. The whites not realizing the Blacks are at the very extremes of the bell curve. So, systemic racism must be the problem or the successful whites would be seeing more Blacks.

Here Murray tries to keep everyone happy. He lists all the reasons folks on the left give for disparities and notes they aren't incorrect,; they have some validity. But then he states that we should get back to the individual merit ideal. Well, you can't have it both ways. Plain and simple. Incidentally Murray does ensure his future employment with a left of center position, definitely not a Trump supporter, with his weaving between systemic racism may be real camps and appearing on Tucker Carlson. In the short book he tries to keep everyone happy and that only leads to frustration on the part of the dear reader.

Sorry I bought the book.

The author, a quantitative social scientist with decades of high-profile works behind him, criticizes the concept of "systemic racism." The systemic racism hypothesis ignores the significant differences between the races in (1) cognitive ability and (2) violent crime offending. And the author convincingly shows that, despite the protests of many who would love to believe otherwise, IQ tests are not biased against non-whites and the differences in violent crime offending are not caused by racist policing.

A very important book, and a nice antidote to the system racism orthodoxy that increasingly dominates elite American institutions.