How dare he write that all the IQ tests and MRI scans show a black-white gap?
If we admit the gap, the world will end, just as it ended when we admitted that Earth revolved around the Sun.
Five months ago, I wrote a series on race, genes, and intelligence. Everything about it hurt: the research, the writing, the reactions, the regrets. Not a day has gone by that I haven’t thought about it. I’ve been struggling to reconcile two feelings that won’t go away: that what I wrote was socially harmful and that I can’t honestly renounce the evidence I presented.
http://www.slate.com/id/2190573/
His point seems to be that genetics is the determinative factor, not race. He adduces all sorts of clinical test data to shows instances where this is important.
What this ignores is that we don’t have clinical test data on the mass of the population but we do have racial data simply by looking at them. We can also make some meaningful correlations between race an educational performance, criminal activity, incarceration rates, and a host of other parameters.
Every thinking person knows that race does not tell the whole story on any individual person. Every person is unique and may fall near the mean or one one extreme or the other for their group. We cannot predict how a particular person will fare in a situation based on race.
That same thinking person also knows that we can make perfectly valid generalizations about large populations of each race in that situation. This is where racial information is useful and valuable. To deny this is ignore reality.