Facing "Facing Reality"

with John McWhorter

In this excerpt from my latest conversation with John, we discuss Charles Murray’s latest book, Facing Reality: Two Truths about Race in America. (You can watch my recent discussion with Charles here.) John is more critical of the book than I am, though I share some of his concerns. For John, Murray’s citation of evidence of racial disparities in IQ tests is so convincing as to be incontrovertible. But when Murray offers suggestions about what to do with this information, John finds him less enlightening.

I see what my friend is saying, and we have a rich back and forth about it. I’m wondering what all of you think. Let me know in the comments!

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GLENN LOURY: Anyway, so we were going to talk about Charles Murray. Do you want to maybe save that for the Q&A? Because we have a queue.

JOHN MCWHORTER: Well, what time ... see, I'm vain, so I'm not wearing my glasses. I don't know if we want to hide that discussion.

Okay, so then let's talk about your reading of Facing Reality and my reading of Facing Reality. I had Charles Murray on The Glenn Show last week discussing his book, his new book Facing Reality: Two Truths about Race in America, in which he explores the data on racial differences in test scores and racial differences in participation in violent crime. And he talks about the significance of these realities, these truths that people don't want to face, for the viability of the American project.

And he's very concerned that our unwillingness to face these truths might endanger the American project going forward. So he's sounding an alarm and offering a bracing confrontation with the reality of our racial condition. I had him on the show. I had him on because I think it's an important book, and I think it's actually pretty well done. I think there's insight in the argument. And I think Charles Murray is not a white supremacist racist, but is a person who thinks IQ is an important part of social life and thinks there are racial differences in IQ that are relevant to racial differences and social outcomes.

He is also pessimistic about social interventions that are intended to reduce the disparities amongst individuals, regardless of race, in intelligence. He thinks there's a significant hardwired component to intelligence. One doesn't have to agree with him about that to be willing to engage with him. And I have been willing to engage with him. I've gotten criticism for that, but that's neither here nor there. You read the same book but came to a different conclusion.

Well, I should say first that I don't have that anti-Murray animus that we're supposed to have. We've discussed that before, and I'm not going to take up time defending it. He's brilliant. And I do know him, yes. However, honestly, this to me was his weakest book. And it comes down to this. You know, how most books are too long, including a lot of mine? This book is too short.

Because he starts out with all of this depressing data. And, you know, as far as these intelligence tests, you've got black, Latino, Asian, and white. And it comes out in the same order, which I'm not even gonna specify, again and again and again. Decade after decade. Not just one IQ test, but many kinds. Various tests for various professions. It's always the same fucking order. And you can have questions about each test. You can have questions about whether there's such a thing as G.

But I'm sorry, the fact that those tests always come out in the same order, all these disparate people, it's always the same thing. To say that that means nothing is to be a denialist. It means that you just can't deal with a certain discomfort. And if people hear me saying that and they want to jump all over me and say that I'm chiming in that black people are less bright, have a field day, go to town. I read the book, I saw the data, and it's always that same order.

And I was very depressed reading it. What I have to say about it is this. All of a sudden, after chapter five, it goes off a cliff. Because he just doesn't say enough. He says three things. One is that we've got to stop affirmative action because well, black people aren't bright enough to benefit from any more special training, et cetera. It's just going to be the way it is. And if you bring in less qualified people, particularly in various bureaucratic and service industries, then you're doing the country a bad turn because those people have lower IQs and they don't do as good a job and that's not good for the fabric of the nation.

Now, is that true? He says, affirmative action is particularly prevalent in fulfilling these bureaucratic and government jobs. I don't know that. Maybe it's true. But suddenly, no footnotes. These exhaustive footnotes for all the stuff about the tests, but all of a sudden here, he just says it like he's at a cocktail party. Not enough. I'd like to see the proof.

And then his second point is that there's possibly going to be this insurrection. That a certain segment of white people are tired of being told that they have privilege and tired of making way for people who clearly aren't as qualified as them. They're tired of being called racist, and we better watch out because it's gonna blow. Now, I understand why somebody might think that, especially after January 6th. Less before it. But is it true that we really are on the verge of, you know, that that woman who runs the liquor store in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania that I'm always making up—are people like that really about to blow? I don't know. And so he just tosses it out. It's just like he's writing an editorial every week and he's just saying a little something.

And then finally there's his point, and I've seen this with other people who have been looking at the intelligence data, where he says that we must judge people as individuals, that we should accept that black people are going to be on the bottom of that scale, but for any individual black person, we cannot let that color how intelligent, how capable we suppose them of being. We should just watch them as an individual, because of course there are black superstars just like there are white dummies. I find that weak. I don't see that happening among human beings in a first-world society with the prelude that we've already had. I suppose if you blew it all up and started again, okay. But his analogy to being in a jungle and trying to keep a garden cleared? No, it would always be a jungle when it comes to that.

The idea that we're going to accept, yeah, black people aren't as bright. However, if you meet a black person, assume that their IQ could be anywhere from zero to 200. No, I find it weak. Or if somebody is going to make that argument—and I know that the people who make that argument are making it with a smile, it's not a condescending smile. I think they really mean it. I take them on faith. But it would take more than two and a half pages to make me fully able to even pretend to get on board with this. And Murray doesn't provide the argument.

So notice, I'm not saying anything about racism here. I just find it to be a weakly argued book once he gets past the data about black stupidity and black violence. The violence I find uninteresting. As we've just discussed, there are many reasons why this violence might be the case. But the IQ part is genuinely interesting. And he didn't go far enough. I would need that book to be at least a third longer than it is before I could think of it as on a par with his other deeply disturbing work, but where he makes a case. There's Human Accomplishment, there's even Coming Apart, and then there's this. The first five chapters are, oh God, this is one of the saddest books I've ever read. What am I going to do with this? I seek this brilliant mind to give me counsel. And then chapters six and seven are just afterthoughts. I was disappointed.

So, you're not disputing the facts that he assembles in the assessment of racial differences in intelligence or of racial differences in violence.

Let's put it this way. There is some problem that black people have with tests. That is perfectly clear. Now there are arguments we can make that it's cultural somehow, but something's going on with black people and tests.

So I'm taking that as a yes. That is, you're not disputing the reportage of the facts.

You can't, no.

And with respect to violence, where he assembles data across US cities that report these data by race on the frequency of people's participation in homicide, rape, assault, and robbery, and he finds seven-to-one, eight-to-one, ten-to-one relative participation rates between black and white. You're not disputing that, but you think it's uninteresting.

You could predict that sort of thing based on the 1960s, both the cultural shifts and the change in welfare legislation that helped break up families. And then the war on drugs. All of that will leave me wondering why young black men would not indulge in more violence than white men in Scarsdale.

So you're talking about explanation. You're saying you find a ready explanation for it. You not surprised by it. He doesn't talk about explanation at all in this book. He doesn't try to account for the differences. He says that's another book. He says my point here is to chronicle and call your attention to these differences. You're not disputing the differences that he's calling our attention to. Your complaint is about what he wants to say.

Who could, unless he's an absolute charlatan? Who could dispute the basic facts that he lays out?

So now with respect to violence, he's saying there's a whole national political crisis that's been precipitated here in the last decade or so, from Trayvon Martin through Michael Brown, through Eric [Garner] and so on to George Floyd and so on. Cities have been set ablaze. There's a galvanizing kind of mobilization along racial lines, which is about police violence against blacks.

And he’s saying—this is Murray, I'm inviting your reaction. I'm defending Murray now to this extent. He's saying, first of all, let's just look at the facts. They're pretty astonishing. There's a big difference across the races in participation in violent crime in American cities. That's a fact. And then he says, are our police officers supposed to be oblivious to this? Are residents who decide where to live, where to send their children to school, whether or not to open up a business, whether or not to drive this avenue or that not supposed to know about this? Are voters supposed to be oblivious to this?

So now we have a national rhetoric about race and policing, which has the bad guys being rogue police officers who don't give a damn about the integrity of black bodies and who are perpetrating genocide, open season on black people, et cetera. And juxtaposed to that, we have a reality about carjacking, robbery, rape, murder, and assault in American cities that is highly racialized, with blacks being vastly overrepresented amongst the offenders. Are we in touch with reality when we discuss race, crime, and punishment largely in terms of white police officers killing black people? Everybody can read the newspaper. Everybody in suburban St. Louis, Baltimore, Philadelphia, et cetera can read the newspaper.

Okay. I don't want to go on too long in this vein. I'm simply trying to identify where it is that you're finding there to be a problem. How can it be uninteresting that there's such racial differences in violent crime, given that we are in fact on the verge of open almost civil war. I mean, deep fissures in the body politic.

What is critical race theory teaching these kids? I mean, we can find the cases, can't we? If you're white, you're likely to grow up to be a police officer, and then you'll be a murderer. That's my paraphrase of what some of this stuff is telling kids. Stand the kids on either side of the room. The black kid over here who’s likely to be a victim of police violence, the white kid over here who's likely to be a perpetrator and police violence and all that kind of stuff, against the actual reality of criminal violence on the streets of American cities. He's saying that there's a disconnect. And likewise, with respect to the test scores.

You say it's old hat. They always come out the same order. The Asians do better than the whites, the whites do better than the Latinos, Latinos do better than the blacks on the average. You say it's always the same thing. Well, maybe that's the reality. It's not an uninteresting reality. You say he hasn't—and I agree with you—he hasn't demonstrated.

Okay, so let me not talk to you long here. First of all, I want to defend the project of assembling the facts. I think that's worthwhile. Secondly, I want to say that the facts are significant. Even if Murray doesn't entirely put his finger on why those facts are significant. Facts about violent crime are politically salient. The facts about differences in test scores matter. And he says, but look, there's no moral blood on my hands for pointing out these facts, because after all, we don't have to view individuals differently just because groups are different at the average.

And you say—and I think you're right—really? You don't think there's any real social weight, real political and moral responsibility that falls on the person who announces certain facts when they are so explosive and so disruptive of our domestic tranquility? Not just that there are white supremacists who will take the facts that you report and use them as ammunition for their pernicious arguments. Not just that there are black people who will be injured in their sense of their own worth and value or of how they perceive themselves as being perceived and valued by others. Don't you have a responsibility, if you report facts like this, to—and I'm not sure what you want him to do—at least own up to the fact that you're shouting fire in a crowded theater? Maybe you oughta whisper and not shout. Anyway, can you respond to some of that?

Yeah, you're bringing me out on it. I've talked to people who are like-minded to him. What they're really saying is that we need to face that, as we move on, black people are going to be uncommon in areas such as astrophysics, in jobs that require the very highest form of cognitive achievement. That we need to just face that black people are going to be more likely to be basketball players and entertainers and low-level civic servants than in the smart stuff. That's what I think Charles Murray needs.

And I can wrap my head around someone saying that and it not meaning that he hates black people. A great many people will say that if you believe that, you're a racist. No. Get out of your belly, use your head. What he's saying is that these are the numbers. This is the genetic reality. And we need to face that there's nothing to be done about it. It's not about societal racism. It's not about that the tests are biased. It's just that that's the way it is. So let's think about a society where we just accept this kind of hierarchy, which is really tough for us given our democratic endowment, given the way we think the world is supposed to be, because this is America.

But he's saying maybe we need to think a new way. That is not inevitably inherently biased against black people. Because that would imply that somehow he's wrong, that there's some other approach that would change things and that you can make as conclusive an argument that that approach would work as he has made a conclusive argument that there are these differences, which is the most depressing thing I've ever seen. And so instead of just saying that—because he's human and he lives in a society and he's been through what he went through after The Bell Curve anyway, I fully get this—I think he sugarcoats it with this argument that we should view all people as individuals.

It's not that he doesn't believe that, but he knows how counterintuitive that would be. And I think what he really is saying is that the reality is something that's deeply unsavory, but that we cannot escape without having a race war, apparently. I think even if we weren't going to have a race war, what he wants us to just accept is that there is this cognitive hierarchy and that a more graceful society would be to just accept it.

That is a very nervy argument. In a way, I respect him for having the balls to even halfway make it. But it's a really tough one to swallow, even for me. We have ideals. That's part of our liberal society. That's part of being intelligent people in the modern Western world. And to accept that black people are gonna be where they were—where we were—roughly in about 1950, that that's about as good as we can expect to get because all the rest of it is affirmative action that puts undeserving people in places they don't belong. Wow. That's very far-sighted, very depressing, and I'm not sure if it's useful thought. Major head-stretching argument.

I'm not calling him a racist. But if he's going to make that argument, I need a good three or four thick chapters. I need some reasoning. And he didn't see fit to provide it. And I was just disappointed.