Thanks Glenn and John for presenting the concept of [settled vs. unsettled questions. ] That is exactly what I need for an opinion essay that I am writing. I have a 50-pg printed pdf from June 2020. The pdf begins with an assumption that “social problem X” has already been evidenced and thus established. Not so. Entirety of pdf addresses how to fix the problem. I am repulsed by such dishonesty.
Glenn, I'm more than halfway through your utterly absorbing memoir and one of the more interesting non-salacious anecdotes that you provided was how you scored a 0 on the Putnam exam one year during your undergrad at Northwestern. In past years the median score among test-takers, who are already a self-selected group of mathematically adept individuals, has often been 0 out of a maximum of 120 points. I believe you stated that in the year that you competed, the winner solved 5 and a half problems, which I took to mean a score of 55.
There's been some scoring inflation in recent years but the median score is often still 0 or 1. In 2023 for instance, the median score on the Putnam was a 1 and the top score 101. A close friend of mine who took the exam twice in the past 20 years scored an 18 both times and was somewhat close to the vicinity of being top 500 on the Putnam. I recall him telling me that in one of the years he competed, the threshold for Putnam top 500 was a 23.
Yet this friend of mine, in part because of various factors such as motivation and focus, hasn't accomplished even a fraction of what you've been able to accomplish as an academic and public intellectual, Glenn. I guess to me this just reinforces the fact that raw aptitude as reflected by performance on tests of cognitive ability is at best a necessary but far from sufficient criterion when it comes to overall life success. This is another reason why although I lean towards there being some biological component to group differences, I don't find the strong hereditarian thesis to be nearly the same gospel that certain other commenters here believe it to be. I look at history both at the level of individuals such as my good friend and at the level of countries and civilizations and find that there's so more than IQ alone that goes into determining whether or not people or nations ultimately over-achieve or under-achieve relative to expectations.
Anyway, thanks again for sharing so many fascinating details of your life story with us Glenn. I expect that I'll be done with the remainder of your memoir in the next couple of days and perhaps I'll have some more thoughts to share then.
Glenn, I hope that your back problem improves soon. However, I had not heard these "old clips" before, and the discussion certainly touched on a number of 'hot' issues. Charles wrote that, "I don't doubt that there are serious, unbiased, nonracist people who study these questions---." May I recommend the book Sociobiology written by EO Wilson C. 1975. He was almost fired from Harvard because he dared to suggest that human men and women had different characteristics. The book is packed with information to complement your discussion about genetic differences.
I attended Wake Forest School of Medicine in 1970, followed in 1975 by 5 years of training in Atlanta, and practiced in a small town near Charlotte, NC. The discussion concerning dumbing down testing is disconcerting to say the least. One of my classmates, who continues to be a friend, is from Nigeria. He failed one year, and to the credit of Wake Forest, he was given a chance to repeat the year, and went on to be a successful surgeon in Denver, Co. I have no issue with an effort to include more diversity in all fields, but the answer is to create opportunities to improve rather than remove standards that have been in place for many good reasons. I have a nephew who graduated from law school. After about 10 attempts at passing the bar exam and failing, he decided that he'd better look into real estate as a career. Glenn, I suspect that you went to a board certified surgeon. By passing that board exam, you can feel confident that your surgeon has a knowledge base that will provide you with competent care. Amy indicated that we may not be able to put the brakes on allowing mediocrity. I hope that will not be the case. One last comment, concerning referring to people as Black and White. When I read Corey Booker's book, he said that he had done genetic testing (I think Ancestry.com), and was, to his surprise, only 51% African. Jason Ford wrote in Quora that a study by HBCU's indicated that 75+ % of Americans who identify as Black, have white ancestry. That proves nothing other than that American is the great melting pot. As Dick Gregory told me when I had to privilege to eat lunch with him when in college, "what happens to me will happen to you". We are in this together. Thanks for the discussions and I appreciate this attempt to look for practical solutions to many of our societal problems.
Please try to get Roland Fryer in on this (if he is so inclined; wouldn't blame him if he weren't).
Nonetheless, as is the case with all fields of study, we should welcome any rigorous pursuit of truth, regardless of the topic.
But at some point, we must also ask ourselves why we are studying X as opposed to Y. That matters, too.
With this topic, it is abundantly clear that the people most interested aren't (typically) all that serious about truth. They are serious as hell about a political agenda; but not truth.
My proof? Watch them vanish into thin air the moment you request a similar study about varying nonracial groups--they don't care. They don't want to compare differences in intelligence between, say, White northern liberals and White Southern Trump supporters; or Obama versus Donald Trump or Bush.
I'm like, why not? Hell, we might learn something. Right?
When Thomas Sowell delved into mountain dwellers' IQ versus urban dwellers' IQ, no one seemed to give a sh*t. Why not?
Like Glenn has said so many times about police misconduct, why racialize the conversation? In this case, we are talking about an increasingly outdated, and frankly, primitive taxonomy. It's arbitrary. It's primarily based on looks; i.e., some combination of skin color, hair texture and eye shape. Not exactly the most rigorous starting point.
And let's not forget about all of the blending we have seen and will continue to see from generation to generation. It is a trend that will undoubtedly affect how we define "race" in the long run. (Newsflash: It already has.)
So, why racialize this conversation? The answer I typically hear from a certain cohort is, "Well, then we as a society won't try to force narratives that can't be fulfilled. i.e., Black people will just accept their place, while White people accept their place, while East Asians and South Asians accept their places, while the Indigenous accept their place, while Ashkenazi Jews accept their place, and so forth and so on...because...umm...that's the way God made us, right?"
"...and we'll figure out the multiracial/biracial folks later."
Sounds so American. So much for individual liberty.
I'll put it this way: If that crowd hates race-based programs like DEI that much, focus on getting rid of them. And I'll be right there, fighting the good fight with them, because much like Glenn, I hate that s***. But if they think this field of study is gonna help us get to that point faster and more efficiently--and I know they don't; it's a façade--they are mistaken.
For the record, I don't doubt there are serious, unbiased, nonracist people who study these questions from a purely scientific point of view. (Yan, I know you're out there somewhere.) I have seen at least one person like that on Coleman's show. But that's not where the strongest energy is coming from in this area. That energy belongs to Amy Wax and her buddies...sans Glenn of course.
Yup, I was lurking in the comments haha. For what it's worth, I actually think that Amy Wax made a good point regarding this matter a while back with Glenn. The race realists have had their hand forced so to speak by the anti-racists who adamantly insist that any disparity is ipso facto proof of systemic racism. When you declare that only one particular hypothesis is acceptable, you invariably invite alternative explanations for the observed facts.
I'm of the belief that the entire race and intelligence debate isn't nearly as useful as we've made it out to be. There may indeed be meaningful differences at the far right tail between different groups such that these groups don't come close to proportional representation in the most esteemed academic and intellectual endeavors. In my opinion though there's significantly broader and lower hanging fruit to be picked that potentially allows us to uplift a much larger portion of society at large. This is where I agree with Glenn that ultimately the issue of race and intelligence isn't only scientific but also political and normative in nature. But I believe that we've been focused on trying to remedy the wrong things.
Most of the conversation surrounding Black America today revolves about the breakdown of the Black family and social dysfunction particularly when it comes to Black male youths. My impression is that a lot of anti-Black sentiment among non-Blacks in this country is due to things like disproportionate rates of Black crime rather than an underrepresentation of Blacks amongst engineers or physicists. Even under stronger hereditarian assumptions there's a lot of fertile ground for vastly improving racial outcomes and the state of race relations in this country. But as I've also mentioned before, despite leaning towards there being some biological component to observed group differences, I also don't believe that the fact of immutable racial differences in intelligence is necessarily Gospel in the way that many in the alt-right believe it to be. Maybe my attitude on all of this is sort of live and let live.
This is tricky terrain to navigate, and I agree that both the alt-right race realists like Jared Taylor and the far-left egalitarians like Ibram X. Kendi have ultimately gotten it wrong. I think there's a fruitful middle ground that we can tread that brings us tangible progress without needing to indulge in shibboleths.
We agree, Yan. (I honestly didn't expect to say that =)) But we do part ways a little at the beginning:
"The race realists have had their hand forced so to speak by the anti-racists who adamantly insist that any disparity is ipso facto proof of systemic racism. When you declare that only one particular hypothesis is acceptable, you invariably invite alternative explanations for the observed facts."
I don't think the so-called race realists are, for the most part, a reaction to the nonsense of the left (even though, yes, a lot of leftist nonsense provides them with a ton of fuel).
I think race realism today is (*mostly*) a modern-day version of similar movements from prior generations. e.g., when I listen to a (self-described) White racialist from the 1990s, I don't detect that much of a difference, if any at all, between his rhetoric and that of a so-called "race realist" today.
In times like these, sanity *must* (or should) prevail at some point. But I often wonder if it's too late for America.
My gut feeling is that people like Amy Wax, despite having obvious white nationalist sympathies, are reacting more to the excesses of the left when it comes to things like race and culture. Jared Taylor on the other hand strikes me as someone who's been going on about the entire race thing for far longer than the early 2010s when the entire modern woke movement reincarnated itself.
I also think that people like Ibram X. Kendi with his fanatical left-wing ideas about race have probably made others who might've stayed silent otherwise feel more empowered to push back. We live in truly interesting times in this country.
A non-racialized conception of group differences might be possible if we could adopt the same mindset that we do towards sports. But unlike the NBA and the NFL which comprise roughly 2,000 athletes total, the broader aspects of society encompass far more individuals and therefore the stakes are too high for most people to ignore one way or the other.
"The race realists have had their hand forced so to speak by the anti-racists who adamantly insist that any disparity is ipso facto proof of systemic racism. When you declare that only one particular hypothesis is acceptable, you invariably invite alternative explanations for the observed facts."
In my case, though, I was going to say Yan hit the nail on the head 100 percent.
Almost everything today is racialized. And the reason given for "disparities in outcome" is Evil White People. It can come as no surprise that that grows old when you are the square peg being pounded into the round hole. The reaction is to, politeness be damned, put square pegs in square holes and round pegs in round holes.
I get the point. It's a fair point. But it's very flawed because of what it implies.
It's not like America was all sweet and colorblind before the big bad leftist wolf came in and ruined everything. If that kind of backlash logic is acceptable, then the Black backlash against Whites after hundreds of years is surely acceptable.
At some point, we gotta be more mature than that, regardless of the bs surrounding us.
I don't think that we should be afraid to learn the truth about whether there is a genetic component to racial/ethnic disparities in cognitive ability as measured by IQ or standardized exams like the SAT, LSAT, or MCAT. I think Dr. Murray is likely correct that it is unlikely that groups separated from each other for tens of thousands of years would just happen to have evolved, on average, identical cognitive aptitudes. However, given the cultural and socioeconomic differences between racial groups in the United States, I don't think it would necessarily follow that African Americans were the group with lower genetic aptitude. The American ethnic group with the highest percentage of graduate degrees is Nigerian Americans. When I read that statistic, it made me think back to my teaching career in the Bronx. Most of the Black students in my honor's classes were Nigerian. But I think that is much more likely to be driven by the fact that many of their parents were immigrants who stressed the importance of their kids doing well in school.
However, if African Americans or Africans more broadly were statistically less likely to have a genetic aptitude for scholastic success, so what? Would such a finding mean that I was smarter than Glenn? (I assure you I am not). People should be treated as unique individuals with their own aptitudes and difficulties. Glenn suggested that a genetic difference could be countered with educational intervention. I agree. We should definitely do that. But why should such intervention depend on the average genetic aptitude across ethnic groups? I'm reminded of a program that the NYC DOE created to try to increase the number of Black and Hispanic students scoring high enough on the Specialized High Schools Admissions Test (SHSAT) to earn admission to Bronx Science and Stuyvesant High School. They began offering Saturday exam prep for middle school students, but when an Asian mother attempted to enroll her son, she was told the program “wasn't for him,” despite the fact that she met the income requirement. She sued and the Department of Education had to allow Asian students into the exam prep classes. If, on average, African-American and Hispanic parents fought as hard as Asian parents to get their children every academic advantage, white people would probably have the lowest test scores.
It's interesting that you bring up the example of Nigerian Americans. One of the more fascinating data points arguing against the strong hereditarian thesis is the fact of disproportionate African immigrant success among both Caribbean and Sub-Saharan African Blacks. It's often asserted that while there's a 1 SD difference in IQ between Blacks and whites in America, there's a 2 SD difference in IQ between whites and Sub-Saharan Africans. The superior IQ of Black Americans relative to Africans is attributed to the fact that African Americans have on average around 20% European admixture.
As you've noted above though, those claims seems to be contradicted by the clear fact of disproportionate African immigrant success in this country relative to that of African descendants of slaves. Some people try to explain this away by pointing out that Sub-Saharan Africa has a much larger population relative to the 40 million or so Blacks who live in the United States and that therefore we should expect higher numbers of Africans to be at the right tail of the IQ distribution.
I make the argument in my comment below that if you make some reasonable assumptions and crunch the numbers, you actually arrive at the opposite conclusion. If the average IQ of Black Americans is 85 relative to the white average of 100 and that of Africans 70, then one would actually expect to find more Black Americans above an IQ threshold of 130 than Sub-Saharan Africans.
As I concluded in my comment below, a Martian anthropologist who observed the dynamics of Black performance in the US would almost certainly be surprised to learn that according to the hereditarian thesis the higher performing Black sub-group was being drawn from a population 1 SD lower in average IQ. While I wouldn't say this definitively refutes the hereditarian thesis, at the very least these facts should give hereditarians some pause about the assumptions underlying their mental models.
I taught social studies and Constitutional law at a high school in the South Bronx for three years. We had 3 or 4 white students, but I didn't teach any of them. This was actually the exact opposite of my experience in elementary school. In my eight years at a Catholic school in an Irish/Italian neighborhood in the North Bronx, there were no Black students until I started 8th grade. That year, an African-American student enrolled in the 4th grade. (My experience at Bronx Science was much less sheltered.) My students would sometimes ask me questions about race. I told them that their race didn't matter unless it mattered to them because of pride in their heritage or someone was going to treat them differently because of it. Other than those 2 situations, the only real difference was that I would sunburn much more easily than most of them. But I told them that culture could be very important.
I am flying to Los Angeles tomorrow because my nieces are graduating from high school and junior high. I always expected them to be bilingual and good at math because their father is the son of Mexican immigrants, and he and my sister are both engineers. My nieces are both straight-A students, but most of the Spanish they know they learned in school, not because they were exposed to Spanish at home. I think that is a good example of the interplay between environment and genetics. How much of the standardized test score deficits of African Americans that is attributable to genetics and how much is attributable to environment, I can't say. But until geneticists identify the genes responsible for intelligence and start engaging in genetic engineering, all we can do anything about are environmental factors.
I believe that the most important reason Asians do so well academically is the emphasis Asian parents, on average, place on their children doing well in school. As I understand it, Nigerian parents tend to place a similar emphasis on their children doing well in school. I am not sure how much of that is Nigerian culture and how much is due to their status as immigrants. Immigrants tend to work harder than native-born Americans because if they weren't hard-working and industrious, they would be unlikely to uproot their families and emigrate to a new country.
The problem with attributing African-American deficits to structural racism isn't that racism isn't an underlying cause of many of those deficits. Slavery, followed by Jim Crow, is certainly responsible for less inherited wealth being passed down to the current generation. However, attributing the deficits to structural racism is useless for coming up with a way to correct those deficits. It's not as if it would be possible to demolish the structures. What would that even mean? I think academic deficits are more a function of African-American families being undermined by Great Society welfare programs. The explosion of out-of-wedlock births among African Americans, particularly among young teen mothers, and the lack of fathers in their homes is more of the proximate cause. I had a 9th-grade student who rarely showed up for my 1st-period class, but when he did, he always reeked of marijuana. His mother told me that, at 14, he already had two children by two different mothers. That is the culture that needs to change. I don't want to be one of those conservatives who give up on the current generation, but I am not sure what we can do to force that change.
To your point about self-selection among immigrants, I actually think that that's distorted our racial discourse in this country significantly. While I have no doubt that a population representative sample of Chinese Americans would still perform well academically, as evidenced by the high performance of countries like China, Japan and South Korea on international standardized tests such as PISA, elite East and South Asian immigration in recent decades has actually significantly distorted human capital at the right tail of the academic population.
Prior to the early 1990s, Jewish Americans predominated in elite high school competitions such as the International Mathematics Olympiad, but since then East Asian immigrants have become significantly overrepresented among IMO competitors. There are also well-known stories about how elite Asian immigration altered the dynamics of top American high schools such as Monta Vista and Thomas Jefferson High.
We're dealing with lagging non-immigrant Black and Hispanic academic performance coupled with a few decades of elite East Asian and South Asian immigration which has significantly skewed the nature of our racial discourse on achievement. Maybe one way to reduce these increasing racial gaps is to slow down the importation of smart people from places like India and China.
As a graduate of Bronx Science, I am somewhat biased when it comes to elite high schools. Bronx Science was roughly 40% Asian when I was a student in the 1980s, but it still had a large number of Jewish students. I am not sure what percentage of the students are Jewish today, but I believe the school is now almost 70% Asian. Bill De Blasio attempted to change the admission criteria from being entirely dependent on the score on the annual entrance exam to something more "holistic," a.k.a. more subjective and amenable to racial preferences. Fortunately, NY State law states that admissions to Bronx Science, Stuyvesant, and Brooklyn Tech must be based on the entrance exam and only the exam. It's not that I think a single exam is the best way to choose students, but it is at least objective. In a school system with over a million students, I don't think there is anything wrong with setting aside less than three thousand places for elite students, or at least elite test takers.
Most people don't know this, but once you are admitted to Bronx Science, you can't be kicked out for failing your classes. I worked in the school program office over the summer. Every student had a program card with all their grades on it. One of my jobs was to go through all the student's program cards at the start of the summer and pull out all the cards with failing grades so that they could be programmed to repeat those classes. About 1/3 of the students failed at least one class and a surprising number of students failed all their classes. Then, in August, summer school grades would come in, and I had to reprogram most of those students not to repeat the classes they failed. All the students were smart, but some just cut school and or didn't do the work, but they usually made an effort in summer school. Almost all the summer school grades were A's.
Anyway, I wouldn't support reducing immigration from China or India as a way to reduce racial gaps. I don't think this country would be better off with fewer smart people. I don't care what their ethnicities are. If nothing else, the elite achievements of Asian students should serve as a motivation to improve the education of African-American and Hispanic students.
As a psychologist I want to see the study of intelligence freed up from preconceived ideas about the "inherent" superiority or inferiority of various groups based on "race" and sex. Intellectual development is a vital area of investigation for social and biological scientists, and objective research on that topic has been undermined since its onset by biases of this kind. It is interesting that many cultures are much more focused on competition over who is smarter than they are on who is better at athletics, music, or manual skills.
On the other hand, a more significant problem in the U.S. is the fact that our schools are not doing a good job of teaching children how to read and do basic math. It is not necessary to have an IQ at the upper end of the human distribution to learn how to read, so the fact that many white kids are performing at below average levels and many black kids are doing even worse is probably not attributable primarily to innate differences in intelligence between groups. If all the kids with average ability were learning and performing as well as they could ideally do, most would be doing well enough to earn a living. Differences in intelligence at the upper end of the range have less impact on the well being of the population generally, and in my opinion, less impact on the advancement of women and minorities.
Yes I agree. The the majority of public schools still refuse to use phonics only to teach reading many are hung up on the whole word method and combine it with the side dish of phonics this does not work I remember how thrilled I was in the third grade or so when I learned to sound out words and understood the meaning they let me loose in the library and my life has been beautiful
I don’t see the point in this research. Any individual can be much higher or lower than the mean of his/her group. In society we should address people as individuals.
"there would still be a debate on how to remedy the resulting ill effects"
There's a lot in that to mull over:
1. We are seeing "ill effects" right now with the current blank slate worldview.
2. The research indicates Asians have an IQ 1/2 std deviation above "whites." I think that's probably in the ballpark and fully accept it. Is that a problem in need of a "remedy"? As a white person, I say no. It is what it is.
3. Does "remedy" mean a new political narrative that maintains a faithful voting bloc? Is the current avoidance and taboo nothing more than a political strategy?
Consider the following friendly amendment to my statement:
"Even if there were an agreed-upon answer on the origins of group differences in intelligence, there would still be a debate on WHETHER AND how to remedy the resulting ill effects..." Neither whether nor how is a purely scientific question. That's my point...
Dr. Loury, thanks for the response. A very pleasant surprise!
That takes care of most of my objections. I still wonder, though, how much of the non-scientific part comes down to, or would come down to, crass political calculation rather than well-intended leadership or governance. And I sincerely believe the nation today contends with, courtesy of the prevailing narrative, ill effects that are not nothing.
I have not yet started reading it, but I have a copy of your book. Good luck with your back as you continue to recover. Please take care of yourself. A lot of us are quite fond of you.
I'm more than halfway through Glenn's memoir and it's utterly absorbing. It's definitely one of my favorite books in recent years and makes me wonder what Thomas Sowell's similarly distinguished memoir would've been like had he taken the same candid approach to detailing his personal life that Glenn did in his book.
Likewise wishing Glenn the best. You're a national treasure Glenn!
I think actually that many if not most of the people who have focused their careers on raising the academic performance of kids in lower income majority black neighborhoods have been very well intentioned. "The soft bigotry of low expectations" was no doubt present in some liberal white people who spent a lot of their energy on improving education, income and so on for black kids. There are many examples, though, of white, black and "other" individuals who have had incredible passion for educating kids from poor families and neighborhoods.
I hate seeing kids fail at basic skills when it seems like we ought to be able to do something about that. But this isn't my area of expertise.
I haven't yet listened to this discussion, but even before I do I question the whole premise of a single intelligence by which people can be measured. Years ago, the Harvard psychology prof Howard Gardiner developed the theory of multiple intelligences (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_multiple_intelligences), which I think is generally accepted by now. These intelligence types are individual, not racial, though I suppose there may be some racial correlation. But it seems obvious that we need them all, and none is superior to or more important than another.
So sorry to hear about your back acting up, Glenn. Fingers crossed it's brief and your healing resumes!
The theory of multiple intelligences has been widely discredited by everyone from Charles Murray to James Flynn. The different types of intelligences have been shown to be highly correlated (implying G), and they don't predict anything beyond what they measure. IQ tests taken at 15 can predict how good of a Mathematician you can be in 20 years. Testing your musical ability, and then predicting your musical ability doesn't tell us anything.
Glenn, I don’t always agree with you but I always appreciate your truth-seeking efforts. This is a great episode. As another person suffering from one of God’s worst creations, I hope your back gets better soon.
If we accept IQ as a meaningful human evaluator, and we also look at the apparent IQ of the average 'Palestinian'adult (according to sources cited on Jordan Peterson's YouTube channel), then is it realistic to think of these people as responsible citizens in a '2 state solution'?
Isn't this the exact same kind of reasoning that Europeans used back in the day to justify colonialism? I'm sure the same thing was said about Africans, that their supposedly lower inherent capabilities somehow justified the system of European colonialism perpetuated upon Africa during the late 19th and early 20th centuries
Given that Israel is often accused of settler colonialism, I'm not sure it's to the benefit of your position to so publicly go down this particular ideological path. National IQ may indeed be correlated with the productivity and success of countries around the world, but I'm not sure I see it as a moral justification to deprive any particular group of people of their right to self-determination.
So then don't accept IQ as an evaluator. You might check out Jordan Peterson's website on this subject; my take was that as a biological matter, there is a lower limit on intelligence that precludes a population from meaningful self-governance. I recognize that no one wants to hear that.
I'm not sure what you mean by IQ as an evaluator. National IQ may indeed be correlated with group level productivity and success, including quality of governance. I'm not sure I see that as a moral justification though for depriving certain groups of individuals the right to self determination. Even Charles Murray advocates for equality of treatment while acknowledging the very real possibility of biologically determined group differences. It sounds like you're literally advocating for the restoration of colonialism.
It's certainly possible that various countries around the world would actually be better off under a form of neocolonialism, but again I'm not sure this is the moral stance one wants to take in this day and age. In fact your very argument validates what many critics of Israel's war in Gaza have pointed out, that many in the West view Palestinians as less than and thus don't value Palestinian lives to the same extent they do Western lives.
It's clear to me that you don't view Palestinians as fully human in the same way you do Americans or Israelis given your morally objectionable line of argumentation. The idea that these people are too dumb and savage to rule themselves is literally what racist whites said about Blacks in this country back in the day, so again I'm not sure this is the sort of stance one wants to take vis-a-vis Israel and Palestinians.
Are you argunig that the profoundly retarded should be allowed to vote or to hold government office? If not, and if that reasoning can be applied to a population, then it's doubtful that such a population could form a responsible government. If those facts apply to Palestinians, or to any other group, so be it. Personal insults or demagoguing the issue won't change the facts.
Thanks Glenn and John for presenting the concept of [settled vs. unsettled questions. ] That is exactly what I need for an opinion essay that I am writing. I have a 50-pg printed pdf from June 2020. The pdf begins with an assumption that “social problem X” has already been evidenced and thus established. Not so. Entirety of pdf addresses how to fix the problem. I am repulsed by such dishonesty.
Glenn, I'm more than halfway through your utterly absorbing memoir and one of the more interesting non-salacious anecdotes that you provided was how you scored a 0 on the Putnam exam one year during your undergrad at Northwestern. In past years the median score among test-takers, who are already a self-selected group of mathematically adept individuals, has often been 0 out of a maximum of 120 points. I believe you stated that in the year that you competed, the winner solved 5 and a half problems, which I took to mean a score of 55.
There's been some scoring inflation in recent years but the median score is often still 0 or 1. In 2023 for instance, the median score on the Putnam was a 1 and the top score 101. A close friend of mine who took the exam twice in the past 20 years scored an 18 both times and was somewhat close to the vicinity of being top 500 on the Putnam. I recall him telling me that in one of the years he competed, the threshold for Putnam top 500 was a 23.
Yet this friend of mine, in part because of various factors such as motivation and focus, hasn't accomplished even a fraction of what you've been able to accomplish as an academic and public intellectual, Glenn. I guess to me this just reinforces the fact that raw aptitude as reflected by performance on tests of cognitive ability is at best a necessary but far from sufficient criterion when it comes to overall life success. This is another reason why although I lean towards there being some biological component to group differences, I don't find the strong hereditarian thesis to be nearly the same gospel that certain other commenters here believe it to be. I look at history both at the level of individuals such as my good friend and at the level of countries and civilizations and find that there's so more than IQ alone that goes into determining whether or not people or nations ultimately over-achieve or under-achieve relative to expectations.
Anyway, thanks again for sharing so many fascinating details of your life story with us Glenn. I expect that I'll be done with the remainder of your memoir in the next couple of days and perhaps I'll have some more thoughts to share then.
Glenn, I hope that your back problem improves soon. However, I had not heard these "old clips" before, and the discussion certainly touched on a number of 'hot' issues. Charles wrote that, "I don't doubt that there are serious, unbiased, nonracist people who study these questions---." May I recommend the book Sociobiology written by EO Wilson C. 1975. He was almost fired from Harvard because he dared to suggest that human men and women had different characteristics. The book is packed with information to complement your discussion about genetic differences.
I attended Wake Forest School of Medicine in 1970, followed in 1975 by 5 years of training in Atlanta, and practiced in a small town near Charlotte, NC. The discussion concerning dumbing down testing is disconcerting to say the least. One of my classmates, who continues to be a friend, is from Nigeria. He failed one year, and to the credit of Wake Forest, he was given a chance to repeat the year, and went on to be a successful surgeon in Denver, Co. I have no issue with an effort to include more diversity in all fields, but the answer is to create opportunities to improve rather than remove standards that have been in place for many good reasons. I have a nephew who graduated from law school. After about 10 attempts at passing the bar exam and failing, he decided that he'd better look into real estate as a career. Glenn, I suspect that you went to a board certified surgeon. By passing that board exam, you can feel confident that your surgeon has a knowledge base that will provide you with competent care. Amy indicated that we may not be able to put the brakes on allowing mediocrity. I hope that will not be the case. One last comment, concerning referring to people as Black and White. When I read Corey Booker's book, he said that he had done genetic testing (I think Ancestry.com), and was, to his surprise, only 51% African. Jason Ford wrote in Quora that a study by HBCU's indicated that 75+ % of Americans who identify as Black, have white ancestry. That proves nothing other than that American is the great melting pot. As Dick Gregory told me when I had to privilege to eat lunch with him when in college, "what happens to me will happen to you". We are in this together. Thanks for the discussions and I appreciate this attempt to look for practical solutions to many of our societal problems.
Wish I could like this comment 1000 times.
Please try to get Roland Fryer in on this (if he is so inclined; wouldn't blame him if he weren't).
Nonetheless, as is the case with all fields of study, we should welcome any rigorous pursuit of truth, regardless of the topic.
But at some point, we must also ask ourselves why we are studying X as opposed to Y. That matters, too.
With this topic, it is abundantly clear that the people most interested aren't (typically) all that serious about truth. They are serious as hell about a political agenda; but not truth.
My proof? Watch them vanish into thin air the moment you request a similar study about varying nonracial groups--they don't care. They don't want to compare differences in intelligence between, say, White northern liberals and White Southern Trump supporters; or Obama versus Donald Trump or Bush.
I'm like, why not? Hell, we might learn something. Right?
When Thomas Sowell delved into mountain dwellers' IQ versus urban dwellers' IQ, no one seemed to give a sh*t. Why not?
Like Glenn has said so many times about police misconduct, why racialize the conversation? In this case, we are talking about an increasingly outdated, and frankly, primitive taxonomy. It's arbitrary. It's primarily based on looks; i.e., some combination of skin color, hair texture and eye shape. Not exactly the most rigorous starting point.
And let's not forget about all of the blending we have seen and will continue to see from generation to generation. It is a trend that will undoubtedly affect how we define "race" in the long run. (Newsflash: It already has.)
So, why racialize this conversation? The answer I typically hear from a certain cohort is, "Well, then we as a society won't try to force narratives that can't be fulfilled. i.e., Black people will just accept their place, while White people accept their place, while East Asians and South Asians accept their places, while the Indigenous accept their place, while Ashkenazi Jews accept their place, and so forth and so on...because...umm...that's the way God made us, right?"
"...and we'll figure out the multiracial/biracial folks later."
Sounds so American. So much for individual liberty.
I'll put it this way: If that crowd hates race-based programs like DEI that much, focus on getting rid of them. And I'll be right there, fighting the good fight with them, because much like Glenn, I hate that s***. But if they think this field of study is gonna help us get to that point faster and more efficiently--and I know they don't; it's a façade--they are mistaken.
For the record, I don't doubt there are serious, unbiased, nonracist people who study these questions from a purely scientific point of view. (Yan, I know you're out there somewhere.) I have seen at least one person like that on Coleman's show. But that's not where the strongest energy is coming from in this area. That energy belongs to Amy Wax and her buddies...sans Glenn of course.
"Yan, I know you're out there somewhere."
Yup, I was lurking in the comments haha. For what it's worth, I actually think that Amy Wax made a good point regarding this matter a while back with Glenn. The race realists have had their hand forced so to speak by the anti-racists who adamantly insist that any disparity is ipso facto proof of systemic racism. When you declare that only one particular hypothesis is acceptable, you invariably invite alternative explanations for the observed facts.
I'm of the belief that the entire race and intelligence debate isn't nearly as useful as we've made it out to be. There may indeed be meaningful differences at the far right tail between different groups such that these groups don't come close to proportional representation in the most esteemed academic and intellectual endeavors. In my opinion though there's significantly broader and lower hanging fruit to be picked that potentially allows us to uplift a much larger portion of society at large. This is where I agree with Glenn that ultimately the issue of race and intelligence isn't only scientific but also political and normative in nature. But I believe that we've been focused on trying to remedy the wrong things.
Most of the conversation surrounding Black America today revolves about the breakdown of the Black family and social dysfunction particularly when it comes to Black male youths. My impression is that a lot of anti-Black sentiment among non-Blacks in this country is due to things like disproportionate rates of Black crime rather than an underrepresentation of Blacks amongst engineers or physicists. Even under stronger hereditarian assumptions there's a lot of fertile ground for vastly improving racial outcomes and the state of race relations in this country. But as I've also mentioned before, despite leaning towards there being some biological component to observed group differences, I also don't believe that the fact of immutable racial differences in intelligence is necessarily Gospel in the way that many in the alt-right believe it to be. Maybe my attitude on all of this is sort of live and let live.
This is tricky terrain to navigate, and I agree that both the alt-right race realists like Jared Taylor and the far-left egalitarians like Ibram X. Kendi have ultimately gotten it wrong. I think there's a fruitful middle ground that we can tread that brings us tangible progress without needing to indulge in shibboleths.
We agree, Yan. (I honestly didn't expect to say that =)) But we do part ways a little at the beginning:
"The race realists have had their hand forced so to speak by the anti-racists who adamantly insist that any disparity is ipso facto proof of systemic racism. When you declare that only one particular hypothesis is acceptable, you invariably invite alternative explanations for the observed facts."
I don't think the so-called race realists are, for the most part, a reaction to the nonsense of the left (even though, yes, a lot of leftist nonsense provides them with a ton of fuel).
I think race realism today is (*mostly*) a modern-day version of similar movements from prior generations. e.g., when I listen to a (self-described) White racialist from the 1990s, I don't detect that much of a difference, if any at all, between his rhetoric and that of a so-called "race realist" today.
In times like these, sanity *must* (or should) prevail at some point. But I often wonder if it's too late for America.
My gut feeling is that people like Amy Wax, despite having obvious white nationalist sympathies, are reacting more to the excesses of the left when it comes to things like race and culture. Jared Taylor on the other hand strikes me as someone who's been going on about the entire race thing for far longer than the early 2010s when the entire modern woke movement reincarnated itself.
I also think that people like Ibram X. Kendi with his fanatical left-wing ideas about race have probably made others who might've stayed silent otherwise feel more empowered to push back. We live in truly interesting times in this country.
A non-racialized conception of group differences might be possible if we could adopt the same mindset that we do towards sports. But unlike the NBA and the NFL which comprise roughly 2,000 athletes total, the broader aspects of society encompass far more individuals and therefore the stakes are too high for most people to ignore one way or the other.
I had clipped the same section:
"The race realists have had their hand forced so to speak by the anti-racists who adamantly insist that any disparity is ipso facto proof of systemic racism. When you declare that only one particular hypothesis is acceptable, you invariably invite alternative explanations for the observed facts."
In my case, though, I was going to say Yan hit the nail on the head 100 percent.
Almost everything today is racialized. And the reason given for "disparities in outcome" is Evil White People. It can come as no surprise that that grows old when you are the square peg being pounded into the round hole. The reaction is to, politeness be damned, put square pegs in square holes and round pegs in round holes.
I get the point. It's a fair point. But it's very flawed because of what it implies.
It's not like America was all sweet and colorblind before the big bad leftist wolf came in and ruined everything. If that kind of backlash logic is acceptable, then the Black backlash against Whites after hundreds of years is surely acceptable.
At some point, we gotta be more mature than that, regardless of the bs surrounding us.
I don't think that we should be afraid to learn the truth about whether there is a genetic component to racial/ethnic disparities in cognitive ability as measured by IQ or standardized exams like the SAT, LSAT, or MCAT. I think Dr. Murray is likely correct that it is unlikely that groups separated from each other for tens of thousands of years would just happen to have evolved, on average, identical cognitive aptitudes. However, given the cultural and socioeconomic differences between racial groups in the United States, I don't think it would necessarily follow that African Americans were the group with lower genetic aptitude. The American ethnic group with the highest percentage of graduate degrees is Nigerian Americans. When I read that statistic, it made me think back to my teaching career in the Bronx. Most of the Black students in my honor's classes were Nigerian. But I think that is much more likely to be driven by the fact that many of their parents were immigrants who stressed the importance of their kids doing well in school.
However, if African Americans or Africans more broadly were statistically less likely to have a genetic aptitude for scholastic success, so what? Would such a finding mean that I was smarter than Glenn? (I assure you I am not). People should be treated as unique individuals with their own aptitudes and difficulties. Glenn suggested that a genetic difference could be countered with educational intervention. I agree. We should definitely do that. But why should such intervention depend on the average genetic aptitude across ethnic groups? I'm reminded of a program that the NYC DOE created to try to increase the number of Black and Hispanic students scoring high enough on the Specialized High Schools Admissions Test (SHSAT) to earn admission to Bronx Science and Stuyvesant High School. They began offering Saturday exam prep for middle school students, but when an Asian mother attempted to enroll her son, she was told the program “wasn't for him,” despite the fact that she met the income requirement. She sued and the Department of Education had to allow Asian students into the exam prep classes. If, on average, African-American and Hispanic parents fought as hard as Asian parents to get their children every academic advantage, white people would probably have the lowest test scores.
It's interesting that you bring up the example of Nigerian Americans. One of the more fascinating data points arguing against the strong hereditarian thesis is the fact of disproportionate African immigrant success among both Caribbean and Sub-Saharan African Blacks. It's often asserted that while there's a 1 SD difference in IQ between Blacks and whites in America, there's a 2 SD difference in IQ between whites and Sub-Saharan Africans. The superior IQ of Black Americans relative to Africans is attributed to the fact that African Americans have on average around 20% European admixture.
As you've noted above though, those claims seems to be contradicted by the clear fact of disproportionate African immigrant success in this country relative to that of African descendants of slaves. Some people try to explain this away by pointing out that Sub-Saharan Africa has a much larger population relative to the 40 million or so Blacks who live in the United States and that therefore we should expect higher numbers of Africans to be at the right tail of the IQ distribution.
I make the argument in my comment below that if you make some reasonable assumptions and crunch the numbers, you actually arrive at the opposite conclusion. If the average IQ of Black Americans is 85 relative to the white average of 100 and that of Africans 70, then one would actually expect to find more Black Americans above an IQ threshold of 130 than Sub-Saharan Africans.
As I concluded in my comment below, a Martian anthropologist who observed the dynamics of Black performance in the US would almost certainly be surprised to learn that according to the hereditarian thesis the higher performing Black sub-group was being drawn from a population 1 SD lower in average IQ. While I wouldn't say this definitively refutes the hereditarian thesis, at the very least these facts should give hereditarians some pause about the assumptions underlying their mental models.
https://glennloury.substack.com/p/john-mcwhorter-the-best-of-glenn/comment/46491510
I taught social studies and Constitutional law at a high school in the South Bronx for three years. We had 3 or 4 white students, but I didn't teach any of them. This was actually the exact opposite of my experience in elementary school. In my eight years at a Catholic school in an Irish/Italian neighborhood in the North Bronx, there were no Black students until I started 8th grade. That year, an African-American student enrolled in the 4th grade. (My experience at Bronx Science was much less sheltered.) My students would sometimes ask me questions about race. I told them that their race didn't matter unless it mattered to them because of pride in their heritage or someone was going to treat them differently because of it. Other than those 2 situations, the only real difference was that I would sunburn much more easily than most of them. But I told them that culture could be very important.
I am flying to Los Angeles tomorrow because my nieces are graduating from high school and junior high. I always expected them to be bilingual and good at math because their father is the son of Mexican immigrants, and he and my sister are both engineers. My nieces are both straight-A students, but most of the Spanish they know they learned in school, not because they were exposed to Spanish at home. I think that is a good example of the interplay between environment and genetics. How much of the standardized test score deficits of African Americans that is attributable to genetics and how much is attributable to environment, I can't say. But until geneticists identify the genes responsible for intelligence and start engaging in genetic engineering, all we can do anything about are environmental factors.
I believe that the most important reason Asians do so well academically is the emphasis Asian parents, on average, place on their children doing well in school. As I understand it, Nigerian parents tend to place a similar emphasis on their children doing well in school. I am not sure how much of that is Nigerian culture and how much is due to their status as immigrants. Immigrants tend to work harder than native-born Americans because if they weren't hard-working and industrious, they would be unlikely to uproot their families and emigrate to a new country.
The problem with attributing African-American deficits to structural racism isn't that racism isn't an underlying cause of many of those deficits. Slavery, followed by Jim Crow, is certainly responsible for less inherited wealth being passed down to the current generation. However, attributing the deficits to structural racism is useless for coming up with a way to correct those deficits. It's not as if it would be possible to demolish the structures. What would that even mean? I think academic deficits are more a function of African-American families being undermined by Great Society welfare programs. The explosion of out-of-wedlock births among African Americans, particularly among young teen mothers, and the lack of fathers in their homes is more of the proximate cause. I had a 9th-grade student who rarely showed up for my 1st-period class, but when he did, he always reeked of marijuana. His mother told me that, at 14, he already had two children by two different mothers. That is the culture that needs to change. I don't want to be one of those conservatives who give up on the current generation, but I am not sure what we can do to force that change.
To your point about self-selection among immigrants, I actually think that that's distorted our racial discourse in this country significantly. While I have no doubt that a population representative sample of Chinese Americans would still perform well academically, as evidenced by the high performance of countries like China, Japan and South Korea on international standardized tests such as PISA, elite East and South Asian immigration in recent decades has actually significantly distorted human capital at the right tail of the academic population.
Prior to the early 1990s, Jewish Americans predominated in elite high school competitions such as the International Mathematics Olympiad, but since then East Asian immigrants have become significantly overrepresented among IMO competitors. There are also well-known stories about how elite Asian immigration altered the dynamics of top American high schools such as Monta Vista and Thomas Jefferson High.
We're dealing with lagging non-immigrant Black and Hispanic academic performance coupled with a few decades of elite East Asian and South Asian immigration which has significantly skewed the nature of our racial discourse on achievement. Maybe one way to reduce these increasing racial gaps is to slow down the importation of smart people from places like India and China.
As a graduate of Bronx Science, I am somewhat biased when it comes to elite high schools. Bronx Science was roughly 40% Asian when I was a student in the 1980s, but it still had a large number of Jewish students. I am not sure what percentage of the students are Jewish today, but I believe the school is now almost 70% Asian. Bill De Blasio attempted to change the admission criteria from being entirely dependent on the score on the annual entrance exam to something more "holistic," a.k.a. more subjective and amenable to racial preferences. Fortunately, NY State law states that admissions to Bronx Science, Stuyvesant, and Brooklyn Tech must be based on the entrance exam and only the exam. It's not that I think a single exam is the best way to choose students, but it is at least objective. In a school system with over a million students, I don't think there is anything wrong with setting aside less than three thousand places for elite students, or at least elite test takers.
Most people don't know this, but once you are admitted to Bronx Science, you can't be kicked out for failing your classes. I worked in the school program office over the summer. Every student had a program card with all their grades on it. One of my jobs was to go through all the student's program cards at the start of the summer and pull out all the cards with failing grades so that they could be programmed to repeat those classes. About 1/3 of the students failed at least one class and a surprising number of students failed all their classes. Then, in August, summer school grades would come in, and I had to reprogram most of those students not to repeat the classes they failed. All the students were smart, but some just cut school and or didn't do the work, but they usually made an effort in summer school. Almost all the summer school grades were A's.
Anyway, I wouldn't support reducing immigration from China or India as a way to reduce racial gaps. I don't think this country would be better off with fewer smart people. I don't care what their ethnicities are. If nothing else, the elite achievements of Asian students should serve as a motivation to improve the education of African-American and Hispanic students.
As a psychologist I want to see the study of intelligence freed up from preconceived ideas about the "inherent" superiority or inferiority of various groups based on "race" and sex. Intellectual development is a vital area of investigation for social and biological scientists, and objective research on that topic has been undermined since its onset by biases of this kind. It is interesting that many cultures are much more focused on competition over who is smarter than they are on who is better at athletics, music, or manual skills.
On the other hand, a more significant problem in the U.S. is the fact that our schools are not doing a good job of teaching children how to read and do basic math. It is not necessary to have an IQ at the upper end of the human distribution to learn how to read, so the fact that many white kids are performing at below average levels and many black kids are doing even worse is probably not attributable primarily to innate differences in intelligence between groups. If all the kids with average ability were learning and performing as well as they could ideally do, most would be doing well enough to earn a living. Differences in intelligence at the upper end of the range have less impact on the well being of the population generally, and in my opinion, less impact on the advancement of women and minorities.
Yes I agree. The the majority of public schools still refuse to use phonics only to teach reading many are hung up on the whole word method and combine it with the side dish of phonics this does not work I remember how thrilled I was in the third grade or so when I learned to sound out words and understood the meaning they let me loose in the library and my life has been beautiful
Sending warm thoughts to you as you rest your back, Glenn. Get well soon.
I don’t see the point in this research. Any individual can be much higher or lower than the mean of his/her group. In society we should address people as individuals.
So sorry to hear your back is acting up. Take it easy, Glenn. I look forward to watching this and to having you back when the time is right.
"there would still be a debate on how to remedy the resulting ill effects"
There's a lot in that to mull over:
1. We are seeing "ill effects" right now with the current blank slate worldview.
2. The research indicates Asians have an IQ 1/2 std deviation above "whites." I think that's probably in the ballpark and fully accept it. Is that a problem in need of a "remedy"? As a white person, I say no. It is what it is.
3. Does "remedy" mean a new political narrative that maintains a faithful voting bloc? Is the current avoidance and taboo nothing more than a political strategy?
Consider the following friendly amendment to my statement:
"Even if there were an agreed-upon answer on the origins of group differences in intelligence, there would still be a debate on WHETHER AND how to remedy the resulting ill effects..." Neither whether nor how is a purely scientific question. That's my point...
Dr. Loury, thanks for the response. A very pleasant surprise!
That takes care of most of my objections. I still wonder, though, how much of the non-scientific part comes down to, or would come down to, crass political calculation rather than well-intended leadership or governance. And I sincerely believe the nation today contends with, courtesy of the prevailing narrative, ill effects that are not nothing.
I have not yet started reading it, but I have a copy of your book. Good luck with your back as you continue to recover. Please take care of yourself. A lot of us are quite fond of you.
I'm more than halfway through Glenn's memoir and it's utterly absorbing. It's definitely one of my favorite books in recent years and makes me wonder what Thomas Sowell's similarly distinguished memoir would've been like had he taken the same candid approach to detailing his personal life that Glenn did in his book.
Likewise wishing Glenn the best. You're a national treasure Glenn!
I think actually that many if not most of the people who have focused their careers on raising the academic performance of kids in lower income majority black neighborhoods have been very well intentioned. "The soft bigotry of low expectations" was no doubt present in some liberal white people who spent a lot of their energy on improving education, income and so on for black kids. There are many examples, though, of white, black and "other" individuals who have had incredible passion for educating kids from poor families and neighborhoods.
I hate seeing kids fail at basic skills when it seems like we ought to be able to do something about that. But this isn't my area of expertise.
Take care of your back! I consider you a national treasure and we need you to carry on.
I haven't yet listened to this discussion, but even before I do I question the whole premise of a single intelligence by which people can be measured. Years ago, the Harvard psychology prof Howard Gardiner developed the theory of multiple intelligences (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_multiple_intelligences), which I think is generally accepted by now. These intelligence types are individual, not racial, though I suppose there may be some racial correlation. But it seems obvious that we need them all, and none is superior to or more important than another.
So sorry to hear about your back acting up, Glenn. Fingers crossed it's brief and your healing resumes!
The theory of multiple intelligences has been widely discredited by everyone from Charles Murray to James Flynn. The different types of intelligences have been shown to be highly correlated (implying G), and they don't predict anything beyond what they measure. IQ tests taken at 15 can predict how good of a Mathematician you can be in 20 years. Testing your musical ability, and then predicting your musical ability doesn't tell us anything.
Glenn, I don’t always agree with you but I always appreciate your truth-seeking efforts. This is a great episode. As another person suffering from one of God’s worst creations, I hope your back gets better soon.
If we accept IQ as a meaningful human evaluator, and we also look at the apparent IQ of the average 'Palestinian'adult (according to sources cited on Jordan Peterson's YouTube channel), then is it realistic to think of these people as responsible citizens in a '2 state solution'?
Isn't this the exact same kind of reasoning that Europeans used back in the day to justify colonialism? I'm sure the same thing was said about Africans, that their supposedly lower inherent capabilities somehow justified the system of European colonialism perpetuated upon Africa during the late 19th and early 20th centuries
Given that Israel is often accused of settler colonialism, I'm not sure it's to the benefit of your position to so publicly go down this particular ideological path. National IQ may indeed be correlated with the productivity and success of countries around the world, but I'm not sure I see it as a moral justification to deprive any particular group of people of their right to self-determination.
So then don't accept IQ as an evaluator. You might check out Jordan Peterson's website on this subject; my take was that as a biological matter, there is a lower limit on intelligence that precludes a population from meaningful self-governance. I recognize that no one wants to hear that.
I'm not sure what you mean by IQ as an evaluator. National IQ may indeed be correlated with group level productivity and success, including quality of governance. I'm not sure I see that as a moral justification though for depriving certain groups of individuals the right to self determination. Even Charles Murray advocates for equality of treatment while acknowledging the very real possibility of biologically determined group differences. It sounds like you're literally advocating for the restoration of colonialism.
It's certainly possible that various countries around the world would actually be better off under a form of neocolonialism, but again I'm not sure this is the moral stance one wants to take in this day and age. In fact your very argument validates what many critics of Israel's war in Gaza have pointed out, that many in the West view Palestinians as less than and thus don't value Palestinian lives to the same extent they do Western lives.
It's clear to me that you don't view Palestinians as fully human in the same way you do Americans or Israelis given your morally objectionable line of argumentation. The idea that these people are too dumb and savage to rule themselves is literally what racist whites said about Blacks in this country back in the day, so again I'm not sure this is the sort of stance one wants to take vis-a-vis Israel and Palestinians.
I appreciate this straightforward and logical response.
Are you argunig that the profoundly retarded should be allowed to vote or to hold government office? If not, and if that reasoning can be applied to a population, then it's doubtful that such a population could form a responsible government. If those facts apply to Palestinians, or to any other group, so be it. Personal insults or demagoguing the issue won't change the facts.