Mike Whitney Interview with Ron Unz
Let’s talk about race, but let’s focus on the thorniest issue of all: Race and IQ.
Can you summarize the issue so that readers understand what we’re talking about and explain why it is such a prickly topic?
Ron Unz—For various reasons, there are few topics more taboo in modern American society than the notion of racial differences. Meanwhile, intelligence testing—the use of IQ exams to measure mental ability—is also extremely taboo these days. Therefore, the combination of race and IQ is a particularly dangerous subject, almost completely avoided by those unwilling to risk a firestorm of attacks on social media or the destruction of their careers.
As a consequence, the vast majority of Americans, including our educated elites, never get any serious or neutral exposure to Race/IQ issues, even if the “forbidden fruit” aspect of the topic might occasionally draw some of them to the fringes of the Internet where the subject is still sometimes discussed.
The landmark Civil Rights Act was passed nearly six decades ago, and since then the notion of racial equality in ability has been enshrined as an absolutely fundamental assumption of our society. Rather than merely being a scientific conclusion based upon empirical research, it has become a central ideological belief, more like a moral axiom or the basic tenet of a religious faith, whose truth transcends any evidence. If particular racial or ethnic minority groups are under-represented in elite university admissions or over-represented in crime and poverty, the only possible explanation is the failure or malice of the larger society rather than the intrinsic characteristics of the groups themselves.
More and more American institutions, including those responsible for education and law enforcement, now operate under this fundamental assumption of racial equality and the recent tidal wave of “wokeness” merely represents the latest manifestations. This situation may produce insurmountable difficulties if that assumption happens to be misaligned with reality. Back in 2013 I closed a long article on some of these issues with the following paragraph:
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