Charles Murray’s just-published Facing Reality: Two Truths About Race in America is an elegantly brief (168 pages) essay devoted to summarizing the great mass of evidence for the existence and persistence of significant racial differences in two areas: 1) cognitive ability, aka intelligence, and 2) violent crime rates. Taken together, this evidence is irrefutable, and informed experts have pretty well given up contesting it. In dramatic contrast, public debate has actually gone backwards ince Murray co-authored The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life in 1994. He hopes his politely rational arguments can change that—or that the Ruling Class will heed his warning about a white backlash. Too bad he’s wrong.
Facing Reality was inspired by the slogans of “systemic racism” and “white privilege” popularized by the Black Lives Matter movement in the summer of 2020. It is Murray’s patient attempt to explain to anyone who will listen just why such incendiary charges “float free of reality,” in the words of the front jacket flap.
Murray’s focus is limited to the USA, yet he refers to American whites as “Europeans” and American blacks as “Africans.” This is due not to any recent conversion to racial nationalism, but because he hopes a more clinical terminology will “make it easier to look at some inflammatory issues with at least a little more dispassion.”
Good luck with that.)
Concerning cognitive ability, Murray concentrates on demonstrating three points:
When Africans, Asians, Europeans and Latins take tests that are related to cognitive ability, their group results have different means. Race differences between Africans and Europeans in cognitive test scores narrowed significantly during the 1970s and 1980s, but the narrowing stopped three decades ago.
Scores on today’s most widely used standardized tests, whether of cognitive ability or academic achievement, pass the central test of fairness: They do not underpredict the performance of lower-scoring groups in the classroom or on the job.[21]
Hundreds of studies on these matters have been performed. Murray limits himself to those involving nationally representative samples, measures of both verbal and mathematical (or visuo-spatial) abilities, and test takers no younger than twelve.
A mix of IQ tests, National Longitudinal Studies, and National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) tests meet these three criteria. For tests performed during the last decade or so, the results are as follows: