Post by artraveler on Jun 18, 2021 10:24:40 GMT -8
Facing Reality
Two Truths About Race in America
Charles Murray
Charles Murray is the author of several controversial works including the Bell Curve and Coming Apart. In this short work he tackles the recent problems of race in America. He talks about the “rhetoric about “systemic racism” and the facts.” By facts, I mean what Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan meant: “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion but not to his own facts.” By reality, I mean what the science fiction novelist Philip Dick meant: “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.”
Murray does not dispute that racism exists, but he rejects the idea that American culture is systematically racist. Murray’s argument centers on two facts, and as a famous web site once proposed, “facts are stubborn things”.
” The first is that American Whites, Blacks, Latinos, and Asians, as groups, have different means and distributions of cognitive ability. The second is that American Whites, Blacks, Latinos, and Asians, as groups, have different rates of violent crime.” The rest of the book takes the reader through how and where these two facts are applied, or not, in our culture. Murray correctly asserts, “There is a reason that reality is ignored. The two facts make people excruciatingly uncomfortable. To raise them is to be considered a racist and hateful person.”
Keeping in mind the two facts Murray asserts that there is an American creed that used to be taught in schools and now sadly has fallen into disuse and even mocked. That creed is in the Declaration of Independence, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights….”
Our collective history as Americans is peppered with many examples of failure to live up to these ideals but it is also equally peppered with achievements over coming opposition to find the “better angels of our nature”. Murray spends the next five chapters discussing how and where success and failure continue to pester the American creed. As a sociologist he uses numbers and statistical methods to illustrate his points. One of which is that police do their jobs differently in high crime areas than they do in low crime areas, but it has nothing to do with race. It has everything to do with the threat to citizens and by extension to the officers. That is not to excuse officers who are racist and act on haltered, but the officers who are doing a difficult and dangerous job in an environment where every confrontation could be a deadly one.
On February 14 almost 100 years ago seven gangsters were murdered in a Chicago garage and the nation was outraged. More people were murdered on the Southside of Chicago last weekend, and it did not make national news. Can any reasonable person assume police do not take calls in these neighborhoods with more caution and aggressiveness then other? The area is a war zone, and the police force are undermanned and unequipped to do their jobs, but it has nothing to do with race.
In the final chapter Murray makes suggestions for researchers seeking answers, “I will be gratified if researchers are buffered from accusations of racism because they entered IQ scores as an independent variable in a regression equation.” Murray says that “Conservatives have been grumbling about the lack of ideological diversity on campuses for decades, and they have had reason to, but it’s time for conservative scholars to make common cause with their (classical) liberal colleagues. The new ideologues of the far left are akin to the Red Guards of Mao’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, and they are coming for all of us. The new Red Guards have been successful when it comes to racial issues because pushback from the victims has been so feeble. The pushback has been so feeble in part because no one has been willing to say, “The systemically racist America you portray doesn’t exist.””
Murray makes the case that identity politics is an existential threat to the American way of life and the only method is to return to the American creed and treat our fellow humans as individuals instead of members of groups or tribes.
This is a short book. I finished it in one sitting, but it is full of statical analyses of how and why we are at a dangerous point in our culture. We have often remarked that the regional and racial divides in our country seem worse now. In many respects those of us who remember the 60s feel times are as bad, if not worse. You won’t find yourself agreeing with Murray on every count but his conclusion and recommendation for solution is valid. We must find a way to return the American creed to the center of our culture or risk becoming another failed empire.
Two Truths About Race in America
Charles Murray
Charles Murray is the author of several controversial works including the Bell Curve and Coming Apart. In this short work he tackles the recent problems of race in America. He talks about the “rhetoric about “systemic racism” and the facts.” By facts, I mean what Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan meant: “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion but not to his own facts.” By reality, I mean what the science fiction novelist Philip Dick meant: “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.”
Murray does not dispute that racism exists, but he rejects the idea that American culture is systematically racist. Murray’s argument centers on two facts, and as a famous web site once proposed, “facts are stubborn things”.
” The first is that American Whites, Blacks, Latinos, and Asians, as groups, have different means and distributions of cognitive ability. The second is that American Whites, Blacks, Latinos, and Asians, as groups, have different rates of violent crime.” The rest of the book takes the reader through how and where these two facts are applied, or not, in our culture. Murray correctly asserts, “There is a reason that reality is ignored. The two facts make people excruciatingly uncomfortable. To raise them is to be considered a racist and hateful person.”
Keeping in mind the two facts Murray asserts that there is an American creed that used to be taught in schools and now sadly has fallen into disuse and even mocked. That creed is in the Declaration of Independence, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights….”
Our collective history as Americans is peppered with many examples of failure to live up to these ideals but it is also equally peppered with achievements over coming opposition to find the “better angels of our nature”. Murray spends the next five chapters discussing how and where success and failure continue to pester the American creed. As a sociologist he uses numbers and statistical methods to illustrate his points. One of which is that police do their jobs differently in high crime areas than they do in low crime areas, but it has nothing to do with race. It has everything to do with the threat to citizens and by extension to the officers. That is not to excuse officers who are racist and act on haltered, but the officers who are doing a difficult and dangerous job in an environment where every confrontation could be a deadly one.
On February 14 almost 100 years ago seven gangsters were murdered in a Chicago garage and the nation was outraged. More people were murdered on the Southside of Chicago last weekend, and it did not make national news. Can any reasonable person assume police do not take calls in these neighborhoods with more caution and aggressiveness then other? The area is a war zone, and the police force are undermanned and unequipped to do their jobs, but it has nothing to do with race.
In the final chapter Murray makes suggestions for researchers seeking answers, “I will be gratified if researchers are buffered from accusations of racism because they entered IQ scores as an independent variable in a regression equation.” Murray says that “Conservatives have been grumbling about the lack of ideological diversity on campuses for decades, and they have had reason to, but it’s time for conservative scholars to make common cause with their (classical) liberal colleagues. The new ideologues of the far left are akin to the Red Guards of Mao’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, and they are coming for all of us. The new Red Guards have been successful when it comes to racial issues because pushback from the victims has been so feeble. The pushback has been so feeble in part because no one has been willing to say, “The systemically racist America you portray doesn’t exist.””
Murray makes the case that identity politics is an existential threat to the American way of life and the only method is to return to the American creed and treat our fellow humans as individuals instead of members of groups or tribes.
This is a short book. I finished it in one sitting, but it is full of statical analyses of how and why we are at a dangerous point in our culture. We have often remarked that the regional and racial divides in our country seem worse now. In many respects those of us who remember the 60s feel times are as bad, if not worse. You won’t find yourself agreeing with Murray on every count but his conclusion and recommendation for solution is valid. We must find a way to return the American creed to the center of our culture or risk becoming another failed empire.
