Speaking The Unspeakable

     Few indeed are the public voices willing to address the persistent cleavages between the black and white races. John Derbyshire is one:

     Given all that I just said, and supposing it was all correct, how do custodians of the state ideology explain the obvious issues that arise from race differences—for example, the huge and stubbornly persistent black-white gaps in criminality, educational attainment, and so on?

     The short answer is: They fall back on magic....

     You see this in our current official explanations for the social issues arising from race differences. “Institutional racism,” “stereotype threat,” “white privilege“: If you look closely at these concepts you see that they are essentially magical—mysterious emanations or vapors, invisible and unquantifiable, known only by their results, like the messages sent from the spirit world to a ouija board.

     In the past couple of decades we’ve seen the rise of one particular explanatory strategy. That strategy recently acquired a name—or possibly it’s had the name for a while and I only just recently noticed. Whatever, I really like the name: Magic Dirt.

     The core idea is that one’s physical surroundings—the bricks and mortar of the building you’re in, or the actual dirt you are standing on—emit invisible vapors that can change your personality, behavior, and intelligence.

     The entire article is eminently worth your reading time. Derbyshire, already famous – infamous? – for his ”The Talk: Nonblack Version,” respects the evidence too greatly to dismiss the persistent gaps between white and black achievement and criminality as the working of “magic dirt,” especially given that:

• The “bad dirt” of “bad schools,” “bad neighborhoods,” et cetera apparently cannot be counteracted by the “good dirt” made available through busing, forced neighborhood integration, et cetera;
• No conceivable experiment could be designed, one of the possible outcomes of which would falsify the “magic dirt” hypothesis.

     But how does one refute a hypothesis that can’t be falsified?

     One doesn’t. One either accepts it or rejects it on faith.

     If you’re feeling adventurous, ask the nearest left-liberal: “If faith has no place in a public school classroom, why is it being used as a justification for public policy?” Preferably from a safe distance, of course.

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     America, like the rest of the First World, has been thoroughly steeped in the notion that the preferential treatment of Negroes – in education, employment, public deportment, and criminal justice – is a moral imperative. But why? It’s a question that’s asked ever less often these days. Merely letting a shadow fall across your countenance when confronted by an advocate of race-based policies can get you pilloried as a “racist.” Their reaction to being questioned is an order of magnitude greater. As for contradicting them outright – e.g., by suggesting that they’re the racists for proposing such a thing – I’d advise you to have one hand on your wallet and the other on your gun.

     I’ve been on the receiving end of that sort of hostility ever since I first posted this essay. It taught me a priceless lesson, one that Victor Marguerite expressed with maximum drama:

     The Fascists cannot argue, so they kill.

     He who cannot support his convictions with evidence and reasoning will resort to violence as a matter of course. Perhaps he’ll restrict himself to rhetorical violence: denunciations and accusations of low motives. But there are some that don’t stop there. Unfortunately, by doing their foul deeds anonymously or from concealment, they get away with it more often than not.

     That’s the way some faiths “defend” themselves upon being rejected. Muslims do it. Radical feminists do it. Homosexual activists do it. Environmentalist radicals do it. Racial hatred promoters and preferential treatment hucksters most certainly do it. The supposed forces of order are notoriously lax about pursuing them for it.

     The consequence has been a blanket silencing of all objective discussion of racial cleavages:

• Whether they exist;
• Why they exist;
• Whether they’ve been redressed by any technique attempted to date;
• Whether they can be redressed by any technique that’s as yet untried;
• What the implications are for public policy on:
  • Immigration;
  • Education;
  • Governmental hiring and personnel policies;
  • “Public accommodations” laws;
  • “Affirmative Action” programs.

     The suppression of such discussions has brought us to where we are today.

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     John Derbyshire advocates race realism: i.e., the acceptance of race as a real thing with real consequences. Note that those who denounce him and other race realists will argue that “race is a social construct” right up to the point where they start demanding preferential treatment by race. Some are aware of the contradiction involved; others merely parrot them.

     Articles of faith -- pieties -- are only acceptable when they remain personal convictions that don’t engender actual violence. When they become mandates for militancy, blood starts to flow. When they become public standards with penalties for nonconformance, the trickles of blood turn into rivers.

     Race realism is up against a piety enforced as humorlessly as any State church. Similar pieties protect feminism, environmentalism, homosexuality, Islam, and several other au courant social pathologies. To speak against any of these things openly invites awakening to a horse’s severed head. Accordingly, many sensible persons won’t even whisper of their convictions to the contrary until assured by incontrovertible evidence that they’re in the company of others of like mind.

     In witness whereof, for speaking the unspeakable John Derbyshire, an intelligent, erudite, and articulate writer, for years one of the ornaments of National Review and conservative thought generally, has been disowned by the very persons his thinking could most benefit. And we lesser ones, many of us greatly in need of the data and analyses he has amassed, must hunt through the red-light districts of the Word Wide Web for his work.