Home Truths Continued: Race And Realism

     For those who haven’t been listening, or were far away the last 999 times, I’ll say it again, in bold and italicized font: I am a racist. That is: I see statistical differences among the anthropologically recognized races, some of which become significant, even determinative, in specific circumstances. This admission makes me one of the Commentariat’s Untouchables, someone the “good folks” strive to avoid. You know, like John Derbyshire.

     Recently the au courant term for my sort of miscreant is race realist: the assertion that we who dare to speak of what we see are merely being realistic about what we see. It’s a bit redundant – “realist,” a highly inclusive term, would have sufficed – but these days everyone and his halfwit second cousin Delbert seems to be a bit repetitive and redundant.

     In this connection, the cited passage from the Urban Dictionary is illuminating:

     To be realistic & understand that stereotypes within each race exist for a reason and are usually backed by hard data. To understand that although facts surrounding a particular race can sometimes be hard to hear, it's still a fact, therefore it is more valid than how you feel.

Ex 1:
     Timmy: Some guy just robbed that convenience store! What do you think is his ethnicity?
     Alex: Race realism-speaking, probably black. After all, they do commit around 50% of our nation's crimes, despite only making up 13% of the population.

     Let’s make the chain of inferences in the above into a syllogism:

Given: American blacks commit 50% of America’s felony crimes.
Hypothesis: The convenience store on the corner was just robbed.
Inference: The probability that the robber was black is 50%.

     Pretty simple, eh? And not at all controversial...unless you’re a social-justice warrior snowflake who insists that when a black man commits a crime, it’s “society’s fault,” or “the legacy of slavery,” or “white capitalist oppression,” or some other such evasion, and that therefore...

     Therefore what? Can such an a posteriori rationale invalidate the statistic? Is there some method of calculation that could change the numbers? More important yet, would any conceivable exculpation change the inference law-abiding citizens would draw?

     Though I’m confident that there are exceptions, the implication of the statistic is clear: Preponderantly black areas will tend to be higher-crime areas. They will be places where the passer-by is exposed to heightened risks to life and property. They will be places where businesses will suffer increased costs due to pilferage and open robbery. Should racial tensions be inflamed in any way, commercial institutions in a black area will be in extreme danger of being trashed or burned out.

     The police know it. Parents know it. Business owners know it. Insurers know it. And you know it, no matter what race you are. It’s in the data.

     A realist of any sort must respect the data.

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     There are inferences possible from the data above that cannot be proved or disproved beyond question. In the usual case, the arguments will be over whether statistical differences among the races arise from environmental conditions – including cultural influences – or from genetics – meaning from race itself.

     What’s generally not addressed in such disputes, in part because it’s an intractable subject, is the influence of environmental factors on genetics through natural selection.

     Man is both an adaptable creature and an adapting creature. Lacking tools, energy, and the required knowledge, he adapts to his environment, though the process might take many generations as environmental conditions select for the characteristics best suited to those conditions. In that case, genetic traits will emerge over time that reflect the environment that produced them. They might not become dominant in the Mendelian sense, but they will come to outnumber the environmentally disfavored characteristics, because they’ll have sufficient longevity to propagate themselves through reproduction.

     However, when and where Man possesses the tools, energy, and knowledge required, he’ll alter the environment to suit what he already is, whether slightly or dramatically. In that case, Man himself will change genetically less quickly and less dramatically, if at all. He’s made it unnecessary to adapt himself by adapting the environment.

     When a people that has adapted over the millennia to set of conditions X migrates to a region where conditions X do not hold, the adaptation process might logically be expected to change. The migrants would begin to adapt to the conditions of their new homes. This, of course, assumes the usual “all other things being equal” proviso. But all other things are seldom equal:

• The migrants probably possess a different level of energy, tools, and knowledge than their forebears;
• They must compete with the previous residents of their new environment, who are better adapted to it;
• The previous residents will almost certainly attempt to co-adapt to their new neighbors.

     The analytical complexity is staggering. The outcome cannot be foreseen. Only one thing is certain: things will change, for both the previous residents and the migrants.

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     Political factors are environmental factors. They can accelerate or retard the adaptation of migrants to their new homes. Over the century behind us, they’ve usually retarded the necessary changes, doing immense damage to everyone involved.

     Many who argue that our racial disparities arise entirely from cultural differences are also involved in political activism for policies that retard the necessary adaptation. They defend those policies as “respect for another culture,” which is baldly idiotic. If the differences between the “domestic” culture and the “imported” culture of the migrants are the drivers of crime and interracial animosity, then the “imported” culture must be expunged. Exactly the opposite has occurred: political forces have perpetuated – even celebrated! — the African cultures that migrating blacks brought with them to America. This suggests that the proselytizers of the “it’s all about culture” explanation are either idiots or insincere. Notwithstanding the old axiom that one must never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity, it’s been going on for too long, and has been championed by persons too obviously intelligent, as demonstrated by their performances in other fields.

     Leftists’ cries for a mindless, nation-destroying “tolerance” have only grown louder as interracial animosity has worsened and voluntary racial segregation has intensified. They persist in blaming the uninvolved – law-abiding American whites – for the criminality, profligacy, and irresponsibility prominent among American blacks. The message has come through loud and clear to both peoples: Whites must not hold blacks accountable for their choices or actions. Both peoples have responded accordingly.

     It can’t all be put down to stupidity. It implies a sinister agenda, especially among the strategists and kingpins of the Left.

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     The home truth I’m hammering here is a simple one. Indeed, it’s so simple that were the subject anything but race, it would occasion no dispute whatsoever:

What you penalize will decrease.
What you tolerate will continue.
What you reward will increase.

     If the price of insisting on something so obvious is being called a “racist,” I can handle it. Over my sixty-five years I’ve been called, in the idiom of a friend, “everything but white.” In any event, I’d rather be known as a racist than as a BLEEP!ing idiot.