from American Renaissance,
I am the child of two professors, who are, like most of their profession, dogmatically multiculturalist. From 1993 to 2002, I was a graduate student in comparative literature, and when I started out, I agreed with the Marxist, deconstructionist, multiculturalist intellectual orientation of the field. Although I soon began to be irritated by the mindless celebration of diversity, the lack of intellectual rigor, and the obscurantism of my field, it was not until much later that I started seriously to doubt the orthodox view of race that is at the basis of all contemporary work in literary studies.
Race is a major preoccupation of today’s literary critics. Look at any one of the countless introductions to literary theory, and you will find at least one chapter devoted to work on the representation of race in literature. Such literary criticism, whose premises are unchallenged within the field, is devoted to exposing the ways in which whites have misrepresented people of other races in the interests of dominating them. For literary critics, racial differences are entirely the result of our cultural history, and they see it as their duty to change our culture in ways that will make these differences disappear.
My shift away from racial orthodoxy began when I became familiar with evolutionary psychology, the field that argues that all aspects of human behavior have an innate cause and that culture merely influences the unfolding of our innate nature. I began to go to conferences and read Internet discussion groups that dealt with evolutionary psychology. J. P. Rushton, Glayde Whitney, and Charles Murray regularly posted on Ian Pitchford’s evolutionary psychology listserv, where other research on human racial differences, such as that of Richard Lynn, was discussed. I read some of the books of these thinkers. Although I felt a bemused revulsion for them at first, I soon came to realize how plausible they were. I read other books about the links between genetics and behavior, and learned that all human personality traits show substantial heritability; even how we hold our hands, how often we laugh, and the strength of our religious beliefs appear to be heritable.
So, when you see that there is an average difference of 15 points between the IQs of American whites and American blacks, and of 25 points between American whites and African blacks, the conclusion that at least some of this variance must be due to biology naturally follows. The same conclusion follows from the large and well-documented variances between whites and blacks in criminal behavior. I started to realize that my culture is founded on a massive denial of the truth that is sustained by what must be the most pervasive and successful propaganda campaign in history.
I began to notice confirmations of the ideas of the “racist scientists” in the world around me. For example, as J. P. Rushton shows, blacks are higher in self-esteem than whites and willing to deny the most obvious facts about the world in order to maintain their high opinions of themselves. I witnessed a striking instance of this trait. I taught an English composition class, and I had many black students. A few were decent, and a very few even outstanding students, but most were not. About half were abysmally dull and unteachable, but they had no problems finding ways to blame me for their troubles.
Slowly, I came to realize the true meaning of black culture. Although I live in a neighborhood of downtown Buffalo that is still majority-white, the ghettoes are very close, and one feels their influence everywhere. Blacks had heckled me many times, had bullied me once, and even mugged me once. But I had not reflected on these experiences before I started reading about race. I now became fully conscious of the insecurity and disgust that my neighborhood inspired in me. Blacks were the primary reasons for these feelings, but I found the Hispanics and Arabs who also congregated in my neighborhood scarcely better.
I also began to notice the genetic deterioration in our society. My neighborhood thronged with the retarded, alcoholics, drug addicts, and the homeless, who were housed in downtown “group homes.” It added to the offense that rich bureaucrats who lived in upper-class neighborhoods would put these people in my midst and keep them away from their own homes. It horrified me that these people might be reproducing. I am amazed that people consider eugenic sterilization inhumane, but don’t consider it inhumane to subject residents of downtown neighborhoods to a parade of freaks.
Were these people—the blacks, Arabs, Hispanics, the handicapped, and the homeless—making my life richer and more vibrant, as liberal propaganda claimed they were? I had been inclined to think so before. I had thought it rather romantic to live in such a cosmopolitan environment, and I had even taken a sort of pleasure in the presence of freaks. But I came to realize that I had never genuinely enjoyed the daily sight of these people; they were offensive, discouraging, and alienating. The vibrancy and richness that remained came from the white people who were still clinging to their downtown neighborhoods.
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