The Pew Research Center conducted a survey, mostly in March and April this year, about Americans' attitudes to race relations. Results have just been published. The sample size wasn't impressive: 1,800 white respondents, 1,000 blacks, and a few hundred Hispanics; but the results agree with my own unsystematic observations.
Main takeaway: Serious disagreement between whites and blacks over how fairly blacks are treated, whether we shall ever get to racial equality, and the reasons for different statistical life outcomes between blacks and whites.
For example: Has our country made the changes — I assume they mean social changes — necessary to bring about racial equality? If it hasn't, will it ever?
Thirty-eight percent of whites but only eight percent of blacks think the changes have been made. Forty-three percent of blacks think the changes haven't been made and never will be; only eleven percent of whites think that.
And then this one. Question: Which of these is a major reason that some blacks have a harder time getting ahead? You get six possible major reasons listed, thus:
For a person of the stone-kicking persuasion like myself, the remarkable thing about this survey was its utter lack of any references to race realism — to the notion that different races are bound to express different statistical patterns on any heritable traits, which would include traits of behavior, intelligence, and personality.
If they had offered me that list, for example, the list of possible reasons some blacks have a harder time getting ahead, I would have declined to mark any of the possibilities offered. The major reason by far for all the statistical disparities between blacks and whites, as also between whites and East Asians, or between north-European white gentiles and Ashkenazi Jews, is that their ancestors followed different paths through evolutionary space. They're difference races, for crying out loud.
All right, you don't have to agree. I'm not a stupid guy, though, and I know a lot of other thoughtful, non-stupid people are race realists like myself. Couldn't the Pew people at least have asked? Is plain race realism really so far outside the boundaries of polite discourse? Even if you don't agree with it, doesn't it belong to the category of things that might be true, and that people think might contribute to different statistical outcomes?
And as has often been pointed out — it's a favorite theme of Jared Taylor's — if race realism is not the case, then black statistical underperformance can only be the result of white malignity. Isn't race realism a socially more healthy position? If the fault is not with Mother Nature, it must be with the white devils!
I guess there's something big that I'm just not getting here. I guess I must, after all, be pretty stupid.
