Henry, William. In Defense of Elitism . New York: Anchor, 1994: 70-1

In truth, we don't know whether there are racial differences in intelligence because we don't want to find out. Research into the subject is taboo because, if it turns out that there are such differences, we have no means of handling the political implications. When I say the topic is taboo, I mean really taboo. A tenured professor at the University of Delaware was threatened with the loss of her job a few years ago for even considering taking a grant-to study entirely different matters related to heredity-from a foundation that had "tainted" itself by underwriting past research into racial differences.

The same willful ignorance is true in matters of gender. It is an axiom of the women's movement that ability of men and women is equal, not only in the aggregate but in all subcategories of intelligence (except, perhaps, for the ill-defined "women's intuition" that even many ardent feminists tend to claim as an asset for their sex). When men perform better on mathematical tests and women on verbal ones, this divergence is treated as proof per se of unequal socialization, not of any thing inherent. That may well be right, but we don't know because our government is unwilling to fund massive, truly objective studies of the subject, and nearly all private research is colored by some political agenda.

Most of the past two decades of civil rights litigation have depended on the assumption that unequal results in the allocation of society's goodies automatically prove that the process for allotting them is unjust. If researchers demonstrated that racial or gender differences exist (I personally suspect they don't, but who really knows?), that rationale would obviously be invalidated. What would be the next step? To adjust the quotas downward by some debatable percentage? To throw them out altogether? To create some vast improvement scheme for minorities and women (or for white men, if it turns out they are the weaker performers)? Or perhaps, in keeping with the egalitarian spirit of our age, to declare that ability is not the prime criterion for employment anyway? Without resolving whether racial prejudice is still holding blacks down or whether preference quotas are buoying them up-both are probably true, sometimes for the same individual-or whether any one person's talent is equal to his appointed task, we can say that a closer analysis of black economic experience suggests that the real problem has less to do with race than with the culture of poverty. In Paved With Good Intentions: The Failure of Race Relations in Contemporary America, Jared Taylor reports on economic research demonstrating that blacks and whites "who grew up under the same circumstances and went on to get similar educations show no difference in their average incomes." Among others, Taylor cites black scholar Walter Williams of George Mason University, who says that data about the comparable earnings of black and white women college graduates are "one of the best-kept secrets of all time and virtually totally ignored in the literature on racial differences." Taylor quotes Thomas Sowell, a black economist at the Hoover Institution, who says, "There is a positive hostility to analyses of black success if they suggest that racism may not be the cause of black failure." Taylor notes that while the black population doubled between 1950 and 1990, the number of black white-collar workers went up ninefold.

Carl Gutierrez-Jones,

Department of English

University of California

Santa Barbara, CA 93106

E-mail: carlgj@humanitas.ucsb.edu