There are so many fallacies about race that it would be hard to
say which is the most ridiculous. However, one fallacy behind many
other fallacies is the notion that there is something unusual about
different races being unequally represented in various
institutions, careers, or at different income or achievement
levels.
A hundred years ago, the fact that people from different racial
backgrounds had very different rates of success in education, in
the economy and in other endeavors, was taken as proof that some
races were genetically superior to others.
Some races were considered to be so genetically inferior that
eugenics was proposed to reduce their reproduction, and Francis
Galton urged “the gradual extinction of an inferior race.”
It was not a bunch of fringe cranks who said things like this.
Many held Ph.D.s from the leading universities, taught at the
leading universities and were internationally renowned.
Presidents of Stanford University and of MIT were among the many
academic advocates of theories of racial inferiority — applied
mostly to people from Eastern and Southern Europe, since it was
just blithely assumed in passing that blacks were inferior.
This was not a left-right issue. The leading crusaders for
theories of genetic superiority and inferiority were iconic figures
on the left, on both sides of the Atlantic.
John Maynard Keynes helped create the Cambridge Eugenics
Society. Fabian socialist intellectuals H.G. Wells and George
Bernard Shaw were among many other leftist supporters of
eugenics.
It was much the same story on this side of the Atlantic.
President Woodrow Wilson, like many other Progressives, was solidly
behind notions of racial superiority and inferiority. He showed the
movie Birth of a Nation, glorifying the Ku Klux Klan, at
the White House, and invited various dignitaries to view it with
him.
Such views dominated the first two decades of the 20th century.
Now fast forward to the last few decades of the 20th century. The
political left of this era was now on the opposite end of the
spectrum on racial issues. Yet they too regarded differences in
outcomes among racial and ethnic groups as something unusual,
calling for some single, sweeping explanation.
Now, instead of genes being the overriding reason for
differences in outcomes, racism became the one-size-fits-all
explanation. But the dogmatism was the same. Those who dared to
disagree, or even to question the prevailing dogma in either era
were dismissed — as “sentimentalists” in the Progressive era and
as “racists” in the multicultural era.
Both the Progressives at the beginning of the 20th century and
the liberals at the end started from the same false premise —
namely, that there is something unusual about different racial and
ethnic groups having different achievements.
Yet some racial or ethnic minorities have owned or directed more
than half of whole industries in many nations. These have included
the Chinese in Malaysia, Lebanese in West Africa, Greeks in the
Ottoman Empire, Britons in Argentina, Indians in Fiji, Jews in
Poland, and Spaniards in Chile — among many others.
Not only different racial and ethnic groups, but whole nations
and civilizations, have had very different achievements for
centuries. China in the 15th century was more advanced than any
country in Europe. Eventually Europeans overtook the Chinese — and
there is no evidence of changes in the genes of either of them.
Among the many reasons for different levels of achievement is
something as simple as age. The median age in Germany and Japan is
over 40, while the median age in Afghanistan and Yemen is under 20.
Even if the people in all four of these countries had the same
mental potential, the same history, the same culture — and the
countries themselves had the same geographic features — the fact
that people in some countries have 20 years more experience than
people in other countries would still be enough to make equal
economic and other outcomes virtually impossible.
Add the fact that different races evolved in different
geographic settings, presenting very different opportunities and
constraints on their development, and the same conclusion
follows.
Yet the idea that differences in outcomes are odd, if not
sinister, has been repeated mindlessly from street corner
demagogues to the august chambers of the Supreme Court.
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