This social-science thesis has _nothing to do with race_. Imagine an alternate history where humans never [migrated across the Bering land bridge](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Settlement_of_the_Americas) to become Native Americans, and where the [Atlantic slave trade](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_slave_trade) never happened, such that, in this alternate world, European explorers found a continent empty of humans and founded a civilization that was monoracial from the start, unable to oppress and exploit blacks and Native Americans who simply weren't present.
-In that world, _most_ of _The Bell Curve_ (so infamous in our world for its reputed racism) could be published unchanged! Most of the analysis is strictly about differences _between_ different white people, in order to avoid potential confounding by racial issues. (Thus, _Coming Apart_ is subtitled _The State of White America, 1960–2010_, not that this would endear Murray to progressives who don't understand the anti-confounding rationale for studying "white America" (!) and wouldn't be caught dead reading the book.)
+In that world, _most_ of _The Bell Curve_ (so infamous in our world for its reputed racism) could be published unchanged! Most of the analysis is strictly about differences _between_ different white people, in order to avoid potential confounding by racial issues. (Thus, _Coming Apart_ is subtitled _The State of White America, 1960–2010_—not that this does anything to endear Murray to progressives who don't understand the anti-confounding rationale for studying "white America" (!) and wouldn't be caught dead reading the book.)
I mean, yes, there are those two chapters in _The Bell Curve_ about ethnic differences in IQ, and two chapters on affirmative action—I can see why people are pissed about _that_—but there's so much more to the man's work than that! Even 2020's _Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class_ (that subtitle!!) was much more muted than what a racialist ideologue would have written: the race section mostly just covers the Science of SNP frequencies while punting with "More research is needed" about what population differences in SNP frequencies _mean_; the visibility of the two pages of discussion on the interpretation of ethnic differences in IQ is reduced by discreetly tucking it away into footnote 4 of the "class" section.
[TODO: the police getting the wrong guy of the same race is the kind of thing that would contribute to structural racism—if the System is going to treat you interchangeably anyway, that changes your incentives]
-Another source of data for triangulation is in reports of crimes _to_ the police: crime _victims_ might not be racist in the same way the police themselves are—and it turns out that even black and Latino _victims_ report more black and Latino perpretrators, even in neighborhood where they are an minority.
+Another source of data for triangulation is in reports of crimes _to_ the police: crime _victims_ might not be racist in the same way the police themselves are—and it turns out that even black and Latino victims report more black and Latino perpretrators, even in neighborhoods where they are an minority.
[TODO: summarize chapter on first-order effects of IQ]
[TODO: summarize chapter on first-order effects of crime]
-Murray wraps up with a chapter on "If We Don't Face Reality." The
+Murray wraps up with a chapter on "If We Don't Face Reality." The facts of IQ and crime differences don't imply any particular policy, but Murray wants researchers to at least be able to control IQ as an independent variable, and for the targets of our ongoing Cultural Revolution to offer a little more resistance. Moreover, Murray contends, identity politics is an existential threat to the American system: it was one thing when just minorities thought of themselves as collective interest groups, but if the white working class picks up the same playbook, then the ideal of individualism will be truly lost within the tides of ethnic conflict. Murray identifies eliminating government-sponsored affirmative action as politically impossible, "not within our grasp", but that a partial solution would be for those on the center-left and center-right to reaffirm the American creed and the goal of equality before the law.
+
+To me, this seems ... pretty naïve? I _also_ feel a lot of affection and loyalty to the previous ideological regime, but what made equality before the law such an effective marketing promise was the unstated premise that it would lead to, you know, _actual_ equality. If that's _empirically not true_, and people _aren't_ actually colorblind—if people notice ethnicity as a cluster in high-dimensional configuration space and tend to care more about people "like us"—then the classic ideal of individualist egalitarianism
+
+That bell can't be unrung.
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projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff