Interesting piece of news: the University of Pennsylvania’s Black Law Student Association (BLSA) held a panel discussion last week titled, “Revisiting Race and Remedies: Should the Government Play A Role in Eliminating Racial Disparities in Education and Employment?“
A search for mainstream media news articles about the panel turned up nothing. Of the four panelists, John Derbyshire has written about the discussion (online, at least). Derbyshire is a believer in human biodiversity (HBD); that is, there are biological differences between races that “can’t be legislated out of existence; nor can they be ‘eliminated’ by social or political action.”
HBD is controversial, and it’s quite amazing that the organizers invited Derbyshire to participate. Physical differences between the races are obvious and readily admitted, but mental differences, well, we’re not supposed to acknowledge or talk about those. But people like Derbyshire, “racial realists,” do talk and write about the topic. At National Review Online’s The Corner blog, he said this about the event:
“It wasn’t actually very exciting. The main point of the thing was indeed to chew over Amy Wax’s new book. The argument of the book, very briefly, is that what can be done in law, politics, and social engineering to make amends for slavery and Jim Crow has been done, and the rest is up to African Americans themselves.”
On his web site, Derbyshire posted his remarks that the government should not play a role in eliminating disparities between the races, because it can’t. He says the differences are “natural” and “intractable.”
You can imagine how his presentation went over. Derbyshire said his 10-minute remarks were “followed by a sort of stunned silence, into which Madame Moderator [preferences proponent Dr. Camille Zubrinsky Charles] interjected the remark that ‘Mr. Derbyshire is here as a private guest of Prof. Wax, not at the invitation of the BLSA.’ This was not true. BLSA invited me, and I have the email trail to prove it. To his credit, David Williams, the BLSA officer who’d invited me, came up afterwards and apologized for the immoderate demeanor of our ‘moderator.’”
Impressive, but Williams’s apology would have had a greater impact if uttered during the discussion.
Part of the reason racial preferences exist is disparities between preferred minorities (blacks, Hispanics, American Indians) and whites and non-preferred minorities (certain Asians) exist. Racial preferences (euphemistically called affirmative action) are designed to artificially narrow the disparities.
As painful as some topics may be to publicly air, they need to be aired. Let’s assume for a moment that biology (genetics) is the basis for racial differences, and the differences are intractable. Do the biological component and intractability justify lowering standards for blacks, or should the government strive to achieve and put into practice race-neutral standards for all, despite differences between racial groups?
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