An Open Letter to Steven Sailer
Steven Sailer is a journalist and blogger who has made a reputation for himself for claiming that African-Americans and Mexicans are less intelligent than white people and Asians, for the mere fact of their race. He often cites obsolete and long disproven research to make his case. While I have chosen to address this open letter to Sailer, it presents an open question to all peddlers of scientific racism.
Dear Mr. Steven Sailer,
You are a very dangerous man.
Most of the time, people I argue with about race (and the alleged qualitative differences between races) are ill-equipped for the fight, and their arguments are easily defeated. This is mostly because they argue from an emotional platform — justifying venomous preconceptions because of personal grievances without examining the non-facts that underpin them. The pretentious and self-proclaimed intellectuals amongst them argue on the basis of ancient and obsolete scholarship — indeed straight out of the Carleton S. Coon school of anthropology.
You, on the other hand, seem to be a member of that intellectual elite who have studied to some degree the current biological/genetic/anthropological literature, and who comes out on what I’d consider the “wrong side” of the debate. But because you have studied the literature, your arguments — probably wasted on the majority of your audience, who lack the intelligence to understand them — are difficult to defeat because the jury is still out on the real genetic differences between groups
I am not a geneticist, or a biologist, or an anthropologist, although I studied each of these subjects superficially. But like you, I have read enough to sustain my argument against the lesser of those who purport qualitative differences between races, and have launched something of a crusade against the entire institution of race. However, when I cross paths with people like you, I recognize that my relatively meager knowledge of genetics, biology, and anthropology may not hold up in a debate. I may be called on the actual scholarship that supports the concept of race and any necessary differences between them. I am not yet up to the task, and would probably call upon Richard Lewontin, Stephen Jay Gould, and Ashley Montague to bolster my defense, only to get lost in the details.
So, rather than argue with you about whether I am somehow genetically inferior as an “African-American”, whether or not my “race” makes me inherently less intelligent, lazier, or more prone to violence as you have suggested both implicitly and explicitly at different times, I will pose these questions instead.
For all the studies that purport to show the statistical differences in test scores, school performance, degrees held, income, and whatever other American contrivance believed to determine a person’s worth — between African-Americans, Euro-Americans, Asians, and other groups, what is the end goal? Let’s say that the arguments about race and genetics and intelligence come to an end in the face of irrefutable proof that African-Americans (or Mexicans or any other “group”) are on the whole “less intelligent” than Euro-Americans.
Okay, fine. Then what? What will that finding have accomplished? Is the ultimate goal — as seems to be the case in books like The Bell Curve — to justify racism?
And if we’re going to cite genetic/biological/otherwise-inherent reasons for apparent intelligence deficiencies corresponding to race, then shouldn’t we start examining other things, too? Like the far more widespread — spatially and temporally — tendencies of “white people” to conquer, plunder, rape, oppress, steal, exploit, and destroy anything they come into contact with? The “evidence” for this is far more robust than what ill-motivated intelligence testing demonstrates. There is literally no place on earth where Europeans expanded that they did not do one or all of the above — except for Anarctica — which escaped on the basis of its uninhabitability. There were no people to destroy there.
If this is a truism all across the globe and all throughout history, perhaps we should examine “white people’s” genetic predispositions towards complete and utter savagery. And in the end, if the purpose of evaluating “intelligence” is to then make a qualitative assessment between perceived races, or worse to dehumanize one or the other, then let us ask ourselves which is less “human” — being “less intelligent” or being savage and hateful destroyers of peoples and the environment?
Being someone who wishes to abolish the entire concept and institution of race, these can’t be positions that I hold with any conviction. However, within the context of the discussion of race’s validity and qualitative differences between groups, are these not fair questions? I think so.
These questions mandate some new perspective, particularly on what our individual intentions are in even debating race issues. Mine are to see a world where human relationships are defined by our common values, our common goals, our common humanity. And where we differ to learn to understand, appreciate, or at the very least accept those differences.
How about you, Mr. Sailer? What are your intentions?