Michael Levin - Why Race Matters: Race Differences and What They Mean

Other titles from New Century Books:

Jared Taylor, Ed., The Real American Dilemma: Race, Immigration, and the Future of America, 1998

George McDaniel, Ed., A Race Against Time: Racial Heresies for the 21st Century, 2003

Jared Taylor, Paved With Good Intentions: The Failure of Race Relations in Contemporary America, 2004

Also published by New Century Foundation:

American Renaissance (www.AmRen.com)

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Century
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Levin, Michael E.
Why race matters : race differences and what they mean / Michael Levin
p. cm.(Human evolution, behavior, and intelligence, ISSN 1063-2158)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-275-95789-6 (alk.paper)
1. Race. 2. Nature and nurture. 3. United StatesRace relations. 4. BlacksIntelligence levels. I. Title. II Series.
GN269.L49 1997
305.8dc20 96-36361

Initial copyright 1997 by Michael Levin
Copyright renewed 2005 by New Century Foundation, ISBN: 0-9656383-5-9

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 96-36361

Originally published in 1997 by Praeger Publishers

Printed in the United States of America
First New Century Books Edition

To Meg, Mark, and Eric

Ill teach you differences

King Lear I, iv.

Copyright Acknowledgments

The author and publisher gratefully acknowledge permission to use the following:

Hacker, Andrew, Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal. Copyright 1992, 1995 by Andrew Hacker. Excerpted with the permission of Scribner, a Division of Simon & Schuster, and reprinted by permission of the authors agent, Robin Straus Agency, Inc.

Rosenfeld, Michael, Affirmative Action and Justice (1991). Excerpts reprinted by permission of Yale University Press.

Gould, Stephen Jay, The Mismeasure of Man (1981). Copyright 1981 by Stephen Jay Gould. Excerpts reprinted by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

Levin, Michael, A Comment on the Minnesota Transracial Adoption Study, in Intelligence 19 (1994): 1320. Reprinted by permission of Case Western Reserve University.

Levin, Michael, Race, Biology and Justice, in Public Affairs Quarterly 8 (1994): 267285. Excerpted by permission.

Levin, Michael, Responses to Race Differences in Crime, Journal of Social Philosophy 23 (1992): 529. Excerpted by permission of Trinity University.

FIGURES

TABLES

A number of individuals scrupulously reviewed earlier drafts of this work, making literally thousands of stylistic and substantive suggestions, and saving me from many errors. For encouragement, advice and assistance, I wish to thank my wife Margarita, Joseph Fulda, Walter Block, Ed Gordon, Jared Taylor, Wallace Matson, Max Hocutt, Louis Pojman, J. P. Rushton, Seymour Itzkoff, Arthur Jensen, Linda Gottfredson, Shelby Hunt, C. D. Ankney, Glayde Whitney, David Harder, Ethan Akin, Neven Sesardic, Richard Herrnstein, Charles Murray, David Stove, Richard Lynn, and Thomas Bouchard. Criticisms offered by David Weissman helped me clarify my own thinking. Lynn Zelem and Pattie Steele did an invaluable job of editing. My computer-literate sons Mark and Eric helped with the tables and graphs, and rescued me from countless computer panics and crises.

This book was made possible by a grant from the Pioneer Fund, under the auspices of the City University of New York Research Foundation. I deeply appreciate their help.

by Jared Taylor

I first became aware of Michael Levin in 1988 when I read his book, Feminism and Freedom. It is a marvelous demonstration by a professor of philosophy doing what philosophers are supposed to do: apply the tools of rigorous thought to important and even controversial questions. I was so impressed by the quietly relentless way Prof. Levin demolished fashionable feminist arguments that, for the first time in my life, I wrote a fan letter to an author.

I got a replytyped by hand, as letters were in those days. It was so pleasant and informative that I saved it. On rereading it now, I am struck by this passage:

Ive toyed with the idea of a second edition. As you shrewdly surmised, the whole experience of writing F&F has been an extremely unpleasant onemade bearable by letters such as yoursand Im not sure I want to devote more of my life to such a thankless task as criticizing feminism.

In fact, over the years, Prof. Levin has devoted a great deal of his life to the thankless task of criticizing not just feminism but other fashionable ideologies with equally shrill and powerful defenders. Prof. Levin is one of the very, very few people in America willing to write unpalatable truths without regard for the consequences. Those consequences have generally been, as he described the experience of writing F&F, unpleasant.

Prof. Levin had established himself early as an iconoclast. His 1984 article in The Monist, Why Homosexuality is Abnormal, was already in his characteristically uncompromising style. But if the consequences of criticizing feminists and homosexuals were unpleasant, they were nothing compared to what was to follow.

In 1988, Prof. Levin and his wifealso a Ph.D. in philosophywrote a joint letter to the New York Times in reply to an editorial. They argued that New York store owners were justified in what was later to be called racial profiling, that is to say, in refusing to open their doors to young blacks they were afraid might rob them. The Levins pointed out the Timess inconsistency in worrying that some innocent blacks might suffer from this precaution when they were unconcerned that innocent whites might suffer from racial preferenceswhich the Times supported.

Anti-racist activists circulated the letter at City University of New York where Prof. Levin teaches, and picketed his classes. They were so menacing the university assigned him a bodyguard. After a few weeks, the picketers got bored and went away, but calm did not return for long. The Australian magazine Quadrant had asked Prof. Levin for an assessment of American education, and he described a number of its deficiencies. One observation, however, provoked outrage back in New York: there is now quite solid evidence that the average black is significantly less intelligent than the average white.

The uproar was immense. It did not matter that Prof. Levins students of all races pronounced him scrupulously fair; or that in philosophy lectures he never talked about race. Demonstrators disrupted his classes and physically prevented him from speaking in public. The faculty senate called a meeting for which they did not give him enough notice to attend, and convicted him, in absentia, of racism. For a time, he was forbidden to teach introductory philosophy. Once, when he went to his office he found the door covered with swastikas and the message, You F***ing Jew. A New York City editorial writer wrote that he was a horses ass.

Perhaps most disturbing, City Universitys then-president Bernard Harleson, who is black, made every possible effort to break Prof. Levins tenure. Americans are supposed to treasure freedom of speech, and universities are supposed to foster debate, but Prof. Levin had to hire a lawyer to keep from being gagged and fired. It was tenure that saved him. If Prof. Levin had been a junior faculty member he would almost certainly have lost his job.