Intellectual racism, in its cultural and pseudoscientific guises, is having a bit of a renaissance of late. At least, it's receiving more attention than at any time since the debut of "The Bell Curve," the 1994 book by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray about race and IQ. Murray himself is back in the news, triggering protests as he tours college campuses. Andrew Sullivan, who published excerpts of Murray's work as editor of The New Republic
, recently went out of his way
to make a case against the persistence of racism and for black pathology at the end of
a much-read piece about Hillary Clinton. Within the last year, white nationalist sites like VDARE
, American Renaissance and Radix have become part of the political landscape.
I've written elsewhere about the trap of intellectualized racism, which cuts against the common assumption that racism is rooted in ignorance and provincialism, that it can only be crude and passe. Thus when Richard Spencer, the face of the alt-right,
shows up in a natty suit, he is treated as an unusual curiosity. When Charles Murray
shows up brandishing a Ph.D. and some regression tables, he is treated as a sober-minded scholar.
But it's not just journalists who make this sort of mistake. Academics do, too. In the February issue of the American Historical Review, one of the history profession's flagship journals, Raymond Wolters reviewed Ansley Erickson's new book, "
Making the Unequal Metropolis: School Desegregation and Its Limits."Wolters seemed to have the right credentials to review Erickson's work on desegregation and busing in Nashville: emeritus professor at the University of Delaware, author of several books on race and education.
Oh, and also an active proponent of racist pseudoscience.
The list of white nationalist publications Wolters has written for is extensive: American Renaissance, VDARE, the Occidental Quarterly, Taki's Mag, the National Policy Institute (Richard Spencer's organization). He credits John Derbyshire and Jared Taylor for influencing his transformation to a "race realist" (that is, "racist"). Taylor is the founder and editor of American Renaissance. A taste of
his "race realist" analysis of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina: "Blacks and whites are different. When blacks are left entirely to their own devices, Western civilization – any kind of civilization – disappears." For his part, Derbyshire was booted as a contributor to National Reviewafter publishing "
The Talk: Nonblack Version," in which he advised his children not to "act the Good Samaritan to blacks in apparent distress" (but to cultivate an intelligent black friend as "an amulet against potentially career-destroying accusations of prejudice").
Derbyshire and Taylor have provided Wolters with an intellectual framework for his racist analysis, but he had settled on the underlying sentiment much earlier. His most famous work, published in 1984, was "The Burden of Brown: Thirty Years of School Desegregation," which argued that desegregation was a failure and that the legacy Brown v. Board was mostly negative. In the book, he
placed the blame for desegregation's failure not on white racism but "the ignorance and uncivilized behavior of many blacks." The book generated a good deal of controversy, though it also garnered some awards.
Wolters also serves as another reminder that racism is about power, not ignorance. It is infinitely adaptable. It comes in fitted suits as well as flowing sheets, in well-appointed faculty lounges as well as smoke-filled dive bars. And just because more people are now paying attention to the extent of its influence and the perniciousness of its power doesn't mean that intellectual racism is something new. It just means that more people are starting to notice and to combat it.
