Taboo: 10 Facts You Can't Talk About

by Wilfred Reilly

To a certain extent, this almost seems obvious, once said. If employers could hire an identically qualified Black guy or businesswoman for 80 percent the cost of a white guy, why wouldn’t every single edgy firm in the country do exclusively that—and gain a massive market-share lead on the competition by immediately shaving 20 percent off labor costs? Why have we never heard of even one single tech bro doing it? The answer is simple: the basic premise of the left-wing argument about what performance gaps mean is wrong.

a whole range of other factors predict success in life as much as or more than race does. A short list of these might include sexual orientation, sex, attractiveness, height, weight, IQ, aggression, birth order, urban (as opposed to rural) status, Northern (as opposed to Southern) status, Christianity (as opposed to “oppressed” minority religions), “cisgender” status, and social class. Prager convincingly points out that perhaps the most important privilege in modern society is simply being raised by a stable two-parent family. The poverty rate is 7 percent for the Black children of married couples and almost 25 percent for the white children of single moms. My own calculations indicate that, with non-racial factors fully controlled for, the effect of simply not being white on the life outcomes of minority Americans is on the order of 2–3 percent. In fact, in the affirmative action era, Black and Hispanic Americans not infrequently seem to have the advantage when competing for a particular collegiate spot or Fortune 1000 job.

almost everything that any given human being uses was originally invented by the citizens of a nation other than his or her own.

In the U.S.A., as anti-racists themselves used to proudly point out, our beer is German, our favorite take-out food is Chinese, half of our cars are Japanese, and our very numbers are of Arabic origin. Logically, if borrowing from other cultures was truly morally wrong, we Black Americans would have to toss away our pants and shoes—most civilized African peoples preferred robes and sandals—and every Japanese businessman would have to immediately trade in his beloved Brooks Brothers suit for a kimono and sword.

Regions of the world populated almost totally by members of the Caucasian racial group include Eastern Europe (Albania, Moldova, the former Yugoslavia), the Middle East (Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine), and the “Stans” in Central Asia (Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Borat’s country). These countries may all have rich and wonderful histories, but they are hardly the safest, richest, or most stable countries on earth. The Protestant ethic and the free public schools have a great deal more to do with the high average performance of white, Asian, and West Indian Americans than does their genetic heritage alone.

Equally simply put, the Continuing Oppression Narrative fails totally. Any coherent review of real, non-fringe data reveals that only 1,000–1,200 people of all races are killed by LEOs in a typical year, with fewer than 300 of these being Black and fewer than 100 being “unarmed.” Interracial crime of all varieties is not exponentially more common, with more than 80 percent of the victims of serious crimes such as murder, across all races, being targeted by someone of the same race. Performance gaps between groups sometimes still do exist but seem almost never to be due primarily to old-school racism. For example, the earnings gap between Black and white males closes almost totally if we compare equivalent men and adjust only for the variables of age, region, education, and aptitude test scores. Finally, “new-school” conceptualizations of racism (such as cultural appropriation and white privilege) turn out to be almost totally meaningless when analyzed using modern empirical methods. For good measure, the identitarian visions that rival the C.O.N. logically fail as well.

In a remarkable side note, Fridell, almost in passing, concludes that this “bias” seems to be at least as strong among minority officers as white ones. Falsely believing that a suspect was armed in a series of threat perception modules was slightly but significantly more common when the “suspect” was Black, even if all of the tested officers were themselves Black or Hispanic. Fridell does not stand alone in this secondary finding: multiple serious scholars have found that Black and Latino officers are in fact more likely to discharge their weapons at criminal suspects of all races than white officers are.

example, Vanity Fair author Kia Makarechi mentioned a well-known and impeccably researched study conducted by Washington State University faculty, which demonstrated that police officers were less likely during hyperrealistic video simulations to shoot unarmed Black suspects than unarmed white suspects.

All major sources appear to agree that well under 10 percent of all American homicides—and only a minuscule 4 percent of Black homicides—involve a police officer or other law enforcement officer acting in any official capacity.

Rates of crime, violent crime, hostile police encounters, and arrests vary dramatically between Blacks and whites, and adjusting for any of those rates eliminates the apparent disparity in police shootings.

the Black rate of serious/violent crime is roughly 2.5 times the white rate.

As Thomas Sowell has pointed out for decades, the simple existence of disparities in group performance is not evidence of discrimination.

Alton Sterling had a rather remarkable criminal record. Among other things, he was—in the technical, legal sense of this term—a child molester. According to a Louisiana records search, Sterling was convicted on September 20, 2000, for “carnal knowledge of a juvenile,” an in-state female in her early teens. He was subsequently charged on August 12, 2015, and April 8, 2016, for failure to ever register as a sex offender. In addition to that minor peccadillo, Sterling was criminally charged over the years with battery (January 6, 1998), public intimidation (May 4, 2000), domestic violence/woman beating (September 4, 2001), burglary (May 24, 2005), receiving stolen property (July 11, 2005), enhanced burglary/burglary of an inhabited dwelling place (September 12, 2005), criminal damage to property (March 17, 2006), domestic abuse yet again (April 4, 2008), and illegal possession of a weapon (October 12, 2009).