Taboo: 10 Facts You Can't Talk About

by Wilfred Reilly

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.

Simply put, strong men keep the wild young boys who live near them peaceful by offering work opportunities, athletic coaching, math tutoring—and the occasional whack with a belt. In the absence of these men, no such discipline occurs. To a very real extent, what the left insists on calling “toxic masculinity” is simply untrained or even feminized masculinity: the fist-fighting and woman-chasing and dueling with guns that males naturally engage in without a dad or mentor to teach them better.

“for all their diversity,” virtually all successful minority (and white!) immigrant groups in the U.S.A. share three distinct success-boosting traits. The first of these is a “superiority complex,” a deep-seated belief that one is basically good, skilled, and can make it by working hard. The second might be called “hunger,” or a feeling that whatever you have done so far, at least prior to ultimate success, is not yet good enough. The third is “impulse control,” a willingness to work hard and long to grind out results, even in the absence of immediate gratification. The presence or absence of these traits, rather than “racism” or “reverse racism” or “late capitalism,” is the primary factor which predicts success for individuals of all races. Furthermore, strong, stable families seem to provide the best greenhouses for developing the three key traits.

Just as the remarkable success of dark-skinned Black and Asian immigrants indicates that the problems of “the hood” are not primarily due to contemporary racism, so also does the fact that working-class and poor whites experience these problems at roughly the same levels as Blacks. Interestingly, Chua and Rubenfeld noted this phenomenon in passing when discussing immigrant success, noting that below the most elite levels of society, white American parents today are “more focused on building children’s social skills and self-esteem” than on actually teaching their kids business skills or the traditional moral virtues.