Taboo: 10 Facts You Can't Talk About

by Wilfred Reilly

The idea of universal white privilege is plausible, but wrong. In contrast, the idea of cultural appropriation—that it is racist for white people to borrow things from “minority” cultures—sounds and is insane.

As we have already seen, there is no epidemic of interracial crime of any kind in the U.S.A. There were indeed about five times as many Black-on-white crimes as white-on-Black crimes—560,600 to 103,563—during the representative year that I use for data analysis purposes.

As we have already seen, there is no epidemic of interracial crime of any kind in the U.S.A. There were indeed about five times as many Black-on-white crimes as white-on-Black crimes—560,600 to 103,563—during the representative year that I use for data analysis purposes.

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.”

Tackling taboos is difficult, but necessary. Very often—MOST often—they are used not to shield strong and valid ideas from pointless attacks, but rather to protect weak ones from worthwhile criticism.

the simple existence of disparities in group performance is not evidence of discrimination.

there is no logical reason to expect that all large groups will generally have the same crime rates, leaving racism as the most logical explanation for group disparities in arrests or fatal encounters with police.

the “unspoken assumption” of liberal academics is that rates of police shootings should exactly match America’s overall racial demographics, but this is a foolish and dangerous assumption.

Black Lives Matter got a ton of Black people killed.

However, interracial violent crimes of any kind are extremely rare. In the case of murder, an astonishing 85 percent of white victims and 93 percent of Black ones are killed by an assailant of their own race.

Furthermore—and this is almost never said—when interracial crimes do occur, they slant at least 75–80 percent POC-on-white. Both of these largely undisputed facts have held true for the last several decades.

the idea that widespread white-on-Black crime, specifically, is currently at epidemic levels borders on the insane.

Whites make up 62 percent of the population but represented only 38.6 percent of those targeted by Black crooks—a 38 percent underrepresentation. White goombahs seem even more politically correct: Blacks make up fully 13 percent of the population but were only 3.6 percent of those attacked by white criminals. This figure represents a 72 percent underrepresentation of Blacks among the targets of white criminals.

is no epidemic of white-on-Black crime. In fact, interracial crimes on an annual basis have been consistently 75–85 percent Black-on-white for the past thirty years.

“Overrepresentation of Blacks in the criminal justice system is not consistent with the interpretation that Black criminals are more likely to be targeted for arrest.”

In plainer words, poor, fatherless young men commit virtually all blue-collar crime, and simply adjusting for the percentage of such men in the population across different communities eliminates most of the gaps in crime rate which are glibly attributed to race.

The U.S.A.’s “chain migration” process—which prioritizes the spouses, parents, and siblings of anyone already here over most elite professionals—is rightly a whipping boy for conservatives, and the incendiary results of Europe’s recent “mass influx” policies can be seen on the news every night.

virtually all of the top executive, professional, and managerial jobs in the U.S.A. require an IQ of “at least 115 or thereabouts,” and that major gaps in group representation across elite fields would thus appear in the absence of any racial bias whatsoever in society.

However, the plain empirical fact remains that the mean SAT score for Asians is 240 points higher than the mean SAT score for Blacks. There are only 1600 points on the test. In the context of these very real performance gaps, only massive programs of preferential admissions can provide the level of visible “skin tone diversity” that elite universities and firms profess to want.

While lower-end white racism obviously still exists at the fringes of our society, the plain fact is that the middle-class white male applicant to any good college or Fortune 500 job does not actually enjoy massive white privilege.

Nor are disparities like this confined to the past. In his National Review article “The Fallacy of White Privilege,” conservative pundit Dennis Prager demonstrated that a number of cultural variables predict individual success far more than simply being white does.

After bluntly discussing this 314 percent advantage in favor of Blacks, Prager declared the two-parent family the most important “privilege” in our society today.

However, the simple reality that racism still exists does not challenge the empirical, mathematical point that cultural variables are a bigger predictor of group success than experiences with bigotry.

Multiple serious studies of affirmative action, such as Mismatch by Richard Sander and Stuart Taylor Jr. (2012), find that a Black candidate for opportunities like those just mentioned is generally 300–400 percent more likely to be brought on board than an equally qualified white.

Seventy-one percent of high school dropouts are fatherless.

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.

“The fact is that most of the social pathology seen in poor Black neighborhoods is entirely new.” It is no exaggeration to say, as both he and I have, that perhaps 60 percent of contemporary income, IQ, and incarceration gaps between Blacks and whites are due solely to the contemporary surge in father-absent families.

While it has been popular since the 1960s to say that broken Black families are “the legacy of slavery,” this is empirically untrue to a rather remarkable degree.

If anything, broken Black families are the legacy of white liberal do-gooding.

Then came pay-per-child welfare, no-fault divorce, and the normalization of illegitimacy. The nation’s out-of-wedlock birth rate “began a rapid and relentless climb across all demographic lines,” a trend which would continue apace until 1994, “when the Welfare Reform Act helped put the brakes on.”

Overall, some strong counterclaims aside, it seems indisputable that the 500 percent growth of the welfare state over the past five decades has had a significant, negative impact on metrics like fatherlessness and crime among Blacks and other Americans—and has certainly had more of an impact on these things than “racism” or “transphobia.”

These Black and Asian minority immigrants are so successful not because they never experience racism, but rather because they intelligently exploit American opportunities such as the free market, public education, and affirmative action while also working and studying hard.

“Nigerians make up less than 1 percent” even of the Black population of the United States, but make up roughly one quarter of all Black students at Harvard Business School.

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.

To sum this chapter up, the claim that contemporary Black problems such as illegitimacy, crime, and drug use can be excused by citing “racism” or “the legacy of slavery” fails almost totally.

Treating Blacks especially well is “well-meaning racism,” employing racial stereotypes (for example, of Italian or Black criminals) in the movies is “representational racism,” neutral tests like the SAT (which produce slightly disparate results across racial groups) are part of “institutional racism,” and so on. Furthermore, some claim, all of these varieties of racism are exclusively white provinces—only whites can ever be racist, due to the structure of contemporary American power relations. In a sentence, all of this is nonsensical garbage.

Racism remains what it has always been: the vice of disliking members of other groups for genetic reasons.

The idea that racism, traditionally defined as simple skin-color bias, is some complex and all-enveloping miasmatic phenomenon has been prevalent on the political left for decades.

Notably, like most leftists, Nittle seems to feel that the simple existence of disparities in group performance, or in public attitudes toward particular groups, is by itself de facto evidence of racial discrimination.

Her take on what constitutes racism is unsurprisingly broad. For example, in a corporate setting, “When pictures of presidents, board members, award-winning whomevers are hung, and they do not depict a demography that matches that of the state… then your organization might have an institutional racism problem.”2 Your move, NAACP of Iowa!

In a sentence, the basic problem with the institutional racism argument is that disparate outcomes do not prove, or in most cases even imply, discrimination.

“This [assumption] of equal outcomes requires not one speck of evidence, and defies mountains of evidence to the contrary.”

the claim that racism is “prejudice plus power,” and thus is possible only for members of dominant groups, is not confined to campus radicals and other fringe-dwellers.

“The only race that exceeds their population percentage in hate crime offenders are… Blacks.”

Perhaps the strongest argument against the idea that only members of majority groups can be racist because “only they have power” is that in America and most of the Western world, this would require a completely unified all-white ruling class.

it certainly militates against the idea that the white population of the U.S.A. constitutes one monolithically conservative, viciously racist voting bloc.

you are raised by a father and a mother, you enter adulthood with more privileges than anyone else in American society, irrespective of race, ethnicity, or sex.

Those readers with a strong stomach and trouble sleeping can check out a full list of demands like this, issued by students at seventy-six different four-year colleges, at www.thedemands.org.

Race, like biological sex, is a valid idea based upon an objective, observable reality.