https://johnmcwhorter.substack.com/p/why-charles-murrays-new-book-is-his
I come not to bury Charles Murray, but not to praise him, either.
He has a new book out, Facing Reality. It’s a doozy.
His books have a way of being doozies, going up against ideas sacred to the American intelligentsia on race as well as class.
He is also one of America’s most brilliant thinkers.
To many familiar with Murray’s work, I have already revealed myself as a “racist” in engaging his work at all, and/or not calling him one.
However, Murray’s work is too carefully reasoned and too deeply founded on scholarly sources to be dismissed as “racist,” except by people whose definition of “racist” is “That which people of the black American race don’t like for any reason.”
Rather: I salute Murray’s brilliance while being disturbed by many of his arguments. What many will call racism is what I call being able to walk and chew gum at the same time.
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Yet Facing Reality is seriously disturbing. Murray gives a great deal of evidence for two points. One is that black people aren’t, on the average, as intelligent as other people. The other is that black people in America are more violent than others.
Those who on some level celebrate the latter as black people getting back at the white man in the only way they can, should know that the facts don’t lend themselves to that vigilante justice analysis. More specifically, black people kill each other more than members of other groups kill each other.