Jim DeMint’s Heritage Foundation is catching flack for publishing the ravings of a white supremacist, though why that should be a surprise, I do not know.
Prominent Republican lawmakers such as Marco Rubio has questioned the accuracy of the $6.3 trillion price tag. Then there are the revelations that the co-author of the study, Jason Richwine, wrote for white nationalist publications which comes after the Washington Post discovered Richwine wrote that whites have superior intelligence to Hispanics in his doctoral dissertation.
Richwine’s dissertation asserts that there are deep-set differentials in intelligence between races. While it’s clear he thinks it is partly due to genetics — “the totality of the evidence suggests a genetic component to group differences in IQ” — he argues the most important thing is that the differences in group IQs are persistent, for whatever reason. He writes, “No one knows whether Hispanics will ever reach IQ parity with whites, but the prediction that new Hispanic immigrants will have low-IQ children and grandchildren is difficult to argue against.”
(via FDL News Desk)
Okay, I’m willing to attach the term “racist” to Richwine, and I realize that it’s difficult to define the term “race” in any definitive fashion given that it has no biological foundation, but since the argument that different “races” have different IQs requires at least some coherent way to define the difference between one race and another, I am deeply puzzled by Richwine’s conclusion. Has anyone every actually argued that Hispanics constitute their own race? If so, which race is it? My general impression is that the term is applied generally to people who come, or whose ancestors came, from Spanish speaking countries in the Americas. (Also counting, of course, the folks who were within the present geographical limits of the greatest country on earth when it decided to take some low hanging fruit away from Mexico.) My further impression is that these folks are an amalgam of Native American, Europeans and Africans, with the mixes differing pretty wildly from place to place. So it would be interesting to know how this “scholar” defines the term “Hispanic”. Is there some magic amount of white blood that exempts one from membership in this race, or is the old saw about one drop still operative? For that matter is it only the Hispanics that come here that are dumber, or is there some empirical evidence that the average IQ in South America, Central America or Mexico is lower than here in God’s (who is and always was white, by the way) country? I guess my money would be on the theory that the average Hispanic IQ is inversely proportional to the quantity of African blood in the Hispanic. Old traditions die hard.
But getting back to the whole idea of defining races, if we get to make up new races pretty much at will, is some color variation from the norm (the norm being white, of course) a sine qua non for a group to qualify as a race? Because I’d like to define a new race: Republicans. I have no evidence that their IQs are not lower (though the idea is full of truthiness), but they are definitely unable to employ their brains to engage in rational thought. For that reason they are definitely inferior to those of the Democratic race. In order to preserve our way of life (i.e, the things and social customs I like and the ideologies with which I agree) we should limit their privileges consistent with their inferiorities. Obviously they should not be allowed to vote. Being a softie, I’m all for opening up preserves, where their race can develop along its own lines, and where they can even shoot each other to their heart’s content. Since they couldn’t vote anymore, we could let them watch Fox News as much as they want.
The price tag for allowing them to range freely has been enormous. We have been mired in depression now for 5 years, almost solely because their inability or refusal to engage in rational thought has made it impossible for us to get out of that depression. They’re here, so we can’t build a fence to keep them out, but we can certainly take steps to keep them under control.
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