Dr. Ralph Scott’s Forty-year Battle for Science in Research on Forced Busing: Angela Saini, Barry Mehler, and the Academic Left
Angela Saini, who describes herself as a “freelance science journalist,” has written a propaganda piece on race for the Guardian (“Why race science is on the rise again”), a precis of a now-released book of the same title. You know what you are up against right from the beginning, with the phrase “so-called ‘races,’” with ‘races’ in scare quotes. She describes herself as growing up in an “Indian-Punjabi household” and appears to be yet another non-White who is campaigning against the idea that Whites are a real group—a group with interests and a long, proud history.[1] In other words, she is promoting her own ethnic interests in dismantling the West as an ethnic entity and sees herself as a lifelong victim of White racism (“racism was the backdrop to my teenage years”) because there was a White nationalist bookstore in her neighborhood and because of the murder of one Black person — Stephen Lawrence who has since been elevated to sainthood by the same activists and media that have systematically ignored or downplayed victimization of native Brits by non-White immigrants; see Tobias Langdon, “Black Saints, White Demons: The Martyr-cult of Stephen Lawrence”).
The Guardian piece centers around one Barry Mehler, who has been a longtime anti-race realism activist as head of the Institute for the Study of Academic Racism, a non-profit housed on the campus of a state-supported university, Ferris State in Michigan.
I’ve long been aware of Mehler, being a target of some his writing. Mehler was the protégé of Jerry Hirsch, a behavior geneticist who devoted much of his professional life to campaigning against sociobiology and against quantitative behavior genetics, especially as applied to humans. Hirsch has a cameo role in Chapter 2 of The Culture of Critique, so you know what I think of ethnic activists like Hirsch and Mehler.
Indeed, Mehler is Faculty Advisor to Jewish Students at Ferris State University, a good indication that he has a strong Jewish identity. Saini’s article also shows his Jewish identification as informing his crusading against race science: Mehler “immediately saw parallels between the far-right network of intellectuals and the rapid, devastating way in which eugenics research had been used in Nazi Germany, terrifying him with the possibility that the brutal atrocities of the past could happen once more.”
Also indicative of his ethnic activism, Mehler has long been associated with the ADL. A 1995 article on the ADL website describes Mehler as the ADL National Commissioner. Another describes him as the chairman of the ADL’s Latin American Committee working to combat the confiscation of Jewish property and forced exile of Jews by the Sandinista government because of Jewish support for the previous government and because of Jewish support for Israel.
Not much doubt that Mehler is a Jewish academic ethnic activist, an activist ensconced at a state-supported university—the height of establishment respectability.
Once again, we see the confluence of Jewish identity and academic activism aimed at furthering Jewish interests, in this case by someone with no training in evolutionary biology or genetics. Despite the clear ethnic and political motivations characteristic of both Mehler and Saini, Saini has the gall to claim that race science is “innately political,” thereby absolving the activism of people like Mehler and Saini from any taint of extra-scientific interests. Read more