Race Differences in Behavior

The Dissolution of the Family among Non-Elite Whites: Review of “Red Families v. Blue Families” by Naomi Cahn and June Carbone

/40 Comments/in , , , , /by

I heard Naomi Cahn and June Carbone talk about their book, Red Families v. Blue Families: Legal Polarization and the Creation of Culture (Oxford, 2010), on Commie Radio Pacifica, so you can be sure there is a “progressive” message. As summarized in their op-ed in the Christian Science Monitor, the idea is that families in Blue State America are thriving, while families in Red State America are failing because they are too hung up on old fashioned ideas like sexual abstinence.

There is an obvious dishonesty in this approach because it completely ignores race in the analysis in an effort to pin the blame on traditional sexual beliefs and customs. Blacks and Latinos who live in urban areas and in very Blue States exhibit high rates of teenage pregnancy, non-marriage, and dropping out of the education process — much higher than Whites in Red State America.

So what they are really trying to explain is variation in family patterns among White people. And there they have a point. Red State White America is in a crisis. (Indeed, it’s no accident that Red State America is where most of the much-commented-on White anger is coming from.) The data they are summarizing really relate to some of the correlates of education which are in turn linked to IQ. But we have known at least since The Bell Curve that higher IQ people not only are more likely to go further in the  educational system, they are more likely to have stable marriages, they don’t have babies outside of marriage, and they begin child bearing later. These people are more likely to live in large urban and suburban areas where there are jobs for educated people.

The Whites in non-urban Red State America have a lot to be angry about. The present economic crisis is just the most recent disaster in the long pattern of dispossession of Whites who are less educated. Good jobs in the private sector have pretty much evaporated — the unions are gone and the jobs have been shipped overseas. These people see their communities invaded by racial and cultural aliens, many of them illegal, making a middle class life impossible. They see themselves losing political power to the coalition of minorities and elite Whites that has become the Democratic Party.

As The Bell Curve emphasized, since World War II the cognitive elite are pulling away from the rest of America. Hard economic times only make it worse.

And hard times are always difficult on families. As Cahn and Carbone note, “the latest studies show that as the economy has gone south, teen and nonmarital births and abortions have all increased. … Employment figures also demonstrate that male employment has fallen even further than female employment, making youthful weddings that much riskier.”

In evolutionary terms, the high-investment style of reproduction becomes non-viable as men are unable to provide for their families. Women start having babies sooner and don’t expect to receive support from males over a long period of time, especially where welfare programs are available.

Being on the left, however, C & C use this opportunity to propose that the real culprit is traditional family values. If we could just get rid of those Bible Belt ideas, all would be well:

Missing from this debate is recognition of the bankruptcy of traditionalist family values as policy for the postindustrial era. …

In the United States, states that emphasize abstinence-only education, limit public subsidies of contraception, restrict access to abortion – and, yes, oppose gay marriage – have higher teen birth and divorce rates.

Yet the failure of the family values movement simply produces another round of moral panic and calls for more draconian restrictions.

Their solution combines typical leftist utopianism with a very real program of lowering the birth rate of people with traditional values.

The solution? As we outline in great detail in our book “Red Families v. Blue Families,” there are three critical steps we can take: (1) promote access to contraception – within marriage as well as outside it; (2) develop a greater ability to combine not only work and family, but family and education; and (3) make sure the next generation stays in school, learns the skills to be employed, and cultivates values that can adapt to the future.

This is a nice distillation of the bizarre idea that all Americans have the potential to be college graduates with lots of skills suitable for a post-industrial economy. IQ never enters the equation. But this utopian future is just not going to happen. A far better program would be to provide better economic opportunities for White people, especially White males, whose prospects have been blunted by the present regime.

The fact is that traditional sexual attitudes worked perfectly well in the West to produce a very adaptive culture of high-investment parenting combined with individualist social institutions. C & C attempt to tar traditional values with the stigma of Muslim and African societies where female virtue is prized: “We are entirely sympathetic with those inclined to lock up their daughters from puberty until marriage, but we do recognize that the societies abroad most insistent on policing women’s virtue are locked into cycles of poverty.”

But there is no reason to suppose that the problem with Muslim and African societies is policing the sexual behavior of women. Other traits of these cultures are far more likely culprits,  including low average IQ and social institutions like cousin marriage and clan-based social and political systems.

The reality is that social support for high-investment parenting has always been a critical feature of Western social structure until the sexual revolution of the 1960s. Since then, all of the markers of family stability have headed south  — including divorce rates and births out of wedlock for all races and ethnic groups. (Nevertheless, there are very large differences between races and ethnic groups in conformity with Rushton’s lifespan theory of race differences.)

But this relative lack of social support for marriage has had very different effects depending on traits like IQ. For example, a well-known study in behavior genetics shows that the heritability of age of first sexual intercourse increased dramatically after the sexual revolution of the 1960s. In other words, after the social supports for traditional sexuality disappeared, genetic influences became more important. Before the sexual revolution, traditional sexual mores applied to everyone. After the revolution, genes mattered more. People with higher IQ were able to produce stable families and marriages, but lower IQ people were less prone to doing so, and these trends have been exacerbated by the current economic climate. Hence the Red State/Blue State dichotomy among White people observed by C & C.

And this brings me to thinking about Jews and particularly Jewish influence on sexual culture. In their book, C & C note that Jews tend to exhibit  the Blue State pattern— an unsurprising result given Jewish IQ patterns. A theme of Chapter 4 of The Culture of Critique is that the psychoanalytic assault on traditional Western sexual culture had a disparate impact on different IQ groups and benefited Jews:

Jews suffer to a lesser extent than [non-Jews] from the erosion of cultural supports for high-investment parenting, and Jews benefit by the decline in religious belief among [non-Jews]. As [Norman] Podhoretz (1995, 30) notes, it is in fact the case that Jewish intellectuals, Jewish organizations like the AJCongress, and Jewish-dominated organizations such as the American Civil Liberties Union … have ridiculed Christian religious beliefs, attempted to undermine the public strength of Christianity, and have led the fight for unrestricted pornography. The evidence of this chapter indicates that psychoanalysis as a Jewish-dominated intellectual movement is a central component of this war on [non-Jewish] cultural supports for high-investment parenting. …

Although other factors are undoubtedly involved, it is remarkable that the increasing trend toward low-investment parenting in the United States largely coincides with the triumph of the psychoanalytic and radical critiques of American culture represented by the political and cultural success of the counter-cultural movement of the 1960s.

I then go into the academic version of the ideas presented here, especially the greater importance of social controls and traditional religious beliefs for people on the left side of the Bell Curve. (See here, in the  Conclusion).

There is nothing wrong with traditional Western sexual codes. C & C are trying to rationalize the destruction of the last vestiges of that culture by noting that people with traditional religious ideas on sexuality increasingly behave in ways that are contrary to those beliefs. But the problem is not the traditional culture. Rather it is the economic dispossession of non-elite Whites combined with a media culture that glorifies expressive individualism and uninhibited sexuality (i.e., drugs, sex, and Rock ‘n’ Roll) — a media culture that, in my view, was critically shaped by the Jewish intellectual movements reviewed in The  Culture of Critique.

Bookmark and Share

Brain imaging evidence for the genetic basis of IQ and behavioral restraint

/32 Comments/in , /by

A UCLA study points to very high heritability of IQ and behavioral restraint–probably the two most important traits in the modern world. It also points to the brain mechanisms responsible for differences in these traits. Paul Thompson and his colleagues

used a new type of brain-imaging scanner to show that intelligence is strongly influenced by the quality of the brain’s axons, or wiring that sends signals throughout the brain. The faster the signaling, the faster the brain processes information. And since the integrity of the brain’s wiring is influenced by genes, the genes we inherit play a far greater role in intelligence than was previously thought.

Genes appear to influence intelligence by determining how well nerve axons are encased in myelin — the fatty sheath of “insulation” that coats our axons and allows for fast signaling bursts in our brains. The thicker the myelin, the faster the nerve impulses.

For example, the connections in the parietal lobe associated with math and logic are 85% heritable, while the connections in the frontal lobe responsible for working memory and  for inhibiting impulsive behavior are 65% heritable. Behavioral restraint not really IQ  but relate to behavioral control–things like being able to inhibit immediate gratification and plan for the future . These are traits that show important race differences associated with criminality, especially impulsive criminality (as opposed, say, to most white collar crime).

The difficulty for the left will be to convincingly argue that the sorts of interventions they have been championing will really change brain myelination. As noted in my previous blog, they seem to be running out of ideas on how to improve educability of low-IQ populations, and Head Start doesn’t work either. They may take comfort in the possibility that genetic engineering could actually do the trick:

And could this someday lead to a therapy that could make us smarter, enhancing our intelligence?
“It’s a long way off but within the realm of the possible,” Thompson said.
This sort of gene therapy would be socially beneficial because it would increase educability and behavioral restraint. But it certainly would not be a panacea for White ethnic interests. Indeed, it would make these groups more competitive while not making them less ethnocentric.

When will they finally start talking about IQ?

/48 Comments/in , /by

Diane Ravitch’s recent LA Times op-ed (“The Big Idea — it’s bad education policy“) opposes “Big Ideas” in education policy, but what it is really saying is that the educational establishment is running out of ideas. “We now face a wave of education reforms based on the belief that school choice, test-driven accountability and the resulting competition will dramatically improve student achievement.” She argues that none of this is working:

Today there is empirical evidence, and it shows clearly that choice, competition and accountability as education reform levers are not working. But with confidence bordering on recklessness, the Obama administration is plunging ahead, pushing an aggressive program of school reform — codified in its signature Race to the Top program — that relies on the power of incentives and competition. This approach may well make schools worse, not better. …

On the federal tests, known as the National Assessment of Educational Progress, from 2003 to 2009, charters have never outperformed public schools. Nor have black and Latino students in charter schools performed better than their counterparts in public schools.

When charter schools have performed well, it’s because of selection: Better, more motivated children attend them, and this does  nothing for the masses of Black and Latino children. Holding teachers accountable doesn’t work either.

But if course, Ravitch can’t really come to grips with the problem. In pointing to things that could affect student achievement besides teachers, she comes up with this list:  “students’ motivation, the schools’ curriculum, family support, poverty and distractions on testing day, such as the weather or even a dog barking in the school’s parking lot.”

No mention of IQ — 16 years after The Bell Curve placed IQ and the intractability of changing became front and center for the American public. Coming on the heels of the finding that the Head Start pre-school program has no demonstrable effects on IQ or academic achievement, one would think that at long last it would start to dawn on people that there are no easy solutions because no one has come up with a way to improve IQ. The result is that race differences in achievement are going to be here long into the future. And that means that importing millions of low-IQ people is a long term disaster for the country.

Ravitch herself seems to have given up the fight. There are no Big Ideas that will work, so she advocates returning to a well-rounded curriculum rather than the Obama Administration’s focus on math and reading. If you can’t teach them to read or do math, you might as well entertain them by having them do art and music.

Bookmark and Share

Christopher Donovan: NPR Stumbles on Racial Truth of Mortgage Meltdown

/14 Comments/in /by

Christopher Donovan:  Before it slips too far into my rear-view mirror, I have to post about an NPR report I heard on the way to work last week about the mortgage meltdown.  The reporter focused on a single block in California and interviewed residents Anita Sandoval, Brenda Moore, and William and Laura Betts.  The story I link to doesn’t mention it, but if you listen to the broadcast, it’s obvious that Sandoval is Hispanic, Moore is black, and the Betts are white.

Unwittingly, I’m sure, the reporter captured the racial specifics of the mortgage meltdown in microcosm.  Sandoval, the Hispanic, simply stopped making payments on her mortgage. Moore, the black woman, refinanced eight times, and now owes $300,000.  The Betts were the lone examples of responsible financial behavior:   they now own their home, though the rollercoaster of appreciation and depreciation left them with an unimpressive gain in equity.

Such are the impoverishments for whites who live in the multiracial society:  The responsible, hard-working Betts are, in many ways, underwriting the irresponsibility of the Sandovals and the Moores through higher interest rates and probably other ways I’m not aware of.

Particularly striking was the short time-horizon view of Moore, the black woman:  “I look at it this way:  You’re sitting on a bank, so if you can use it, use it because you can’t take it with you, so enjoy it while you can.”

Contrast this with the frugality of the Betts, who would send in 10 extra dollars with each mortgage payment.

And, of course, Moore’s understanding of finance is incorrect:  she’s not sitting on a source of free money, she’s sitting on an asset that can secure a loan — but a loan that either has to be paid back or foreclosed and the house taken away.

Here’s a financial think-tank of the liberal persuasion admitting that blacks and Hispanics have shorter time-horizons than whites.

How many whites understand that what’s often characterized as a “crazy and unpredictable” economy has some forbidden explanations?

Christopher Donovan is the pen name of an attorney and former journalist. Email him.

Bookmark and Share

Christopher Donovan: The Black Supremacist Mayor of Harrisburg — And Her Obedient House Press

/31 Comments/in , /by

Christopher Donovan:  Harrisburg, Pennsylvania recently elected a bizarre black woman named Linda Thompson as its mayor.  The subtext of her campaign — and now, it appears, her governance — is as follows:  “Harrisburg had a white mayor for years.  I’m black.  The population of Harrisburg is majority black.  So, put me in there.  I’ll kick out the whites and replace them with blacks.”  It was never clear to me that she was about much else.

Thompson typifies erratic black behavior:  she skated by for years as head of a non-profit group called “Loveship, Inc.” that gave her interest-free loans, collected unemployment benefits but drove a Mercedes-Benz, filed a lawsuit against a gas station after spraying herself with gas at what she alleged was a defective pump, and claimed that God had annointed her mayor.  In office, she’s sweeping out the whites and replacing them with blacks, including the new police chief.

The local paper, the Patriot-News, dutifully reports some of this weirdness, despite being a typically pro-black, politically correct city newspaper.  In all its campaign coverage, it never got to the racial heart of her campaign against Stephen Reed, her white predecessor and a fellow Democrat, and Nevin Mindlin, the politically correct Jewish “Republican” who stepped in to oppose her in the general election.  Bloggers were a little bolder, including one who coined the phrase “Zimbabwe on the Susquehanna.”

None of this is really news — racist black mayors have been ruining American cities for years now by driving out business and tax-paying white residents, letting crime run rampant, and doling out goodies to their black friends.  Zimbabwe on the Susquehanna, indeed.  It’s what happens when the “racial molecular atmospherics” of a city go from white to black.

But I had to chuckle at this story in the Patriot-News, in which Thompson, in the midst of thundering against whitey at a black church across the river, rips the paper itself.  The paper then takes the highly unusual (and disfavored by professional journalists) step of quoting its Jewish honcho, David Newhouse:  

We share Mayor Thompson’s belief in the power of both education and economic opportunity, as well as the importance of an inclusive society,” said Patriot-News executive editor David Newhouse. “Despite her unhappiness with our reporting, we are strongly committed to being a partner with the black community, in Harrisburg and throughout the midstate, in these crucial goals.

Chew on that one for a second.  The response to a bat-shit crazy black mayor’s uninformed ranting is that the newspaper is “strongly committed to being a partner with the black community.”  I might innocently ask if the paper is committed to simply telling the truth, but today’s “mainstream” — and strongly Jewish — media works overtime to bury the truth.  My only comfort is that most people, particularly whites, do understand this much.

Christopher Donovan is the pen name of an attorney and former journalist. Email him.

Bookmark and Share

"It’s Not the Arguments"

/38 Comments/in , , , , /by

A recent TOO piece offered an argument for the importance of solid funding for the success of any media venture, TOO included. The basic idea is an important one to discuss — that high status confers influence. Indeed, the importance of high status is a critical ingredient of theories of influence in sociology, and psychologists have argued that attraction to high status is part of our evolutionary heritage.

We see this repeatedly in the key institutions throughout the West, including the media and the academic world. Jewish influence basically stems from their influence on all of the high ground of the culture. The revolution of the Left was a top-down revolution that began in the most prestigious academic and media institutions and then spread to the lower reaches of the media and the K-12 educational system.

For all its espousal of egalitarianism, the academic world is a hierarchical system in which the highest levels are rigorously policed to ensure ideological conformity because any leak in the system would mean that non-conformists would benefit from institutional prestige. This, of course, is exactly why John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt caused such a panic attack in the ranks of the Israel Lobby. Mearsheimer and Walt weren’t just two easy-to-ignore guys from some college no one heard of; nor were they members of an easily marginalized group, such as Arabs. They were well-known and academically productive professors from prestigious institutions — the University of Chicago and Harvard respectively. This resulted in a full-fledged smear campaign emphasizing “shoddy scholarship” (typically made by Jewish activist organizations or others without the least experience as scholars) and charges of being anti-Semites on a par with the authors of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. When all else fails, …

Another example is E. O. Wilson, the Harvard biologist who in 1975 stunned the academic left with the publication of Sociobiology: The New Synthesis. Wilson included a chapter applying evolutionary thinking to humans — a topic that had been expunged from the social sciences ever since the triumph of Boasian anthropology in the 1920s. Wilson was already well-known as an entomologist and ecologist, and his position at Harvard gave him immense authority.

The Left went into full-fledged moral panic mode, led by high-profile attacks from Richard Lewontin and Stephen Jay Gould — both of whom were also at Harvard and were discussed in Chapter 2 of Culture of Critique as examples of leftist Jewish intellectuals who undermined evolutionary and biological approaches in the social sciences.

The Israel Lobby and the Left won these battles ultimately. Politicians are loathe to cite Mearsheimer and Walt, and it is unthinkable that they could attain positions in the government where they could directly influence US foreign policy. Tamer versions of evolutionary psychology are tolerated, but arguments related to ethnic interests (Salter), the reality of ethnic and racial differences (Jensen, Lynn, Rushton), and my writing on Jewish influence on culture have been expunged from the mainstream media. I have sometimes thought that my ideas would be more influential if I held a position at Harvard. But the reality is that occasional lapses from decorum have been managed quite effectively.

The result is that Whites are intellectually and culturally insecure. Any cultural confidence they have must buck the tide of elite opinion which is constantly telling them they are racists who owe whatever success they have in life to “White privelege” or other inventions of the Left. As I noted elsewhere, “one of the greatest triumphs of the left has been to get people to believe that people who assert white identity and interests or who make unflattering portrayals of organized Jewish movements are morally degenerate, stupid, and perhaps psychiatrically disturbed. Obviously, all of these adjectives designate low status.”

The revolution may well begin because of the rage of non-elite Whites. But it won’t be successful until the elite bastions of anti-White opinion are breached. And that will not be an easy fight to win.

Bookmark and Share

Race Bias and Conception Risk: Implicit and Explicit Whiteness in Action

/51 Comments/in , , , /by

A recent article in a top psychology journal (“Race Bias Tracks Conception Risk Across the Menstrual Cycle” shows that women have more race bias when they are most at risk for conception. Further, it shows that race bias is even stronger if the woman feels more vulnerable to sexual coercion.

The study once again shows a difference between implicit and explicit race bias. Implicit bias is unconscious. Implicit bias was shown by subjects taking longer to associate negative words like ‘horrible’ or ‘evil’ with photos of Whites than with photos of Blacks. (You can take a similar test here to see if you have implicit biases toward Blacks; around 80% of Whites do)  The study is saying that White women are more likely to have unconscious negative thoughts about Blacks when they are ovulating and this is especially the case if they think they are vulnerable to being raped.

Explicit bias, on the other hand, is assessed by rating how strongly subjects endorse negative racial stereotypes of Blacks (e.g., ‘‘Generally, Blacks are not as smart as Whites’’; ‘‘It is likely that Blacks will bring violence to neighborhoods when they move in’’). People tend to give more socially acceptable answers on race bias items compared to their unconscious, implicit attitudes.

Usually the differences between conscious and unconscious race bias are very large — especially for liberals. Liberals are supreme hypocrites when it comes to race. My favorite is the White affirmative action officer at a university who was horrified to find that she had strong unconscious biases toward Blacks.  Unconscious biases have been shown to have subtle effects on behavior.

What was surprising here was that these White women were also more likely to explicitly endorse negative stereotypes of Blacks when they were ovulating. The effect was weaker than for unconscious attitudes, but it was in the same direction and nearly as strong as for unconscious attitudes — what statisticians call a trend.

In other words, the hormones that make them ovulate are also making them less politically correct. Their unconscious negative attitudes about Blacks are more likely to leak out in their conscious opinions. The primitive brain wins out over the politically correct censor in the higher part of the brain, so that they become more conscious of their negative attitudes toward Blacks. They would therefore be better able to consciously plan ways to avoid them.

The other two tests of race bias were also quite explicit. In fact, the strongest single predictor of conception risk was explicitly stated fear of Black males. The subjects rated how “scary” photos of Black men and White men were. In general, these White women found photos of Black men scarier around the time they are ovulating — especially if they feel vulnerable to rape.

This shows that despite all the propaganda to the contrary, White women retain defensive attitudes — both consciously and unconsciously — about Blacks as potential rapists. The authors suggest that this psychological mechanism may work by being sensitive to the stereotype that Blacks are dangerous. In other words, White women’s evolutionary psychology is making them behave adaptively based on the stereotype that Blacks are more likely to rape. It works by making them avoid Black men, especially if they are ovulating and especially if they are in a situation where there is a danger of rape. And it is making them more conscious of the real threats posed by Black men and less likely to suppress these attitudes in order to be socially acceptable.

Of course, the stereotype has more than a grain of truth: The 2005 FBI Uniform Crime Report show that though Blacks are only 12.4% of the US population, they commit 33.6% of the rapes of White females.

Bookmark and Share