Facing Reality

Charles Murray must be the bravest man in America. His new book, to be published in June, is titled Facing Reality: Two Truths about Race in America. This is how the book is described on Amazon:

The charges of white privilege and systemic racism that are tearing the country apart fIoat free of reality. Two known facts, long since documented beyond reasonable doubt, need to be brought into the open and incorporated into the way we think about public policy: American whites, blacks, Hispanics, and Asians have different violent crime rates and different means and distributions of cognitive ability. The allegations of racism in policing, college admissions, segregation in housing, and hiring and promotions in the workplace ignore the ways in which the problems that prompt the allegations of systemic racism are driven by these two realities.

What good can come of bringing them into the open? America’s most precious ideal is what used to be known as the American Creed: People are not to be judged by where they came from, what social class they come from, or by race, color, or creed. They must be judged as individuals. The prevailing Progressive ideology repudiates that ideal, demanding instead that the state should judge people by their race, social origins, religion, sex, and sexual orientation.

We on the center left and center right who are the American Creed’s natural defenders have painted ourselves into a corner. We have been unwilling to say openly that different groups have significant group differences. Since we have not been willing to say that, we have been left defenseless against the claims that racism is to blame. What else could it be? We have been afraid to answer. We must. Facing Reality is a step in that direction.

Facing Reality is being published by Encounter Books, so it will make its way into print unless Encounter is shut down before June. Whether it will remain for sale by Amazon and Barnes and Noble will be interesting to watch, and a good index to whether freedom of speech, as a practical matter, still exists in America.

Leftists obsessed with race generally only want to talk about two races, black and white, even though those categories are increasingly intermingled, with an occasional nod toward American Indians and “Hispanics,” a meaningless term concocted for the purpose of affirmative action in the U.S. But they prefer never to mention Asians. When liberals talk about income gaps, I like to ask why they think Asians, on average, earn so much more than whites, and what they think the government should do to correct that disparity.

As of 2018 Census Bureau data, whites are 17th among ethnic groups in median income, trailing not only just about every Asian minority, including Iranians and Pakistanis, but also African immigrant groups like Nigerian-Americans and Ghanian-Americans. The case for American “white supremacy” is ludicrously weak, but it may be a capital offense to point that fact out. I hope Charles Murray has the means to hire armed guards, and I hope Encounter Books can withstand whatever crackdown may be coming from the now-fully-regnant Swamp.