Witch-Hunting Returns to Massachusetts

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American Thinker:

May 18, 2013

Witch-Hunting Returns to Massachusetts

 

By Robert Weissberg

By all accounts, today's college campuses grow more intolerant by the day. We move closer to the old Soviet Empire, where political dissidents risked the gulag for even joking about Marxism. In the U.S., however, the hate crimes concern anything that touches on race, ethnicity, gender differences, diversity, and sexuality (see here and here). Even an old-fashioned ethnic joke almost guarantees mandatory counseling. snip

 

Nevertheless, just when you thought that imposing the PC orthodoxy could not get any worse, it does. The latest example concerns the firing of Jason Richwine from the Heritage Foundation. Richwine's heresies can be found in his 2009 Harvard dissertation, not anything he said or did while employed at Heritage. He asserted that racial/ethnic groups differed in genetic-based IQ and then suggested that U.S. immigration policy might recognize these differences when dealing with immigration from Mexico.

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Why People Keep Misunderstanding the ‘Connection’ between Race and IQ

 

By

 

Brink Lindsey

This article appeared in The Atlantic on May 15, 2013.

Last week Heritage Foundation scholar Jason Richwine, coauthor of a hotly disputed new study on the fiscal costs of comprehensive immigration reform, resigned his position in a hail of controversy over his 2009 Harvard Ph.D. dissertation. In that dissertation Richwine had argued, among other things, that American “Hispanics” are less intelligent than native-born whites as evidenced by their lower average scores on IQ tests. Richwine then attributed Hispanics’ alleged intellectual inferiority at least partly to genetic factors.

 

The Richwine affair is just the latest flap in a long-running dispute over the significance of IQ tests and group differences in IQ scores. It’s easy enough to shut down that debate with cries of racism, but stigmatizing a point of view as morally tainted isn’t the same thing as demonstrating that it’s untrue. Here I want to explain why Richwine’s position is intellectually as well as morally unsound.

 

http://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/why-people-keep-misunderstanding-connection-between-race-iq