Charles Murray, despiser of “white-bread” America, lives in virtually all-white town

Russell Wardlow writes:

There’s a fascinating three hour interview with Charles Murray at the CSPAN website in which he recounts much of his work and life. The interview also goes into his present domestic life and shows video clips of his home and workspace. He lives in Burkittesville, Maryland, a small village 60 miles from DC, and he does most of his work out of a home office.

The reason I’m writing is because all of this information about Murray’s personal details brought back to mind his comments in regard to immigration and his denigrating offhand reference to boring and unappealing “white-bread communities” on which you commented once. [LA adds: Murray said: “I’d a hell of a lot rather live in a Little Vietnam or a Little Guatemala neighborhood, even if I couldn’t read the store signs, than in many white-bread communities I can think of.” To which John Derbyshire had replied: “[N]ot a thing I can see to disagree with.”] Burkittesville, Maryland, as I learned when I looked it up, is 95% white, 1% black, 4% Asian and literally zero percent Hispanic. That’s just about a paradigmatic white-bread community. Also, if you go to the town website, you can see several pictures of the community which make it clear that this place is just about the polar opposite of those “vibrant” or “interesting” immigrant communities that Murray said were preferable. It looks like the archetypal WASP-made community that makes me, living here in vibrant California, ache with a longing for a sense of lost America.

The point of all this is that when incongruities like these come up (and they do seem to recur awfully frequently), I always wonder what’s going on in someone like Murray’s head. Was Murray making some consciously calculated sop to the diversity shibboleths of our age so as not to be hounded as some crypto-Nazi (like he was, horribly unfairly, when The Bell Curve came out), or has he really bought into it and yet lives his life in such an “unprincipled exception” manner?

Posted by Lawrence Auster at May 07, 2007 01:59 PM | Send