And now some really disturbing news
A third year student at Harvard Law School named Stephanie Grace last November sent an e-mail to several friends in which she said, inter alia, “I don’t think it is that controversial of an opinion to say I think it is at least possible that African-Americans are less intelligent on a genetic level, and I didn’t mean to shy away from that opinion at dinner.”
Recently one of her correspondents forwarded the six month old e-mail to the Harvard Black Law Student’s Association, and all hell broke loose against Stephanie Grace, possibly jeopardizing her law career.
Here’s an article from the Boston Globe about it. This goes beyond past PC episodes. This is not about someone in a public position, like the owner of a sports team (Marge Schott) or a professional sports coach (Al Campanis) or the president of a university (Lawrence Summers) making a public remark about race or sex differences and getting in trouble over it. This is about a private individual making a private remark, and this becomes a public matter and she is condemned by the Dean of Harvard Law School and has to issue an apology and retraction. Meaning that a law student is prohibited from having the opinion that there may possibly be differences of intelligence between races. Meaning that no individual in our society may have that opinion. Even held privately and communicated privately.
A site called Gawker has three items on the incident, here, here, and here.
A site called “Jezebel: Celebrity, Sex, Fashion for Women,” has an article by Anna North, who approves of the private e-mail being turned over to the black students group in order to expose the racist Stephanie Grace. See the vengeful tone in which the article is written. It would appear that that along with celebrity, sex, and fashion, what Anna North feels most strongly about is eliminating from the universe any deviation from liberal race orthodoxy.
Here’s an e-mail I wrote to her:
Anna North
Jezebel.com
Miss North:
You approve of the fact that Stephanie Grace’s private e-mail was publicized, causing her lasting damage. You feel she deserves to be punished for privately stating that genetic racial differences in intelligence cannot be ruled out.
Are you not aware that liberal media and educators are obsessed with the racial intellectual achievement gap and how to close it? Are you not aware that over the last 20 years there have been innumerable articles, books, studies on this problem? Obviously there is a racial difference of some nature. What is its nature? The fact is that nothing has succeeded in closing the gap in intellectual achievement. For example the charter schools that Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom touted for “closing” the four-year racial difference in reading ability between black and white high school seniors did not eliminate the difference but only narrowed it from four years to three—still a huge difference. Given the intractability of the racial difference in intellectual performance, it is obvious that inherited group difference in intelligence cannot be ruled out as an explanation. One hundred years of increasingly sophisticated IQ testing consistently show that U.S. blacks are about 15 points in IQ lower than whites. The racial IQ differential is simply a fact, denied by no one. But if a private individual privately expresses the opinion that we cannot rule out that this racial difference in IQ is due to heredity, she is seen as a criminal, an enemy of society, a threat to the social order, and she must be raked over the coals, ostracized, her future must be ruined.
I repeat: since (a) the racial difference in intellectual performance is a fact that is denied by no one; and since (b) there is a vast industry of liberal educators, scholars, and journalists who are deeply concerned about this difference and keep trying to find ways to solve it; and since (c) no means have been found that solves it, doesn’t that lead to the logical possibility that there is a genetic group difference in intelligence between the races? And if this is the case, is a person to be hated and destroyed for privately stating that logical opinion?
Lawrence Auster
- end of initial entry -
Leonard K. writes:
At The American Prospect blog, Monica Potts writes: “Why Stephanie Grace Should Lose Her Clerkship.” Here’s one of the comments:
Wouldn’t it be nice if people dealt with facts and science rather than irrational parroting of politically correct baloney?
“A 60-page review of the scientific evidence, some based on state-of-the-art magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of brain size, has concluded that race differences in average IQ are largely genetic … “`Neither the existence nor the size of race differences in IQ are a matter of dispute, only their cause,’ write the authors. The Black-White difference has been found consistently from the time of the massive World War I Army testing of 90 years ago to a massive study of over 6 million corporate, military, and higher-education test-takers in 2001.”
Posted by: John Galt | April 30, 2010 4:06 PM
May 1
Dean E. writes:
Reading over the comments about Stephanie Grace at Gawker and Jezebel (and other sites young liberals frequent) I’m struck, first, as always, by the revolting foul-mouthed language in casual use. Here is the ideal citizen manufactured by the Liberal State: an ignorant, vicious, foul-mouthed slut pierced like a savage, tattooed like a criminal, draped in filthy rags, stuffed with state-approved slogans and screaming like a stuck harpy. What a horror. And these horrible creatures are on a wilding against the poor dove who so innocently wondered, in a private email, whether there may be a genetic component, after all, in intelligence, and so called into question the Liberal religion’s most Sacred Tenet, its most Holy Doctrine: WHITE RACISM CAUSES BLACK INEQUALITY.
All they know is what’s been drummed into them by their Liberal priesthood: races don’t really exist, it’s just an arbitrary social construct, science can’t find genetic differences among races, etc, and it’s evil to think otherwise. The Soviet Union’s lies were propagated by a criminal elite at the point of a gun, but it’s an amazing sight to see this sort of flaming mental madness pounded into the citizens of a free society. Anyone whose brain hasn’t been destroyed by Mad Liberal Disease can plainly see that differences exist among all orders of being, from trees and grasshoppers to mice and men, and that these differences are partly nature and partly nurture, and that they matter, and that it is a right and proper subject for thought and discussion. But in the mindless, savage conformity of Liberal orthodoxy no such discussion is possible.
LA replies:
Another thing that struck me about the comments at Gawker and Jezebel was how many people repeated, in exactly the same words and tone, that Stephanie Grace is a complete idiot and ignoramus because the notion of any racial difference in intelligence has been absolutely disproved and everyone knows this.
Posted by Lawrence Auster at April 30, 2010 02:28 PM | Send