Nicholas Wade

When I was six years years old, my parents taught me not to say “the baddest word in the world.” Not being exactly Victorian prudes, the word they had in mind was not “sex.” But it was closely related and started with an “f.” Today, that word in politically correct circles starts with an “r.” Of course, you can talk about race all you want—many do ad nauseam—as an indicator of economically unjust conditions or as a “social construct.” But not “race” as a “biological reality” (whatever that may be).

A case in point, as if we needed yet another (a similar firestorm twenty years ago surrounded Charles Murray and Richard J. Herrnsteins’ “The Bell Curve” on IQ and race), is the building reaction of Nicholas Wade’s new book, “A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race, and Human History.” A former science writer for the “New York Times,” Wade is of course a good liberal (as we have recently learned, all Timesmen and Timeswomen are “good liberals,” but not all are equally paid) and not a racist, though some of his new critics are treating him as he was an “r”—as in radioactive racist—for suggesting that the profound changes in human history over the past 10,000 years are a reflex of small changes in the human genome in response to the diverse environments confront by racially distinctive European, Asian, and African populations.

As an historian, I know well the pernicious intellectual and political history of the use and abuse of the concept of race over the last two hundred fifty years not only in Europe but in America. American Jews—viscerally if not always politically “good liberals” respond with understandable passion to this history. A hundred fifty years ago, many if most European intellectuals (as Sander Gilman, among others, have documented), classified Jews as, in some sense other, an African or “Negroid” race, inferior both in their in looks and moral physiognomy. Less than a 100 years ago, most American social scientists were convinced on the basis of culturally-biased World War I IQ tests that European Jewish immigrants were intellectually inferior.

A new breed of scientific intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic like Franz Boas and Ashley Montague—“Dr.” David Duke’s followers calls them “Jewish gatekeepers” of a new egalitarian “false consciousness”—rebelled against this racist orthodoxy and laid the foundations for our new color-blind consensus that race, biologically, doesn’t matter much if not at all.

Of course, findings about the human genome during the last 30 years have demonstrated that race does matter, at least in terms of disease propensities (the Ashkenazi Jews and Tay-Sachs disorder, African Americans and sickle cell trait, Native Americans and diabetes). However, the broader liberal-academic argument that it is cultural evolution—not racial biology—that drives recent human evolution still dominates the climate of opinion. (more…)