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. Wade’s critics have already gone to work putting him and his arguments beyond The Pale. Notre Dame anthropologist Agustín Fuentes flays and filets Wade for having only a vague notion of what constitutes “a race.” University of North Carolina anthropologist Jonathan Marks in the pages of “In These Times,” derides his ignorance of “epigenetics.” What is “epigenetics”? To translate as best I can, it is the theory or notion that humans across racial boundaries are culturally adaptable animals, all of whom are quite good at making changes in response to environmental forces. This is “genetic” in the sense that human beings a common species inheritance, but not “racial” because it transcends racial differences. From my perspective, “epigenetic” doctrine may be fine-and-good, but I don’t see how it gets us that far beyond Arnold Toynbee’s quaint notion that “challenge and response” (inside and outside the great river valleys that spawned civilizations) is that major motor driving human history. Having learned from Murray and Herrnsteins’ “time on the cross” for suggesting that race and IQ explained virtually everything about white-black differences, Wade tries not to stick out his neck as much. But he does make provocative suggestions that have been pounced in by critics, e.g., that obedience among Chinese, violence among Africans, and literacy (and capitalism) among Jews may be genetic inheritances albeit of relatively recent evolutionary origin. Counterarguments come easily to mind: if Jews are “genetically” prone to capitalism, were French Protestants in Europe, overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia, and Indians and Lebanese in different parts of Africa also partly “Jewish”? Why did the Hebrew Bible and Talmud show little tolerance for free market economics? And why didn’t Jews in China—there always have been some—develop into budding capitalists? Or, if as Wade suggests, the Japanese love of intricate gardens shows an East Asian genetic propensity to “order,” why did the English—also island-bound like the Japanese—love their intricately-ordered “English gardens.” On the other hand, it seems too easy or convenient to dismiss differential ethnic-racial propensities out of hand as explanatory. Different “diaspora minorities” may also excel economically, but only the Jews have produced such a “disproportionate” number of Nobel Prize winners? Once again to cite “Dr. David Duke”—that self-esteemed racial and racist savant—there is really no contradiction. Jews win lots of Nobel Prizes in Science only because they have used their insidious economic wiles to corrupt the Swedish Academy that awards them! The core problem, in my view, is that modern liberals—faithful believers in both equality and science—tend to insist that there can be no tension, much less contradiction, between the two. The Declaration of Independence’s affirmation that “all men are created equal” is a philosophical, not a scientific, affirmation. Thomas Jefferson averred that—put a moral argument to a philosopher and a plowman—and the plowman will give the better answer. But he did not argue that philosophers and plowmen were intellectual equals. Indeed, Jefferson, unfortunately, also believed that black plowmen were far from the equal of white plowmen which is where the problem begins. To return to what my parents taught me about “the baddest word in the world,” i.e., “fucking,” I suspect that many white liberals in the twentieth century—Hannah Arendt and Norman Mailer were both rather different examples—suspected that only interracial marriage (or, to use a now increasingly archaic word, miscegenation) would end the problem of racism and racial inequality. As the U.S. moves toward “postracial society” is this happening—and does it need to happen for us to become both just and equal? All that should be needed to be “a good liberal” is the faith that all human beings, whatever their race, are smart enough to enjoy and exercise equal rights, though there may be part of a standard deviation in some measures of IQ (variously defined) between groups. It’s time to stop trying to impose an intellectual-political orthodoxy about race by pillorying someone like Nicholas Wade. In my view, he raises provocative questions without providing persuasive answers. By all means, rebut his answers by offering better ones—but don’t dismiss him as a racist or “reactionary.”