Steve Sailer: Still noticing after all these years

Bo Winegard reflects on the immense influence of Steve Sailer and reviews 'Noticing', a newly published anthology of Sailer's essays.

Written by Bo Winegard

When I was a young, closeted race realist in graduate school, I first began to read Steve Sailer’s essays—and I was impressed both by their honesty and by their elegant but unpretentious style. He wrote the things I wanted to say. And how I wanted to say them. But I was a social psychologist. And being a race realist in social psychology is like being a happy man at a funeral. You are certain that you are not alone but prudent enough to keep your views private. At least, until you really trust somebody.

Thus, I was a solitary Sailer reader. For a while. Eventually I tired of prudence. Race, IQ, immigration—these were topics too important to suppress. Therefore, I became more outspoken about my views—by which I mean that I broached the topic of race and IQ from time to time. What I discovered surprised me. I was far from the only Sailer fan around. This does not mean that psychology graduate programs are full of surreptitious race realists like resistance fighters in some occupied country. Far from it.

But I did find a loyal club of fellow dissidents.

We discussed race and IQ and immigration and crime. And of course Sailer. Each of his heretical sentences thrilled us. “Can you believe he wrote that?!” we’d exclaim before analyzing his latest essay. Reading and discussing Sailer felt rebellious. And rebellion is very attractive to young intellectuals. But Sailer was more than a provocateur; he was a serious thinker. Wrestling with his writings made us more knowledgeable and more aware of important subterranean ideas. (As Sailer has noted, many of these ideas are mainstream in academia if you translate the deceptive nomenclature of journal articles into ordinary language.)

Sailer’s influence on me was more profound even than it was on my fellow dissidents because I was so impressed with his candor that I decided to write about race publicly. At first—and I owe Steve an apology for my cowardice—I kept my distance and never cited him. Writing about race was one thing, citing Steve Sailer was another. As Steve himself has written, “…people who don’t know me tend to hate me.” (Conversely, people who know Steve, like him.)

I wanted to write honestly about race, but I also wanted to keep my job in academia; and I worried that Sailer was so blunt and alienating that citing him was a guilt-by-association gift to enemies of honesty and open inquiry. As it turned out, I was not wrong. One of the sins I was accused of before getting fired was liking a tweet by Steve Sailer. I explained that I thought that the tweet was interesting and that I believed in the importance of dialogue and debate. Maybe I could encourage debate in a different way my boss responded.

I’d like to say that this was my Michael Corleone moment in which I understood the utter corruption of the institutions around me and went all in on the family. But I’m not sure if that’s true. Perhaps we can never be truly honest about our views even to ourselves. Nevertheless, I strive for intellectual transparency and honesty. If somebody asks my opinion about something, I will forward it, with appropriate caveats about human fallibility. And in that, Steve Sailer’s influence was enormous, along with Arthur Jensen and Charles Murray.

The reader can thus understand why I was so excited when I discovered that a collection of Sailer’s essays was to be published soon. And why I was even more excited when I received a review copy from the man himself. This was like getting a signed copy of The Great Gatsby from F. Scott Fitzgerald. It’s a thrill few get to experience.

I am not an unbiased reviewer. And I will not pretend to be. I am a fan whose worldview was significantly shaped by Steve’s writings.

Appropriately entitled Noticing after his penchant for observing and discussing realities elites attempt to hide or obfuscate, the book is a treasure for any fan of Sailer. In fact, it is indispensable for anybody who cares about race, IQ, immigration, and modern conservatism. And I am happy to report that my enthusiasm for Sailer has not waned. Rereading his essays, in fact, has persuaded me that I already had commendable taste as a first-year graduate student. Sailer is a fine stylist. He does not prevaricate. He writes with panache. And he’s puckishly clever. A few examples.

Noticing that journalists are verbally tilted and think words are like magic:

“IQ is off-limits today because people who are verbally facile, such as journalists and academics, tend to assume that reality is largely constructed from words. Thus, if we would all just stop writing about unpleasant facts, they would disappear.”

Noticing that public intellectuals won’t grapple with important topics:

“Indeed, trying to figure out how nature and nurture intertwine in modern America is one of the great challenges of the examined life. Public intellectuals should try it. It’s fun.”

Noticing that white intellectuals are hypocritical about IQ:

“The typical white intellectual considers himself superior to ordinary white folks for two contradictory reasons. First, he constantly proclaims his belief in human equality, but they don’t. Second, he has a high IQ, but they don’t.”

Noticing that neoconservative ideas about citizenship are not entirely sensible:

“If believing in neoconservative theories should make anyone in the world eligible for immigration, what should disbelieving them make thought criminals like you and me? Candidates for deportation? For the guillotine?”

Noticing that blacks fear blacks too:

“In other words, the two black men racially profiled each other as dangerous criminals and then violently attacked each other. Why did the two blacks profile each other? Oh, sorry, I forgot: because white people. Wait, my mistake: because people who believe they are white. Occam’s razor suggests that the reason blacks tend to fear violence from one another is because they tend to be violent.”

But the thing that really struck me after reading Noticing is that Sailer cares more about the plight of black Americans than many of the white progressives who denounce him. While they ostentatiously display their commitment to racial justice by chastising anybody who talks honestly about the causes of racial disparities in the West, he writes incisively about the problems that plague black America. At times, his candor can seem harsh:

“American blacks had a hard enough time competing with American whites. Putting them up against ever more of the cleverest and most ambitious of four billion Asians is increasingly a wipe-out.”

Or

“For instance, the fact that African-Americans seem to have a particular tendency toward criminal violence, for whatever combinations of reasons of nature and nurture, suggests that they need law enforcement more, not less, than do the rest of us.”

These are the kinds of sentences that rankle the sensibilities of white elites. The temerity to write so honestly about the shortcomings of a supposedly maligned minority! Even some of the dissidents I met in graduate school were squeamish about Sailer’s frankness, which they thought counterproductive. But Sailer is not gratuitously rude. Rather, he is brutally honest. Unsurprisingly, I agree with him, “…the truth is better for us than ignorance, lies, or wishful thinking.”

Exactly. Because well-meaning lies are still lies just as sweetened poison is still poison. And as the post-Floyd homicide spike illustrated, lies about black Americans can lead to dead Americans. If policy makers listened more to Sailer and less to preening white liberals, thousands of black men and women who were killed from 2014-2024 might still be alive today:

“As I may have mentioned once or twice over the past year, the media-declared ‘racial reckoning’ following the death of George Floyd on May 25, 2020, has been getting a lot of blacks murdered by other blacks. But I am not being ironic in saying that I am now stunned to find out that motor vehicle fatalities among blacks similarly soared 36% in June-December 2020 versus the same period in 2019, compared with a 9% increase in the rest of the population.”

“Well, we’ve since tried telling blacks that they are morally better than whites. How’s that working out for all concerned.”

What is more, Sailer shows real regard for his fellow Americans (of all races), promoting a view that he calls citizenism, which “affirms that true patriots and idealists are willing to make sacrifices for the overall good of their fellow American citizens rather than for the advantage of either six billion foreigners or of the special interests within our own country.”

To my mind, this is a reasonable, centrist notion of the nation, encouraging camaraderie and sacrifice while avoiding the potential excesses of ethnic nationalism. It could also give meaning to those who, through no fault of their own, are prevented from entering the high-IQ club of prestige journalists and other cosmopolitans who signal their sophistication by ridiculing patriotism and the supposedly irrational emotions it rouses. Like courtiers criticizing the coarseness of some book or another while the peasants starve in the countryside, these elites condemn Sailer’s bluntness and honesty while promoting policies that ravage the middle class and drain meaning from the lives of many citizens of all races. It is infinitely more cruel to compel American blacks to compete with millions of immigrants than it is to speak honestly about IQ and crime.

I won’t belabor the point or attempt to summarize Sailer’s philosophy (or lack thereof). Any thinker as interesting as Sailer is impossible to describe in a readable review. What I will say is that Noticing is a delight. It is helpfully organized into amusingly and appropriately named sections, such as “Sailer’s Law of Mass Shootings” and “Sailer’s Law of Female Journalism.” More importantly, it is full of his essays. And those are always valuable and engaging. They can be read at random like a Spotify playlist. Or they can be read in order like a theme album. But however one does it, one should read them.

Much has changed since I was a young graduate student discretely reading Sailer’s essays. I decided to take a shot at writing honestly about race while maintaining an academic job. I failed.

Thankfully the ruin of my academic career led to better things. I began writing here at Aporia where candor about race is an asset, not a threat to my job. I could finally express my admiration for Sailer openly. I even interviewed him for our podcast.

What has not changed is the importance of noticing. Indeed, in an intellectual climate suffocated by political correctness and by mainstream conservatives trying to police their own, noticing has never been more crucial. To this end, few books are more helpful than the one aptly titled Noticing. Get a copy. And start noticing.

For details about purchasing ‘Noticing’, click here.

Bo Winegard is the Executive Editor of Aporia.

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