The long dissent: Charles Murray and the protest against orthodoxy
Charles Murray's Human Diversity and Facing Reality are his most recent contributions to his ongoing dissent against American orthodoxy about race.
Written By Bo Winegard.
The proverbial Martian would find contemporary discourse about race in America peculiar, even paradoxical. On the one hand, many modern intellectuals insist that “race” is a pernicious reification of superficial human differences that has been refuted by modern science. On the other hand, many of these same intellectuals obsess about racial disparities and injustices and actively promote policies that treat people of different races differently, e.g., affirmative action.
Thus, mainstream discourse simultaneously contends that belief in race is bigoted and anachronistic and that racial equality is an ethical imperative that can only be achieved through racially conscious policy and analysis. To circle this apparent square, sophisticated defenders of the mainstream argue that although race does not actually exist, it is real because the masses believe that it is real and therefore treat people of different (but also illusory) races differently. And this differential treatment causes disparate outcomes. The category “race,” like the category “witch,” is therefore analytically indispensable so long as people’s belief in it influences their behavior toward others. (I will refer to this position as the orthodoxy.)
