US journalist John Derbyshire has published\u00a0a screed comprising racist advice to his son.\u00a0 Among the tendentious statements contained in it is this one:<\/p>\n
(5)<\/strong> As with any population of such a size, there is great variation among blacks in every human trait (except, obviously, the trait of identifying oneself as black). They come fat, thin, tall, short, dumb, smart, introverted, extroverted, honest, crooked, athletic, sedentary, fastidious, sloppy, amiable, and obnoxious. There are black geniuses and black morons. There are black saints and black psychopaths. In a population of forty million, you will find almost any human type. Only at the far, far extremes of certain traits are there absences. There are, for example, no black Fields Medal winners. While this is civilizationally consequential, it will not likely ever be important to you personally. Most people live and die without ever meeting (or wishing to meet) a Fields Medal winner.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n
It is true that there are no black Fields Medallists.\u00a0 There are also no women, of whom there are rather more in the world than the 40 million black Americans.\u00a0\u00a0 There are also no Canadians, no Spaniards, and no Poles among the winners.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0This is particularly surprising given the major and disproportionate contribution that Polish mathematicians, for example, have made to mathematics and related disciplines.\u00a0\u00a0 And there are many more New Zealanders and Belgians than their populations would lead one to expect.\u00a0 Perhaps the list of medal winners more reflects the knowledge and biases of the people\u00a0awarding the prizes\u00a0than the ability of the potential candidates.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Such a social construction provides a more logical explanation than what Derbyshire implies.\u00a0 But of course logic is never a strong point of racists.<\/div>\n\u00a0<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"US journalist John Derbyshire has published\u00a0a screed comprising racist advice to his son.\u00a0 Among the tendentious statements contained in it is this one: (5) As with any population of such a size, there is great variation among blacks in every human trait (except, obviously, the trait of identifying oneself as black). They come fat, thin, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,50],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3983","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anthropology","category-mathematics","p1","y2012","m04","d08","h22"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3983","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3983"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3983\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3983"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3983"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3983"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}