WPC
From: Jim Blaut
July 1, 1997
Subject: bell curves, etc.
I'll take the liberty of reproducing here a brief passage from my book* that I
believe is relevant to thediscussion taking place here about bell curves and the
like:
"Moderate racism is, today, a more serious problem in the world of scholars
than is classical racism,because it is mainly an implicit theory... But more
serious still is the surviving influence of what I will call *very* moderate
racism. A great number, perhaps the majority, of mainstream scholars [until
recently]believed that racial differences are very slight and that the
individual human being's capabilities and potentialities are not predictable
from his or her race;that race differences only appear influential on a
statistical basis for large groups: for instance, a slightly higher average
"intelligence quotient" forwhites as against blacks.
This belief was consistent with militant opposition to racial discrimination.
But it was not much better than classical racism when applied to questions of
social evolution and comparison between European and non-European history. This
is so because the historical arguments did not need to postulate large racial
differences. If whites, on the average, held a tiny advantage over nonwhites in,
let us say, inventiveness,that tiny advantage, working out its influence over
the centuries and millennia, would produce the result that whites built high
civilization and nonwhites did not. In a sense, this very moderate racism was a
more serious problem than ordinary racism, because it allowed scholars to take
liberal positions in opposition to overt racial discrimination yet continue to
believe that whites are superior genetically to nonwhites within the
subject-matter scope of their own fields...
[There] is no credible evidence in support of the idea that races differ in
genetic inheritance except in trivial matters like skin color...racial
differences explain nothing about culture or cultural evolution."
*The Colonizer's Model of the World: Geographical Diffusionism and Eurocentric
History, p. 65.