Читать книгу Negrophobia and Reasonable Racism - Jody David Armour - Страница 12

Perhaps the gravest threat today to progress toward racial justice comes from the right-wing ideologues bent on convincing White people of good faith that negative stereotypes about Blacks are justified. Trotting out discredited studies, unscientific experiments, and cooked statistics, these pundits try to prove that Blacks are inherently less intelligent and more violent than Whites. The unmistakable implication of these “proofs” of Black inferiority is that disparities between Blacks and Whites in education and employment must be blamed on Blacks’ own inferior genes, not on past and present discrimination. A further implication is that Whites need not resist the influence of some profoundly derogatory stereotypes on their thinking about Blacks. After all, according to these learned men, many of these ugly stereotypes are true!

Old-fashioned racism of the Ku Klux Klan variety is still out of fashion. Growing in its place, however, is the highbrow, pseudoscientific variety—racism on stilts, if you will—one that hides its fascist boots beneath a laboratory coat. Pseudoscientific apologies for racial subordination are nothing new in the American experience. One aim of this book is to add a nail to the coffin of this most recent embodiment of highbrow racism, though I am ever mindful that no quantity of nails will lay it to rest for good. For, like eighteenth-century body snatchers who made handsome profits stealing corpses from graves, opportunistic ideologues like Charles Murray and Richard Hernstein will always be prowling the cemeteries of science for the noisome remains of discredited scientific theories with which to foul the marketplace of ideas.