Andrew Sullivan: Stalwart Defender of Scientific Racism

Andrew Sullivan has recently made a concerted effort to revive the reputation of scientific racism. Today, he highlighted research that claims to show that Ashkenazi Jews have a higher average IQ than the rest of the population. He concludes, approvingly: “I like the fact that asking these kinds of questions is also part of the Jewish inheritance.” Apparently Andrew believes that asking certain “kinds of questions” is a genetic trait, strongly expressed in Jews.

Sullivan’s defense of scientific racism is wide ranging: from “The Bell Curve,” to ear wax, to foot size. Every time he can find a glimmer of subtle correlation between a racial group and a physical trait, he is eager to trump it up and defend it as evidence “that race does in some way exist as an essential fact of human nature... The social and political ramifications of this deserve a different and deeper treatment....” How differences in foot size and ear wax could possibly have “social and political ramifications,” I’m not entirely sure. Sullivan’s main concern is to reclaim race as a scientifically-based concept, on whatever grounds he can find.

Sullivan’s eagerness to highlight supposed biological racial differences stems from his self-proclaimed conservatism. Conservatism hinges in part on the notion of a natural order of things and people. This natural order justifies the economic and social inequality that conservatives romanticize as the “richness and variety of human experience.” Conservatives console themselves that they need not redress inequality because that is the way God meant it to be, or else, simply the way things are. But because social and economic inequality in America is correlated with race, conservatives must maintain that racial inequalities have a genetic basis. They would otherwise have to confront the fact that no feature of a natural order can explain why African Americans are disproportionately represented in incarceration and child welfare, and have a lower life expectancy, even after controlling for income level. However, no evidence supports the contention that these inequities can be explained by any racially-determined genetic or biological trait whatsoever. The best Sullivan can do is display as many scientific confirmations of racial difference as possible in hopes that his readers will make an inference to the worst explanation.

Sullivan never explicitly states or defends his belief in a natural racial order. His strategy is obliquely to introduce and legitimize racist hypotheses, in order to introduce skepticism that racial social and economic inequality is purely human handiwork. For example, in a post on “Race and IQ,” Sullivan begins with a link to recent quotes from James Watson, the Nobel Prize winning discoverer of DNA structure, who is “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa," since he believes that “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours – whereas all the testing says not really” (Daily Telegraph 10/20/07). Previously, Dr. Watson has claimed that dark skinned women have a higher sex drive than light skinned women. Sullivan does not explicitly support any of Watson’s views. He is, however, in line with Watson in believing that natural racial difference has "social and political ramifications." And he seems to acknowledge Watson's assertions as a valid contribution to reasoned public debate on genetics, under the auspices of Williams Saletan’s principle: “Never be afraid to consider testable claims about your sex or ethnicity.”

To assert that one should never be afraid to consider testable claims about one’s ethnicity is not, however, to say that one should not be insulted and offended by the suggestion that certain testable claims are worth testing, or are worth any serious consideration before they have been tested. It is no coincidence that Watson’s “testable claims” are the claims of racist stereotypes: that blacks are less intelligent than whites and have a higher sex drive. If a scientist wanted to test whether Jews had a natural propensity towards greed, that would likewise strike me as off color, to say the least. There are myriad hypotheses we can test, and there are finite resources for experimentation. So, the hypotheses we choose to test say a great deal about what questions we think are most important, and what answers we are most interested in hearing. We should therefore be suspicious of scientific programs and pseudo-scientific pontification that seek to empirically verify racist stereotypes, the perpetuation of which serves to justify and reproduce racial inequality.