Bo Winegard’s Review of ”Noticing” in ”Aporia” | Blog Posts

Bo Winegard’s Review of ”Noticing” in ”Aporia”

03/29/2024

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From Aporia:

Steve Sailer: Still noticing after all these years

Bo Winegard reflects on the immense influence of Steve Sailer and reviews ‘Noticing’, a newly published anthology of Sailer’s essays.

MAR 28, 2024
Written by Bo Winegard

When I was a young, closeted race realist in graduate school, I first began to read Steve Sailer’s essays—and I was impressed both by their honesty and by their elegant but unpretentious style. He wrote the things I wanted to say. And how I wanted to say them. But I was a social psychologist. And being a race realist in social psychology is like being a happy man at a funeral. You are certain that you are not alone but prudent enough to keep your views private. At least, until you really trust somebody.

Thus, I was a solitary Sailer reader. For a while. Eventually I tired of prudence. Race, IQ, immigration—these were topics too important to suppress. Therefore, I became more outspoken about my views—by which I mean that I broached the topic of race and IQ from time to time. What I discovered surprised me. I was far from the only Sailer fan around. This does not mean that psychology graduate programs are full of surreptitious race realists like resistance fighters in some occupied country. Far from it.

But I did find a loyal club of fellow dissidents.

We discussed race and IQ and immigration and crime. And of course Sailer. Each of his heretical sentences thrilled us. “Can you believe he wrote that?!” we’d exclaim before analyzing his latest essay. Reading and discussing Sailer felt rebellious. And rebellion is very attractive to young intellectuals. But Sailer was more than a provocateur; he was a serious thinker. Wrestling with his writings made us more knowledgeable and more aware of important subterranean ideas. (As Sailer has noted, many of these ideas are mainstream in academia if you translate the deceptive nomenclature of journal articles into ordinary language.)

Sailer’s influence on me was more profound even than it was on my fellow dissidents because I was so impressed with his candor that I decided to write about race publicly. At first—and I owe Steve an apology for my cowardice—I kept my distance and never cited him. Writing about race was one thing, citing Steve Sailer was another. As Steve himself has written, “…people who don’t know me tend to hate me.” (Conversely, people who know Steve, like him.)

I wanted to write honestly about race, but I also wanted to keep my job in academia; and I worried that Sailer was so blunt and alienating that citing him was a guilt-by-association gift to enemies of honesty and open inquiry. As it turned out, I was not wrong. One of the sins I was accused of before getting fired was liking a tweet by Steve Sailer.