July 31, 2005

Diversity v. Freedom, Chapter CLXXXVII: The Case Of Andrew Fraser

By Steve Sailer

"I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."

If Voltaire were alive today, he'd be spinning in his grave.

The latest collision between "diversity," the highest ideal of the present age, and such outmoded concepts as academic freedom has a VDARE.com contributor, Australian law professor Drew Fraser, as the victim.

For having the temerity to write a letter to a local newspaper.

"A Sydney university has banned a controversial law professor from teaching after he publicly aired his views on non-whites and Africans in Australia. Canadian-born Associate Professor Andrew Fraser was cautioned by Macquarie University last week over a letter he wrote to a suburban newspaper…University vice-chancellor Professor Di Yerbury responded with a three-page memo to staff announcing that Professor Fraser would not teach until further notice…" [Outspoken Academic banned from teaching, Tamara Mclean, News.com.au, July 29 2005][VDARE.COM note: The original letter, published in the Parramatta Sun, is not online. Professor Fraser posted the text of it as a comment on MajorityRights.com (scroll down)]

Connoisseurs of irony will treasure the university's justification:

"Professor Fraser yesterday rejected an offer by the university to buy out his contract and launched a bitter attack on Vice-Chancellor Di Yerbury, describing her as an 'intellectual coward'. Professor Yerbury responded by suspending Professor Fraser from teaching, citing a report in The Australian yesterday in which he claimed a group called Smash Racism was planning to disrupt his classes… 'We have a duty to act decisively to protect his safety and that of others on campus,' she said. Professor Yerbury told The Weekend Australian late yesterday that she would seek legal advice if he made further unauthorized public statements…. Yerbury said she was not bothered by Professor Fraser's personal attack on her. ‘I will wear that as a badge of honour,’ she said. ‘I made the apology because I was distressed and ashamed he had associated the university with views which so fundamentally contravened its position.’  [Lecture ban for 'racist' professor , Greg Roberts, The Weekend Australian, July 30, 2005]

Okay, let me see if I have this straight: The university must keep their professor from saying that immigration raises the risk of criminal violence—to safeguard him from criminal violence from immigrants and their supporters?

R-i-g-h-t… [Email Macquarie University Vice-Chancellor Di Yerbury].

Perhaps not coincidentally, this was happening at the same time that police were arresting several East African immigrants in the attempted July 21 terrorist bombings in London.

In effect, Fraser is being prevented from expressing views on politics—although professors pontificating about politics is a much-loved feature of public life throughout the Anglosphere.

So what about Professor Fraser's statement that Africans tend to have low IQs and high testosterone levels?

Here at VDARE.com, unlike at almost every other outlet (and, apparently, Macquarie University), our first question is not whether it's politically correct to say something. Instead we ask: Is it true?

And it is true. Africans do tend to have low IQs.

The average IQ of sub-Saharan Africans in Africa has been studied many times over many decades. It keeps coming out almost two standard deviations below that of Europeans and nearly two and half standard deviations below that of Northeast Asians.

Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen’s landmark book IQ and the Wealth of Nations (2002) summarizes 32 published studies of representative samples of individuals in black African countries: No researchers found an African average national IQ higher than 80.

Of course, a selective immigration system—which we don’t have—could mitigate part of this IQ shortfall by picking unusually talented applicants, of which there are certainly some from all countries.

For example, a friend of mine who was getting his Ph.D. at UCLA came from a family of nine children in Cameroon in West Africa. Eight of the nine earned advanced degrees from Western universities, and the oldest was a surgeon and oncologist who had shared in the prestigious Albert Lasker Award for Clinical Medical Research.

(Naturally, the West's brain-draining of Africa's smartest people just contributes to the continent's poverty. But that’s another story.)

Here in America, the massive National Longitudinal Study of Youth found that the mean IQ of blacks who were the children of immigrants was 90, about five points above the norm for African-Americans. The logic of regression toward the mean suggests that their immigrant parents probably averaged even higher IQs.

One little-discussed reason why American political and media elites in Washington D.C. favor immigration so much more than the rest of us is because they prefer the fairly well-educated, polite, and hard-working immigrants from Africa's best families who flock to the D.C. area over the capital's native-born African-Americans, whom our leaders privately view as ignorant, surly, lazy, and crime-prone.

(Naturally, importing immigrants to out-compete our black fellow citizens doesn't solve their problems. It just makes them worse. But that’s another story too.)

Unfortunately, the African immigrants' kids often assimilate toward the values expressed in the most charismatic force in African-American culture: gangsta rap.

Will the children of African immigrants to Australia hip-hop down the same disastrous trail? The Israeli example is not encouraging. According to the Associated Press, the young Falasha Jews whose parents were airlifted from Ethiopia have found

"an unlikely source of solace, pride and identity—America's black culture. The fact that most of these Ethiopian teens have never visited the United States or even met a black American doesn't prevent them from embracing rap music and hip-hop fashion, along with sometimes misguided stereotypes gleaned from MTV, movies and news reports."

What about Fraser's contention that blacks have more testosterone on average?

This hasn't been studied as much as IQ. But the scientific evidence supports Fraser once again.

Andrew Sullivan, a prescription testosterone user, has written a long article in the New York Times Magazine (The He Hormone, April 02, 2000) about the powerful effect of his prescription testosterone injections on his behavior. In it, Sullivan pointed out:

"Even more unsettling is the racial gap in testosterone. Several solid studies, published in publications like Journal of the National Cancer Institute, show that black men have on average 3 to 19 percent more testosterone than white men. This is something to consider when we're told that black men dominate certain sports because of white racism or economic class rather than black skill."

The relevant question is not just hormone levels in the bloodstream, but the varying power of the male hormone receptors. Men with stronger androgen receptors tend to behave as if they have higher levels of testosterone and other male hormones. A team of geneticists led by Rick Kittles of Howard U. documented that race accounts for 20 percent of the variations in the gene that controls the strength of the body's androgen receptors. Men of African descent tend toward the high end, men of East Asian descent toward the low end, whites generally near the middle.

Keep in mind that 80% of the variation observed was within racial groups. Which is about what you'd expect from observing the world around you. In every racial group, there exists a wide variety of physical and personality types among men, from the most hyper-masculine to the most gentle.

Still, few who watch sports on television, follow Olympic running results, or examine interracial marriage patterns, will be surprised that blacks on the whole score highest on those androgen receptor gene alleles associated with greater masculinity.

Let's discuss the larger issue: Why is truth-telling important? What's so useful about free speech? Wouldn't it be better just to bury our heads in the sand about things like race and IQ?

No—because everything that is true is causally connected to something else that is true. In contrast, lies, ignorance, and wishful thinking are dead ends.

If, as National Review’s Austin Bramwell kindly suggested recently, my articles are more interesting and insightful than those of the better-paid purveyors of the conventional wisdom, the main reason is simply because I follow the chains of cause and effect wherever they lead.

The promotion of ignorance is cruel, not kind, because facts are useful while twaddle is just a dead end.

Two examples:

"African-American men are at substantially higher risk of developing and dying from prostate cancer than Caucasians in the United States. African-American men living in the San Francisco area have a risk of developing prostate cancer that is 120 times that of Chinese men living in China… A systematic study of black men in Nigeria found that prostate cancer incidence was actually much higher than previously reported and may be as high as that noted among black men in the US (Osegbe 1997, Prostate cancer in Nigerians: facts and nonfacts, Journal of Urology, 157(4):1340-1343.)."

Because African-Americans score around 85, and they share about 80% of their genes with their African cousins, it seems likely that the difficult environment in Africa (malnutrition, disease, disorder, poverty, and so forth) depresses the typical African's IQ substantially below his or her genetic potential.

Perhaps the most cost-effective way to raise IQs in Africa is to attack the IQ-lowering medical syndromes caused by a lack of micronutrients, such as "endemic cretinism," which stems from too little iodine in the diet. Western countries started fortifying salt with iodine and flour with iron back before WWII, and that quickly eliminated what had been a substantial problem here.

UNICEF issued an important study of poor countries' micronutrient deficiencies last year. I wrote in VDARE.com about what we could be doing to help the Third World raise its average IQ, here and here.

But almost no one else in the press was interested—because they know they will get in trouble, like Professor Fraser, if they mention African IQ.

See, "nice" people think it's more moral to let endemic cretinism and the like ravage Africa than to bring up IQ in polite society.

Only EVIL people try to get the world to notice the problem…and do something about it. 

But we can’t make problems go away by pretending they don't exist.

As Enoch Powell pointed out in his continually-denounced but never-refuted 1968 immigration speech:

"The supreme function of statesmanship is to provide against preventable evils. In seeking to do so, it encounters obstacles which are deeply rooted in human nature…. Above all, people are disposed to mistake predicting troubles for causing troubles and even for desiring troubles: ‘if only’, they love to think, ‘if only people wouldn't talk about it, it probably wouldn't happen.’

And Powell’s conclusion is equally valid today:

"All I know is that to see, and not to speak, would be the great betrayal."