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From: A. Summer (e-mail him)
Re: Jared Taylor's Column: Egalitarian Orthodoxy: Noble Fiction—Or Noxious Poison?
My question: Do American blacks, within their own communities, discuss "the great taboo"?
My own intimations are that they do not—at least to any socially discernable extent.
Professor Eugene Valberg discovered two decades ago that in Africa spontaneous interviews could be conducted widely about this issue—in a setting in which 99 percent of the population was black (in one variant or another0.
But for American black community leaders at all disposed to confront unwelcome facts would be that in a society in which blacks are only 15 percent of the population, open discussion is tantamount to lighting a match when the lights go out in an ammo depot.
Jared Taylor replies: With the exception of a few conversations with African taxi drivers, who all willingly admit whites are smarter than blacks on average, my experience in talking with blacks about race and IQ is limited to the speeches I wrote about in my article. I know Eugene Valberg quite well. He is an American philosophy PhD who has lived for many years in Africa and he has the unusual habit of bringing up racial differences in IQ with just about every black he meets. He says that although American blacks do not concede race differences quite as readily as Africans do, they are, by and large, quite open to the idea and not offended by it.
I have no idea how often blacks discuss racial differences in IQ among themselves, but judging from the keen interest in the subject shown by my audiences, I suspect it is not quite so rarely as you suggest.
