With Facing Reality, Charles Murray aims to provide an extremely brief corrective to our current debate over racial inequality. That debate, he says, is missing “two truths”:
The first is that American Whites, Blacks, Latinos, and Asians, as groups, have different means and distributions of cognitive ability. The second is that American Whites, Blacks, Latinos, and Asians, as groups, have different rates of violent crime.
Once we recognize that these differences exist and will be with us “indefinitely,” we should stop blaming all racial inequality on racism, abandon race-conscious policies, and rededicate ourselves to the American ideal of treating one another as individuals.
What is the target audience for such an argument? Murray says one group is a special priority: “people on the center-left who are liberals in the tradition that extended from FDR through Bill Clinton and included Senator Joe Biden.”
It is true, of course, that there are real and highly consequential racial gaps in test scores and crime rates — and that we’ve expended considerable effort trying to close them, with mixed-at-best results. It’s less clear that many Americans are unaware of these gaps, that Murray is the right person to convince a skeptic, or that the case he has assembled here is well tailored to that purpose.
To begin with, I would posit that most Americans know about these problems, even if they’d rather not dwell on them or state them out loud in crude terms. Some may cringe at the assertion that different racial groups have different levels of “cognitive ability” on average, for instance, but gaps in academic performance are widely accepted. Every year we hear about gaps on standardized tests and debate how to address them. High rates of crime in minority neighborhoods are similarly obvious and troubling to mainstream and center-left Americans. In 2016, Barack Obama called the black murder rate “way out of whack compared to the general population.”
Further to the left, there certainly is a growing segment of “woke” folks who deny Murray’s truths, the ones who would eliminate standardized testing and blame racial differences in incarceration entirely on a biased justice system. But even this ideology — obsessed with a subtle “systemic racism” that can perpetuate inequality even through colorblind rules and good-intentioned people — doesn’t have to deny the facts about test performance and violence, which can simply be seen as effects of systemic racism in themselves. Two Urban Institute researchers wrote last year, for example, that “violence and the disproportionate rates of victimization in Black communities” are “a product of structural racism.”
So, it may not really come as a shock to center-left Americans, and even some with more radical inclinations, that there are different levels of crime and academic performance among racial and ethnic groups.
Further, Murray is probably not the person to reason with those who remain skeptical. He is, after all, a co-author of The Bell Curve, the still-taboo 1994 book that ascribed the racial IQ gap in part to genetics. Many of the people Murray is trying to convince are not remotely open to such a claim. Facing Reality itself avoids the issue of what causes the “two truths,” but of course it will be read in the light of the author’s previous work.
At any rate, there is also the question of whether the book’s arguments are crafted to convince someone who is new to these topics or already skeptical of Murray’s view. One can never know how someone else will digest a book, but my sense is that such a person could end up overwhelmed by Murray’s attempt to cover so much ground in so little space — urging readers to check the endnotes and an online supplement for more detail, and sometimes including weak arguments alongside much stronger ones.
Take the chapter on intelligence, which is only about 25 pages. Here Murray focuses on racial gaps on IQ tests and other measures of academic ability, including the National Assessment of Educational Progress. The black–white gap on such tests narrowed quite a bit in the 1970s and 1980s, but it’s been pretty consistent ever since. In discussing these scores, Murray blitzes through a fair amount of statistical jargon, a basic overview of how big the gaps are, a lengthy excerpt from a 1995 American Psychological Association report arguing that test bias isn’t what causes the gaps, and an explanation that the tests don’t “underpredict” blacks’ performance at school or on the job. (If the tests unfairly give low scores to members of a certain group, that group might later perform better than the tests predicted — though, of course, other obstacles and forms of bias might suppress the group’s performance elsewhere too.) It’s a lot to take in.
Then consider Murray’s discussion of violent crime. He starts by laying out arrest rates, and rather than rely on national numbers easily available from the federal government, he does his own analysis of data from 13 cities that make their numbers public. He provides his technical reasons for this decision in an endnote; I won’t belabor the issue here, but I would argue that these reasons fail to outweigh the downsides of covering only a handful of cities while abandoning the simplicity and authority of nationwide numbers from the federal government.
Murray’s data show that blacks and to a lesser extent Hispanics are arrested for serious violent crimes more than whites and Asians are . . . but since racism in the criminal-justice system is a core claim of the modern Left, this doesn’t really prove much to a skeptic. So Murray looks to several other sources to “triangulate” his way to better evidence. For example, he shows that reports to police that identify the race of the offender (data available only in New York) show a similar skew . . . but then again, another big claim of the modern Left is that racist white “Karens” are calling the cops on black and brown people for no good reason all the time. So he looks at reports from black and Hispanic callers . . . but thanks to residential and social segregation, those callers might simply live among high numbers of blacks and Hispanics, and disproportionately be victimized by blacks and Hispanics for that reason. He repeats this analysis with zip codes that are highly multiracial . . . but of course there may be segregation within those smaller geographic units as well.
His most compelling piece of evidence relies specifically on murder arrests. Cops take murder seriously regardless of the race of the victim — and I would add that homicides with black victims are somewhat less likely to be cleared than homicides with white victims, meaning that, since homicide is heavily intraracial, these statistics might even undercount the share of murder offenders who are black. These data still show an extreme racial tilt, with blacks having a per capita arrest rate for murder many times higher than whites in all 13 cities (and nationwide). The white–Hispanic gap is not nearly so pronounced but still present.
Meanwhile, I was surprised to see that Murray did not make use of the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), which asks Americans about their experiences with crime regardless of whether they reported the crimes in question to the police. These data, too, show a racial skew in violent offending, though not as severe a skew as in the murder numbers. According to a recent report from the Bureau of Justice Statistics, for instance, offenders were identified as black in about 36 percent of the serious violent crimes reported to the NCVS, while blacks are only about 13 percent of the overall population.
Of course, if these gaps are real, the consequences are obvious enough. Groups with higher academic ability will be strongly represented in the most intellectually demanding and remunerative fields; groups with higher rates of crime will be incarcerated more. Murray doesn’t deny that racial minorities also face discrimination. But he’s right that, so long as these differences persist, we cannot expect equal outcomes, at least not without truly massive racial preferences.
So, what to do?
As already mentioned, and as will come as little surprise to his longtime readers, Murray is intensely skeptical that these gaps will close anytime soon. More broadly, he believes that there is little to gain by “going after racism,” and that America’s problems “will be solved, or ameliorated, by going after systemic educational problems, systemic law enforcement problems, systemic employment problems.” These issues are “exacerbated by individual racism,” but “the racism is not systemic.”
Somewhat oddly, though, his most fleshed-out proposal is to end government-sponsored affirmative action, which he admits is “not politically within the realm of possibility.” He cautions that the more identity politics take hold, the more white people will be inclined to adopt them; many already have. To head off even more racial division, we must commit to color-blindness rather than putting the races in open political conflict. Fair enough, but this is an unsatisfying way to cap off a book documenting that a once-enslaved American minority group still suffers from poor academic skills and high crime.
Not that anyone asked, but I would have written this book a bit differently, with the goal of meeting those center-left Democrats whom Murray wants to reach a little closer to where they are. I would have sidelined the concept of “cognitive ability,” speaking instead of academic performance, and I would have focused the crime discussion more tightly on measures that can’t be waved aside with allegations of bias in the justice system. I would have avoided claims that racial gaps will exist “indefinitely,” which unnecessarily raise the specter of genetic causes, instead simply explaining that they exist and we must take them into account in any analysis of what causes today’s racial inequality.
And to go along with any suggestion of eliminating affirmative action, I would have laid out an aggressive, colorblind policy platform to reduce crime, reform policing, improve schools, and end restrictive zoning laws that entrench segregation and hinder upward mobility. Even if there are no panaceas that we know of to racial gaps, we do know that our current approaches to these issues are far from perfect. When we fix all of that, then we can start worrying in earnest about how long any remaining gaps will last.
Murray’s “two truths” are important. But I am unsure how widely they are really denied, and how convincing someone from the other side of the aisle would find Facing Reality.
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Robert VerBruggen is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
This piece originally appeared in National Review Online