Why Conservatives Love to Link Race and IQ
It’s easy to see how this argument works — if some people are less intelligent than others, as a consequence of either genetics or “underclass culture,” then government programs aren’t likely to help equalize society — creating an economically more level playing field will only cause the most talented to rise to the top again. Inequality is thus natural and ineradicable; poverty might be helped at the margins, but helping the unintelligent will be fraught with unintended consequences.
Moreover, this framing allows conservatives to explain the obviously racial character of American poverty without having to concede the continued relevance of racism to American public life. If it’s really the case that people with certain backgrounds simply aren’t as smart as others, then it makes sense that they’d be less successful as a group. What strikes progressives as offensively racial inequality thus becomes naturalized for conservatives in the same way that inequality and poverty writ large do.
Not only does positing a link between race and IQ provide conservatives with an overarching intellectual framework that supports their public policy preferences, it does so while allowing them to claim the mantle of objective scientists persecuted for telling “hard truths.” One of the founding myths of modern conservatism is that conservatives are hard-headed rationalists, while liberals let their soft-minded care for the downtrodden get in the way of rational public policy. Race and IQ theory, despite being based in truly shoddy data, presents itself as neutral social science, allowing conservatives to take refuge in the “it’s not our fault that the truth is what it is” argument when dismissing public policy ideas to take on American racism.