Top Conservative Publication Defends Linking Hispanics To Low IQ

Monday morning, the flagship conservative journal National Review published a piece arguing that Richwine’s work was legitimate academic inquiry and that Heritage should have defended the dissertation rather than distancing itself from it.

The piece, authored by deputy managing editor Robert VerBruggen, argues that Richwine’s dissertation was “most certainly competently executed,” and that Richwine’s research on IQ helps support “much of the actual data” in giving “reason for concern” about “Hispanic assimilation.” That makes it wrong to call Richwine’s dissertation racist, in VerBruggen’s view:

These sorts of debates are resolved by having scholars take different views, conduct research, and make their case, confident that their current and future “educational institutions” will not punish them for doing so. Indeed, today genome research is progressing at a rapid clip, with scientists worldwide making fascinating discoveries almost constantly. (Soon, I hope, this work will render the research Richwine cites, much of which is decades old, obsolete.) The Left would like to cut this process off, expelling from polite society — with the help of a conservative think tank in this case — any researcher who dares to defend the hereditarian view.

The Left’s labeling of Richwine’s argument as “racist” is especially dangerous. In modern America it is axiomatic that “racism,” whatever it is, is wrong — and this is a good thing. It therefore is a mistake to define racism to include falsifiable hypotheses in addition to racial hatred. If Richwine’s view is racist, what are we to do if it turns out to be correct?