[TownHall] - Give Charles Murray, longtime scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, credit for courage. Again and again, despite outrageously unfair attacks, he has returned to the public arena and persisted in telling unwelcome truths. In his meticulous prose, with charts and tables so elegant as to betray an aesthetic bent, he makes his points with precision and clarity.
Murray's 1994 book "The Bell Curve," co-authored with Harvard psychologist Richard Herrnstein, evoked furious and undeserved denunciation. It will be interesting to see whether there is a similar reaction to his latest and much shorter book, "Facing Reality: Two Truths About Race in America."
His first truth is that "American Whites, Blacks, Latinos, and Asians, as groups, have different means and distributions of cognitive abilities." Murray makes mincemeat of arguments against IQ tests and shows that they're highly correlated with achievement in schools and in later life. Asians have the highest average scores, followed by Whites, Latinos and Blacks.
Murray's second truth is that "American Whites, Blacks, Latinos, and Asians, as groups, have different rates of violent crime." Murray deftly extrapolates from the best available crime rates and shows that average violent crime rates are far above average among Blacks, somewhat above average among Latinos, somewhat below average among Whites and almost negligible among Asians.
For many Americans, these are uncomfortable (I have often used the word "unhappy") truths. Blacks are about eight times more likely than Whites (I use Murray's capitalization practice) to commit violent crimes. And I feel a twinge of discomfort in the below-average cognitive ability scores of some of my ancestral ethnicities.
Any time, anyone, solves a quadratic equation it is a microaggression against the Blacks?
Conventional media and academic elites routinely suppress these truths, apparently for fear that ordinary Americans would take them as a warrant for racial discrimination against individuals. To that argument, I reply, as I did in National Review in 1994 and in a Washington Examiner blog post in 2013, that ordinary Americans know better.
"They have learned, from school, from work, from everyday life, that there is wider variation within each measured group than between measured groups." They understand that averages don't reliably describe individuals, "that it is irrational to discriminate according to race or religion or ethnic group, and that it is rational to judge individuals on their own merits."
...Those in need of facing the reality of Charles Murray's two truths are not ordinary Americans, but elites -- the corporate leaders, gentry liberal voters and human resources department lifers who cling desperately to the identity politics of Black Lives Matter organizers and the critical race theory hucksters.
How come nobody ever demands diversity for NFL/NBA? 
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