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Taboo: 10 Facts You Can't Talk About
It has become virtually impossible to honestly discuss race, gender, and class issues in mainstream American society because if you dare repeat certain "tabooo truths," you'll be ostracized as a bigot. Professor Wilfred Reilly (author of Hate Crime Hoax ) fearlessly presents 10 of these truths here and investigates why the mainstream is so afraid to acknowledge that they're true. Among these taboo
* Men and women are different, although equal.
* There is no epidemic of police murdering Black people. The year Black Lives Matter began, cops shot under 1,200 people, and only 258 of them were Black.
* Crime rates vary among ethnic groups. The Black violent crime rate is about 2.4 times the white rate.
* There are almost no "pay gaps" between big groups, when variables other than race and sex are adjusted for.
* Men and women are different, although equal.
* There is no epidemic of police murdering Black people. The year Black Lives Matter began, cops shot under 1,200 people, and only 258 of them were Black.
* Crime rates vary among ethnic groups. The Black violent crime rate is about 2.4 times the white rate.
* There are almost no "pay gaps" between big groups, when variables other than race and sex are adjusted for.
256 pages, Hardcover
First published January 28, 2020
217 people are currently reading
794 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 77 reviews
May 4, 2021
At the start:
I thought I'd challenge my progressive sensibilities by reading a book from The Other Side, so to speak. I have a lot of admiration for the current group of Black contrarians who go against the liberal grain. Maybe not so much because I agree with their positions, but because I admire going against the grain in general, especially if you are going against the mainstream with integrity and intelligence. As a person who considered himself antiracist well before the current craze took hold of American discourse, the best way I've been able to keep true to my progressive belief system has been to challenge it, to have hard questions posed that make me think on the values I hold dear. Well, as long as the challenge is not coming from some dimwit who is all too easily dismissed. Professor Wilfred Reilly, an engaging writer with clear pride in his identity as a Black American and an impressive ease with incorporating data and research, is pretty much the opposite of a dimwit.
PROGRESS NOTES
After the finish:
Not bad! Of course, there is so much that I disagreed with and, more importantly to me, Reilly seems to miss key points because he's so focused on quantitative data while only giving creedence to qualitative information when it supports his own theses. And by "key points" I mean key points about not just race & racism, but the human condition itself. All that said, the quantitative research displayed here is incredibly impressive. This is a very, very well-sourced book. My feelings and reactions about his various points are contained in my progress notes, so no need to exhaustively go over them again. Too tiring.
Did I learn anything new? To a limited extent, I did. Mainly within the first half of his chapter on immigration. Not so much with the rest of the book.
IDLE PERSONAL MUSINGS
Wilfred Reilly's voice is at different points sarcastic & snarky, down-to-earth & self-effacing, pretentious & condescending, hyper-left-brained & intellectual to a fault, and wonderfully, hilariously bitchy in his eagerness to score both important points and also some exceedingly petty points. I love a petty bitch and it takes one to know one. Reilly is a massively entertaining person. In short, a person I'd love to get drunk with. We'd disagree on so much, but hey we'd have a good time. Despite the dead seriousness of its topics, this book was often, surprisingly, a lot of fun. Debate should be fun! And I debated a lot with this book.
NEXT UP
I thought I'd challenge my progressive sensibilities by reading a book from The Other Side, so to speak. I have a lot of admiration for the current group of Black contrarians who go against the liberal grain. Maybe not so much because I agree with their positions, but because I admire going against the grain in general, especially if you are going against the mainstream with integrity and intelligence. As a person who considered himself antiracist well before the current craze took hold of American discourse, the best way I've been able to keep true to my progressive belief system has been to challenge it, to have hard questions posed that make me think on the values I hold dear. Well, as long as the challenge is not coming from some dimwit who is all too easily dismissed. Professor Wilfred Reilly, an engaging writer with clear pride in his identity as a Black American and an impressive ease with incorporating data and research, is pretty much the opposite of a dimwit.
PROGRESS NOTES
After the finish:
Not bad! Of course, there is so much that I disagreed with and, more importantly to me, Reilly seems to miss key points because he's so focused on quantitative data while only giving creedence to qualitative information when it supports his own theses. And by "key points" I mean key points about not just race & racism, but the human condition itself. All that said, the quantitative research displayed here is incredibly impressive. This is a very, very well-sourced book. My feelings and reactions about his various points are contained in my progress notes, so no need to exhaustively go over them again. Too tiring.
Did I learn anything new? To a limited extent, I did. Mainly within the first half of his chapter on immigration. Not so much with the rest of the book.
IDLE PERSONAL MUSINGS
Wilfred Reilly's voice is at different points sarcastic & snarky, down-to-earth & self-effacing, pretentious & condescending, hyper-left-brained & intellectual to a fault, and wonderfully, hilariously bitchy in his eagerness to score both important points and also some exceedingly petty points. I love a petty bitch and it takes one to know one. Reilly is a massively entertaining person. In short, a person I'd love to get drunk with. We'd disagree on so much, but hey we'd have a good time. Despite the dead seriousness of its topics, this book was often, surprisingly, a lot of fun. Debate should be fun! And I debated a lot with this book.
NEXT UP
April 21, 2021
An alright books that does challenge a lot of mainstream thoughts on race. I’ve listened to Reilly debate and I was pleasantly delighted to see that he was releasing another book. Reilly does challenge the claim that police are systematically racist in good fashion. However, I did expect a bit more out of this than I should have. Maybe being too harsh with three stars.
May 2, 2020
Please give my Amazon review a helpful vote - https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-re...
I am a factual-details, empirical-data person. When someone makes a claim, I typically ask "Evidence?" Opinions are fine, but I want to know what the facts behind the opinions are. I don't just read the headlines, I read the article and then I ask questions and fact check the questions. So much of what passes for knowledge is wrong. The gaslighting that exists is designed to prevent us from even thinking of questioning the buried assumptions in our thinking.
This applies to virtually everything, from history to economics to entertainment, etc. It's what you don't know you don't know that will get your every time.
So, I loved this book. Professor Reilly takes on ten of the planted assumptions surrounding race. These planted assumption are not simply maintained by gaslighting and misdirection - although there is a lot of that going on - but by outright hostility.
Professor Reilly's taboo facts and data are:
#1 The Police Aren’t Murdering Black People
'The basic claims of BLM are simply not true. Fewer than 1,200 people were killed by police in the year the movement began; only 258 of them were Black, and exactly 17 were unarmed Black men shot by white officers. Because they were directed at a nonexistent problem, the sweeping solutions of these proud young activists did far more harm than good. In a typical Midwestern city, shootings increased by half while police stops dropped 80 percent. Whatever the movement’s intentions, it is hard not to come to an unpleasant and unavoidable conclusion: Black Lives Matter got a ton of Black people killed."
17????
Reilly also points out that while cases involving POC get the lion's share of attention, those involving whites get none. I'm from Fresno and I had forgotten the example of Dylan Noble, killed in Fresno, while absolutely unarmed and no threat to anyone.
#2 There Is No “War on POC”… and BBQ Becky Did Nothing Wrong
"There is no race war going on in the U.S.A., and there certainly is no epidemic of white-on-Black crime. In fact, interracial crimes on an annual basis have been consistently 75–85 percent Black-on-white for the past thirty years. More importantly, there is no horrifying epidemic of interracial crimes of any variety because 84 percent of white murder victims and 93 percent of Black murder victims are killed by a mundane member of their own race. We see constant media coverage of BBQ Becky, Permit Patty, Coupon Carl, and George Zimmerman not because these people are everywhere, but because the corporate media have an agenda to push. We should stop taking this agenda seriously—today."
#3: Different Groups Perform Differently
Professor Reilly's position - backed by data - is that different population groups perform differently in different areas but not for genetic reasons since performance can change over time and be higher for subpopulations within the same race. This example has been around for a while:
"Black West Africans and Caribbean people are essentially genetically identical to Black Americans, almost all of whom descend from West African captives sold overseas as slaves. Thus, again, an eight-to-ten-point tested IQ gap between Black West Africans and Black Americans logically cannot be genetic. After suppressing a bit of a giggle here, let me note that high Black immigrant IQ is also not a result of uniquely rigorous immigration processes employed by the U.S.A. and modern Europe."
Asians do better than whites on entrance examinations. These are facts and ignoring the facts can make for failed social policy as the "mismatch effect" where affirmative action pushes less well prepared "POC" into colleges where they have lower graduation rates.
#4: Performance—Not “Prejudice”—Mostly Predicts Success.
Race is a far too easy single-cause explanation for success. There are numerous - several dozen factors - that affect success, the largest of which may simply be having a two-parent family.
This is a small point, but I found this interesting:
"While it is shameful that 7 percent of Americans would not vote for a qualified Black member of their political party for president, my immediate reaction to that statistic was that at least the same level of prejudice must exist against many white groups. Fifteen minutes of research verified that this is in fact the case. According to 2015 data, 6 percent of Americans would not vote for a (presumably white) Catholic President, 8 percent would not vote for a woman of any race, 7 percent would not vote for a Jew, 8 percent would not vote for a Mormon, and 24 percent would not vote for a gay person. It is almost offensive to argue that this level of discrimination, which we literally all face, could stop a driven Black or Hispanic American—or an Irish Mormon, for that matter—from succeeding. For minorities and others, culture predicts success far more than outside prejudice of this kind; it “matters.”
#5: Racism Didn’t Cause the New Problems of Today
Prior to the great society, the African-American community had largely intact families. The change occurred after the civil rights era. The destruction of the two-parent family has had a pernicious effect on the African-American community as a whole.
"The problem with the idea that racism has declined (“gone underground”) little, if at all, and that the minority problems of today are caused by racism—just as those of the past may have been—is threefold. First, most contemporary Black problems were less serious when racism was much worse. Few Black teenagers had babies out of wedlock in 1960, and almost no middle-class Black men went to jail, although the Black crime rate was still frankly a bit higher than the white crime rate. Second, most of these contemporary problems do not exist today for visibly non-white immigrants from Africa, South Asia, and the West Indies, who often outperform both American whites and Blacks. Finally, most of these issues, along with other terrible problems like opiate addiction, do exist for the working-class whites who live alongside poor Blacks. All of this indicates that internal American cultural collapse is the root cause of the problems we as a society face"
#6: Anyone Can Be Racist (and “Racist” Has a Real Meaning)
There is an odd sense among a large part of the left that it is impossible for minorities to be "racist."
"Everett went on to reject that idea and instead argued, “To carry out acts of racism, a race must have power and privilege.” She concluded that there has never been a time in American history when a substantial number of non-whites have been in positions of power or privilege over whites. Barack Obama, president of the United States when Everett wrote, could not be reached for comment. Nor could Eric Holder, his attorney general, or General Colin Powell, who was secretary of state during the previous Bush administration. Jokes aside, the claim that racism is “prejudice plus power,” and thus is possible only for members of dominant groups, is not confined to campus radicals and other fringe-dwellers."
Reilly points out that if racism can't be racist without power, that leaves the obviously racist South African White Nationalist movement in a position where it can't be described as racist.
#7 and #8: Whiteness Isn’t the Only “Privilege”—and “Cultural Appropriation” Is Not Real
Reilly nicely punctures these windbags, usually with deft humor, but the subject is very serious:
"The example of the literal return of actual segregation shows the real danger of such concepts as cultural appropriation and universal white privilege, which might initially seem lightweight and silly. These are not mere fancies, but rather tentative first steps down a very dangerous road. If we decide to again judge people not primarily as individuals, but rather as members of intractable and often squabbling tribes, it will become increasingly difficult to ever find common ground between them. Down that path lies balkanization and the clashes and even genocides that resulted from that in the Balkans themselves. Let us take a different road."
#9: A Sane Immigration Policy Isn’t Racist (And We Need One!)
This is a well-argued section. I am going to highlight this factoid because it is stunning:
"This policy might, again, be dismissed by some as harsh. However, it seems to me to be no great favor to bring people who might well have benefited their home societies into a potentially hostile foreign country where they will almost certainly be unable to earn a good living. The empirical evidence in favor of this argument is staggering. A recent article in Stockholm’s The Local reported that by May 2016, fewer than 500 (494) of more than 163,000 Africans and Middle Easterners to migrate to Sweden during the past decade or so had managed to find jobs in that nation’s first-world economy. Many of those who had not, often ambitious working-age men, were miserable."
#10: The “Alt-Right” Has Nothing to Offer
I really did not know what the Alt-Right was. Long story short, they are as crazily racist as the left. They argue for inherent differences between the races, eternal enmity between the races, and the retreat of whites to Idaho.
This simply isn't the America that I was raised to believe in, any more than I was raised to believe that whites bear the mark of Cain and should constantly apologize for their alleged sins against humanity.
Professor Reilly is right; we're better than this nonsense. We're Americans. We're in this together. Let's act like it.
This books was information and filled with common sense insights and a good sense of humor.
I recommend it.
I am a factual-details, empirical-data person. When someone makes a claim, I typically ask "Evidence?" Opinions are fine, but I want to know what the facts behind the opinions are. I don't just read the headlines, I read the article and then I ask questions and fact check the questions. So much of what passes for knowledge is wrong. The gaslighting that exists is designed to prevent us from even thinking of questioning the buried assumptions in our thinking.
This applies to virtually everything, from history to economics to entertainment, etc. It's what you don't know you don't know that will get your every time.
So, I loved this book. Professor Reilly takes on ten of the planted assumptions surrounding race. These planted assumption are not simply maintained by gaslighting and misdirection - although there is a lot of that going on - but by outright hostility.
Professor Reilly's taboo facts and data are:
#1 The Police Aren’t Murdering Black People
'The basic claims of BLM are simply not true. Fewer than 1,200 people were killed by police in the year the movement began; only 258 of them were Black, and exactly 17 were unarmed Black men shot by white officers. Because they were directed at a nonexistent problem, the sweeping solutions of these proud young activists did far more harm than good. In a typical Midwestern city, shootings increased by half while police stops dropped 80 percent. Whatever the movement’s intentions, it is hard not to come to an unpleasant and unavoidable conclusion: Black Lives Matter got a ton of Black people killed."
17????
Reilly also points out that while cases involving POC get the lion's share of attention, those involving whites get none. I'm from Fresno and I had forgotten the example of Dylan Noble, killed in Fresno, while absolutely unarmed and no threat to anyone.
#2 There Is No “War on POC”… and BBQ Becky Did Nothing Wrong
"There is no race war going on in the U.S.A., and there certainly is no epidemic of white-on-Black crime. In fact, interracial crimes on an annual basis have been consistently 75–85 percent Black-on-white for the past thirty years. More importantly, there is no horrifying epidemic of interracial crimes of any variety because 84 percent of white murder victims and 93 percent of Black murder victims are killed by a mundane member of their own race. We see constant media coverage of BBQ Becky, Permit Patty, Coupon Carl, and George Zimmerman not because these people are everywhere, but because the corporate media have an agenda to push. We should stop taking this agenda seriously—today."
#3: Different Groups Perform Differently
Professor Reilly's position - backed by data - is that different population groups perform differently in different areas but not for genetic reasons since performance can change over time and be higher for subpopulations within the same race. This example has been around for a while:
"Black West Africans and Caribbean people are essentially genetically identical to Black Americans, almost all of whom descend from West African captives sold overseas as slaves. Thus, again, an eight-to-ten-point tested IQ gap between Black West Africans and Black Americans logically cannot be genetic. After suppressing a bit of a giggle here, let me note that high Black immigrant IQ is also not a result of uniquely rigorous immigration processes employed by the U.S.A. and modern Europe."
Asians do better than whites on entrance examinations. These are facts and ignoring the facts can make for failed social policy as the "mismatch effect" where affirmative action pushes less well prepared "POC" into colleges where they have lower graduation rates.
#4: Performance—Not “Prejudice”—Mostly Predicts Success.
Race is a far too easy single-cause explanation for success. There are numerous - several dozen factors - that affect success, the largest of which may simply be having a two-parent family.
This is a small point, but I found this interesting:
"While it is shameful that 7 percent of Americans would not vote for a qualified Black member of their political party for president, my immediate reaction to that statistic was that at least the same level of prejudice must exist against many white groups. Fifteen minutes of research verified that this is in fact the case. According to 2015 data, 6 percent of Americans would not vote for a (presumably white) Catholic President, 8 percent would not vote for a woman of any race, 7 percent would not vote for a Jew, 8 percent would not vote for a Mormon, and 24 percent would not vote for a gay person. It is almost offensive to argue that this level of discrimination, which we literally all face, could stop a driven Black or Hispanic American—or an Irish Mormon, for that matter—from succeeding. For minorities and others, culture predicts success far more than outside prejudice of this kind; it “matters.”
#5: Racism Didn’t Cause the New Problems of Today
Prior to the great society, the African-American community had largely intact families. The change occurred after the civil rights era. The destruction of the two-parent family has had a pernicious effect on the African-American community as a whole.
"The problem with the idea that racism has declined (“gone underground”) little, if at all, and that the minority problems of today are caused by racism—just as those of the past may have been—is threefold. First, most contemporary Black problems were less serious when racism was much worse. Few Black teenagers had babies out of wedlock in 1960, and almost no middle-class Black men went to jail, although the Black crime rate was still frankly a bit higher than the white crime rate. Second, most of these contemporary problems do not exist today for visibly non-white immigrants from Africa, South Asia, and the West Indies, who often outperform both American whites and Blacks. Finally, most of these issues, along with other terrible problems like opiate addiction, do exist for the working-class whites who live alongside poor Blacks. All of this indicates that internal American cultural collapse is the root cause of the problems we as a society face"
#6: Anyone Can Be Racist (and “Racist” Has a Real Meaning)
There is an odd sense among a large part of the left that it is impossible for minorities to be "racist."
"Everett went on to reject that idea and instead argued, “To carry out acts of racism, a race must have power and privilege.” She concluded that there has never been a time in American history when a substantial number of non-whites have been in positions of power or privilege over whites. Barack Obama, president of the United States when Everett wrote, could not be reached for comment. Nor could Eric Holder, his attorney general, or General Colin Powell, who was secretary of state during the previous Bush administration. Jokes aside, the claim that racism is “prejudice plus power,” and thus is possible only for members of dominant groups, is not confined to campus radicals and other fringe-dwellers."
Reilly points out that if racism can't be racist without power, that leaves the obviously racist South African White Nationalist movement in a position where it can't be described as racist.
#7 and #8: Whiteness Isn’t the Only “Privilege”—and “Cultural Appropriation” Is Not Real
Reilly nicely punctures these windbags, usually with deft humor, but the subject is very serious:
"The example of the literal return of actual segregation shows the real danger of such concepts as cultural appropriation and universal white privilege, which might initially seem lightweight and silly. These are not mere fancies, but rather tentative first steps down a very dangerous road. If we decide to again judge people not primarily as individuals, but rather as members of intractable and often squabbling tribes, it will become increasingly difficult to ever find common ground between them. Down that path lies balkanization and the clashes and even genocides that resulted from that in the Balkans themselves. Let us take a different road."
#9: A Sane Immigration Policy Isn’t Racist (And We Need One!)
This is a well-argued section. I am going to highlight this factoid because it is stunning:
"This policy might, again, be dismissed by some as harsh. However, it seems to me to be no great favor to bring people who might well have benefited their home societies into a potentially hostile foreign country where they will almost certainly be unable to earn a good living. The empirical evidence in favor of this argument is staggering. A recent article in Stockholm’s The Local reported that by May 2016, fewer than 500 (494) of more than 163,000 Africans and Middle Easterners to migrate to Sweden during the past decade or so had managed to find jobs in that nation’s first-world economy. Many of those who had not, often ambitious working-age men, were miserable."
#10: The “Alt-Right” Has Nothing to Offer
I really did not know what the Alt-Right was. Long story short, they are as crazily racist as the left. They argue for inherent differences between the races, eternal enmity between the races, and the retreat of whites to Idaho.
This simply isn't the America that I was raised to believe in, any more than I was raised to believe that whites bear the mark of Cain and should constantly apologize for their alleged sins against humanity.
Professor Reilly is right; we're better than this nonsense. We're Americans. We're in this together. Let's act like it.
This books was information and filled with common sense insights and a good sense of humor.
I recommend it.
May 6, 2020
Oh boy. This review is going to be a challenge. As the title says; "10 Facts You Can't Talk About."
Okay, here goes; the author, Wilfred Reilly discusses a lot of the myths about race and racism. ( Jeez, even writing that make me think people might get mad at me). He uses plenty of resources to back up his claims, so it's not just his opinion. He covers other things like immigration, police shootings and IQ test scores. And, as I said after reading and reviewing Reilly's last book 'Hate Crime Hoax", if you're first instinct is to say "Yeah, well this Reilly guy is probably just some white supremacist.", feel free to go and do a Google Image search of him,,,, : )
Okay, here goes; the author, Wilfred Reilly discusses a lot of the myths about race and racism. ( Jeez, even writing that make me think people might get mad at me). He uses plenty of resources to back up his claims, so it's not just his opinion. He covers other things like immigration, police shootings and IQ test scores. And, as I said after reading and reviewing Reilly's last book 'Hate Crime Hoax", if you're first instinct is to say "Yeah, well this Reilly guy is probably just some white supremacist.", feel free to go and do a Google Image search of him,,,, : )
June 18, 2024
"Do you have a right to be offended by facts?"
-the pitch.
With this book, Reilly enjoys a certain amount of good luck based simply on the current nature of political discourse. By 2021, we’ve all became familiar with how bad the mainstream media are at covering contentious issues and how much worse social media are at doing so.
The nation’s political rhetoric has gotten extreme that an author like Reilly can gain an audience just by saying things that come as surprises but that are backed up by statistics. The intent of the book is the idea that statistics reveal a more complicated and nuanced story than you are likely to see in a political meme.
Wilfred Reilly works at refuting, with hard numbers, many of the lies of the left and right. Are the “obvious facts” that Reilly cites really taboo?
Yes and no.
What are the controversial opinions in question:
1. The Police Aren’t Murdering Black People.
2. There is no "war" on people of color, references claiming 30-50% of hate crimes are hoaxes
3. Different groups of people perform differently, but due to culture and how they invest in themselves, not genetics.
4. Performance – not prejudice – predicts success.
“…not only do group differences have very little to do with racism or ethnic conflict, but they have much more to do with group success than bigotry does.”
Chapters 5-10 discuss racism as a leading cause of present problems, racism itself, so-called white privilege and cultural appropriation, a sane immigration policy and the alt-right.
4/5
African American communities historically had a higher proportion of fathers in the home when racism was worse, so it can’t simply be “racism” that has led to this issue. Can Reilly be sure that welfare is really the culprit here? If so, he hasn’t backed up that claim by showing that other changes are not to blame.
There are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies, and statistics, often through efficient cherrypicking to disagree with the most obvious statements.
You can learn some interesting takes this book, but be skeptical, the chapters also succumb to repetitive themes in order to get a round number of taboos.
-the pitch.
With this book, Reilly enjoys a certain amount of good luck based simply on the current nature of political discourse. By 2021, we’ve all became familiar with how bad the mainstream media are at covering contentious issues and how much worse social media are at doing so.
The nation’s political rhetoric has gotten extreme that an author like Reilly can gain an audience just by saying things that come as surprises but that are backed up by statistics. The intent of the book is the idea that statistics reveal a more complicated and nuanced story than you are likely to see in a political meme.
Wilfred Reilly works at refuting, with hard numbers, many of the lies of the left and right. Are the “obvious facts” that Reilly cites really taboo?
Yes and no.
What are the controversial opinions in question:
1. The Police Aren’t Murdering Black People.
2. There is no "war" on people of color, references claiming 30-50% of hate crimes are hoaxes
3. Different groups of people perform differently, but due to culture and how they invest in themselves, not genetics.
4. Performance – not prejudice – predicts success.
“…not only do group differences have very little to do with racism or ethnic conflict, but they have much more to do with group success than bigotry does.”
Chapters 5-10 discuss racism as a leading cause of present problems, racism itself, so-called white privilege and cultural appropriation, a sane immigration policy and the alt-right.
4/5
African American communities historically had a higher proportion of fathers in the home when racism was worse, so it can’t simply be “racism” that has led to this issue. Can Reilly be sure that welfare is really the culprit here? If so, he hasn’t backed up that claim by showing that other changes are not to blame.
There are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies, and statistics, often through efficient cherrypicking to disagree with the most obvious statements.
You can learn some interesting takes this book, but be skeptical, the chapters also succumb to repetitive themes in order to get a round number of taboos.
February 2, 2020
An interesting book full of valuable statistics for anyone trying to make sense of the political pressure narratives that surround us and drive public policy. However, Reilly falls into a bit of his own narrative trap as he forgets sometimes to treat people as individuals instead of statistical categories.
Read
April 13, 2021Occasionally I try to read a book that tries to argue rationally against what I believe in. In the best case, this provides a better perspective of the contours of a complex issue. In the worst case, I'm left with a list of flawed or biased studies and statistics that the author has shouted from an unassailable platform. Unfortunately, this book is closer to the second category than the first.
My biggest problem with this book is that it aspires to rationality: it presents itself as an empirical presentation of 10 "taboo" "facts" that we are not supposed to discuss in modern America. I agree with the author that no topic should be safe from rational discourse, but I think that the more controversial the issue the more careful we must be, and the more willing we must be to admit we are wrong.
Here is the issue: this book sounds "just rational enough" to convince a reader who is already half-persuaded, but does not treat the issues with the required nuance.
Here is a long list of examples, I've provided citations where I can. This is not everything I disagree with in this book:
(1) Here is a common argument from the author, paraphrased: "Different arrest rates between races are fully explained by different crime rates. Therefore, police are not racist." There are a number of different problems with this statement, here are a few:
(a) It's not fair to control for crime rates when explaining arrest rates because racism could be causing different crime rates. I'm not saying that racism literally causes certain races to commit more crime, but its easy to imagine that racism could lead to crime indirectly, for example through different poverty rates, economic opportunities, living areas, etc.
(b) More generally, you must be very careful what you "control for" in any analysis. Here is a dumb example: "Once you control for the number of confederate flags, there is no difference in hate crimes between the north and the south. Therefore, the south is no more racist than the north." The punch line is that if you're trying to show that a difference is not caused by factor A, but instead by factor B, you also have to convince me that factor A does not also cause factor B. The Author does not bother with this exercise.
(c) How do you measure crime rates in a way that is free from racism? You can't use police reports: then the police are grading themselves on whether they are racist. The author points to the National Crime Victimization Survey, which is better but not perfect. After all, if the people being surveyed are prejudiced, they might be more likely to report the perpetrator as a race that they or the surveyor "expect." Here are some brief overviews of potential issues with the NCVS - think carefully about how racism could act through the problems presented: 1 2.
Is this to say that the root causes of different arrest rates are immune from empirical analysis? Absolutely not, just that it must be done with more care and more disinterest than the author has.
(2) The author notes that a black person is more likely to commit a violent crime against a white person than a white person is against a black person. Of course this is true! White people make up a larger portion of the population. Even if crime were completely random, black people would still commit more crimes against whites than the reverse, simply because there are more white people in America. This is an incredibly simple explanation, and yet the author does not mention it at all. The author was perfectly happy adjusting for relative population sizes when discussing the share of crimes committed by different races, which is telling.
(3) For a "dispassionate account" there certainly are a lot of visceral descriptions of black-on-white crime. How does this further the narrative? How does it do anything but make everyone angry and make it more difficult to think through these issues? The author's point, I'm sure, is that this is what the media is doing for white-on-black crime or police brutality, but I found this more of a cheap shot to rile up emotions on the author's part.
(4) The author attempts to refute "resume studies" that show a difference in call back rates for identical resumes between black and white applicants. His argument boils down to "even if there were differences, everyone got a callback, and these differences probably don't exist for anything but minimum wage jobs." First, the difference in call-back rates in most of these studies is huge and represents a real hurdle for people of color to get a job, so "everyone got a callback" isn't exactly comforting. Second, recent studies show gaps in resume callbacks across industries, payscales, and collar colors, for example this one.
(5) The author notes that the rate of illegitimacy and single-parent households has been increasing since the institution of the "welfare state," and implies that this is a causal relationship. Any researcher worth his salt should know: correlation does not imply causation. Did the author examine and refute any other possible factors that might be causing an increase in single-parent households? Of course not, because his narrative requires that the reader only apply the barest minimum of critical thinking. How about this relationship: welfare payments increased in response to a decline in traditional family structure, in other words the causality is the other direction. Or possibly there is another factor causing the decline in traditional family structure unrelated to welfare payments, perhaps a war on drugs that disproportionately affects young black men, making it impossible for them to form traditional families. An unmotivated researcher would at least consider alternative explanations, but this author does not.
(6) To paraphrase another of the Author's arguments, "black immigrants do better in America than native black people, so the problem must be with black culture, not American racism." This is ridiculous: America might be just as racist against black immigrants than native born black people, but if black immigrants have more tailwinds than natives, e.g. better education and more wealth, they will do better regardless of this racism (The author himself admits that immigrants tend to be better educated in another section of the book)
(7) According to the author, "immigrant families tend to cost more in welfare payments and other transfers than non-immigrant families." First, the focus on just welfare payments is too narrow: if you expand the scope to look at all transfers and services, the average immigrant actually costs less than the average american citizen, mostly because they require less public schooling. Second, you can't just look at what immigrants cost the federal government, you also have to look at what they provide in terms of tax payments (contrary to popular belief, immigrants do pay taxes). Taken together, the value of a high-school educated (or more) immigrant to the public budget is actually positive. In other words, immigrants pay more in than they get out, unlike most Americans. For a digestible, if literally cartoonish overview of the economics of immigration, I highly recommend Open Borders: The Science and Ethics of Immigration
I cannot write all it would take to adequately refute everything in this book, and even if I did, the right people wouldn't read it. The punch line is: Too many people read a book like this and then use it as license to indulge their pre-existing views. The "taboo facts" that the author presents deserve more care.
My biggest problem with this book is that it aspires to rationality: it presents itself as an empirical presentation of 10 "taboo" "facts" that we are not supposed to discuss in modern America. I agree with the author that no topic should be safe from rational discourse, but I think that the more controversial the issue the more careful we must be, and the more willing we must be to admit we are wrong.
Here is the issue: this book sounds "just rational enough" to convince a reader who is already half-persuaded, but does not treat the issues with the required nuance.
Here is a long list of examples, I've provided citations where I can. This is not everything I disagree with in this book:
(1) Here is a common argument from the author, paraphrased: "Different arrest rates between races are fully explained by different crime rates. Therefore, police are not racist." There are a number of different problems with this statement, here are a few:
(a) It's not fair to control for crime rates when explaining arrest rates because racism could be causing different crime rates. I'm not saying that racism literally causes certain races to commit more crime, but its easy to imagine that racism could lead to crime indirectly, for example through different poverty rates, economic opportunities, living areas, etc.
(b) More generally, you must be very careful what you "control for" in any analysis. Here is a dumb example: "Once you control for the number of confederate flags, there is no difference in hate crimes between the north and the south. Therefore, the south is no more racist than the north." The punch line is that if you're trying to show that a difference is not caused by factor A, but instead by factor B, you also have to convince me that factor A does not also cause factor B. The Author does not bother with this exercise.
(c) How do you measure crime rates in a way that is free from racism? You can't use police reports: then the police are grading themselves on whether they are racist. The author points to the National Crime Victimization Survey, which is better but not perfect. After all, if the people being surveyed are prejudiced, they might be more likely to report the perpetrator as a race that they or the surveyor "expect." Here are some brief overviews of potential issues with the NCVS - think carefully about how racism could act through the problems presented: 1 2.
Is this to say that the root causes of different arrest rates are immune from empirical analysis? Absolutely not, just that it must be done with more care and more disinterest than the author has.
(2) The author notes that a black person is more likely to commit a violent crime against a white person than a white person is against a black person. Of course this is true! White people make up a larger portion of the population. Even if crime were completely random, black people would still commit more crimes against whites than the reverse, simply because there are more white people in America. This is an incredibly simple explanation, and yet the author does not mention it at all. The author was perfectly happy adjusting for relative population sizes when discussing the share of crimes committed by different races, which is telling.
(3) For a "dispassionate account" there certainly are a lot of visceral descriptions of black-on-white crime. How does this further the narrative? How does it do anything but make everyone angry and make it more difficult to think through these issues? The author's point, I'm sure, is that this is what the media is doing for white-on-black crime or police brutality, but I found this more of a cheap shot to rile up emotions on the author's part.
(4) The author attempts to refute "resume studies" that show a difference in call back rates for identical resumes between black and white applicants. His argument boils down to "even if there were differences, everyone got a callback, and these differences probably don't exist for anything but minimum wage jobs." First, the difference in call-back rates in most of these studies is huge and represents a real hurdle for people of color to get a job, so "everyone got a callback" isn't exactly comforting. Second, recent studies show gaps in resume callbacks across industries, payscales, and collar colors, for example this one.
(5) The author notes that the rate of illegitimacy and single-parent households has been increasing since the institution of the "welfare state," and implies that this is a causal relationship. Any researcher worth his salt should know: correlation does not imply causation. Did the author examine and refute any other possible factors that might be causing an increase in single-parent households? Of course not, because his narrative requires that the reader only apply the barest minimum of critical thinking. How about this relationship: welfare payments increased in response to a decline in traditional family structure, in other words the causality is the other direction. Or possibly there is another factor causing the decline in traditional family structure unrelated to welfare payments, perhaps a war on drugs that disproportionately affects young black men, making it impossible for them to form traditional families. An unmotivated researcher would at least consider alternative explanations, but this author does not.
(6) To paraphrase another of the Author's arguments, "black immigrants do better in America than native black people, so the problem must be with black culture, not American racism." This is ridiculous: America might be just as racist against black immigrants than native born black people, but if black immigrants have more tailwinds than natives, e.g. better education and more wealth, they will do better regardless of this racism (The author himself admits that immigrants tend to be better educated in another section of the book)
(7) According to the author, "immigrant families tend to cost more in welfare payments and other transfers than non-immigrant families." First, the focus on just welfare payments is too narrow: if you expand the scope to look at all transfers and services, the average immigrant actually costs less than the average american citizen, mostly because they require less public schooling. Second, you can't just look at what immigrants cost the federal government, you also have to look at what they provide in terms of tax payments (contrary to popular belief, immigrants do pay taxes). Taken together, the value of a high-school educated (or more) immigrant to the public budget is actually positive. In other words, immigrants pay more in than they get out, unlike most Americans. For a digestible, if literally cartoonish overview of the economics of immigration, I highly recommend Open Borders: The Science and Ethics of Immigration
I cannot write all it would take to adequately refute everything in this book, and even if I did, the right people wouldn't read it. The punch line is: Too many people read a book like this and then use it as license to indulge their pre-existing views. The "taboo facts" that the author presents deserve more care.
June 1, 2021
Introduction
6/10
The introduction is well-written and interesting. It’s short and to the point. There is a lot of info in every line which is impressive and up to the standard of Reilly’s online articles in Quillette and other sites. The chapter has good info on the progressive left and the impossible ideas about the supposed systemic racism and sexism making society the way it is. Reilly tries to dispute the alt-right ideas too and unfortunately the intro goes into some less than stellar lines of arguments here.
He creates an alt-right strawman and then attacks it without even making it clear what their beliefs really are or where he found these statements. I can get into the main claims only as Goodreads doesn’t allow long reviews. Here is Reilly’s main claim/strawman argument:
“... the “alt-right,” a rival identitarian movement which claims that Caucasians are genetically superior to people of color and that successfully integrated societies are almost impossible.”
And here is one of his own points disputing the claim:
“If this even needs to be said, the genetic explanation for the success of American Caucasians also fails totally and begins to collapse as soon as we look beyond the boundaries of this country. Regions of the world populated almost totally by members of the Caucasian racial group include Eastern Europe (Albania, Moldova, the former Yugoslavia), the Middle East (Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine), and the “Stans” in Central Asia (Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Borat’s country). These countries may all have rich and wonderful histories, but they are hardly the safest, richest, or most stable countries on earth.”
The first claim about a race being “genetically superior” is not scientific. So you can’t really tackle it scientifically as it’s laymen terms that don’t have any clear definitions. It’s not correct or wrong, it’s just an unspecified claim. Then we have the claim of “successfully integrated societies are almost impossible”. Again, this is not a scientific claim as it’s impossible to clearly define. One could instead have a claim about perfect race integration being impossible and that multicultural societies are worse off than homogeneous societies - this claim is factual. The counter-claim about some White countries doing badly is also weird. For example, East Asians have higher IQ than White people yet countries like North Korea and China are much poorer per capita than most European countries, USA, Australia and New Zealand. A high IQ race can still live in a poor country if there is some extreme top-down control. The IQ claim would not be: “Chinese people are ALWAYS rich in ALL countries.” Rather they are rich in free capitalist countries where they are legally allowed to create companies and trade in a free market. We saw this in Hong Kong. That’s the proper claim to dispute. You don’t even need to go into if IQ is heritable or not. It just differs between groups and it predicts crime rates and unemployment to some degree.
Chapter 1: Taboo Obvious Fact #1: The Police Aren’t Murdering Black People
8,5/10
There are still some silly and non-factual claims about right-wing beliefs and research he calls alt-right/far-right but overall the chapter is strong. For example, when he has to illustrate why Black people don't automatically make an area more criminal he says that Chicago was more White yet very criminal in the 20's because of the mafia. This is a loose argument on the level with the country argument in the intro chapter. Some random anecdote can always support your claim no matter how weird your claim is.
Then we get into Black people being shot by cops and how that's actually a conspiracy. Reilly uses crime data and various research articles to show that the mass media claims about systemic racism are wrong. It's a very strong case for his claims and a very convincing chapter. But I felt like much of it were just old ideas - to me. A year ago I spent some weeks reading up on the topic by finding research articles, data and news articles on this issue, because of Reilly's tweets, so I knew this already. He does mention some very interesting shooting cases and actually illustrates them in a completely unbiased way which was a surprise. In NYT, CNN, WP and even much conservative media they often make up claims or misconstrue reality when describing these cases so this is very impressive. He also uses a lot of stats and numbers. The many numbers is actually what I felt didn't work for me. Just a bunch of stats in the middle of a page is confusing and feels a bit like noise. They should preferably be in tables. This and many other small points made the chapter feel a bit long. I was convinced very early on and didn't need the extra stuff. But I get why it's needed.
It's a very strong intro to the topic. He concludes the chapter by stating that BLM actually causes more Black people to die as police are now more hands off and it creates room for criminals. A shame.
Chapter 2: Taboo Obvious Fact #2: There Is No “War on POC”… and BBQ Becky Did Nothing Wrong
7/10
A bit less structured chapter. It's about all systemic racism claims overall so there is no way to just dispute all the claims in a few pages. Reilly largely presents cases and explains why they were not racist and then also shows that Black on White violence is actually worse than the opposite. He makes a case against the "war on POC" claim by largely using 2 extreme stories of Black people murdering White people and showing that news media actually mostly ignored those cases, but then made a huge thing of White on Black crime cases that weren't nearly as extreme. Unfortunately the cases are a bit too nasty for me. I like crime docs and watch a lot of them, but I like the detective work not the killings. So this is a bit much.
These cases clearly illustrate a media bias even from Fox News. He shows that mainly only alt-right media presents the other side here as even big conservative media doesn't want to go into this race war on the unpopular side.
Largely I just feel the chapter is a bit too focussed on using anecdotes to illustrate claims. But this is what you can do when the conspiracy you try to disprove is so vague.
Chapter 3: Taboo Obvious Fact #3: Different Groups Perform Differently
6/10
I’ll try to write shorter chapter reviews to not break the Goodreads max length.
He does illustrate that Blacks commit more crime, but then he goes on to say that this can be explained away by adjusting for fatherless homes and low SES. This of course is yet another easy fast trick to dismiss an "alt-right" theory. This doesn't explain anything. You can't assume some random correlation is the cause. Sure, in theory fatherless homes could make children more criminal, but right now we have nothing to show this causation.
There is more alt-right stuff to point out. He uses a weird random site for his national IQ list. I suggest using the very detailed list David Becker updates regularly. It’s very good. For example, Italy being the top White IQ country in this book makes little sense. No one could seriously argue for that. Finland and Estonia on the other hand are known to have high IQ scores and high grade scores. Grades are predicted by IQ to a large degree so therefore correlate with IQ. When you have such consistent data it's better.
He then uses a single study to show that US Black IQ is above 85 today - ergo alt-right is wrong. But his reused Thomas Sowell theory has many holes in it. It doesn’t explain how environment couldn't wipe out differences in any area of the world. There is no place where Black and White IQ is the same. Yet we surely should have seen such a thing if the ethnic group IQ differences were 100% caused by environment. Not a single town, city or country has these effects.
He then uses mix-race US army children studies to conclude that race IQ differences are in fact environmental. Yet again he looks past the critique and just assumes a single study is all it takes to dispute thousands of studies on the other side. The issue with social science is that you can always find a study supporting your point of view. I could find a study showing that women are as strong as men. There are many such studies made by feminist groups. They just scour for data or use very specific experiment designs. What matters is the overall picture. In this chapter/book we get lost in single anecdotes and data points. He spends so much time on showing that IQ differences are environmental that he forgets the title of the chapter. There is not much info here about "systemic racism" claims where group differences are explained away by claims of some pseudo-cause. He actually made more room for that claim by finding all those environment-IQ studies. So the chapter is from my point of view a miss and unconvincing even though it does present a ton of studies - some good.
Chapter 4: Taboo Obvious Fact #4: Performance—Not “Prejudice”—Mostly Predicts Success
5,5/10
Yet again a chapter that feels pointless in a book about taboo topics. If we are explaining taboo topics we better have very good evidence. Not just use loose sources from various websites and then only use alt-right sources to make a case for the nature side in the nature-nurture debate. Not a fan of this as it's also a bit messy with how much random info is put together to make a case for all his nurture claims. There is no clear logical argument made for his claims. Just a bunch of anecdotes and data points showing a correlation.
The first chapter was clear and focused on the best research on the area. There was no picking and choosing sources and he often even supported the progressive side by claiming that some cops did have bad shootings. It was great because all arguments and issues were looked into so the conclusion was strong. But after the first chapter he keeps using the weak theory of "fatherless Blacks" to dispute all claims from the nature side. I think his theory is fine. It's an interesting conservative theory we should look into and study. But right now there is just no good studies to support his claims. If you want to write about taboo topics don't use very weak claims. It's not "taboo obvious fact" if you don't use facts, but instead find specific books and articles to support your own ideology.
Chapter 5: Taboo Obvious Fact #5: Racism Didn’t Cause the New Problems of Today
5,5/10
Guess what this chapter is about? You get one guess. Nice! Good job! It is in fact about fatherless Black children with higher crime rates and lower IQ. Of course how this fatherless effect actually works is never explained.
Chapter 6: Taboo Obvious Fact #6: Anyone Can Be Racist (and “Racist” Has a Real Meaning)
7,5/10
Finally an actual “taboo” fact and not just Reilly’s homespun hypothesis about Black men and their low grades, high crime rate and high unemployment rate. Here he looks into the wrong assumption that only some races can be racist or that only groups in power can be racist. A weird progressive notion that doesn’t stand up to scrutiny and the chapter does a good job of presenting various examples of Blacks or Hispanics being racist. In Rwanda one Black ethnic group is racist against another Black ethnic group and they exchange power from time to time so there is no one group in power.
Of course there is still the issue of how he logically argues for a point. He finds articles and blog-posts online often written by political extremists while pointing out they are political posts or sites. This leaves out some of the deeper social science research. Still, in this chapter it works.
Chapter 7: Taboo Obvious Facts #7 and #8: Whiteness Isn’t the Only “Privilege”—and “Cultural Appropriation” Is Not Real
7/10
I mentioned that he uses websites/big blogs as sources, but he actually even uses Wikipedia articles as sources too. Not for great claims, but just to state that he saw something there or as a source for something smaller like some stats. This is not ideal, but it's nothing terrible at all.
Chapter 8: Taboo Obvious Fact #9: A Sane Immigration Policy Isn’t Racist (And We Need One!)
7,5/10
Obviously nearly only about US immigrants. You don’t see many African low IQ immigrants or extremely high crime African/Muslim immigrants in USA which makes this a way less serious issue than in Europe. In Europe immigration is a very taboo topic because non-White immigrants are extremely bad at integrating into White Europe. The rape and crime rates in these groups are extreme while up to half don't even find a job. In USA it’s less taboo because there is much greater selection of high IQ immigrants even from poor countries which makes the chapter less taboo.
But overall the chapter is strong. Reilly shines when he doesn't write about Black people, when he is less emotionally engaged in the topic and just states his opinion outright instead of spending pages defending a group he likes/loves.
Chapter 9: Taboo Obvious Fact #10: The “Alt-Right” Has Nothing to Offer
6/10
Yeah… more about how low Black IQ is not heritable. How is this even taboo when he is supporting SJW points here? So it's not taboo, but rather anti-taboo.
I'm not sure why his homespun theory needs to get this many chapters. Just mention it once as an alternative theory in one chapter. Don't lazily use it as a crutch to just explain away any point pertaining to Black people. He uses the same single 2006 Flynn study to show that US Black IQ is 93. Yet the alt-right is still partly correct even if the difference is only 1 genetic IQ point. I'm not convinced he actually tackles their main claims.
Reilly then assumes that the gap has shrunk since the study was done in 2006 - which is just random guesswork. My main counterpoint to Reilly is of course that race IQ difference research has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with alt-right. Just because American Renaissance had a YouTube channel before Google banned them doesn't mean they were doing any of the research themselves. They now write blog posts on their site which is shadow banned on Google. They are not publishing papers or testing hundreds of Black kids. They are looking up studies like we all do. Instead of looking into the studies they found Reilly constantly uses this secondhand source which makes his critique inconclusive and vague.
Here he at least gets into Islam which is of course essential for a book about taboo topics. He then uses emotional arguments to show that multicultural societies are better off. The idea of it is fine, but in reality single ethnic group societies are better off. You can of course still argue that more varied food and athletes matter a lot. That's fine. It's just your own opinion, not big data. Which again is maybe not the best way to make a claim in a book about taboo topics. Use data when you can.
My final opinion on the book
The word “Black” features 813 times in the book if we count all text in the book no matter on what page. This includes words where Black is part of the word. The word “White” 808 times. “Asian” only 158 times. “Racism” 220 times. “America-” 506 times. “Police-” 243 times. “IQ” 105 times.
These stats show what the book is about. It's not about taboo facts overall. It's about Black people and how Black people instead of believing in the progressive values need to believe in Reilly's fatherless homes hypothesis he got from other Black conservatives. Obviously this change of faith would be extremely useful for Black people. But it won't just magically fix race differences as he alludes to. They will remain. If you plan on teaching Black kids that there is some utopia around the corner you will just disappoint people long-term. With all these hope and change beliefs and predictions in the book it's not really tackling issues using direct and advanced research. Rather it's a book using emotional and pointed arguments using a mix of good data, anecdotes and opinion pieces. Often unfortunately ignoring some research that may have disproven some of the points.
The title of the book should have been: "Progressives are wrong about systemic racism. But alt-right are wrong about race IQ differences. Systemic racism is not some huge effect as fatherless homes actually explains all race IQ differences and crime rates."
6/10
The introduction is well-written and interesting. It’s short and to the point. There is a lot of info in every line which is impressive and up to the standard of Reilly’s online articles in Quillette and other sites. The chapter has good info on the progressive left and the impossible ideas about the supposed systemic racism and sexism making society the way it is. Reilly tries to dispute the alt-right ideas too and unfortunately the intro goes into some less than stellar lines of arguments here.
He creates an alt-right strawman and then attacks it without even making it clear what their beliefs really are or where he found these statements. I can get into the main claims only as Goodreads doesn’t allow long reviews. Here is Reilly’s main claim/strawman argument:
“... the “alt-right,” a rival identitarian movement which claims that Caucasians are genetically superior to people of color and that successfully integrated societies are almost impossible.”
And here is one of his own points disputing the claim:
“If this even needs to be said, the genetic explanation for the success of American Caucasians also fails totally and begins to collapse as soon as we look beyond the boundaries of this country. Regions of the world populated almost totally by members of the Caucasian racial group include Eastern Europe (Albania, Moldova, the former Yugoslavia), the Middle East (Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine), and the “Stans” in Central Asia (Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Borat’s country). These countries may all have rich and wonderful histories, but they are hardly the safest, richest, or most stable countries on earth.”
The first claim about a race being “genetically superior” is not scientific. So you can’t really tackle it scientifically as it’s laymen terms that don’t have any clear definitions. It’s not correct or wrong, it’s just an unspecified claim. Then we have the claim of “successfully integrated societies are almost impossible”. Again, this is not a scientific claim as it’s impossible to clearly define. One could instead have a claim about perfect race integration being impossible and that multicultural societies are worse off than homogeneous societies - this claim is factual. The counter-claim about some White countries doing badly is also weird. For example, East Asians have higher IQ than White people yet countries like North Korea and China are much poorer per capita than most European countries, USA, Australia and New Zealand. A high IQ race can still live in a poor country if there is some extreme top-down control. The IQ claim would not be: “Chinese people are ALWAYS rich in ALL countries.” Rather they are rich in free capitalist countries where they are legally allowed to create companies and trade in a free market. We saw this in Hong Kong. That’s the proper claim to dispute. You don’t even need to go into if IQ is heritable or not. It just differs between groups and it predicts crime rates and unemployment to some degree.
Chapter 1: Taboo Obvious Fact #1: The Police Aren’t Murdering Black People
8,5/10
There are still some silly and non-factual claims about right-wing beliefs and research he calls alt-right/far-right but overall the chapter is strong. For example, when he has to illustrate why Black people don't automatically make an area more criminal he says that Chicago was more White yet very criminal in the 20's because of the mafia. This is a loose argument on the level with the country argument in the intro chapter. Some random anecdote can always support your claim no matter how weird your claim is.
Then we get into Black people being shot by cops and how that's actually a conspiracy. Reilly uses crime data and various research articles to show that the mass media claims about systemic racism are wrong. It's a very strong case for his claims and a very convincing chapter. But I felt like much of it were just old ideas - to me. A year ago I spent some weeks reading up on the topic by finding research articles, data and news articles on this issue, because of Reilly's tweets, so I knew this already. He does mention some very interesting shooting cases and actually illustrates them in a completely unbiased way which was a surprise. In NYT, CNN, WP and even much conservative media they often make up claims or misconstrue reality when describing these cases so this is very impressive. He also uses a lot of stats and numbers. The many numbers is actually what I felt didn't work for me. Just a bunch of stats in the middle of a page is confusing and feels a bit like noise. They should preferably be in tables. This and many other small points made the chapter feel a bit long. I was convinced very early on and didn't need the extra stuff. But I get why it's needed.
It's a very strong intro to the topic. He concludes the chapter by stating that BLM actually causes more Black people to die as police are now more hands off and it creates room for criminals. A shame.
Chapter 2: Taboo Obvious Fact #2: There Is No “War on POC”… and BBQ Becky Did Nothing Wrong
7/10
A bit less structured chapter. It's about all systemic racism claims overall so there is no way to just dispute all the claims in a few pages. Reilly largely presents cases and explains why they were not racist and then also shows that Black on White violence is actually worse than the opposite. He makes a case against the "war on POC" claim by largely using 2 extreme stories of Black people murdering White people and showing that news media actually mostly ignored those cases, but then made a huge thing of White on Black crime cases that weren't nearly as extreme. Unfortunately the cases are a bit too nasty for me. I like crime docs and watch a lot of them, but I like the detective work not the killings. So this is a bit much.
These cases clearly illustrate a media bias even from Fox News. He shows that mainly only alt-right media presents the other side here as even big conservative media doesn't want to go into this race war on the unpopular side.
Largely I just feel the chapter is a bit too focussed on using anecdotes to illustrate claims. But this is what you can do when the conspiracy you try to disprove is so vague.
Chapter 3: Taboo Obvious Fact #3: Different Groups Perform Differently
6/10
I’ll try to write shorter chapter reviews to not break the Goodreads max length.
He does illustrate that Blacks commit more crime, but then he goes on to say that this can be explained away by adjusting for fatherless homes and low SES. This of course is yet another easy fast trick to dismiss an "alt-right" theory. This doesn't explain anything. You can't assume some random correlation is the cause. Sure, in theory fatherless homes could make children more criminal, but right now we have nothing to show this causation.
There is more alt-right stuff to point out. He uses a weird random site for his national IQ list. I suggest using the very detailed list David Becker updates regularly. It’s very good. For example, Italy being the top White IQ country in this book makes little sense. No one could seriously argue for that. Finland and Estonia on the other hand are known to have high IQ scores and high grade scores. Grades are predicted by IQ to a large degree so therefore correlate with IQ. When you have such consistent data it's better.
He then uses a single study to show that US Black IQ is above 85 today - ergo alt-right is wrong. But his reused Thomas Sowell theory has many holes in it. It doesn’t explain how environment couldn't wipe out differences in any area of the world. There is no place where Black and White IQ is the same. Yet we surely should have seen such a thing if the ethnic group IQ differences were 100% caused by environment. Not a single town, city or country has these effects.
He then uses mix-race US army children studies to conclude that race IQ differences are in fact environmental. Yet again he looks past the critique and just assumes a single study is all it takes to dispute thousands of studies on the other side. The issue with social science is that you can always find a study supporting your point of view. I could find a study showing that women are as strong as men. There are many such studies made by feminist groups. They just scour for data or use very specific experiment designs. What matters is the overall picture. In this chapter/book we get lost in single anecdotes and data points. He spends so much time on showing that IQ differences are environmental that he forgets the title of the chapter. There is not much info here about "systemic racism" claims where group differences are explained away by claims of some pseudo-cause. He actually made more room for that claim by finding all those environment-IQ studies. So the chapter is from my point of view a miss and unconvincing even though it does present a ton of studies - some good.
Chapter 4: Taboo Obvious Fact #4: Performance—Not “Prejudice”—Mostly Predicts Success
5,5/10
Yet again a chapter that feels pointless in a book about taboo topics. If we are explaining taboo topics we better have very good evidence. Not just use loose sources from various websites and then only use alt-right sources to make a case for the nature side in the nature-nurture debate. Not a fan of this as it's also a bit messy with how much random info is put together to make a case for all his nurture claims. There is no clear logical argument made for his claims. Just a bunch of anecdotes and data points showing a correlation.
The first chapter was clear and focused on the best research on the area. There was no picking and choosing sources and he often even supported the progressive side by claiming that some cops did have bad shootings. It was great because all arguments and issues were looked into so the conclusion was strong. But after the first chapter he keeps using the weak theory of "fatherless Blacks" to dispute all claims from the nature side. I think his theory is fine. It's an interesting conservative theory we should look into and study. But right now there is just no good studies to support his claims. If you want to write about taboo topics don't use very weak claims. It's not "taboo obvious fact" if you don't use facts, but instead find specific books and articles to support your own ideology.
Chapter 5: Taboo Obvious Fact #5: Racism Didn’t Cause the New Problems of Today
5,5/10
Guess what this chapter is about? You get one guess. Nice! Good job! It is in fact about fatherless Black children with higher crime rates and lower IQ. Of course how this fatherless effect actually works is never explained.
Chapter 6: Taboo Obvious Fact #6: Anyone Can Be Racist (and “Racist” Has a Real Meaning)
7,5/10
Finally an actual “taboo” fact and not just Reilly’s homespun hypothesis about Black men and their low grades, high crime rate and high unemployment rate. Here he looks into the wrong assumption that only some races can be racist or that only groups in power can be racist. A weird progressive notion that doesn’t stand up to scrutiny and the chapter does a good job of presenting various examples of Blacks or Hispanics being racist. In Rwanda one Black ethnic group is racist against another Black ethnic group and they exchange power from time to time so there is no one group in power.
Of course there is still the issue of how he logically argues for a point. He finds articles and blog-posts online often written by political extremists while pointing out they are political posts or sites. This leaves out some of the deeper social science research. Still, in this chapter it works.
Chapter 7: Taboo Obvious Facts #7 and #8: Whiteness Isn’t the Only “Privilege”—and “Cultural Appropriation” Is Not Real
7/10
I mentioned that he uses websites/big blogs as sources, but he actually even uses Wikipedia articles as sources too. Not for great claims, but just to state that he saw something there or as a source for something smaller like some stats. This is not ideal, but it's nothing terrible at all.
Chapter 8: Taboo Obvious Fact #9: A Sane Immigration Policy Isn’t Racist (And We Need One!)
7,5/10
Obviously nearly only about US immigrants. You don’t see many African low IQ immigrants or extremely high crime African/Muslim immigrants in USA which makes this a way less serious issue than in Europe. In Europe immigration is a very taboo topic because non-White immigrants are extremely bad at integrating into White Europe. The rape and crime rates in these groups are extreme while up to half don't even find a job. In USA it’s less taboo because there is much greater selection of high IQ immigrants even from poor countries which makes the chapter less taboo.
But overall the chapter is strong. Reilly shines when he doesn't write about Black people, when he is less emotionally engaged in the topic and just states his opinion outright instead of spending pages defending a group he likes/loves.
Chapter 9: Taboo Obvious Fact #10: The “Alt-Right” Has Nothing to Offer
6/10
Yeah… more about how low Black IQ is not heritable. How is this even taboo when he is supporting SJW points here? So it's not taboo, but rather anti-taboo.
I'm not sure why his homespun theory needs to get this many chapters. Just mention it once as an alternative theory in one chapter. Don't lazily use it as a crutch to just explain away any point pertaining to Black people. He uses the same single 2006 Flynn study to show that US Black IQ is 93. Yet the alt-right is still partly correct even if the difference is only 1 genetic IQ point. I'm not convinced he actually tackles their main claims.
Reilly then assumes that the gap has shrunk since the study was done in 2006 - which is just random guesswork. My main counterpoint to Reilly is of course that race IQ difference research has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with alt-right. Just because American Renaissance had a YouTube channel before Google banned them doesn't mean they were doing any of the research themselves. They now write blog posts on their site which is shadow banned on Google. They are not publishing papers or testing hundreds of Black kids. They are looking up studies like we all do. Instead of looking into the studies they found Reilly constantly uses this secondhand source which makes his critique inconclusive and vague.
Here he at least gets into Islam which is of course essential for a book about taboo topics. He then uses emotional arguments to show that multicultural societies are better off. The idea of it is fine, but in reality single ethnic group societies are better off. You can of course still argue that more varied food and athletes matter a lot. That's fine. It's just your own opinion, not big data. Which again is maybe not the best way to make a claim in a book about taboo topics. Use data when you can.
My final opinion on the book
The word “Black” features 813 times in the book if we count all text in the book no matter on what page. This includes words where Black is part of the word. The word “White” 808 times. “Asian” only 158 times. “Racism” 220 times. “America-” 506 times. “Police-” 243 times. “IQ” 105 times.
These stats show what the book is about. It's not about taboo facts overall. It's about Black people and how Black people instead of believing in the progressive values need to believe in Reilly's fatherless homes hypothesis he got from other Black conservatives. Obviously this change of faith would be extremely useful for Black people. But it won't just magically fix race differences as he alludes to. They will remain. If you plan on teaching Black kids that there is some utopia around the corner you will just disappoint people long-term. With all these hope and change beliefs and predictions in the book it's not really tackling issues using direct and advanced research. Rather it's a book using emotional and pointed arguments using a mix of good data, anecdotes and opinion pieces. Often unfortunately ignoring some research that may have disproven some of the points.
The title of the book should have been: "Progressives are wrong about systemic racism. But alt-right are wrong about race IQ differences. Systemic racism is not some huge effect as fatherless homes actually explains all race IQ differences and crime rates."
January 3, 2023
ربما تكون الحقيقة الأصلية المحظورة - ولكن الواضحة - في الجدل حول العرق الأمريكي هي: لا يوجد ما يسمى "وباء" قتل الأمريكيين من أصل أفريقي على يد الشرطة في الولايات المتحدة الأمريكية.
استنتجت التحليلات التجريبية الجادة التي أجراها الجميع بداية مني أنا إلى هيذر ماك دونالد من معهد مانهاتن إلى موقع killedbypolice - وهو مورد ويب كامل تم إعداده لدراسة هذا الموضوع - استنتجت دائمًا أن أقل من 1200 شخص من جميع الأجناس والأعراق يُقتلون سنويًا على يد ضباط الشرطة الأمريكيين . في عام نموذجي ، مثل عام 2015 ، سيكون ما يقرب من 250 (258) من هؤلاء الأشخاص من السود. صحيح أن نسبة السود من الأفراد الذين قتلتهم الشرطة ، 22-24 في المائة ، أعلى قليلاً من نسبة 13-14 في المائة للسود في إجمالي سكان الولايات المتحدة. ومع ذلك ، فإن هذه الفجوة البالغة 10 في المائة ، يمكن تفسيرها بالكامل من خلال حقيقة أن معدل جرائم السود ، ومعدل الجريمة العنيفة ، ومعدل الاعتقال ، ومعدل مواجهة الشرطة كلها أعلى بكثير من معدلات الأشخاص البيض.
.
Wilfred Reilly
Taboo
Translated By #Maher_Razouk
استنتجت التحليلات التجريبية الجادة التي أجراها الجميع بداية مني أنا إلى هيذر ماك دونالد من معهد مانهاتن إلى موقع killedbypolice - وهو مورد ويب كامل تم إعداده لدراسة هذا الموضوع - استنتجت دائمًا أن أقل من 1200 شخص من جميع الأجناس والأعراق يُقتلون سنويًا على يد ضباط الشرطة الأمريكيين . في عام نموذجي ، مثل عام 2015 ، سيكون ما يقرب من 250 (258) من هؤلاء الأشخاص من السود. صحيح أن نسبة السود من الأفراد الذين قتلتهم الشرطة ، 22-24 في المائة ، أعلى قليلاً من نسبة 13-14 في المائة للسود في إجمالي سكان الولايات المتحدة. ومع ذلك ، فإن هذه الفجوة البالغة 10 في المائة ، يمكن تفسيرها بالكامل من خلال حقيقة أن معدل جرائم السود ، ومعدل الجريمة العنيفة ، ومعدل الاعتقال ، ومعدل مواجهة الشرطة كلها أعلى بكثير من معدلات الأشخاص البيض.
.
Wilfred Reilly
Taboo
Translated By #Maher_Razouk
March 4, 2020
I received this book for free from the author via Twitter. I enjoyed it and found it valuable in addressing some of the key talking points that social justice warriors on the left use, while also calling out the unsubstantiated claims of the alt right folks. I found his voice reasonable and balanced. It was a quick and enjoyable read, certainly useful as a reference if you want to debate the various topics (taboos) he covers. I value civilized conversations and debate, so I appreciate this author’s approach.
July 27, 2020
Over the last couple of years, my go-to book for people looking for a counterweight to popular platitudes has been Thomas Sowell’s Discrimination and Disparities. But Wilfred Reilly’s Taboo is a contender for the best rebuttal to the social justice movement (though, in the end, it may not unseat Sowell’s work).
Taboo is written as a challenge to the identitarianism that has consumed American political discourse over the last several years. Leftist identitarianism – embodied most prominently by the Black Lives Matter movement – has gotten the majority of the press, though Reilly correctly identifies the alt-right movement that exists on the fringes of conservatism as a right-wing answer to leftist identitarians. Reilly organizes his chapters, then, around “Taboo Obvious Facts” that answer common claims by both sides. A political scientist, Reilly tests these claims against empirical data, an approach that, despite its rousing success in most ways, falls short in a few.
The first chapter addresses the familiar claim that endemic racism in the justice system leads police officers to systemically single out black Americans for violence. Not so, says Reilly. Echoing Sowell, he argues that racism cannot simply be assumed as an explanation for police violence, and that other potential variables need to be accounted for. Once other factors are considered, including rates of crime, the power of racism to explain any specific instance of police violence, much less an entire system of racism, diminishes to the vanishing point.
Reilly helpfully includes contextual details about specific incidents of blacks being killed by police officers, noting that they are rarely the result of victims minding their own business and cops looking for a minority victim to kill. This is not, to be sure, a blanket justification of force, but it helps disarm some of the more incendiary claims that often find expression. He also shows how much of the angst on the topic is media-driven, and that white and Hispanic victims of police shootings (which comprise roughly 75% of such events) are covered to a smaller and less sympathetic degree. Furthermore, given the pullback in active policing that social justice agitation results in, Reilly concludes that "Black Lives Matter [has gotten] a ton of Black people killed."
Reilly extends this analysis to high-profile stories of whites allegedly oppressing and harassing blacks at pools, parks, and other public places. These do not, he argues, represent an epidemic of white hatred of black people. Indeed, these cases cannot even be considered racial incidents, since they typically involve normal (if a bit persnickety) people attempting to enforce reasonable regulations. The larger narrative, that whites are waging war on blacks, is not only not backed up by the data, but is positively falsified by it. Reilly notes that the vast majority of crime is racially homogeneous and, furthermore, that at least 75% of the interracial crime that does exist is black-on-white. Again, Reilly notes the media’s role in perpetuating a false narrative, in that stories that appear to confirm their preconceptions get widely shared while those that don’t get suppressed. The danger in this, he writes, is two-fold. First, it gives blacks the false impression that whites hate them (an impression which, if untrue, is positively evil to perpetuate). Second, it can give whites the impression that racial harmony is impossible, which in turn threatens to drive more people into the ranks of the alt-right. This is a key insight. Telling lies to push an agenda has consequences, and Reilly is right to say that we have to seek truth and ignore agendas. Our social harmony depends on it.
Reilly further challenges the systemic racism narrative by, again channeling Sowell, noting that there is no reason to expect different groups to have identical outcomes. He shows that differences in outcomes result primarily from differences in group behaviors. He cites crime statistics to argue that blacks are overrepresented in the prison system not because of systemic racism, but because, as a group, blacks commit (and are the victims of) a higher proportion of crime relative to other ethnic groups. But whites, too, grapple with social pathologies more than other groups, including higher rates of suicide, overdose, and traffic deaths.
Continuing the theme, Reilly shows that differences in IQ scores are not, as the alt-right claims, genetic in nature. Rather, black IQs have been increasing over time (something which the genetic argument has no answer for), and when cultural differences are accounted for, IQ differences narrow, disappear, or are inverted. Group differences, then, are explained best neither by the left’s focus on discrimination nor the far right’s focus on genetics, but rather by a multiplicity of other factors that influence individual development, decisions, and priorities.
The most important of these factors may be the presence of both parents in a child’s home, which much more strongly correlates with a whole host of better outcomes than race does. For instance, the poverty rate is 7% for two-parent black families, but 22% for single-parent white households, calling the pervasiveness and even the existence of “white privilege” into question. This, and other factors, influence cultural attitudes towards work and education, and when these factors are considered in Reilly’s analysis he again finds that they largely mitigate group disparities. The way to address these disparities, then, seems not to be found in pushing a theory of systemic discrimination but rather in encouraging the habits that have proven to contribute to success in manifold ways. As Reilly simply says, “Culture matters.”
Reilly’s analysis along these lines is further buttressed by observing that when these cultural attributes are controlled for within ethnic groups, we see the same outcome disparities that exist between ethnic groups. This applies to whites, where fatherlessness has been growing in recent decades with the predictable rise in poverty and crime, and also to blacks, who experience lower levels of poverty and crime the more that beneficial cultural elements are found. Of note, he observes that black immigrants, who often come from more traditional cultures, often earn higher incomes than whites, another difficult-to-explain fact if discrimination were the cause of disparities.
None of this is to say that discrimination in no way exists in modern America, but that it’s ability to explain disparities (particularly in the context of the affirmative action apparatus in government, education, and business) is much less than cultural considerations.
Midway through the book, Reilly turns his attention from statistical disparities between groups to some of the more theoretical claims of the modern left. He challenges the gathering redefinition of racism from its traditional meaning of antipathy or prejudice toward a group of people based on their race to one that relies on power structures. Readers of Roger Scruton’s Fools, Frauds, and Firebrands will notice the New Left Marxism embodied in this new definition, and it’s one that Reilly finds uncompelling. Such a definition, he notes, would exempt from the charge of racism the Boers in South Africa, who train and propagandize like Nazis but have very little political power. Reilly not only defends the traditional definition, he makes the common sense observation that anyone can be guilty of it – and that, indeed, both white and black Americans are guilty of it. He says this not to intimate that a race war is impending, but to point out the obvious: that racism is real, definable, and needs to be fought against in all its forms.
Similarly, Reilly challenges the notion of cultural appropriation, which he calls "an insanely stupid idea." Despite the flamboyant leftist outrage over the idea that somebody from one culture would use the creations of another, Reilly writes that "No such moral rule…has ever existed. Modern liberals just made it up." He argues that the war against cultural appropriation would ultimately prohibit a multiplicity of different groups from learning from each other, and partaking in the benefits of that shared knowledge. This in turn would have the effect of devolving society back to tribes who would in the best case scenario live segregated lives, and in the worst case scenario war with each other.
In the last two chapters, Reilly deals with immigration policy and the ideas of the alt-right. While he has many good things to say on these topics, it is here that the purely empirical approach begins to show some weaknesses.
On immigration, Reilly writes that that it's not unreasonable for a country to control who crosses its borders, particularly in a "semi-socialist welfare state." He believes that the traditional American policy of requiring immigrants to support themselves should be enforced, indeed strengthened. Other suggestions for reform include ending the policy of allowing distant relatives of immigrants become citizens, and ensuring that new immigrants can contribute to the American society by confirming that they are sane, healthy, employable, and don't have a criminal record. There's no harshness or fear-mongering in Reilly's recommendations, though he does express concern about the long-term political consequences of unchecked immigration.
What Reilly doesn't address are the cultural implications of immigration. Just as it’s reasonable to expect immigrant to support themselves, it seems reasonable to expect immigrants to assimilate into the culture by adopting its symbols, institutions, and history as their own. As Scruton notes in How to be a Conservative, there is in this a reciprocal duty of society to accept these immigrants as full citizens. The liberal opposition to such suggestions, as Reilly notes, is to claim that they are racist, but this tells us more about liberals - who thus reveal themselves as cultural relativists or people who actively detest American society - than it does about the policies.
In the final chapter, Reilly turns his focus to the alt-right, correctly noting that it is largely a reactionary movement oriented against the SJW left. Determining who exactly the alt-right is, though, is a difficult task, Reilly observes, but common traits include genetic racism repackaged as “race realism,” knee-jerk nationalism, oversimplified anti-feminism, and a crass defense, if we can call it that, of traditional morality.
Based on my own observations of the alt-right, this seems like a fair enough list, but it’s still (excepting the first point) not all that helpful at identifying who counts as a member. For instance, Reilly observes that there’s a strong tendency for the alt-right to wish that the 1960s "cultural revolution…had never occurred," but this is problematic because Reilly’s hero (and mine) Sowell, obviously not a member of the alt-right, fits this criterion. The reader, then, doesn’t come away with much clarity, as several points of Reilly’s definition are broad enough to include basically all conservatives except globalist neoconservatives. Herein lies a prime problem with the alt-right (besides their gross views on race): their positions are often perversions of traditional conservative beliefs and thereby mimic, to the casual observer, authentic conservatism.
Moving to the task of assessing the alt-right's contentions, Reilly notes that their attempts to prove, via IQ test scores, that blacks are genetically inferior rely on dated statistics and interpretive fallacies, as does their attempt to draw connection between crime and IQ. To the extent that statistical disparities on IQ scores and crime exist between groups, a multiplicity of factors other than genetics must be considered, just as they must when assessing claims of discrimination. And when they are considered, they are again shown to have a stronger correlation to outcomes than the single factor identified by the alt-right. Interestingly, the alt-right and the SJW left, the two poles of American politics, are thus shown to have essentially identical analytical frameworks.
Reilly further notes that the alt-right routinely confuses ethnic, tribal, religious, and cultural differences with race. He notes how the societies lauded by the alt-right are almost racially identical to many of those they decry. The alt-right's proposed solutions, to the extent they have any (which isn’t much), are unsurprisingly revealed to be no solution at all.
But Reilly’s case for why they're not solutions lands only a glancing blow. He is right to point out the absurdity of, as the alt-right sometimes suggests, splitting up the country based on skin color. But his reason for finding the idea absurd is that it would harm the strength of the American nation and economy, limit our accomplishments in athletics and technology, and reduce the diversity of artistic expression and cuisine. All of this is true enough, but Reilly says nothing about the misunderstanding of culture that pervades both the proposals of the alt-right and the mainstream defense of multiculturalism.
Both viewpoints lack an understanding of what keeps people together, which is a shared belief in common values. A culture with wildly opposed views on religion, tradition, manners, and the purpose of life is unlikely to be a happy one no matter how many ethnic restaurants are in business or how similar the skin tone of its members. Reilly fails to acknowledge the deeper source of social cohesion, instead referencing high-minded but abstract notions of "scientific inquiry, freedom-loving skepticism of government, and absolute equality." And while these ideals are important as far as they go, they don't go very far in giving people a sense of a shared purpose and destiny, and the attempts to ground societies in them, rather than something more concrete, has failed many times over throughout the world.
The alt-right is surely wrong that the values that ground a society are racially-based. But the materialist defense of multiculturalism also fails to provide a proper grounding, particularly without an overt commitment to cultural and political pluralism. The problem with Reilly's analysis, then, is not so much that it's wrong but that it's incomplete. It’s a slightly frustrating end to a fine book, because real conservatives loathe the fallacies and inhumanity of the alt-right, but also understand that diversity and multiculturalism have limitations in a healthy society.
Overall, Taboo is an important book at this moment in our history, one I hope gains a wide audience. To regain the cultural attributes that are essential to our survival, we must defeat the identitarians, left and right. Herein, Wilfred Reilly has contributed mightily to that effort.
Taboo is written as a challenge to the identitarianism that has consumed American political discourse over the last several years. Leftist identitarianism – embodied most prominently by the Black Lives Matter movement – has gotten the majority of the press, though Reilly correctly identifies the alt-right movement that exists on the fringes of conservatism as a right-wing answer to leftist identitarians. Reilly organizes his chapters, then, around “Taboo Obvious Facts” that answer common claims by both sides. A political scientist, Reilly tests these claims against empirical data, an approach that, despite its rousing success in most ways, falls short in a few.
The first chapter addresses the familiar claim that endemic racism in the justice system leads police officers to systemically single out black Americans for violence. Not so, says Reilly. Echoing Sowell, he argues that racism cannot simply be assumed as an explanation for police violence, and that other potential variables need to be accounted for. Once other factors are considered, including rates of crime, the power of racism to explain any specific instance of police violence, much less an entire system of racism, diminishes to the vanishing point.
Reilly helpfully includes contextual details about specific incidents of blacks being killed by police officers, noting that they are rarely the result of victims minding their own business and cops looking for a minority victim to kill. This is not, to be sure, a blanket justification of force, but it helps disarm some of the more incendiary claims that often find expression. He also shows how much of the angst on the topic is media-driven, and that white and Hispanic victims of police shootings (which comprise roughly 75% of such events) are covered to a smaller and less sympathetic degree. Furthermore, given the pullback in active policing that social justice agitation results in, Reilly concludes that "Black Lives Matter [has gotten] a ton of Black people killed."
Reilly extends this analysis to high-profile stories of whites allegedly oppressing and harassing blacks at pools, parks, and other public places. These do not, he argues, represent an epidemic of white hatred of black people. Indeed, these cases cannot even be considered racial incidents, since they typically involve normal (if a bit persnickety) people attempting to enforce reasonable regulations. The larger narrative, that whites are waging war on blacks, is not only not backed up by the data, but is positively falsified by it. Reilly notes that the vast majority of crime is racially homogeneous and, furthermore, that at least 75% of the interracial crime that does exist is black-on-white. Again, Reilly notes the media’s role in perpetuating a false narrative, in that stories that appear to confirm their preconceptions get widely shared while those that don’t get suppressed. The danger in this, he writes, is two-fold. First, it gives blacks the false impression that whites hate them (an impression which, if untrue, is positively evil to perpetuate). Second, it can give whites the impression that racial harmony is impossible, which in turn threatens to drive more people into the ranks of the alt-right. This is a key insight. Telling lies to push an agenda has consequences, and Reilly is right to say that we have to seek truth and ignore agendas. Our social harmony depends on it.
Reilly further challenges the systemic racism narrative by, again channeling Sowell, noting that there is no reason to expect different groups to have identical outcomes. He shows that differences in outcomes result primarily from differences in group behaviors. He cites crime statistics to argue that blacks are overrepresented in the prison system not because of systemic racism, but because, as a group, blacks commit (and are the victims of) a higher proportion of crime relative to other ethnic groups. But whites, too, grapple with social pathologies more than other groups, including higher rates of suicide, overdose, and traffic deaths.
Continuing the theme, Reilly shows that differences in IQ scores are not, as the alt-right claims, genetic in nature. Rather, black IQs have been increasing over time (something which the genetic argument has no answer for), and when cultural differences are accounted for, IQ differences narrow, disappear, or are inverted. Group differences, then, are explained best neither by the left’s focus on discrimination nor the far right’s focus on genetics, but rather by a multiplicity of other factors that influence individual development, decisions, and priorities.
The most important of these factors may be the presence of both parents in a child’s home, which much more strongly correlates with a whole host of better outcomes than race does. For instance, the poverty rate is 7% for two-parent black families, but 22% for single-parent white households, calling the pervasiveness and even the existence of “white privilege” into question. This, and other factors, influence cultural attitudes towards work and education, and when these factors are considered in Reilly’s analysis he again finds that they largely mitigate group disparities. The way to address these disparities, then, seems not to be found in pushing a theory of systemic discrimination but rather in encouraging the habits that have proven to contribute to success in manifold ways. As Reilly simply says, “Culture matters.”
Reilly’s analysis along these lines is further buttressed by observing that when these cultural attributes are controlled for within ethnic groups, we see the same outcome disparities that exist between ethnic groups. This applies to whites, where fatherlessness has been growing in recent decades with the predictable rise in poverty and crime, and also to blacks, who experience lower levels of poverty and crime the more that beneficial cultural elements are found. Of note, he observes that black immigrants, who often come from more traditional cultures, often earn higher incomes than whites, another difficult-to-explain fact if discrimination were the cause of disparities.
None of this is to say that discrimination in no way exists in modern America, but that it’s ability to explain disparities (particularly in the context of the affirmative action apparatus in government, education, and business) is much less than cultural considerations.
Midway through the book, Reilly turns his attention from statistical disparities between groups to some of the more theoretical claims of the modern left. He challenges the gathering redefinition of racism from its traditional meaning of antipathy or prejudice toward a group of people based on their race to one that relies on power structures. Readers of Roger Scruton’s Fools, Frauds, and Firebrands will notice the New Left Marxism embodied in this new definition, and it’s one that Reilly finds uncompelling. Such a definition, he notes, would exempt from the charge of racism the Boers in South Africa, who train and propagandize like Nazis but have very little political power. Reilly not only defends the traditional definition, he makes the common sense observation that anyone can be guilty of it – and that, indeed, both white and black Americans are guilty of it. He says this not to intimate that a race war is impending, but to point out the obvious: that racism is real, definable, and needs to be fought against in all its forms.
Similarly, Reilly challenges the notion of cultural appropriation, which he calls "an insanely stupid idea." Despite the flamboyant leftist outrage over the idea that somebody from one culture would use the creations of another, Reilly writes that "No such moral rule…has ever existed. Modern liberals just made it up." He argues that the war against cultural appropriation would ultimately prohibit a multiplicity of different groups from learning from each other, and partaking in the benefits of that shared knowledge. This in turn would have the effect of devolving society back to tribes who would in the best case scenario live segregated lives, and in the worst case scenario war with each other.
In the last two chapters, Reilly deals with immigration policy and the ideas of the alt-right. While he has many good things to say on these topics, it is here that the purely empirical approach begins to show some weaknesses.
On immigration, Reilly writes that that it's not unreasonable for a country to control who crosses its borders, particularly in a "semi-socialist welfare state." He believes that the traditional American policy of requiring immigrants to support themselves should be enforced, indeed strengthened. Other suggestions for reform include ending the policy of allowing distant relatives of immigrants become citizens, and ensuring that new immigrants can contribute to the American society by confirming that they are sane, healthy, employable, and don't have a criminal record. There's no harshness or fear-mongering in Reilly's recommendations, though he does express concern about the long-term political consequences of unchecked immigration.
What Reilly doesn't address are the cultural implications of immigration. Just as it’s reasonable to expect immigrant to support themselves, it seems reasonable to expect immigrants to assimilate into the culture by adopting its symbols, institutions, and history as their own. As Scruton notes in How to be a Conservative, there is in this a reciprocal duty of society to accept these immigrants as full citizens. The liberal opposition to such suggestions, as Reilly notes, is to claim that they are racist, but this tells us more about liberals - who thus reveal themselves as cultural relativists or people who actively detest American society - than it does about the policies.
In the final chapter, Reilly turns his focus to the alt-right, correctly noting that it is largely a reactionary movement oriented against the SJW left. Determining who exactly the alt-right is, though, is a difficult task, Reilly observes, but common traits include genetic racism repackaged as “race realism,” knee-jerk nationalism, oversimplified anti-feminism, and a crass defense, if we can call it that, of traditional morality.
Based on my own observations of the alt-right, this seems like a fair enough list, but it’s still (excepting the first point) not all that helpful at identifying who counts as a member. For instance, Reilly observes that there’s a strong tendency for the alt-right to wish that the 1960s "cultural revolution…had never occurred," but this is problematic because Reilly’s hero (and mine) Sowell, obviously not a member of the alt-right, fits this criterion. The reader, then, doesn’t come away with much clarity, as several points of Reilly’s definition are broad enough to include basically all conservatives except globalist neoconservatives. Herein lies a prime problem with the alt-right (besides their gross views on race): their positions are often perversions of traditional conservative beliefs and thereby mimic, to the casual observer, authentic conservatism.
Moving to the task of assessing the alt-right's contentions, Reilly notes that their attempts to prove, via IQ test scores, that blacks are genetically inferior rely on dated statistics and interpretive fallacies, as does their attempt to draw connection between crime and IQ. To the extent that statistical disparities on IQ scores and crime exist between groups, a multiplicity of factors other than genetics must be considered, just as they must when assessing claims of discrimination. And when they are considered, they are again shown to have a stronger correlation to outcomes than the single factor identified by the alt-right. Interestingly, the alt-right and the SJW left, the two poles of American politics, are thus shown to have essentially identical analytical frameworks.
Reilly further notes that the alt-right routinely confuses ethnic, tribal, religious, and cultural differences with race. He notes how the societies lauded by the alt-right are almost racially identical to many of those they decry. The alt-right's proposed solutions, to the extent they have any (which isn’t much), are unsurprisingly revealed to be no solution at all.
But Reilly’s case for why they're not solutions lands only a glancing blow. He is right to point out the absurdity of, as the alt-right sometimes suggests, splitting up the country based on skin color. But his reason for finding the idea absurd is that it would harm the strength of the American nation and economy, limit our accomplishments in athletics and technology, and reduce the diversity of artistic expression and cuisine. All of this is true enough, but Reilly says nothing about the misunderstanding of culture that pervades both the proposals of the alt-right and the mainstream defense of multiculturalism.
Both viewpoints lack an understanding of what keeps people together, which is a shared belief in common values. A culture with wildly opposed views on religion, tradition, manners, and the purpose of life is unlikely to be a happy one no matter how many ethnic restaurants are in business or how similar the skin tone of its members. Reilly fails to acknowledge the deeper source of social cohesion, instead referencing high-minded but abstract notions of "scientific inquiry, freedom-loving skepticism of government, and absolute equality." And while these ideals are important as far as they go, they don't go very far in giving people a sense of a shared purpose and destiny, and the attempts to ground societies in them, rather than something more concrete, has failed many times over throughout the world.
The alt-right is surely wrong that the values that ground a society are racially-based. But the materialist defense of multiculturalism also fails to provide a proper grounding, particularly without an overt commitment to cultural and political pluralism. The problem with Reilly's analysis, then, is not so much that it's wrong but that it's incomplete. It’s a slightly frustrating end to a fine book, because real conservatives loathe the fallacies and inhumanity of the alt-right, but also understand that diversity and multiculturalism have limitations in a healthy society.
Overall, Taboo is an important book at this moment in our history, one I hope gains a wide audience. To regain the cultural attributes that are essential to our survival, we must defeat the identitarians, left and right. Herein, Wilfred Reilly has contributed mightily to that effort.
May 25, 2020
I was sort of hoping Wilfred Reilly would branch out a bit in this book, but he really just broadens the scope of his previous book the Hate Crime Hoax a bit but lingers on the same theme. All 10 facts are about race as he does his best Thomas Sowell impression, generally making good points but doing so in the most pompous ass way possible.
I found some his arguments and the data he brought out to support them struck me as seriously interesting, others seemed a bit weaker and I felt like I could poke some holes in.
Overall I appreciate Wilfred Reilly's willingness to, almost gleefully, jump into one of the touchiest subjects in America today. That said I would love to see him point that big brain and bitchy attitude at other touchy subjects, some of the other American taboos outside of race.
I found some his arguments and the data he brought out to support them struck me as seriously interesting, others seemed a bit weaker and I felt like I could poke some holes in.
Overall I appreciate Wilfred Reilly's willingness to, almost gleefully, jump into one of the touchiest subjects in America today. That said I would love to see him point that big brain and bitchy attitude at other touchy subjects, some of the other American taboos outside of race.
July 6, 2020
Should be required reading for 2020
Caution. Don't read this book if you are unable to defend your opinions with facts or are afraid that facts and logic may force you to hold opinions that differ from the current mob-think of social justice warriors and your cocktail party friends.
Well written, readable and well researched.
Caution. Don't read this book if you are unable to defend your opinions with facts or are afraid that facts and logic may force you to hold opinions that differ from the current mob-think of social justice warriors and your cocktail party friends.
Well written, readable and well researched.
March 21, 2020
Fact-filled and incredibly persuasive book based on sound logic that refutes popular bias narratives.
April 6, 2020
well reasoned, fair and minimally biased. good read
December 15, 2020
This was an interesting book that will no doubt garner many polarized reviews.
I have followed author Wilfred Reilly for a few years now, via his many podcast appearances and various media contributions. Reilly is an American political scientist. He is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Kentucky State University. He holds a PhD in Political Science from Southern Illinois University and a law degree from the University of Illinois, according to his Wikipedia page.
Wilfred Reilly :
I wasn't sure what to expect with this one, as the title is fairly ambiguous... Almost all of the writing in this book has to do with issues surrounding race. An equal-opportunity offender, Reilly is sure to upset people on both sides of the political aisle with the material he presents here.
The 10 Taboos covered by Reilly in this book are :
* Taboo Obvious Fact #1: The Police Aren’t Murdering Black People.
* Taboo Obvious Fact #2: There Is No “War on POC”… and BBQ Becky Did Nothing Wrong.
* Taboo Obvious Fact #3: Different Groups Perform Differently.
* Taboo Obvious Fact #4: Performance—Not “Prejudice”—Mostly Predicts Success.
* Taboo Obvious Fact #5: Racism Didn’t Cause the New Problems of Today.
* Taboo Obvious Fact #6: Anyone Can Be Racist (and “Racist” Has a Real Meaning).
* Taboo Obvious Facts #7 and #8: Whiteness Isn’t the Only “Privilege”—and “Cultural Appropriation” Is Not Real.
* Taboo Obvious Fact #9: A Sane Immigration Policy Isn’t Racist (And We Need One!).
* Taboo Obvious Fact #10: The “Alt-Right” Has Nothing to Offer.
Reilly has some very interesting writing in here about racial differences and IQ. Namely, he complies data to make the case that much of the disparity in group-level performances between the races can be attributed more to cultural, rather than genetic factors. Reilly lays out this case well here, and I found his arguments compelling.
Reilly also correctly identifies race as a valid concept grounded in biology, running contrary to most academic leftists. Good for him for speaking to the obvious here. See here -> for his quote from the book.
While the subject of this book and the topics it covers are interesting, I found Reilly's writing to be a bit dry at times. While providing the relevant stats for his claims, Reilly tends to machine-gun stats at the reader.
Critisisms of Reilly's tone aside, this book and contrarian voices like his are more important now than ever before, IMHO. These heterodox opinions and voices are a necessary counterbalance to established orthodoxy, which can (and have) lead to tyranny and authoritarianism.
As such, it should be read by ideologues on both sides of the political spectrum.
4 stars, but I'll add a BONUS star here, because of the testicular fortitude author Wilfred Reilly exhibited by producing a work this controversial in the first place...
I have followed author Wilfred Reilly for a few years now, via his many podcast appearances and various media contributions. Reilly is an American political scientist. He is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Kentucky State University. He holds a PhD in Political Science from Southern Illinois University and a law degree from the University of Illinois, according to his Wikipedia page.
Wilfred Reilly :
I wasn't sure what to expect with this one, as the title is fairly ambiguous... Almost all of the writing in this book has to do with issues surrounding race. An equal-opportunity offender, Reilly is sure to upset people on both sides of the political aisle with the material he presents here.
The 10 Taboos covered by Reilly in this book are :
* Taboo Obvious Fact #1: The Police Aren’t Murdering Black People.
* Taboo Obvious Fact #2: There Is No “War on POC”… and BBQ Becky Did Nothing Wrong.
* Taboo Obvious Fact #3: Different Groups Perform Differently.
* Taboo Obvious Fact #4: Performance—Not “Prejudice”—Mostly Predicts Success.
* Taboo Obvious Fact #5: Racism Didn’t Cause the New Problems of Today.
* Taboo Obvious Fact #6: Anyone Can Be Racist (and “Racist” Has a Real Meaning).
* Taboo Obvious Facts #7 and #8: Whiteness Isn’t the Only “Privilege”—and “Cultural Appropriation” Is Not Real.
* Taboo Obvious Fact #9: A Sane Immigration Policy Isn’t Racist (And We Need One!).
* Taboo Obvious Fact #10: The “Alt-Right” Has Nothing to Offer.
Reilly has some very interesting writing in here about racial differences and IQ. Namely, he complies data to make the case that much of the disparity in group-level performances between the races can be attributed more to cultural, rather than genetic factors. Reilly lays out this case well here, and I found his arguments compelling.
Reilly also correctly identifies race as a valid concept grounded in biology, running contrary to most academic leftists. Good for him for speaking to the obvious here. See here -> for his quote from the book.
While the subject of this book and the topics it covers are interesting, I found Reilly's writing to be a bit dry at times. While providing the relevant stats for his claims, Reilly tends to machine-gun stats at the reader.
Critisisms of Reilly's tone aside, this book and contrarian voices like his are more important now than ever before, IMHO. These heterodox opinions and voices are a necessary counterbalance to established orthodoxy, which can (and have) lead to tyranny and authoritarianism.
As such, it should be read by ideologues on both sides of the political spectrum.
4 stars, but I'll add a BONUS star here, because of the testicular fortitude author Wilfred Reilly exhibited by producing a work this controversial in the first place...
January 7, 2022
After reading Reilly’s other book Hate Crime Hoax and loving it, I knew I had to grab a copy of Taboo and check it out. This book was decent but nowhere near as good as the book about hate crime hoaxes. I’m thinking this book wasn’t as good because with the previous book, Reilly could just tell a story of a hoax, how the person was caught, and reactions to it. In this book, it relied a lot on data, but even moreso, opinions. In this book, his biases and motivated reasoning was on full display, but there were definitely great chapters in this book.
I do want to make sure I highlight the good parts about this book. Even though I disagree with a some of his opinions, I think the overarching theme of each chapter is great and definitely needs to be discussed. The point of this book is to have a conversation about racial topics. The issue with the “woke” people is that they refuse to even allow you to have these conversations. I think some of the strongest chapters in this book were where Reilly argues against the idea of cultural appropriation and for the idea that anyone can be racist. He also ends the book by taking a stance against some of the ideas from the Alt-Right.
When it comes to the bad, you can tell when Reilly is interpreting data or citing studies or sources, it’s clearly bias. Reilly identifies as center-right in this book, and it shows. I’m not saying people center-left or far left don’t do the same thing, but I can’t take a book seriously that puts their bias on full display and doesn’t even attempt to argue with itself or point out solid counter-arguments. The other thing I found extremely interesting was that multiple times in the book, Reilly points to “research” from people like Dennis Prager or Dinesh D’Souza. I may be wrong, but I don’t think you’ll find many peer-reviewed research papers from either of these guys. Other than that, Reilly has some strange inferences and assumptions from data that I know has way more solid evidence of other interpretations of the data.
Overall, this book is worth the read. Each chapter is something we need to have conversations about, and if nothing else, I respect Reilly for not being afraid to have these conversations and get them out there publicly.
I do want to make sure I highlight the good parts about this book. Even though I disagree with a some of his opinions, I think the overarching theme of each chapter is great and definitely needs to be discussed. The point of this book is to have a conversation about racial topics. The issue with the “woke” people is that they refuse to even allow you to have these conversations. I think some of the strongest chapters in this book were where Reilly argues against the idea of cultural appropriation and for the idea that anyone can be racist. He also ends the book by taking a stance against some of the ideas from the Alt-Right.
When it comes to the bad, you can tell when Reilly is interpreting data or citing studies or sources, it’s clearly bias. Reilly identifies as center-right in this book, and it shows. I’m not saying people center-left or far left don’t do the same thing, but I can’t take a book seriously that puts their bias on full display and doesn’t even attempt to argue with itself or point out solid counter-arguments. The other thing I found extremely interesting was that multiple times in the book, Reilly points to “research” from people like Dennis Prager or Dinesh D’Souza. I may be wrong, but I don’t think you’ll find many peer-reviewed research papers from either of these guys. Other than that, Reilly has some strange inferences and assumptions from data that I know has way more solid evidence of other interpretations of the data.
Overall, this book is worth the read. Each chapter is something we need to have conversations about, and if nothing else, I respect Reilly for not being afraid to have these conversations and get them out there publicly.
July 24, 2020
A great book with a lot to think about. Over the past two months, since George Floyd's murder and BLM protests have been sweeping across the US of A, I have been given a list of podcasts, books, articles, movies and blog posts to consume - almost as required reading. As I've delved into these lists, I've encountered emotional appeals and stories. Empirical data was light and ambiguous. Reading Taboo, on the other hand, gave a lot of hard data, and conclusions to think about.
Reilly cuts right down the middle. He follows the data and is highly critical of both the hard-left and alt-right.
If you are needing facts and data on IQ scores, crime, college demographics - all based on race - this is the book for you.
Reilly paints of spectrum of issues and variables for people to consider - a breath of fresh air when compared to the binary view on skin color many people would want us baited into these days. There are literally hundreds of other variables to consider when it comes to successful living, crime, IQ scores, college admissions and career data. While race is a factor, it is not the prime one. In fact, race(ism) only accounts for maybe 1 or 2 percent in many of these issues. Time and time again, Reilly rips apart alt-right and hard-left narratives about race.
In sum - a great, informative book; one I'll be referencing for quite some time.
Reilly cuts right down the middle. He follows the data and is highly critical of both the hard-left and alt-right.
If you are needing facts and data on IQ scores, crime, college demographics - all based on race - this is the book for you.
Reilly paints of spectrum of issues and variables for people to consider - a breath of fresh air when compared to the binary view on skin color many people would want us baited into these days. There are literally hundreds of other variables to consider when it comes to successful living, crime, IQ scores, college admissions and career data. While race is a factor, it is not the prime one. In fact, race(ism) only accounts for maybe 1 or 2 percent in many of these issues. Time and time again, Reilly rips apart alt-right and hard-left narratives about race.
In sum - a great, informative book; one I'll be referencing for quite some time.
January 9, 2021
The best thing about this book is it's use of empirical data rather than emotional pandering. The author's points are almost always supported with the idea of looking at the data for all races, not just the one that you want to make the point for. When you look at the data holistically many of the arguments that the politically motivated use fall apart. As a statistician he points out many of the techniques that politically motivated groups use to bolster their cases. For example, using percentage instead of actual numbers because the percentage makes it seem like more of a dire situation. For example two is 100% more than one. if you were to say we have one more crime than last year most people would discount it. But if you say we have 100% increase in crime people pay attention.
An honest look at questions that others would discount as being insensitive or racist, which is really just a tactic to try and shame you into not looking closer into a situation. He covers both sides, the left and the right, and shows, as most of us know, the truth lies somewhere in the middle.
An honest look at questions that others would discount as being insensitive or racist, which is really just a tactic to try and shame you into not looking closer into a situation. He covers both sides, the left and the right, and shows, as most of us know, the truth lies somewhere in the middle.
June 4, 2020
A must read densely filled with facts and studies from all sides of arguments about these topics. Read this book and you will have gained an immense amount of knowledge on these controversial but important topics
May 5, 2020
Accessible and fun political musings with data and argument
March 27, 2022
This is not a book I would typically pick up on my own to read. It was recommended to me and overall I’m glad that I had the chance to read it. At first glance, each taboo may be a subject that we have become accustomed to avoid in a politically correct world. The author does a thorough job at explaining each taboo with facts that challenge common thinking. This book digs deep on race issues without walking on eggshells. That is what I liked the most about it. The author lays out the facts and lets the reader decide on their own whether the taboo is warranted or not. The reason I gave it 3 stars is because I felt like this book could have easily been spread out between 2 or 3 books. The author covers way too much information, abruptly moving onto the next topic without much of a transition. It felt very condensed, busy and rushed. But overall a good read.
September 14, 2023
I found this book to have an interesting and unheard-of perspective on the issues of race in current America. While I may not agree with him whole-heartedly on his solutions, I would agree that he has done his research on this topic and provides good evidence for his points. That being said, it was very statistic heavy, which gets a little confusing when listening to the audiobook version. He also uses an occasional curse word which I didn't prefer. I also thought that this book would go into more taboo facts than those just dealing with racism, but it was entirely about it. Overall a good perspective, would recommend, but also wasn't my piece of cake.
listened-to
September 10, 2024I enjoyed the book and it's perspective on race relations. The author admits generational wealth is causing most inequality and yet they don't view inheritance as an obstacle to meritocracy or equal opportunity-- they don't consider generational wealth racist but rather a fact of life. So instead of proposing an ideal policy replacing inheritance and phasing out band-aid policies, they point out current policies are less than optimal and less than fair on an individual level.
I like reading center right academics on occasion. I frequently feel liberals treat symptoms or headlines rather than issues/causes and conservatives nitpick and propose no solutions.
Liberal or Conservative I enjoy books that advocate for a more holistic view i.e. total poverty rather than disproportionate poverty. I think the approach is unifying in the long run.
I like reading center right academics on occasion. I frequently feel liberals treat symptoms or headlines rather than issues/causes and conservatives nitpick and propose no solutions.
Liberal or Conservative I enjoy books that advocate for a more holistic view i.e. total poverty rather than disproportionate poverty. I think the approach is unifying in the long run.
March 31, 2021
Political scientist, Wilfred Reilly is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Kentucky State University and holds a PhD in Political Science from Southern Illinois University and a law degree from the University of Illinois. What drew me to want to read this book is the fact that Reilly's research focuses on empirical testing of political claims. As a (scientific) skeptic who prioritizes empirical evidence over ideology -- even ideological values I myself hold -- I wished to see what he had to say about some issues I've seen being politicized, mostly by the left, that has piqued my skepticism.
Reilly tells us that the facts (the numerical evidence) tell us a radically different story than that we are force-fed by mainstream media which has become a mouth-piece for a certain segment of the left which is illiberal to the point of being religious in its dogma (see The Elect by John McWhorter) and totalitarian in its ideology.
Reilly points out that it has become taboo to question the dogma that tells us America has never been more racist than it is now; that there's been no progress since the Civil Rights Movement of the 50s and 60s. That there is an all-out war being waged by the police against Black people and that minorities cannot be racist.
Here are some of the "forbidden truths" Reilly -- a Black man (and that matters; if he were White, I'm sure he'd face charges of being racist. But being Black, and offering an important voice critical of folks like Kendi, Coates, and DiAngelo, he'll mostly be ignored by those in the current so-called "anti-racism movement"):
1. The Black rate of violent crime is 2.5 times the White rate. When demographic variables are taken into account, there are no racial differences in the rate of police-involved shootings.
2. Interracial crime is actually remarkably rare and not nearly as prevalent as we are made to think. AND, 75 - 80 percent of it occurs against White people, though the media covers only 10% of these Black on White crimes while giving the 20% of White on Black 90% of the exposure.
3. Minorities can be racist, and he gives the example of the Nation of Islam, a group that gets respect from many politicans while teaching that Whites are an inferior race created by a Black scientist.
4. That while many see racism in racial group disparities in IQ and SAT performance, the truth is that such disparities have little to anything to do with race but are the result of cultural variables; that the single most telling factor is whether there is an active father in the picture.
5. He eviscerates the alt-Right in showing convincingly how incoherent their ideology is.
The final pages are devoted to singing the praises of diversity as he did on April 21, 2016, when Reilly participated in a regionally televised debate against alt-right personality Jared Taylor. Reilly argues for the social value of diversity, contending that it makes life "more interesting, civilized, and fun," and using published research to point out that mono-racial societies (e.g. Bosnia, Somalia) are often no more peaceful or less conflicted than multi-racial societies, due to the greater prevalence of tribal in-fighting within them.
Even here he looks to present empirical evidence (from the great availability of the world's cuisines to Nobel Prize winners) showing how cultural, ethnic, and racial diversity provides for a richness we should all learn to prize and celebrate:
1. The USA leads the all-time Olympic medal count by more than 1,000 medals over second place due to the fantastic diversity of our Olympic teams. Second-place is the former Soviet Union, also hugely diverse as is third place Great Britain. Those monoglot, homogenous nations such as South Korea are at the bottom of the list.
2. An interesting fact pointing to the wonderful diversity in art and culture, his research shows that there are more than 100 actively performing Gamelan ensembles in the US (we have one here in Tucson!).
3. Since 2000, 33 of the 85 (39%) American Noble Prize winners have been immigrants.
4. According to the 2016 Silicon Valley Index, roughly 75% of "employed computer and mathematical workers ages 25 to 44" were foreign born Americans.
Reilly ends his discussion of taboos by reminding us that "successful American resistance to failed foreign ideas such as Communism and post-modernism will not be founded in failed foreign ideas such as fascism. Only by turning back to our own best traditions of non-politically correct scientific inquiry... freedom-loving skepticism of government, and absolute equality for all can we push back the tide of nonsense and taboo."
Reilly tells us that the facts (the numerical evidence) tell us a radically different story than that we are force-fed by mainstream media which has become a mouth-piece for a certain segment of the left which is illiberal to the point of being religious in its dogma (see The Elect by John McWhorter) and totalitarian in its ideology.
Reilly points out that it has become taboo to question the dogma that tells us America has never been more racist than it is now; that there's been no progress since the Civil Rights Movement of the 50s and 60s. That there is an all-out war being waged by the police against Black people and that minorities cannot be racist.
Here are some of the "forbidden truths" Reilly -- a Black man (and that matters; if he were White, I'm sure he'd face charges of being racist. But being Black, and offering an important voice critical of folks like Kendi, Coates, and DiAngelo, he'll mostly be ignored by those in the current so-called "anti-racism movement"):
1. The Black rate of violent crime is 2.5 times the White rate. When demographic variables are taken into account, there are no racial differences in the rate of police-involved shootings.
2. Interracial crime is actually remarkably rare and not nearly as prevalent as we are made to think. AND, 75 - 80 percent of it occurs against White people, though the media covers only 10% of these Black on White crimes while giving the 20% of White on Black 90% of the exposure.
3. Minorities can be racist, and he gives the example of the Nation of Islam, a group that gets respect from many politicans while teaching that Whites are an inferior race created by a Black scientist.
4. That while many see racism in racial group disparities in IQ and SAT performance, the truth is that such disparities have little to anything to do with race but are the result of cultural variables; that the single most telling factor is whether there is an active father in the picture.
5. He eviscerates the alt-Right in showing convincingly how incoherent their ideology is.
The final pages are devoted to singing the praises of diversity as he did on April 21, 2016, when Reilly participated in a regionally televised debate against alt-right personality Jared Taylor. Reilly argues for the social value of diversity, contending that it makes life "more interesting, civilized, and fun," and using published research to point out that mono-racial societies (e.g. Bosnia, Somalia) are often no more peaceful or less conflicted than multi-racial societies, due to the greater prevalence of tribal in-fighting within them.
Even here he looks to present empirical evidence (from the great availability of the world's cuisines to Nobel Prize winners) showing how cultural, ethnic, and racial diversity provides for a richness we should all learn to prize and celebrate:
1. The USA leads the all-time Olympic medal count by more than 1,000 medals over second place due to the fantastic diversity of our Olympic teams. Second-place is the former Soviet Union, also hugely diverse as is third place Great Britain. Those monoglot, homogenous nations such as South Korea are at the bottom of the list.
2. An interesting fact pointing to the wonderful diversity in art and culture, his research shows that there are more than 100 actively performing Gamelan ensembles in the US (we have one here in Tucson!).
3. Since 2000, 33 of the 85 (39%) American Noble Prize winners have been immigrants.
4. According to the 2016 Silicon Valley Index, roughly 75% of "employed computer and mathematical workers ages 25 to 44" were foreign born Americans.
Reilly ends his discussion of taboos by reminding us that "successful American resistance to failed foreign ideas such as Communism and post-modernism will not be founded in failed foreign ideas such as fascism. Only by turning back to our own best traditions of non-politically correct scientific inquiry... freedom-loving skepticism of government, and absolute equality for all can we push back the tide of nonsense and taboo."
July 23, 2023
[Imported automatically from my blog. Some formatting there may not have translated here.]
I read Wilfred Reilly's Hate Crime Hoax last year, and liked it. So I picked up this 2020 book via Interlibrary Loan from Boston College. (BC seems to have kept buying dead-trees books, the University Near Here has apparently stopped.)
Without further ado, here are the "ten facts" that Reilly says will get you into big trouble if you proclaim them:
1. The police aren't murdering Black people.
2. There is no "War on POC" … and BBQ Becky did nothing wrong.
3. Different groups perform differently.
4. Performance—not "prejudice"—mostly predicts success.
5. Racism didn't cause the new problems of today.
6. Anyone can be racist (and "racist" has a real meaning).
7. Whiteness isn't the only "privilege".
8. "Cultural appropriation" is not real.
9. A sane immigration policy isn't racist (and we need one!)
10. The "alt-right" has nothing to offer.
(You might have to Google "BBQ Becky".)
Let me be blunt: Reilly's thesis is overstated and sensationalistic. You'll get plenty of disagreement from some quarters for saying those things, but nothing rises to the "taboo" level.
And, for that matter, who could be against a "sane" immigration policy? That's not "taboo" at all! Neither is pointing out the "alt-right" as being entirely worthless.
But that said, Reilly's arguments are a worthwhile counter to (mostly) leftist cant. (And—again, see number ten—some rightist cant.) Many valuable points are made along the way. (Some points are made over and over again: the book does get a tad repetitive on some issues.) Most valuable are his debunkings of racial victimologists who claim that statistical disparities "prove" the fundamental bigotry of American society. Reilly notes (following Thomas Sowell) that cultural differences are often strongly correlated along racial/ethnic lines with no bigotry involved.
Reilly is also a strong opponent of the notion that Black/White IQ differences are fundamentally genetic, something a lot of "alt-right" racists have bought into. He provides evidence-based arguments the other way (the Flynn Effect, intra-racial differences). Unfortunately, Charles Murray is not mentioned at all. His book, Facing Reality covers much the same ground as Reilly's, and it would be good to tease out and discuss the issues on which they agree or disagree on.
March 3, 2021
This is the best book I've read on race. It's not over long, but professor Reilly packs in all the necessary facts. It's such a relief to watch a scholar masterfully lay out the correct data and reasoning. He says taboos don't exist to protect good ideas, they're created to protect weak ideas from valid challenge. Though it is a risk for us to challenge these ideas, it weakens, sickens and corrupts our culture to be cowards in this way. Prof. Reilly is no coward. I hope this book is widely read and that more people concerned about a moral crisis around issues of race in the US today could instead of continuing to project a rorschach inkblot of what they fear onto our nation, will instead frame their understanding within the structure of the relevant facts.
I think this book really calls out the left. Why do we have to depend on conservative writers to point out the hard truths? Why is there so much talk about police violence, and black incarceration, but no discussion on what cultural factors lead the black community to have such shocking and disproportionate crime rates? It seems to me, that if we really want to see the black community do better, then we need to confront exactly the facts the prof. Reilly highlights in this book. No more pretty lies about sweeping injustices that are only discussed in vague terms. The hard facts paint a different picture, and it's time that we attend to reality.
I think this book really calls out the left. Why do we have to depend on conservative writers to point out the hard truths? Why is there so much talk about police violence, and black incarceration, but no discussion on what cultural factors lead the black community to have such shocking and disproportionate crime rates? It seems to me, that if we really want to see the black community do better, then we need to confront exactly the facts the prof. Reilly highlights in this book. No more pretty lies about sweeping injustices that are only discussed in vague terms. The hard facts paint a different picture, and it's time that we attend to reality.
June 17, 2021
This is one of the more important books of this time. Wilfred Reilly absolutely shreds the misinformation currently being manipulated for media and social media headlines to support a biased narrative. He calls out the specific essays and studies the hard left and alt-right have produced/reported on and points out their obvious faults and often adds the statistics they left out to completely invalidate their findings. This skilled author (PHD in political science as well as a law degree) is about using quality data and completeness of data to make assertions, he sites his sources and encourages the reader to check them out. If this book could reach a wider audience (forget the hard left and alt-right, I believe both extremes are aware of exactly what they are pulling) but the large center of this county on either side of center, we might have a shot of changing the way the masses are so quickly and easily get moved in a direction to support a biased opinion. This book teaches the reader to always think, is that everything and is there more to the story that was purposefully left out? It could also help people feel comfortable thinking...that's interesting, let me see the data or has anyone else brought this study/essay into question, we should review that as well. In reading this book, I was so often reminded of Paul Harvey's famous tag line "and now you know, the rest of the story."
November 5, 2022
TABOO
10 FACTS (You Can't Talk About)
WILFRED REILLY
Review by Author Roy Murry
What you can't talk about is a phrase that puts me in a tailspin. So, when I saw the cover of Dr. Reilly's dissertation on racial mores, I needed to read the book.
I am not an intellectual, but I have always been able to pick a phony. Dr. Reilly is not one. He is an intellectual, as was Thomas Sowell, who opened my mind to some ideas I didn't understand. They each have a different take on racism.
Wilfred Reilly's TABOO taught me things I had yet to learn because of a lack of study. Example: Anthropologists and biologists agreed that there are four primary genetic human races: Caucasian, Mongolian/Asiatic, and Negroid.
What are we thinking today - Black and White racism only? At SCOTUS today, there is an Affirmative Action case - Asians against Harvard because of its Diversity quota system.
Then, as some on the RIGHT would say, there is White Racism? There is too much in this book to explain. It would be best if you read it.
Dr. Reilly's prose is easy to follow and overly detailed. The only drawback is the multiple uses of IQ for layering races and some repetitions of themes.
A book for the Inquisitive Mind:
10 FACTS (You Can't Talk About)
WILFRED REILLY
Review by Author Roy Murry
What you can't talk about is a phrase that puts me in a tailspin. So, when I saw the cover of Dr. Reilly's dissertation on racial mores, I needed to read the book.
I am not an intellectual, but I have always been able to pick a phony. Dr. Reilly is not one. He is an intellectual, as was Thomas Sowell, who opened my mind to some ideas I didn't understand. They each have a different take on racism.
Wilfred Reilly's TABOO taught me things I had yet to learn because of a lack of study. Example: Anthropologists and biologists agreed that there are four primary genetic human races: Caucasian, Mongolian/Asiatic, and Negroid.
What are we thinking today - Black and White racism only? At SCOTUS today, there is an Affirmative Action case - Asians against Harvard because of its Diversity quota system.
Then, as some on the RIGHT would say, there is White Racism? There is too much in this book to explain. It would be best if you read it.
Dr. Reilly's prose is easy to follow and overly detailed. The only drawback is the multiple uses of IQ for layering races and some repetitions of themes.
A book for the Inquisitive Mind:
Read
September 5, 2020This is one of those odd books you can’t really review. The most valuable thing Reilly—let it be noted that I borrowed this book to hear how a local(ish) Black author could disagree with the left narrative—offers here is to remind us that all media is biased, that the Left and the Right are both wrong, that data can be bent to serve a purpose, and that there are often other factors that should be controlled for when reporting social statistics. For example, racial disparity gaps narrow when controlling for single parenthood. We science-minded don’t design experiments, only control for a handful of variables and chalk the rest up to some nebulous unknown force. It’s something worth having in the back of your head when you read and listen to the news. If we ever hope to have a shot at solving the issues of this country, we have to be able to identify and acknowledge what they are. And they cannot be solved by partisan politics, because the problems—and solutions—are much more complicated than either “side” would ever admit.
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