Daily Inspiration Quote by J. Philippe Rushton

A sentence like this isn’t trying to describe the world so much as to settle an argument in advance. Rushton’s phrasing has the clipped confidence of a “finding,” but its real work is political: it smuggles a hierarchy in through the side door of measurement. By stacking geographies (Caribbean, Britain, Canada, sub-Saharan Africa, the United States) he signals that the pattern is supposedly global and therefore “natural,” not contingent. That rhetorical move is the tell. If disparity appears everywhere, the reader is nudged to stop looking for local causes: schools, nutrition, lead exposure, segregation, labor markets, immigration selection, or the basic fact that tests are built inside cultures with unequal access to the goods that tests reward.

The subtext is an old one with a modern lab coat: group differences in outcomes are framed as differences in innate capacity, making inequality feel less like a policy choice and more like a biological verdict. “Relative to whites” sets whiteness as the silent benchmark, converting a historically produced category into a neutral standard. Even the broad term “Blacks” flattens wildly different populations and histories into a single essence, which is convenient when your goal is to argue for race as a meaningful biological unit.

Context matters because Rushton wasn’t merely commenting; he was a prominent figure in late-20th-century “race and intelligence” research, work that repeatedly ran aground on methodological problems, biased sampling, and the reification of IQ as a pure, portable proxy for intelligence. The line’s force comes from borrowing science’s authority while directing the audience toward a single, foreclosing interpretation: that racial inequality is deserved, inevitable, or at least not our problem to solve.