Life & Wisdom Quote by Barbara Ehrenreich

Ehrenreich slips a sharpened knife into the velvet glove of statistics. The line pretends to argue "black intellectual superiority", then immediately reveals its real target: white political judgment. By pinning "clear evidence" to a single election result, she’s not doing social science; she’s staging a trap for readers who treat numbers as moral proof. The joke is that voting against Reagan is framed as an IQ test, a deliberately outrageous reduction that exposes how casually America ranks groups while refusing to interrogate the choices of the majority.

The subtext is not that Black voters are inherently smarter, but that lived experience can function as political literacy. Reaganism sold optimism, patriotism, and market faith; it also carried the aftershocks of civil-rights backlash, welfare stigmatization, and a law-and-order agenda that Black communities had reason to read skeptically. If you were paying the costs of that project, the appeal looked less like "morning in America" and more like a rebranding of old hierarchies. Ehrenreich flips the usual racialized framing of competence: instead of asking why Black voters "deviate" from white norms, she asks why whites kept buying the pitch.

Context matters: Ehrenreich, a leftist critic of American mythmaking, wrote in an era when Reagan’s popularity was treated as a national referendum on common sense. Her provocation punctures that consensus. It also needles liberal pieties: if you’re uncomfortable with the phrase "intellectual superiority", good. That discomfort is the point. She’s forcing a recognition that the country accepts sweeping generalizations when they flatter power, and panics when the generalization points upward.