Daily Inspiration Quote by J. Philippe Rushton

“Of course” is doing the heavy lifting here: it signals a concession offered with a shrug, the ritual throat-clearing that lets a controversial argument pass as balanced. Rushton’s intent is less to defend individual dignity than to pre-empt the most obvious rebuttal to racial essentialism: that people within any so-called race don’t line up neatly. By foregrounding individual variation, he’s trying to launder the credibility of whatever group-level claims he wants to advance next. It’s the rhetorical equivalent of “I’m not saying all X, but...”

The subtext is strategic: you can almost hear the courtroom language. Treat individuals “as such” sounds humane, even liberal, but it also reaffirms the premise that “racial groups” are coherent categories worth discussing in the first place. The sentence grants individuality while quietly smuggling in the taxonomy. That’s why it works: it disarms moral alarm while keeping the conceptual scaffolding intact.

Context matters because Rushton’s career is inseparable from a specific late-20th-century project: reviving biological race explanations for differences in intelligence, behavior, and social outcomes, often framed as sober science resisting “political correctness.” This line reads like the safety disclaimer on a dangerous product. It acknowledges variability, then clears a path for generalizations that have predictable real-world uses: justifying inequality, naturalizing hierarchy, and shifting responsibility from institutions to biology.

The sophistication is precisely in its moderation. It doesn’t sound like a slur; it sounds like a footnote. That’s the point.