Daily Inspiration Quote by J. Philippe Rushton

Startling is doing a lot of work here. Rushton opens by staging a small drama: brave empiricism versus squeamish public opinion. By framing the claim as “alarming to many,” he preemptively casts critics as emotional, politically correct, or incapable of facing “data.” It’s a classic rhetorical move in contentious science-writing: inoculate the argument against moral objection by treating moral objection as proof of bias.

The key phrase is “if all people were treated the same.” It sounds like a generous concession to egalitarianism, but it functions as a trapdoor. He grants the hypothetical of perfect equality, then uses it to argue that persistent “race differences” must be intrinsic rather than produced by history, discrimination, or environment. That’s the subtext: not just that group averages differ, but that social remedies are structurally limited because the differences are presumed durable even under idealized fairness.

“Most average race differences” is also carefully elastic. It’s vague enough to smuggle together disparate outcomes (test scores, crime rates, health measures) and imply a single underlying cause, while “average” offers statistical cover against the obvious counterpoint that individuals overlap massively. The sentence performs scientific neutrality while nudging the reader toward a political conclusion: equal treatment won’t equalize results, so inequality can be reinterpreted as natural.

Context matters. Rushton’s work sits in the late-20th-century revival of biological racial hierarchy arguments, adjacent to debates over IQ, heritability, and sociobiology. In that ecosystem, “data” isn’t just information; it’s a badge of authority used to launder a contested ideological project into the language of inevitability.