"To deny the predictive validity of race at this level is nonscientific and unrealistic"
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Rushton isn’t merely making a technical point about statistics; he’s trying to launder a political conclusion through the language of empiricism. “Predictive validity” sounds like sterile psychometrics, but it’s doing rhetorical heavy lifting: it frames “race” as a stable, measurable variable that legitimately forecasts behavior or ability, and it quietly shifts the burden of proof onto skeptics. If you disagree, you’re not just wrong - you’re “nonscientific,” a word choice that turns a contested social category into an acid test of intellectual honesty.
The subtext is combative. “To deny” implies willful blindness, not methodological disagreement. “At this level” gestures toward aggregated group differences, a move common in race-IQ arguments: even if individual variation is huge and categories are messy, the author claims the averages are too “realistic” to ignore. “Realistic” is the tell. It’s a cultural cue that what’s being defended isn’t only a finding, but a worldview in which social hierarchies map neatly onto nature.
Context matters because Rushton was a central figure in late-20th-century hereditarian psychology, associated with claims of biologically rooted racial differences in intelligence and behavior and supported by institutions critics describe as vehicles for scientific racism. In that arena, “race” is rarely treated as a shifting proxy shaped by history, environment, measurement bias, and inequality; it’s treated as essence. The line works by collapsing that debate into a binary: science versus denial, realism versus ideology. It’s persuasion disguised as precision.
The subtext is combative. “To deny” implies willful blindness, not methodological disagreement. “At this level” gestures toward aggregated group differences, a move common in race-IQ arguments: even if individual variation is huge and categories are messy, the author claims the averages are too “realistic” to ignore. “Realistic” is the tell. It’s a cultural cue that what’s being defended isn’t only a finding, but a worldview in which social hierarchies map neatly onto nature.
Context matters because Rushton was a central figure in late-20th-century hereditarian psychology, associated with claims of biologically rooted racial differences in intelligence and behavior and supported by institutions critics describe as vehicles for scientific racism. In that arena, “race” is rarely treated as a shifting proxy shaped by history, environment, measurement bias, and inequality; it’s treated as essence. The line works by collapsing that debate into a binary: science versus denial, realism versus ideology. It’s persuasion disguised as precision.
Quote Details
| Topic | Equality |
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