Education Quote by J. Philippe Rushton

That breezy, almost throwaway line is doing a lot of quiet reputation-management. Rushton isn’t recounting a childhood adventure so much as building a credential: the roaming biography that signals breadth, resilience, and a kind of cosmopolitan authority. “Several places” is deliberately nonspecific, a soft-focus phrase that turns geopolitics into scenery and invites the reader to file him under “worldly academic” before any harder claims arrive.

The context matters because “South Africa” isn’t just another stamp in a passport. In the decades of Rushton’s youth, it carried the moral gravity of apartheid, racial classification, and state power organized around hierarchy. The sentence glides past that weight by using the grammar of inevitability: “We emigrated... and later...” Agency is diffuse (“we”), the reasons are absent, the ethical atmosphere goes unmentioned. It’s a familiar rhetorical move in professional self-narration: keep the autobiography frictionless so the reader doesn’t pause to ask what conditions made those moves possible, or what ideologies were ambient in the places he lived.

Then Canada arrives as a kind of clean endpoint, a nation often coded (fairly or not) as temperate and pluralist. The subtext is contrast: a life that has “seen” different societies, now stabilized in a setting associated with liberal institutions. For a psychologist who became notorious for claims about race and difference, that early mobility reads less like trivia and more like pre-emptive framing. He’s asserting, quietly, that he comes to contentious subjects not from parochial bias but from experience. The understatement is the point; it smuggles authority in under the radar.