Crying Race at the drop of a hat

William F. Buckley once said that he'd rather be ruled by the first 2000 names in the Boston phone book than by the faculty of Harvard University. After the events of this last week, I'm inclined to agree with him.
Remember the incident? A black university professor was returning to his home, had a hard time with the door, and because of a neighbor's 911 call, the cops came and confronted him. The professor wouldn't give them boo. And, he was within his rights. In your house, you don't have to have anything to do with cops unless they have probably cause or a warrant. And they had neither. Trouble was, the cops didn't know it.
So the professor ranted, and he yelled, and he called people racist, and finally they cuffed him.
The irony here is that the police were there specifically to protect the home of the professor. They didn't cuff him because he was a n***** but because they thought he was a burglar.
Now, while the professor had the right of it legally, he did two things wrong: First, he lost his cool and started shouting. Second, he called "Race, Race." Think about it for a minute. Here's a clear case of mistaken identity. Wouldn't it have been better for this supposedly smart person to simply say, "I live here. Here's my ID"? But nooooo, he had to thrash around like a schoolboy caught with a cigarette out behind the gym.
The cops don't come away much better, of course. What they should have done is leave the house, stake it out, and wait for developments.
From the things I read, however, I'm beginning to think it's cops 1, professor 0, President Obama -1.

IQ, math, and race

I'd better start with a disclaimer, I guess, lest people come screaming into my house and stab me in the rotunda (very old joke, given at the end of this post). Here's the disclaimer: I don't think people vary much in their mental capacities from region to region, from color to color, from race to race. Note that I said "I don't think." That's because I don't know. Nobody does. If someone states categorically, "Race X has a higher IQ than race Y," they are thinking wishfully.

That said, it's important to note that if there is no really hard evidence for differences, there is also no really hard difference for sameness. So, when an esteemed author sets out to demonstrate that differences in race are a matter of geographic accident, he starts from the assumption that there are no differences. That bothers me. I don't think that we should start a protracted argument with an undocumented assertion that we accept as an article of faith.

But that's not what I want to talk about today. Let's assume, just for a moment, just for this discussion, that it could be proven that one race had -- oh, let's say -- a seven point IQ advantage over another. Let's assume moreover that we all agree on what IQ is (fat chance), and that we all agree that the testing is valid (ibid). We'd have to ask the question, "What does that mean?" Does it mean that any given member of Race A is 7 points brighter than any given member of Race B? That's patently rediculous, so it has to mean something else. What it means is that the totality of Race A scores 7 points higher. The problem with such a finding is this: What is true of the aggregate is not true of the individual. The question is whether the data has any predictive force. Look, suppose two people are sitting across from you, a member of Race A and a member of Race B. You have to hire one of them, based at least partly on their intelligence. Does the 7-point rule help? Not at all. The member of Race A could be the dumbest person on the planet and the member of Race B could be the smartest.

So, something like a 7-point difference is meaningless when applied to individuals. I am therefore forced to the opinion that people who froth at the mouth about race and IQ either have no real understanding of what the math says, or lump all people together in one category. In either case, they're not people I want to have lunch with.

Besides, it doesn't matter anyway. I am smarter than some of my relatives, dumber than others. That doesn't affect my love for them one way or another. We're all family.

Oh, the joke. Here it is:
Cassius: "They've stabbed Caeser."
Crassus: "Where?"
Cassius: "In the rotunda."