Here’s a story of a third-year law student at Harvard that should be a warning to us all: what you put in an email to someone who you think is a friend can come back to bite. Especially when you’re “friend” is a race nark.
Every time you put something into an email, please remember that someone you send it to may hit Forward. If your email makes the case for a biological reason for racial disparities in intelligence, someone might hit Forward and send it to Black Law Student Associations across the nation.
In context, the remarks weren’t an assertion that Blacks were genetically inferior, just pointing out that science hasn’t ruled that possibility out:
I absolutely do not rule out the possibility that African Americans are, on average, genetically predisposed to be less intelligent. I could also obviously be convinced that by controlling for the right variables, we would see that they are, in fact, as intelligent as white people under the same circumstances. The fact is, some things are genetic. African Americans tend to have darker skin. Irish people are more likely to have red hair. (Now on to the more controversial:) Women tend to perform less well in math due at least in part to prenatal levels of testosterone, which also account for variations in mathematics performance within genders.
[snip]
In conclusion, I think it is bad science to disagree with a conclusion in your heart, and then try (unsuccessfully, so far at least) to find data that will confirm what you want to be true. Everyone wants someone to take 100 white infants and 100 African American ones and raise them in Disney utopia and prove once and for all that we are all equal on every dimension, or at least the really important ones like intelligence. I am merely not 100% convinced that this is the case.
Please don’t pull a Larry Summers on me…
If you recall, Larry Summers is the Obama economic advisor who was fired as president of Harvard for basically saying the exact thing about women and math and science. The difference was that Summers was an University official, and he made the remarks publicly. This was a student sending a private email to someone she shouldn’t have trusted.
Needless to say, the student was forced to apologize, and probably lost a job that was lined up over this. This is the USSA. Learn it.
Tags: Privacy
