THE RACIALIST LEFT
"Median Household Income... Tends to Correlate to Intellect"
Not so long ago, anyone who suggested that some folks might have lower incomes than others due to their correspondingly lower IQs risked banishment from public life and permanent demonization as a crypto-Nazi eugenicist. Imagine my surprise, then, when I stumbled upon a May 15 post on a leftwing Web site which announced that, "median household income... tends to correlate to intellect."
Of course the proprietor of the blog in question — Minneapolis ad salesman and anti-Christian bigot Tom Wickert of ChristianWrong.blogspot.com (he posts under the handle "PWB") — was not referring to Eskimo subsistence hunters, Mexican migrant workers, Islamist cab drivers nor any other officially protected group. His barbs were directed at church-going Southerners. So I guess that makes it all right. Here is what Mr. Wickert wrote:
"I attended in person last evening an interview on Minnesota Public Radio of Fran Liebowitz [sic], the New York satirist. I left the interview feeling refreshed, actually feeling alive. … Political correctness is so out of hand these days that it is rare one can have fun attending a comedic performance."But thanks to feminist jokester Fran Lebowitz, Mr. Wickert got plenty of belly laughs. He shared "some of Fran's gems" on his blog, in the form of what appear to be paraphrases, one of which reads as follows:
"The South is more ignorant and repressive than the Northern States - period. Almost all educational level test scores are lower in the South, the number of Fortune 500 corporate headquarters located in the North vs. South is drastic, the number of divorces in the South are much higher, the median household income (which tends to correlate to intellect) is lower in the South, the number of The Christian Right Churches and `mega-Churches' are more predominant in the South… want me to go on and on? On a whole, this is an accurate statement. I challenge anyone to dispute this comment and show me how the South, in general, is more intelligent than the North."This starkly racialist mode of ridicule strikes me as new — at least new to the current generation. We haven't heard this sort of talk from the left since another feminist icon, Margaret Sanger, proposed sterilizing and aborting members of allegedly inferior races through her American Birth Control League (later renamed Planned Parenthood) in the 1920s and '30s. Something tells me, though, that we'll be hearing a lot more of such rhetoric in the months ahead.
See also Mr. Wickert's post, "The Christian Right and their Brain." It's a doozy.
23 Comments:
The question I have is, are those statistics racially neutral, or are they solely the white Southerners?
One component of Southern intelligence the genius fails to note is the Southern disdain for intellectualoid bullshit.
I thought Fran Leibowitz was the dead girl in Animal House.
What is North and South. I asked because which is California? Missouri? Colorado? Florida? Arizona? Texas? Without a delineation of where the cut off is there is no way to challenge her statements.
Question: since when is the south a race? Answer: when it's the Daytona 500. btw, your usage of racialist is also wrong. wrong wrong wrong. it's racist or it's nuttin'. just like all of us crazy Uzbeks are Mongolian-stock and NOT Mongoloid!
John Brown asks: "What is North and South?"
I think most demographers and statisticians would agree that the South consists of those states which attempted to secede in 1861, while the North consists of those states which prevented them from doing so.
All other states belong in the categories of "west," "mid-west," "south-west," and "Pacific northwest."
Richard Poe:
What I am saying is I want to see the internals and raw data of the polls, surveys, etc.. Because I don't believe she was excluding states like Florida, Missouri, Texas, and Washington.
razzle dazzle asks: "Since when is the south a race?"
In traditional English usage, the term "race" simply means "a people" — hence, Winston Churchill's famous reference to the British "race."
See my article, "A Race is a Race is a Race."
As for your complaint about my use of the word "racialist," I'm not sure I follow you. Please explain.
john brown writes: "…I don't believe she was excluding states like Florida, Missouri, Texas, and Washington."
Texas and Florida were included in the Confederacy and are therefore considered to be part of the South.
John Stuart Mill said it best:
"Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives."
carl writes: "John Stuart Mill said it best: `Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives.'"
Shall I assume then that you agree with Fran Lebowitz's statement that "median household income… tends to correlate to intellect"…?
Here's an interesting usage of the word "race" from an 1839 journal entry by one Fanny Kemble Butler:
"On our drive we passed occasionally a tattered man or woman, whose yellow mud complexion, straight features, and singularly sinister countenance bespoke an entirely different race from the Negro population in the midst of which they lived. These are the so-called pinelanders of Georgia, I suppose the most degraded race of human beings claiming an Anglo-Saxon origin that can be found on the face of the earth -- filthy, lazy, ignorant, brutal, proud, penniless savages, without one of the nobler attributes which have been found occasionally allied to the vices of savage nature. They own no slaves, for they are almost without exception abjectly poor; they will not work, for that, as they conceive, would reduce them to an equality with the abhorred Negroes; they squat, and steal, and starve, on the outskirts of this lowest of all civilized societies, and their countenances bear witness to the squalor of their condition and the utter degradation of their natures. To the crime of slavery, though they have no profitable part or lot in it, they are fiercely accessory, because it is the barrier that divides the black and white races, at the foot of which they lie wallowing in unspeakable degradation, but immensely proud of the base freedom which still separates them from the lash-driven tillers of the soil."
Twice last year, millions of Democrats got excited about a table purporting to show that states that voted for Democratic Presidential candidates in 2000 or 2004 had much, much higher average IQs than Republican states, by as much as 28 IQ points (almost two standard deviations). This even made The Economist magazine.
It was a complete hoax, as I and others persuaded The Economist to admit in its retraction. You can read all about the hoax and see honest relevant data at:
http://www.isteve.com/IQhoax.htm
The median household income is, indeed, higher on average in blue states (although Republicans in blue states tend to be wealthier than their Democratic neighbors). The cost of living, however, is also higher in blue states, largely due to higher housing prices, so the monetary standard of living comes out to be almost the same, with an insignificant advantage for red states. You can see all the data at:
http://isteve.blogspot.com/2005/05/standard-of-living-by-state.html
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Oh my geez. Consistency is wholly optional when you're a leftist, isn't it? If intellect is related to median household income, then what does that say about the inner cities? Or college kids? It says that the stats are bogus. I'm not surprised that this guy goes around looking for a section of the country to hate. He has to have something to counterbalance the migration patterns, the shifting political power base, and the decline of the old media, among other trends. And nothing says "come live in the NE" than "you suck" right? Get a clue, bro. Southern belles always get what they want. There's a reason for that.
Exit poll data shows that Republicans tend to have higher incomes, even though they tend to live in lower cost of living regions.
Exit poll data also shows Republicans and Democrats also claim almost absolutely identical number of years of schooling.
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Southmouth is as old as the northern states. There was a fascinating article on this subject in the National Review some years ago. It argued that the real reason why the north badmouths the south so much is because the south has the three things the north wishes it had: character, class and eccentricity. And that just about says it all.
What Leibowitz said about the relationship betweeen income and intelligence is incontrovertibly true as far as it goes, but as with most liberals, Leibowitz stopped short of the full truth.
Steve Sailer has it right, income is unimportant, it is purchasing power that matters. A person earning $140,000 in San Jose, California has the same purchasing power as someone earning only $67,000 in Chandler, Arizona.
A doctor in Chandler may have the same income as a manual laborer in San Jose but doctors tend to have significantly higher IQs than manual laborers. The correlation is between relative income in a given area and intelligence, not raw dollar income and intelligence.
Actually, what Leibowitz said should have drawn heavy fire from liberals. If the income/intelligence correlation is true then the party that attempts to attract the poor and the downtrodden is necessarily trying to win the votes of idiots!
Democrats trying to appeal to morons? Who'da thunk it?
Mr Meyer observes: "Actually, what Leibowitz said should have drawn heavy fire from liberals. If the income/intelligence correlation is true then the party that attempts to attract the poor and the downtrodden is necessarily trying to win the votes of idiots!"
Very true, Mr. Meyer.
But the problem for Democrats goes deeper than that. Their stand on core issues such as education, affirmative action, welfare, penal reform and so forth rests on their dogmatic assertion that virtually every inequality in our society results from racial discrimination and other forms of malevolent social engineering orchestrated by the white man.
Miss Lebowitz's off-hand remark that "median household income… tends to correlate to intellect" undermines the left's critique of American society and likewise the various "solutions" they propose for correcting its inequities.
BTW, it appears that Miss Lebowitz spells her name "LEBOWITZ." Leibowitz and Liebowitz are more common spellings of the same surname, but, in my experience, Amazon.com tends to be the most reliable authority on the spelling of authors' names (go here).
They have to be reliable. If they get it wrong, the offended scribe will raise hell with the Author Relations department.
Here's another quaint use of the term "race," from the 1928 short story, "The Dunwich Horror" by master of the macabre H.P. Lovecraft. In the passage below, Lovecraft introduces us to the inhabitants of a certain "lonely and curious" region of north central Massachusetts. He writes:
"…the natives are now repellently decadent, having gone far along that path of retrogression so common in many New England backwaters. They have come to form a race by themselves, with the well-defined mental and physical stigmata of degeneracy and inbreeding. The average of their intelligence is woefully low, whilst their annals reek of overt viciousness and of half-hidden murders, incests, and deeds of almost unnamable violence and perversity."
Waitress sandwich, anyone?
Lest I be accused of sparing my own native New York from the Lovecraftian charge of racial "degeneracy," I offer this passage from Lovecraft's 1922 tale "The Lurking Fear," in which he writes of certain Catskill mountaineers:
"The place is a remote, lonely elevation in that part of the Catskills where Dutch civilization once feebly and transiently penetrated, leaving behind as it receded only a few mined mansions and a degenerate squatter population inhabiting pitiful hamlets on isolated slopes… poor mongrels who sometimes leave their valleys to trade handwoven baskets for such primitive necessities as they, cannot shoot, raise, or make. …
"Of Gerrit Martense's descendants less is known than of himself; since they were all reared in hatred of the English civilisation, and trained to shun such of the colonists as accepted it. Their life was exceedingly secluded, and people declared that their isolation had made them heavy of speech and comprehension. … Their social contacts grew fewer and fewer, till at last they took to intermarrying with the numerous menial class about the estate. Many of the crowded family degenerated, moved across the valley, and merged with the mongrel population which was later to produce the pitiful squatters."
Richard,
Lovecraft is brilliant!--good to see that he's finally getting his due. More people are now reading him than ever before.
I read "At the Mountains of Madness" many years ago and have never forgotten it. It still gives me the creeps. Another memorable Lovecraft story is "The Strange Case of Charles Dexter Ward"--a tale that has what is arguably the most frightening ending of any horror tale ever written.
Lovecraft is buried at the Swan Point Cemetary on the East Side of Prov. R.I., about ten miles from my home. My mother-out-law once owned a house on Angell Street in which H.P. once lived in with his mother. (It wasn't too spooky but the basement always gave me the creeps due to my inability not to think of a Lovecraft tale while down there.)
Lovecraft's famous tale, "The Shunned House," was fashioned around a house on Benefit Street on the East Side of Providence. That house, like the one he lived in on Angell St., still stands and has been restored.
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