The End

National Review

Derb is a deeply literate, funny, and incisive writer. Derb is also maddening, outrageous, cranky, and provocative. His latest piece, The Talk, in a webzine, lurches from the politically incorrect to the nasty and indefensible. We never would have published it, but the main reason that people noticed it is that it was by a National Review writer. He is now a former NR writer.

The Talk

By John Derbyshire
Taki's Magazine, April 5, 2012

Edited by Andy Ross

Fellow "white" Americans, address this talk to your kids:

  1  Among your fellow citizens are forty million who identify as black.

  2  American blacks are descended from West African populations.

  3  Your own ancestry is mixed, but blacks will take you to be white.

  4  The default principle is that a black fellow citizen is entitled to the same courtesies you would extend to a nonblack citizen.

  5  Like any human group, blacks vary. There are black geniuses and black morons, black saints and black psychopaths.

  6  Among black Americans, many traits have very different means (averages) for blacks and whites.

  7  They have very different means for antisocial behavior.

  8  Many blacks feel hostility toward whites.

  9  A few blacks are ferociously hostile to whites.

10  Avoid concentrations of blacks not known to you personally. Stay out of black neighborhoods. Do not settle in an area run by black politicians. Do not help unknown blacks in apparent distress. If accosted by a strange black in the street, be polite but keep moving.

11  The mean intelligence of blacks is much lower than that of whites.

12  Affirmative action raises the proportions of blacks in cognitively demanding jobs. At work you will on average find more competence in white than black employees.

13  There are many intelligent and well-socialized blacks.

14  There is strong demand for them.

15  They are special.
 

AR  This drastically shortened and sanitized version of Derbyshire's "talk" was brought to you as a public service. I do not like the tone of his remarks.

Derb was an occasional online friend of mine. I liked his book on mathematician Bernhard Riemann (blog 2007-03-18), I cut and reposted his blog on the 2008 Tucson conference on consciousness, and he wrote a puff for my 2009 book Mindworlds.

It saddens me to see such political naivété.