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What Are Liberals Afraid of?

Why did the Moynihan Report so terrify liberals? The notion that poverty can develop into a self-perpetuating cycle was nothing new. It can be observed in poor white communities as well as in black. It is certainly true that the history of slavery and Jim Crow probably made the climb out of the well of poverty even more difficult, perhaps next to impossible. But that would make it all the more imperative to take positive steps to counter it, not to just pompously preach about the wickedness of racism.

There is a clue in the insistence of some that the Report was covertly racist. There is no objective basis for such an assertion, but apparently the mere suggestion that black people might require special help to rise above poverty says to some that blacks are inherently inferior. Could they be projecting? Could it be that what they fear is their own secret, guilty racism?

Could some of those liberals be really guilty of covert racism? That is a thought that makes conservatives chortle with glee. Many, if not most, conservatives openly or secretly subscribe to the idea that blacks are inferior to whites. They will say that the facts support them and that liberals are living in a fantasy world of wishful thinking and blind denial. Is it possible that at least some liberals are afraid — without even being able to admit it to themselves — that the racists are right?

Perhaps it is time to ask a shocking and heretical question: So what if they are? Let us go to our roots. Liberals believe, not that everyone has equal abilities, but that we are all equally valuable, regardless of ability. What if science were really able to separate nurture from nature and discovered thereupon that black people, as a whole, had different abilities from white people, as a whole? Would it really matter? Should it?

Catch your breath and consider a few salient points. We are talking here about differences of degree, not of kind. We are also talking about statistical, not absolute, differences. The same “facts” that tell us that blacks as a group score below Caucasians and Caucasians below Asians on intellectual aptitude, or “IQ”, tests, also tell us that some blacks score very well indeed. But does it really matter? Do we really believe that someone who happens to be a math whiz is somehow a superior human being to ordinary mortals? That those of us who are intimidated by calculus and rendered incoherent by linear algebra should be required to step off the sidewalk when we happen pass the masters of those mysterious subjects?

Perhaps it is a symptom of the average person's lack of facility with mathematical concepts that accounts for the confusion between absolute and statistical differences. Women are statistically shorter than men, but there are short men and tall women. If a certain job required those who perform it to be at least six feet tall, it would be idiotic to exclude all women on the basis of their height, but there are those who would do just that. There is much hot air generated over the fact that women do less well than men on the mathematical portions of standard aptitude tests, yet little attention is paid when it is pointed out that the same data show that women outperform men in verbal skills. Somehow a lack of verbal skill did not stand in the way of Shakespeare, Shelley, and Shaw, to say nothing of thousands of other male writers.

What matters is obviously not who has the skills, but who has the power. Perhaps if power were equalized we would have not only more female mathematicians, but fewer male writers. If you are a member of a powerful majority, it seems perfectly reasonable to sneer at those groups smarter than yours as dorks, and at those who seem not so smart as morons. What if those smart Asians were the powerful majority? What would that make the rest of us?

It is not about ability. It is about two things: difference and power. As for the first, why should liberals imitate the folly of conservatives by slighting others for being different, regardless of the nature of that difference. As for power, that can be changed. In our society power is about money. Economics again.

And of course we could try to remember our liberal roots and remember that we are all brothers and sisters, children of God, regardless of our many and very real differences.