April 5, 2010: Conservative Columnist Tells Black Law Student Panel that Racial Disparities Originate in ‘Biological Differences between the Races,’ and that African-Americans are Intellectually Inferior to Whites

Conservative columnist John Derbyshire, who has written about the accuracy of racial and ethnic stereotyping (see February 1, 2001), has proclaimed himself a racist (see November 11-18, 2003), and characterized President Obama as “black-ish” (see July 7, 2008), takes part in a panel discussion about government’s role in eliminating racial disparities hosted by the Black Law Students’ Association of the University of Pennsylvania Law School. Derbyshire tells the panel that “racial disparities in education and employment have their origin in biological differences between the human races. Those differences are facts in the natural world, like the orbits of the planets. They can’t be legislated out of existence; nor can they be ‘eliminated’ by social or political action. That there are natural, intractable differences between the human races seems apparent to me on both rational and empirical grounds.” He cites a number of phenomena as “proof” of his assertion, including the disparities in athletic prowess among racial and ethnic groups, what he calls “the extraordinary differentials in criminality between white Americans and African-Americans,” and what he calls the proven intelligence gap between white and black populations. Three days later, Derbyshire will write in a column for the National Review that the moderator of the panel discussion, a Penn law professor, failed to fairly moderate the discussion and presented her own views “at great gassy length” throughout the event. Derbyshire will admit to planting “a couple of shills” in the audience who submitted questions for the panel, and will complain that none of his shills’ questions were selected. He will describe his remarks as “unfiltered race realism, right between the eyes.” In May, Derbyshire will write that his remarks “occasioned much comment, most of it negative,” and will write that he cannot understand the reactions: “My statements on biology and paleoanthropology are of a very basic and uncontroversial kind.… My appeal to individualism was, I thought, well within a venerable American tradition.” He will write that no one has successfully challenged his argument on a factual or logical basis. [John Derbyshire, 4/5/2010; National Review, 4/8/2010]