Diversity v. Freedom, Chapter CLXXXVII: The Case Of Andrew Fraser

By Steve Sailer

"I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your
right to say it."

If Voltaire were alive today, he'd be spinning in his grave.

The latest collision between "diversity," the highest ideal of the
present age, and such outmoded concepts as academic freedom has a
VDARE.com contributor, Australian law professor Drew Fraser, as the
victim.

For having the temerity to write a letter to a local newspaper.

"A Sydney university has banned a controversial law professor from
teaching after he publicly aired his views on non-whites and Africans
in Australia. Canadian-born Associate Professor Andrew Fraser was
cautioned by Macquarie University last week over a letter he wrote to a
suburban newspaper...University vice-chancellor Professor Di Yerbury
responded with a three-page memo to staff announcing that Professor
Fraser would not teach until further notice..." [Outspoken Academic
banned from teaching, Tamara Mclean, News.com.au, July 29
2005][VDARE.COM note: The original letter, published in the Parramatta
Sun, is not online. Professor Fraser posted the text of it as a comment
on MajorityRights.com (scroll down)]

Connoisseurs of irony will treasure the university's justification:

"Professor Fraser yesterday rejected an offer by the university to buy
out his contract and launched a bitter attack on Vice-Chancellor Di
Yerbury, describing her as an 'intellectual coward'. Professor Yerbury
responded by suspending Professor Fraser from teaching, citing a report
in The Australian yesterday in which he claimed a group called Smash
Racism was planning to disrupt his classes... 'We have a duty to act
decisively to protect his safety and that of others on campus,' she
said. Professor Yerbury told The Weekend Australian late yesterday that
she would seek legal advice if he made further unauthorized public
statements.... Yerbury said she was not bothered by Professor Fraser's
personal attack on her. 'I will wear that as a badge of honour,'
she said. 'I made the apology because I was distressed and ashamed he
had associated the university with views which so fundamentally
contravened its position.'  [Lecture ban for 'racist' professor ,
Greg Roberts, The Weekend Australian, July 30, 2005]

Okay, let me see if I have this straight: The university must keep
their professor from saying that immigration raises the risk of
criminal violence-to safeguard him from criminal violence from
immigrants and their supporters?

R-i-g-h-t... [Email Macquarie University Vice-Chancellor Di Yerbury].

Perhaps not coincidentally, this was happening at the same time that
police were arresting several East African immigrants in the attempted
July 21 terrorist bombings in London.

In effect, Fraser is being prevented from expressing views on
politics-although professors pontificating about politics is a
much-loved feature of public life throughout the Anglosphere.

So what about Professor Fraser's statement that Africans tend to have
low IQs and high testosterone levels?

Here at VDARE.com, unlike at almost every other outlet (and,
apparently, Macquarie University), our first question is not whether
it's politically correct to say something. Instead we ask: Is it true?

And it is true. Africans do tend to have low IQs.

The average IQ of sub-Saharan Africans in Africa has been studied many
times over many decades. It keeps coming out almost two standard
deviations below that of Europeans and nearly two and half standard
deviations below that of Northeast Asians.

Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen's landmark book IQ and the Wealth of
Nations (2002) summarizes 32 published studies of representative
samples of individuals in black African countries: No researchers found
an African average national IQ higher than 80.

Of course, a selective immigration system-which we don't
have-could mitigate part of this IQ shortfall by picking unusually
talented applicants, of which there are certainly some from all
countries.

For example, a friend of mine who was getting his Ph.D. at UCLA came
from a family of nine children in Cameroon in West Africa. Eight of the
nine earned advanced degrees from Western universities, and the oldest
was a surgeon and oncologist who had shared in the prestigious Albert
Lasker Award for Clinical Medical Research.

(Naturally, the West's brain-draining of Africa's smartest people just
contributes to the continent's poverty. But that's another story.)

Here in America, the massive National Longitudinal Study of Youth found
that the mean IQ of blacks who were the children of immigrants was 90,
about five points above the norm for African-Americans. The logic of
regression toward the mean suggests that their immigrant parents
probably averaged even higher IQs.

One little-discussed reason why American political and media elites in
Washington D.C. favor immigration so much more than the rest of us is
because they prefer the fairly well-educated, polite, and hard-working
immigrants from Africa's best families who flock to the D.C. area over
the capital's native-born African-Americans, whom our leaders privately
view as ignorant, surly, lazy, and crime-prone.

(Naturally, importing immigrants to out-compete our black fellow
citizens doesn't solve their problems. It just makes them worse. But
that's another story too.)

Unfortunately, the African immigrants' kids often assimilate toward the
values expressed in the most charismatic force in African-American
culture: gangsta rap.

Will the children of African immigrants to Australia hip-hop down the
same disastrous trail? The Israeli example is not encouraging.
According to the Associated Press, the young Falasha Jews whose parents
were airlifted from Ethiopia have found

"an unlikely source of solace, pride and identity-America's black
culture. The fact that most of these Ethiopian teens have never visited
the United States or even met a black American doesn't prevent them
from embracing rap music and hip-hop fashion, along with sometimes
misguided stereotypes gleaned from MTV, movies and news reports."

What about Fraser's contention that blacks have more testosterone on
average?

This hasn't been studied as much as IQ. But the scientific evidence
supports Fraser once again.

Andrew Sullivan, a prescription testosterone user, has written a long
article in the New York Times Magazine (The He Hormone, April 02, 2000)
about the powerful effect of his prescription testosterone injections
on his behavior. In it, Sullivan pointed out:

"Even more unsettling is the racial gap in testosterone. Several solid
studies, published in publications like Journal of the National Cancer
Institute, show that black men have on average 3 to 19 percent more
testosterone than white men. This is something to consider when we're
told that black men dominate certain sports because of white racism or
economic class rather than black skill."

The relevant question is not just hormone levels in the bloodstream,
but the varying power of the male hormone receptors. Men with stronger
androgen receptors tend to behave as if they have higher levels of
testosterone and other male hormones. A team of geneticists led by Rick
Kittles of Howard U. documented that race accounts for 20 percent of
the variations in the gene that controls the strength of the body's
androgen receptors. Men of African descent tend toward the high end,
men of East Asian descent toward the low end, whites generally near the
middle.

Keep in mind that 80% of the variation observed was within racial
groups. Which is about what you'd expect from observing the world
around you. In every racial group, there exists a wide variety of
physical and personality types among men, from the most hyper-masculine
to the most gentle.

Still, few who watch sports on television, follow Olympic running
results, or examine interracial marriage patterns, will be surprised
that blacks on the whole score highest on those androgen receptor gene
alleles associated with greater masculinity.

Let's discuss the larger issue: Why is truth-telling important? What's
so useful about free speech? Wouldn't it be better just to bury our
heads in the sand about things like race and IQ?

No-because everything that is true is causally connected to something
else that is true. In contrast, lies, ignorance, and wishful thinking
are dead ends.

If, as National Review's Austin Bramwell kindly suggested recently,
my articles are more interesting and insightful than those of the
better-paid purveyors of the conventional wisdom, the main reason is
simply because I follow the chains of cause and effect wherever they
lead.

The promotion of ignorance is cruel, not kind, because facts are useful
while twaddle is just a dead end.

Two examples:
bullet    prostate cancer appears to correlate positively with male
hormone  and receptor levels, so it's not surprising that

"African-American men are at substantially higher risk of developing
and dying from prostate cancer than Caucasians in the United States.
African-American men living in the San Francisco area have a risk of
developing prostate cancer that is 120 times that of Chinese men living
in China... A systematic study of black men in Nigeria found that
prostate cancer incidence was actually much higher than previously
reported and may be as high as that noted among black men in the US
(Osegbe 1997, Prostate cancer in Nigerians: facts and nonfacts, Journal
of Urology, 157(4):1340-1343.)."
bullet    Tony Blair and Sir Bob Geldof did their considerable all to make
African poverty a big deal at the recent meeting of the G8 countries.
But little good will come of it-for the simple reason that nobody in
polite society is allowed to talk about sub-Saharan Africa's most
fundamental problem-its average IQ of around 70.

Because African-Americans score around 85, and they share about 80% of
their genes with their African cousins, it seems likely that the
difficult environment in Africa (malnutrition, disease, disorder,
poverty, and so forth) depresses the typical African's IQ substantially
below his or her genetic potential.

Perhaps the most cost-effective way to raise IQs in Africa is to attack
the IQ-lowering medical syndromes caused by a lack of micronutrients,
such as "endemic cretinism," which stems from too little iodine in the
diet. Western countries started fortifying salt with iodine and flour
with iron back before WWII, and that quickly eliminated what had been a
substantial problem here.

UNICEF issued an important study of poor countries' micronutrient
deficiencies last year. I wrote in VDARE.com about what we could be
doing to help the Third World raise its average IQ, here and here.

But almost no one else in the press was interested-because they know
they will get in trouble, like Professor Fraser, if they mention
African IQ.

See, "nice" people think it's more moral to let endemic cretinism and
the like ravage Africa than to bring up IQ in polite society.

Only EVIL people try to get the world to notice the problem...and do
something about it.

But we can't make problems go away by pretending they don't exist.

As Enoch Powell pointed out in his continually-denounced but
never-refuted 1968 immigration speech:

"The supreme function of statesmanship is to provide against
preventable evils. In seeking to do so, it encounters obstacles which
are deeply rooted in human nature.... Above all, people are disposed to
mistake predicting troubles for causing troubles and even for desiring
troubles: 'if only', they love to think, 'if only people wouldn't
talk about it, it probably wouldn't happen.'

And Powell's conclusion is equally valid today:

"All I know is that to see, and not to speak, would be the great
betrayal."