Why People Can’t Face the Truth

John McWhorter is one of a handful of blacks who write sensible things about race. He complains that the media bellow whenever police kill a black man but are silent when they kill a white man, and worries that claims of “systemic racism” are leading to a movement to exempt blacks from standards.

But his review of Charles Murray’s Facing Reality is an explicit statement of the mental prison people on the Left and Right build for themselves: “I reject facts I don’t like.”

Prof. McWhorter summarizes the book: "Facing Reality is seriously disturbing. Murray gives a great deal of evidence for two points. One is that black people aren’t, on the average, as intelligent as other people. The other is that black people in America are more violent than others."

Instead of attacking Dr. Murray’s data — he admits he can’t — he writes: If the facts are as Dr. Murray says, meritocracy would mean that “we need to accept an America in which black people are rarely encountered in jobs requiring serious smarts.” He adds: “I would have to work very hard to come up with a way of accepting that world.” He wants a certain kind of world, and doesn’t care how many facts we have to smother and how many whites and Asians we have to punish for him to get it.

Many people would say of Prof. McWhorter: “Of course he can’t accept the truth. He’s black.” I don’t like that argument. I know no race realist who doesn’t accept the data on IQ differences between whites and Asians.

I suspect he is mentally hobbled by something more. Our climate of racial-moral zealotry doesn’t just punish people who say the wrong thing; it makes them incapable of even thinking the wrong thing.