Has the "Bell Curve" taboo doomed affirmative action?

You aren't supposed to know the IQ gap means blacks need racial preferences to prosper in elite fields, so how do you defend quotas?

The most realistic argument in favor of racial preferences for African-Americans is that under colorblind meritocracy standards of admission and hiring, elite institutions would feature four-fifths or nine-tenths fewer African-Americans than they do now.

The test score gap at the right edge of the Bell Curve is just that severe.

For instance, if admitted only on academic talent, Harvard’s freshman class would be down around 1% black (and then there’s the question of just how African-American are people of some sub-Saharan ancestry who’d get in under fair competition, such as foreign elites and offspring of mixed marriages).

The African-American upper middle class would be ravaged by the abolition of affirmative action and the middle class would take a bruising.

But … how many Americans know that?

Ivy League presidents know that. People who have carefully read The Bell Curve know that. People who followed the discovery process in SFAA vs. Harvard know that.

What about the other 98% of the public, however?

A 2020 survey published in Political Studies Review found:

US Public Perceptions of an Intelligence Quotient Test Score Gap Between Black Americans and White Americans

LJ Zigerell

Intelligence quotient (IQ) is a common measure of intelligence that associates with many important life outcomes. Research over several decades has indicated that the average IQ test score among Black Americans is lower than the average IQ test score among White Americans, but in weighted results from a national nonprobability survey, only about 41% of US adults indicated awareness of this IQ gap.

41% seems surprisingly high.

If true, most people in the know definitely keep their mouths shut about it.

For example, I have read hundreds and hundreds of articles over the years in local newspapers revealing the shocking news that the local school district has a white-black test score gap! I’ve never once seen any local reporter or official respond: Yeah, well, so does every other single school district in the country.

In contrast, I’ve published a colossal number of words on a huge variety of topics over the decades, but I’m most notorious and denounced for my being not ignorant about the IQ gap. Hilariously, my public awareness of basic, undisputed social science data looms over my career like Sharon Stone’s renown is dominated by that one shot in Basic Instinct. It’s just indecent of me to admit that I’m not unaware of the most exhaustively documented finding in all of American social science.

In this century, the Test Score Gap has dominated much of the tenor of the times. Up through about 2012 was the Educational Reform Era when billionaires were sure they had found various One Weird Tricks to eliminate test score gaps. For a dozen years, we were this close to being able to boost black test scores by a standard deviation while not allowing white test scores to go up at all. (I used to ask: wouldn’t it be more feasible to try to boost everybody’s test scores by half a standard deviation? But improving education for all races seemed kind of racist, so nobody else ever said that.)

But, eventually, it became obvious that blacks were not going to make a great leap forward. So then we entered the Great Awokening when elites devoted their energies to blood libeling whites for the failure of blacks to close The Gap.

But, eventually, that proved not just empirically disastrous, but awfully tiresome.

So, now we are in a new era when the Trump Administration is heavily emphasizing the 14th Amendment’s “equal protections of the law” and dropping anti-white discriminatory policies that have been in place for half a century or more.

The liberal Establishment, at present, is flummoxed. They don’t know how to respond other than scream “Racist,” which at the moment seems awfully tired. (If Trump blows up the economy or gets us into a stupid war or something, that could change, of course.) They could try blaming it on 1619 some more, but it’s now 2025 and they’ve mostly been in charge of racial questions for the last 60 years with strikingly little progress over the last 40 or 50 years to show for it. And when they got total control during the recent Racial Reckoning, they screwed up massively.

The real reason for racial preferences — African-Americans objectively need them to succeed in elite institutions at anywhere close to their share of the population, and that doesn’t appear likely to change short of The Singularity or genetic engineering or some other sci-fi development — is off-limits. It’s racist to know that.

So, the mainstream media seems currently stumped by how to argue in favor of quotas.