I'm not a racist but ...

The Richard Hanania Race-Science Side-Step

I’ve already written at length about how to read Richard Hanania - you ought to focus on the anodyne seeming premises rather than the outrage-bait. This is a shorter post, focusing on Hanania’s new essay for Claire Lehman in Quillette, in the wake of his outing as an erstwhile pseudonymous race-and-gender-troll. It’s shorter because it requires much less work - there’s little scope for subtle trolling from a quarry that’s just been flushed from the covert, and is desperately zigging all over the landscape as hounds give tongue behind. Again, the one weird trick for understanding what Hanania is doing is to focus on the bland rather than the angry.

Hanania’s essay is framed as a conversion story. He was an angry, bitter young man, who didn’t have much luck in love or personal relationships. This - together with the delights of online forums - led him to say vicious, angry and hateful things anonymously. In his words, “I all too clearly notice the kind of sloppy thinking, emotional immaturity, and moral shortcomings that can lead one to adopt a quasi-fascist ideology, and am hard on others because I’m hard on myself for once holding such views.”

As he puts it, “[p]hrases like “racism” and “misogyny” get thrown around too easily, but I don’t believe there’s any doubt many of my previous comments crossed the line, regardless of where one thinks that line should be.” Still, he says, “[f]ifteen years is long enough to graduate junior high, go through all of high school and college, earn a PhD, and get a third of the way towards being a tenured professor. If that’s not a long enough time to be beyond the statute of limitations for holding repugnant views one later renounces, then there’s really no hope for us ever moving beyond cancel culture.”

If you’re reading very carefully, you might suspect a lithe and deliberate sinuosity in the phrase, “regardless of where one thinks the line should be.” And you might be right. Because the question of where the line should be is indeed a very important question, as Hanania implicitly acknowledges by ducking it.

The continuing nastiness is wriggling underneath the blandest pair of sentences in the entire artless-seeming essay. Those sentences:

“The reason I’m the target of a cancellation effort is because left-wing journalists dislike anyone acknowledging statistical differences between races. My mistake in a previous life was assigning collective guilt based on certain undeniable facts.”

What exactly are those ‘statistical differences between races?’ Which “undeniable facts” did he make the mistake of assigning collective guilt on? Hanania declines to specify, treating these awkward questions with the delicate circumspection of a Victorian prude, alluding only indirectly at the dinner table to topics better discussed over cigars in the smoking room.

The hidden continuity between the awful things that he wrote pseudonymously as a young man, and the things he writes today as a pundit is tolerably straightforward. Hanania seems to believe that Black people are on average more stupid than white people. He apparently wants to define the line of racism so that those who believe in the innate genetic inferiority of some races, are in some sense not racists. Proper racists, on this account, not only believe these things, but want to do nasty things and to enact policies that discriminate against the inferior races. The implication is that honest believers in The Race-IQ Connection, like Hanania himself, shouldn’t be called racists. They’re just going where the science tells them.

Of course, Hanania can’t write straightly or frankly about these beliefs without blowing the whole essay up. “I’m not a racist any more; I’m just a believer in Race-IQ Science” is not, under this set of circumstances, a winning rhetorical strategy, even if there has been some actual improvement along a pretty godawful curve. Hence, the bland evasions and circumlocutions. One zigs and zags as one must, when one’s reputation and livelihood is at stake.

What is maybe more interesting is Lehman’s championing of this piece (and willingness to let him duck the questions). Perhaps, as she claims, it’s better to have rightists merely embracing the pseudoscience than positively using it to justify the horrible stuff that Hanania and his mates embracedback in the day. But the way in which the whole Intellectual Dark Web/Enlightened Centrist defense of open-mindedness repeatedly collapses into defenses of race science really says quite a lot about where the intellectual energy is. As Philip Kitcher noticed a generation ago, the “scientific” explanations to justify racism kept on changing, as claims kept on getting blown up. What stayed constant, of course, was the racism.

[Explanatory aside: to forestall frustration on all sides, please don’t start in on ‘well akshually IQ’ disquisitions in comments - just scroll down to the end of this post for links to prebuttals, and consider your arguments answered as thoroughly as I care to answer them.]