Math Is Racist, Reality Is Racist, Truth Is Racist, and We Hope to God You’re Racist Too

by David Sims

MATH HAS NOW been deemed “racist” because Blacks consistently score lower on math tests in high school and college classrooms, as compared with Whites.

Math is essentially quantitative logic. It’s a tool for thinking whose validity has been proved by its history of enabling people to predict, to understand, and to achieve. Math has no intrinsic purpose, but it can be used for purposes.

Calling math “racist” because Blacks find it difficult is like calling carpentry “ableist” because people who have had an arm amputated find it difficult to hammer nails. In both cases, the flaw is in the actor, not in the discipline.

Truth-seekers might start investigating whether the reason for the White-Black math test score gap is that most Blacks inherit smaller brains and less intelligence than most Whites do.

I suppose that truth is also “racist,” for similar reasons.

The differences between races is a legitimate subject of inquiry. It’s okay to be curious about it and to want to know the truth.

Anyone who tries to shame you for this curiosity is being dishonest and may be wishing for the truth to remain undiscovered or, at least, unacknowledged. Someone who challenges you with questions like “Why do you care?” or “Why are you obsessed?” is trying to shame you into curtailing your inquiry. Almost certainly, such people know that the truth is something that they would rather remain hidden (or ignored).

The differences between races have a distributed character, which means that they aren’t the same thing as specific differences between individuals. When someone says that Whites are smarter than Blacks, he means that the White race has an average IQ that is higher than is the average IQ of Blacks. He knows perfectly well that the smartest Black person is smarter than the stupidest White person. He knows that there is some overlap in the two races’ distributions of intelligence. What he means by “Whites are smarter than Blacks” is that this is true most of the time. Not always. And how often it is true can be easily predicted by integrating over the two races’ probability density functions (for frequency vs. IQ) and comparing the areas under the curves.

For example, if the White race has an IQ distribution of 103.08±14.54 (Jensen & Reynolds, Personality and Individual Differences, Vol 4, No. 2, pp. 223–226, 1983), and if the Black race has an IQ distribution of 85±13 (a typical finding of studies since 1950), and if a genius is someone with an IQ higher than 140, then, among a million randomly selected White people you may expect that will be about 5556 geniuses, whereas among a million randomly selected Black people there will be only about 12 geniuses.

f(μ) = ½ − [σ√(2π)]⁻¹ ∫(x̄,μ) exp{ −[(x−x̄)/σ]²/2 } dx

f(μ) = 1 − ½ { 1 + erf [(μ−x̄)/(σ√2)] }

The function, f, returns the fraction of a race, whose average IQ is x̄ and whose standard deviation in IQ is σ, that has an IQ of μ or higher.

If there are employers hiring people for a job that it takes a genius to do, then it should not be surprising that the racial proportions among those hired differs greatly from the racial proportions in the general population. This isn’t “racism.” It’s racial reality.

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