Why Are They Allowed to Call Each Other Nigger, Part One Million

Oh, fuck it. In the spirit of the Holiday Shopping Season, I guess I'll say something about IQ. Everyone is talking about it these days, mostly because Bill Saletan over at Slate (no link--find it yerselfs) waded back in with the novel argument that niggaz iz stoopid and ayzhins iz good at the violin. Now I have mentioned IQ in the past, derisively as is my wont, and some wisenheimer always pops in to intone somewhere between mournfully and triumphantly: "Actually, IQ is a remarkably accurate . . . " blah blah blah, making the hardly debatable point that the Intelligence Quotient is a remarkably good measure of the Intelligence Quotient. And the ancient cubit was a remarkably good measure of the ancient cubit, but you don't see anyone building tunnels under the English Channel using the damned thing. Given the enthusiasms of its supporters, it's perfectly obvious that IQ is the current equivalent of phrenology, and if anyone among you doubts that Will Saletan and Andy Sullivan would break out the foreceps and start measuring skulls and noses if some crackpot racialist told them it was back in vogue, then frankly, I should probably give up.

Anyway, IQ. Mine, for instance, is higher than Saletan's or Sullivans. Oh, yes, I was a "gifted" child, and for many years I demonstrated my extrardinary capacity to imagine what this shape would look like if folded that way without actually folding anything! Square pegs, round holes, color-coded memory games. Yes, children, I am the Ubermensch, with Pure Will where my ribs once were and a wound that will not heal and a line-item veto on the laws of nature. And yet here I am, mere blogger and smart-ass, small-potatoes administrator in the backwaters of the American empire while all around me you boobs with your meager 120s and your poor spatial reasoning skills are wheeling and hustling yourselves to more money, more influence, more more than I have or likely shall ever have. That isn't sour grapes. I like my life. My only point here is that IQ ain't Smarts, Smarts ain't Genius, and Genius ain't Success.

Why, you are asking yourselves, are guys like Sally and Sully so godfuckingdamned interested in proving that niggers are a lot of watermelon-eating, crack-smoking, welfare-cheating, baby-having, oversexed, underbrained perennial losers? Why can't they be more like the jooz? Or the Indians? Well in the first place, it's because they're both a couple of vicious racists who, unlike some crotchety remnant Klansman in some holler in the Carolinas, haven't even got the strength of conviction for their own bigotry and have to hide behind some second-rate eugenicist to validate their distaste for the nigra. Also, it's a penis thing. You will notice that the major proponents of these theories of inferiority are white men, and that for some odd reason, they are not threatened by admitting that the Slants are smarter than they are. Well, the White Women aren't at stake in that imaginary equation, are they? But in larger part and in the political realm, these are people who seek to invalidate the social policies of 20th-century American liberalism without blaming themselves. "We tried," you see, "But the damned rappers just weren't good enough." You can see the same narrative shaping itself in, say, Hillary Clinton's ongoing accounts of the failure of the poor, stupid Iraqis to take advantage of the marvelous opportunity we've given them. The failure of liberal social policy is not in question, but to question the actual reasons for such failure would necessarily be to call into doubt certain presumptions about the efficacy and capacity of the state in matters into which it has forcibly extended its purview. That, of course, would be intolerable. Better to blame the blacks. It's not like they ever put down the sweet tea and forties and read Slate anyway.