Dr. Charles Murray argues IQ and test data reveal measurable cognitive differences between racial groups, rejecting claims the black-white gap is purely cultural or systemic racism-driven, instead citing environmental factors like crime and education pipelines. He dismisses critical race theory as harmful ideology, defending hiring and policing disparities as reflections of real-world conditions rather than bias, while insisting genetics play a role in group variation without endorsing determinism. Murray’s Facing Reality sparks debate—critics like John McWhorter warn it discourages Black youth, but he counters that colorblind policies, not affirmative action, foster fairness and mental health by confronting uncomfortable truths about racial disparities. [Automatically generated summary]
Dr. Charles Murray is the F.A. Hayek Chair Emoritis in Cultural Studies at the American Enterprise Institute, the co-author of The Bell Curve.
He has been physically assaulted when he has tried to give speeches by leftists.
He is routinely called a white supremacist and a bigot and all kinds of things.
The difference between me and the left on this is I've actually read his books.
And while I have misgivings about some of the things he says is fine, I'm convinced that he's a man of goodwill and not a bigot at all.
However, his new book, Facing Reality, Two Truths About Race in America, is really quite shocking.
And so I wanted to bring him on and let him explain it to you.
And you can make up your own mind.
Charles, are you there?
I am there.
All right.
I can hear you.
I can't see you now, but hopefully they'll bring you up.
So you open up facing reality by saying that you're writing the book to counter the left's obviously ridiculous accusations of systemic racism in America.
And here's one of the opening sentences in the book.
You say, of the many facts about race that are ignored, two above all, long since documented beyond reasonable doubt, must be brought into the open.
The first is that American whites, blacks, Latinos, and Asians as groups have different means and distributions of cognitive ability.
Now, I read human diversity, and I have to say, it sounded like a fancy way of saying that blacks are not as intelligent on average as whites.
So what are you saying?
I'm saying that when you give mental tests, whether they are IQ tests or whether they're tests of reading and writing or history or anything else, you name it, there is a consistent, substantial difference between whites and blacks, between Asians and whites, and there's a difference also between Latinos and other groups.
These are group means.
And Andrew, the thing that is hardest for me to get people to realize is that you can have a difference in means between two groups, but that doesn't sort them into separate bins.
These are overlapping distributions, to use the jargon, or put it more simply, millions of blacks are smarter than millions of whites.
And if you start from that point and say, yeah, there's a difference in means, I think you have a much different appreciation of the importance of knowing about it.
It is not because looking at a person and seeing the color of their skin tells you how smart they are.
It does not.
But if you are talking about large social consequences, educational outcomes, occupational outcomes among groups, you will see differences that are rooted in the difference in mean cognitive ability.
And are you convinced, I mean, when the Great Migration started and blacks started coming up from the South to the North, they took intelligence tests and a lot of Northern Blacks were smarter than Southern whites and Southern Blacks were less smart.
So are you sure that these results are not just cultural artifacts that can be gotten rid of by cultural means?
No, and actually, Andrew, one of the other things that I say in the book that I want people to focus on is this is one case where the causes are not really important.
For one thing, the black-white gap narrowed substantially for people born before the early 1970s.
And I attribute that narrowing entirely to changes in culture and environment for the better.
But that's not the issue now.
Suppose that the remaining difference, which has been pretty constant for the last 30 years, is entirely cultural.
Just assume that.
That does not make any difference when you are looking at educational outcomes and occupational outcomes.
The difference exists for whatever reasons, and the existence of the difference has social consequences.
We have to talk about them for a very simple reason.
The critical race theorists are basically saying, well, look, we had the Civil Rights Act almost 60 years ago, and look at these disparities in educational outcomes and the number of senior managers at Microsoft that still exist.
What else can it be except racism?
And if you are going to counter that, if you're going to say, well, there are explanations other than racism, and it is related to the difference in mean cognitive ability, that what we are looking at with many of these discrepancies, disparities, is to be expected, given the facts on the ground.
It's not fun to talk about.
It will be misused by the white supremacists.
But we've got to somehow get people to realize these allegations of systemic racism are nonsense.
That doesn't mean that race is not still a factor in American life.
Yes, it is.
Is it systemic?
No.
And you simply got to have recognition of these facts if you're going to destroy this pernicious ideology called critical race theory.
Now, it is a pernicious ideology, and you and I are completely on the same page.
I mean, the left hasn't said anything true really since Marx.
I mean, since there's been a left.
But at the same time, you talk, for instance, in human diversity a lot about genetics and a lot about the interactions between people.
And yet we do see things.
I mean, I wonder if there's a danger of discouraging in attacking critical race theory, but is one thing, but isn't there a danger of discouraging things like the Success Academy charter schools, which have eliminated, it seems, the differences between their mostly black students and other white students in other schools.
In other words, shouldn't we be talking about ways of narrowing this gap?
Or should we not?
Andrew, in the absence of what is now the predominant ideology of the administration in power, in the absence of that, yeah, we can focus exclusively on how can we use the success of success academies and others.
How can we expand that, make the public schools more responsive?
Yeah, that would be wonderful.
We don't have that option because, well, we've talked so far about education and cognitive ability, but in that and also in matters of policing, the charges of racism and white privilege and the degree to which whites are evil and all the rest of that are poisoning the system.
And we are not going to be able to scale up the successes of Success Academy until we first face reality, which is where the title of this book is.
Because Facing Reality, Two Truths About Race in America.
But I just want to make sure I understand what you're saying because the attacks on you, I mean, I read, preparing for this interview, I read an article in the Times Literary Supplement, which is usually a highly intellectual venue by a critical race theorist that was basically invective disguised as a criticism.
I mean, it was just basically making accusations against you with no basis whatsoever.
So I just want to make sure that I understand what you're saying, because your books can be dense.
They're dense with information.
You do seem to rely a lot on genetics.
And one of my problems with genetic thinking is my problem with all materialist thinking is that it falls prey to the logical fallacy that whatever is must be.
Okay.
And so we've seen over time that races change.
I mean, the Jews in Russia are a criminal class, essentially, but they come to America and they're successful.
The Irish are treated like the blacks in Britain, but they come to America and again, successful.
The barbarians who took over Rome built Europe.
And so we see that things change.
And what I'm trying to ask you, I guess, is do you believe, do you believe that the differences in cognitive ability between the races are baked into the system?
Or are they things that we should be addressing?
And if we address them, can we get rid of the disparity?
Point number one, Andrew, have me on again sometime and we'll talk about human diversity.
I'm delighted you read human diversity.
It pretty much sank without a trace.
It was not reviewed by the major publications.
I have my own theories about that.
And it's a very interesting conversation that what we're learning about genetics, not just with regard to cognitive ability, but all sorts of other traits, we could have a fascinating conversation about that.
That does not, it is not relevant to the existence of differences now.
Let me turn to the policing issue.
Maybe I can make the points here there.
Okay, let's say that the black-white difference in violent crime rates, which is the second truth in the book that I refer to, let's say that that is entirely culturally determined.
That's entirely environmental.
Okay, fine.
If you are a cop, a professional, well-trained, well-meaning guy or gal, and you are in a low-income black neighborhood, you are facing an environment, a policing environment that is dangerous, much more dangerous than the environment in a middle-class white neighborhood.
And your appropriate professional response is going to be different in that environment than it is in the white suburban class neighborhood.
It's not systemic racism.
It is professional police acting responsibly, but responding to an environment, which for whatever reasons is different in black neighborhoods and white neighborhoods.
So should we do everything to get rid of the difference in black-white crime rates?
Absolutely.
Can we blame, well, let me say one thing, videos of cops shooting people in the back as they walk away.
That's criminal act.
That's a criminal act that needs to be prosecuted.
But they're way outnumbered by decisions that have to be made in split seconds, where lives are at stake and are mistakes made?
Yeah.
But do they represent racism?
Not necessarily.
And do differences in other kinds of police behaviors reflect racism?
No.
So we're saying two things at the same time.
We leave open the possibility that the black-white difference in violent crime is entirely environmental.
And we also say that differences in policing in black and white neighborhoods now are not the result of racism.
And I could say the same thing if I'm an employer and I'm interviewing candidates for a job.
Whatever the causes of the difference may be, I'm going to have a lot more candidates for high-level programming jobs from Asians, especially, but also from whites than I am from blacks because the educational pipeline is providing many more of the former kinds of candidates than the latter.
Differences Without Racism00:10:05
That's not racism.
And job buying decisions are going to reflect that difference, whatever the causes may be.
That's totally fair.
I completely agree with most of what you just said.
But doesn't it matter what you think the causes are?
I mean, doesn't it ultimately, you know, when you are a public figure, a scholar, and a genuine scholar?
And again, as I said before, I'm absolutely convinced that you're not a racist, that you are operating in goodwill.
But doesn't it matter to somebody reading Facing Reality whether you're saying the left is wrong, but there are other cultural reasons for this, or whether you're saying the left is wrong, and this is incurable.
This is something that can't be changed.
Okay, I've said as often as I'm going to say that, no, it doesn't make any difference what the causes are of this book.
Let me say very briefly what we're going to be going through with regard to genetics over the course of the next decade.
And Andrew, there is nowhere a greater discrepancy between the conventional wisdom in the chattering classes in the elites and what is known by the scientific community in regards genetics.
It is now taken for granted as a consensus among population geneticists who deal in ancient DNA and other things that a great deal of evolution has taken place.
Cynthium has left Africa.
And it is also taken as a consensus that lots of genetic variants have different profiles for different ethnic groups.
And by the way, we don't need to use the word ethnic.
We can just say populations.
It certainly doesn't, we don't need to use the word race.
Armenians have different genetic profiles from Welsh.
And I can go through any pair of ethnic groups you want to talk about and say that's just an empirical reality.
At this point in history, we do not yet know a lot about what those mean for the phenotype.
By the phenotype, I mean observable behavior and traits, but we are going to know.
And another thing that is broadly accepted by geneticists is that there will be differences among different groups, not necessarily large, but that will exist.
And once again, Andrew, that is not genetic determinism.
It is saying, do genes have any influence whatsoever on these traits and behaviors?
Yes.
Is it extremely probable that there are differences, whether they be minor or not so minor, among different ethnic groups?
Yeah, that's also going to happen.
And it's time we were able to talk about that calmly and rationally and not run screaming from the room.
Yeah, you know, did you read the piece that John McWhorter wrote about you?
John McWhorter is a very serious, intelligent linguist and literature scholar, a black guy.
And he wrote a review titled, Why Charles Murray's New Book Is His Weakest, Speaking of Facing Reality, Despite that He is Brilliant and Not a Bigot.
And he calls you one of America's most brilliant thinkers.
But he says that your solution, your approach to this problem, in his words, doesn't work.
He says that Murray thinks we need to accept an America in which black people are rarely encountered in jobs requiring serious smarts.
We need to accept an America in which almost no black people are physicists or other practitioners in STEM or have top-level jobs in government or are admitted to top-level graduate programs.
And basically what he says is that's a very discouraging approach, especially if you're a young black person coming up.
Is he wrong?
I mean, is there something he's getting wrong about what you're saying?
John McWhorter doesn't get very many things wrong.
And he's a linguist, for those who are not familiar with him, and he's a brilliant linguist.
In a sense, I am saying to say almost no people in those positions is incorrect.
But to say, are there going to be a lot fewer at these very high levels?
Yes, for reasons that have to do with, we're getting into the weeds here that we won't, I won't get into them, but when you have a difference in means, that difference gets more important when you move out to the ends of the distribution at the very highest levels.
And you see that in all kinds of things, whether it's sports or hiring particle physicists or whatever.
So is Murray saying that indefinitely we are going to have fewer blacks as particle physicists as a proportion of the black population than we have Asians as particle physicists?
And I'm saying, yeah.
You are.
Yeah, that is true.
Do I sympathize with John's unhappiness at talking about that prospect?
Yes, I do.
Do I think that it is genuinely serious in that it should change, would have bad effects on black-white relations or anything else?
And there I want to step back and say no.
And the reason I want to do it is that we don't really think in terms of groups.
We think in terms of individuals.
We think of people in our workplace.
And if in our workplace, if in our world, the blacks who are in those positions are just as competent, just as, you know, got there with the same criteria for being hired as the whites, hardly anybody is going to be brooding over any disparities in percentages.
Because what they will see around them are people who are just as smart and able as they are.
What we have done by ignoring these problems is we have artificially produced a situation within every occupation.
I'm talking about aggressive affirmative action and its effects, where I will talk about a brutal fact.
The mean difference between the IQs of K-12 teachers who are black and white is about 15 IQ points, which is, you know, a meaningful difference.
That does not need to exist.
If we hired black teachers and white teachers, giving both of them a fair shake according to their qualifications and abilities within any given school setting, the black and white faculty members would be equally competent, equally appropriate.
I'm saying, I guess I'll put it this way, Andrew.
I think a great deal of the deterioration in race relations in this country is produced by ignoring these realities and trying to produce an artificial equality in numbers that necessarily produces an important difference in performance in the job or in the classroom.
To just counter that, my last question, I guess, to play the devil's advocate there.
On the other hand, we can say that people through the years have regarded one another in terms of groups and that that's really kind of worked out badly for people.
I mean, there's been a lot of, you know, racial thinking has created a lot of stunted lives, a lot of violence, a lot of oppression.
Do you have any qualms about that?
Do you have any qualms that maybe you're leading people to a place where human nature being what it is, you're leading them to a place where that's going to accent those problems?
Actually, I am saying that getting rid of any law, regulation, incentive program, or anything else that treats people differently according to their race, I think getting rid of all that would be a marvelous thing, not just for race relations in general, but for the mental health of everybody.
Look, a black guy who's applying for a job in 1940 knows that he has he's not got an equal shot with a white applicant because of his race.
And that was really bad.
And that was poisonous.
A white police sergeant who has gotten a really good score on his examination for promotion to lieutenant, but sees a black guy get promoted over him who does not have nearly the same objective qualifications, that's also poisonous.
And that also is ruining lives.
And I'll tell you one other thing that I feel very strongly about.
When we take smart black kids who would do terrific in an engineering program at Purdue University, which is a good engineering program, and we put them in MIT, and we throw them, they're in the top 3% in intellectual ability for engineering, let's say.
The other people in their class are in the top 10th of the top percentile.
And that kind of difference makes you feel dumb.
It makes you feel depressed.
It makes you more inclined to drop out of school.
And that is true whether you're a white guy put into that kind of situation where you're outclassed, even though you're really quite good, or whether it's a black guy who's put in that position.
So I guess what I go to the wall on, Andrew, is we have produced enormous human suffering by not having a fair, open, gone discussion of the kinds of differences that are in facing reality.
So I was unhappy about writing, having to write the book.
My family was unhappy about me thinking I had to write the book.
Facing Reality00:00:21
In retrospect, I think it was my obligation to do so in very important respects.
Not that it solved anything, but I had to say it.
Dr. Charles Murray, the book is Facing Reality, Two Truths About Race in America.