A lack of understanding about issues of race

Michael Barone's June 25 Daily Herald column lauds Charles Murray's book “Facing Reality: Two Truths About Race in America,” which declares that Blacks “as a group” have lower IQs and higher crime rates than other races. This judgment is leveled without regard to historical context. Barone's delight in Murray's work represents the depths of demagoguery. Barone claims “Murray makes mincemeat of arguments against IQ tests ... American Whites, Blacks, Latinos, and Asians, as groups, have different means and distribution of cognitive abilities.” The fact that the scientific community en masse has disproven this work can be blithely dismissed as “elitism.”

Historically, as a group, American Blacks were not only held in bondage as property for 400 years, brutalized in the process, but later denied the critical means to improve their lot in life. Richard Rothstein's book “The Color of Law” investigates the U.S. government's deliberately imposed racial segregation in metropolitan areas nationwide. Returning Black soldiers during WW II were not able to access FHA loans by law through the GI Bill, for example. Most returning White soldiers were able to build equity buying homes postwar and thereby enable their children to prosper unlike Black soldiers' kids. This is just one glaring example of structural unfairness toward Blacks as a group.

Ignoring structural barriers for Blacks, another “truth” Barone embraces is this: “American Whites, Blacks, Latinos, and Asians, as groups, have different rates of violent crime.” A few scholarly examples of books written “with precision and clarity” that may give Barone a glimpse into the “truth” of Black Americans are Bryan Stevenson's “Just Mercy” or either of Isabel Wilkerson's books “The Warmth of Other Suns” and “Caste.” These may provide Barone with an understanding of the immense challenges that American Blacks faced historically and in our time now.

Sue Zerafa

Grayslake