This column draws from an article written by my good friend and George Mason University colleague, Professor Walter Williams, one of the two leading black economists in the United States (the other being Thomas Sowell of The Hoover Institution in Palo Alto, California.
Professor Williams answers his own question categorically in the negative:
“Are women equal to men? Are Jews equal to gentiles? Are blacks equal to Italians, Irish, Polish and other white people? The answer is probably a big fat no, and the pretense or assumption that we are equal – or should be equal – is foolhardy and creates mischief.” Walter W. Williams, ‘Are We Equal?’ https://mail.gmu.edu/frame.html?rtfPossible=true&lang=en
Some of the counter-examples deployed by Professor Williams in his article are as follows:
Male geniuses outnumber female geniuses 7-1. Female intelligence is packed much closer to the middle of the bell curve, whereas men’s intelligence has far greater variability. There are many more male geniuses, there are also many more male idiots.
Blacks comprise 80 per cent of the players in professional basketball. There are only two Chinese players.
Blacks are among the highest paid players and achieve the highest number of awards for excellence.
Blacks who trace their ancestry to West Africa, including black Americans, hold more than 95 per cent of the top times in sprinting.
Blacks comprise only 2 per cent of the NHL’s ice hockey players. Most U.S. professional hockey players were born in Minnesota, followed by Massachusetts. Not a single U.S. professional hockey player was born in Hawaii (no the Messiah himself never made it in that profession).
Are different races of equal intelligence? No, they are not. Jews represent only 3 per cent of the U.S. population. Yet they constitute a whopping 39 per cent of all U.S. Nobel Laureates. At the international level, the disparity is even more marked. Jews comprise less than 1 per cent of the world’s population. Yet, they constitute 20 per cent of the world’s Nobel Prize winners.
Many other disparities are evident. Asians routinely score the highest on the math portion of the SAT. Blacks routinely score the lowest. Prostate cancer is nearly twice as common among black men as white men. Cervical cancer rates are five times higher among Vietnamese women in the U.S.than among white women.
“Soft-minded and sloppy-thinking academics, lawyers and judges harbor the silly notion that but for the fact of discrimination we’d be proportionately distributed by race across incomes, education, occupations and other outcomes. There is absolutely no evidence anywhere, at any time, that proportionality is the norm anywhere on earth; however, much of our thinking, many of our laws and much of our public policy are based upon proportionality’s being the norm. Maybe this vision is held because people believe that equality in fact is necessary for equality before the law. But the only requirement for equality before the law is that one is a human being.” Walter Williams, ibid.
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