Derbyshire on Race

John Derbyshire has a great, though long, article on race and conservatism over at the New English Review. It's worth a read.

An excerpt:

They, we, all assumed that if the shackles of legal discrimination were removed, black Americans would swiftly distribute themselves across America’s class, income, and status structure in the same proportions as their white fellow-citizens. Why should they not? Human beings form a single biological species. Given a level playing field, any group should perform as well as any other, in any kind of endeavor, shouldn’t it? . . .

Yet the numbers did not come out right, not at all. With black people at thirteen percent of our population, we should, if the dreams of the Civil Rights Movement had come true, find that thirteen percent of our engineers and airline pilots, thirteen percent of our storekeepers, contractors, and entrepreneurs, thirteen percent of our prisoners and unwed mothers, are black. This is not, of course, what we find; and the numerical discrepancies are not of the kind called “statistically insignificant.” Not at all. Not at all.

And this just seems related: