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. Let's look at it.
Male geniuses
outnumber female geniuses 7-to-1. Female intelligence is packed much closer to
the middle of the bell curve, whereas men's intelligence has far greater
variability. That means that though there are many more male geniuses, there
are also many more male idiots. The latter might partially explain why more men
are in jail than women.
Watch any Saturday
afternoon college basketball game and ask yourself the question fixated in the
minds of liberals everywhere: "Does this look like America?" Among the
10 players on the court, at best there might be two white players. If you want
to see the team's white players, you must look at the bench. A Japanese or
Chinese player is close to being totally out of the picture, even on the bench.
Professional basketball isn't much better, with 80 percent of the players being
black, but at least there's a Chinese player. Professional football isn't much
better, with blacks being 65 percent. In both sports, blacks are among the
highest-paid players and have the highest number of awards for excellence.
Blacks who trace their ancestry to West Africa, including black Americans, hold
more than 95 percent of the top times in sprinting.
By contrast,
blacks are only 2 percent of the NHL's ice hockey players. But don't fret about
black NHL underrepresentation. State underrepresentation is worse. Most U.S.
professional hockey players were born in Minnesota, followed by Massachusetts.
Not a single U.S. professional hockey player can boast of having been born and
raised in Hawaii, Mississippi or Louisiana. Any way we cut it, there is simply
no racial proportionality or diversity in professional basketball, football and
hockey.
A more emotionally
charged question is whether we have equal intelligence. Take Jews, for example.
They are only 3 percent of the U.S. population. Half-baked theories of racial
proportionality would predict that 3 percent of U.S. Nobel laureates are Jews,
but that's way off the mark. Jews constitute a whopping 39 percent of American
Nobel Prize winners. At the international level, the disparity is worse. Jews
are not even 1 percent of the world's population, but they constitute 20
percent of the world's Nobel Prize winners.
There are many
other inequalities and disproportionalities. Asian-Americans routinely score
the highest on the math portion of the SAT, whereas blacks score the lowest.
Men are 50 percent of the population, and so are women; yet men are struck by
lightning six times as often as women. I'm personally wondering what whoever is
in charge of lightning has against men. Population statistics for South Dakota,
Iowa, Maine, Montana and Vermont show that not even 1 percent of their
respective populations is black. By contrast, in Georgia, Alabama and
Mississippi, blacks are over-represented in terms of their percentages in the
general population. Pima Indians of Arizona have the world's highest known
diabetes rates. 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.
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