From How Fascism Works (Jason Stanley, 2020) pp82-3
In the university, there remain powerful voices who call for “reasoned discourse” about genetic differences between races in such aspects as intelligence or propensity to violence, and in them we find a clear echo of Stephens’s condemnation of abolitionists as irrational “fanatics” for their firm belief in racial equality. In his March 2018 article for The Guardian, “The Unwelcome Revival of Race Science,” Gavin Evans describes how “race science is [leaching] into mainstream discourse” via figures such as the political scientist Charles Murray and the Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker. According to Evans, in 2005, Pinker began popularizing the view that “Ashkenazi Jews are innately particularly intelligent,” a view that Evans describes as “the smiling face of race science”; the claim that Ashkenazi Jews are innately particularly intelligent invites the reader to draw conclusions about other groups and their “innate intelligence.” In a 2007 piece for the online venue The Edge, Pinker decries how “political correctness” has prevented researchers from studying “dangerous ideas,” including “Do women, on average, have a different profile of aptitudes and emotions than men?” and “Are Ashkenazi Jews, on average, smarter than gentiles because their ancestors were selected for the shrewdness needed in money lending?” and “Do African American men have higher levels of testosterone, on average, than white men?” The concern about this kind of writing is that it presents those who seek a natural source for inequality as brave truth-seekers, driven by reason to reject the heart’s plea for equality. This research has proven to be suspect, at best. And yet, the search for the natural source of inequality that Stephens pointed to as fact somehow continues, grail-like.
Fascists argue that natural hierarchies of worth in fact exist, and that their existence undermines the obligation for equal consideration. One sees a valuation of this kind in the words of the many white supporters of Donald Trump in the 2016 U.S. presidential election who regularly spoke of their disdain for supposedly “undeserving” recipients of U.S. governmental largesse in the form of healthcare, by which they often meant their black fellow citizens. In his run for the presidency, Trump exploited the lengthy history of ranking Americans into a hierarchy of worth by race, the “deserving” versus the “undeserving.”
When pressed by journalists to justify a distinction between the “deserving” and the “undeserving,” Americans who use such vocabulary reach in the first instance for the language of “hardworking” versus “lazy” rather than for the language of racial distinction. But this hardly justifies the division of fellow citizens into such categories. First, in the United States, racism has often taken the form of associating blackness with laziness. Such language has always been a code for division by racial hierarchy. Second, it betrays confusion about the concept of liberal democracy to measure worthiness by a supposed capacity for hard work. It is no part of liberal democratic theory that basic equal respect is won by hard work. The idea behind liberal democracy is that all of us are equally deserving of the basic goods of society.
Tgk1946's Blog 