A Black Man’s Path to Race Realism
Larry Murdock
And where it led.
And where it led.
Never in 1,000 years did I imagine that I would end up the person that I am today: a black race realist—someone who believes IQ is normally distributed and that averages may differ among races the same way other genetic variables do. Over the years, I noticed that people are fired up about this or that aspect of evolution, but that the question of genetic differences in race and IQ were off limits. And after many years of painful experience, I gradually went from “Why not?” to “This is the way it is.”
Two things contributed to my conversion to race realism. The first was my training—I have an MS in chemistry—and the second was a lot of life experience.
To start at the beginning, I grew up in a two-parent family in Michigan, and went to church every Sunday. Both my parents worked at decent jobs with good benefits. One thing that my late father always taught me is that “life is about thinking for yourself and doing what is good, right, and best for you.” A necessary consequence of this was making up my own mind on what was relevant to me.
I graduated from high school in the top 10 percent of my class and was offered a full scholarship at a university in a neighboring state. I graduated, and after taking a break from school, went back to complete a master’s degree.
How did my training help lead to my conversion? A chemist looks at a system, without prejudice, and in a process called abductive reasoning, tries to choose the best explanation. If I had to distill my most life-changing experiences and what I learned from them, they would be as follows:
Going to church (ages 12 to 18)
We went to a small church that was not as most people imagine black churches—no whooping and hollering and fainting. It was a very conservative Church of Christ congregation that did not even allow instrumental music. In my years there I saw a great deal of inept leadership. For example, although the church had ample funds, it took two years to put in a new door because the leadership spent so much time bickering. Even though I was only 13 years old, I spent an afternoon making calls to get prices on the installation on a new door, but that still was not enough to get them take action. . . .
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