February 28, 2005

Oblivious to the Obvious

Luke Ford interviews Reason magazine editor Nick Gillespie and tries to get him to say something, anything, politically incorrect about race, while Nick ducks and weaves, trying to stay as smug and boring as possible:

Luke: "Why do you think there are so many white women with black men and so few black women with white men?"

Nick: "I don't know that any of that is the case. I would suspect that in every possible category, you are seeing [more interracial relationships], not less. The premise of your question is probably flawed."

Luke: Steve Sailer writes in the National Review 7/14/97:...

In the 1990 Census, 72 per cent of black - white couples consisted of a black husband and a white wife. In contrast, white - Asian pairs showed the reverse: 72 per cent consisted of a white husband and an Asian wife....

Luke: "We see few Asian men with white women as opposed to Asian women with white men."

Nick: "Is this the kind of discussion that you had with Virginia [Postrel]?"

Gillespie also trots out this chestnut:

Nick: "My mother was Italian and my father was Irish. A hundred years ago, neither of them was part of the white race. I suspect in the future that might change again."

[You'll recall that famous scene in Gone with the Wind where Scarlett O'Hara's Irish last name is discovered and she is immediately sold into slavery.]

Luke: "So you don't regard yourself as a white man?"

Nick: "I don't think of myself in those terms.

"I grew up in suburban New Jersey in a working class immigrant [neighborhood]. There were a lot of Irish, Italian and Polish-Americans. We had a similar background. In Europe, we wouldn't have considered ourselves that similar."

Luke: "Would most of your friend be conventionally considered white?"

Nick: "Most of my friends would be conventionally considered interesting What is your fixation with race?"

Luke: "I don't think we discuss it honestly and I think it plays a much larger role..."

Nick: "In what way? Do you have some kind of visceral reaction to people who look more or less like you?"

Luke: "I think people tend to overwhelmingly live among people of their own race but they don't want to admit it."

[Here's the famous April 2002 Atlantic piece by Jonathan Rauch showing how people naturally segregate themselves by race.]

Nick: "OK. Then you don't need my opinion on it, do you?"...

Luke: "How come all the people who write in your book are white?"

Nick: "They're not all white. In our next issue, we have something written by a Taiwanese-American."

Luke: "No, in the book Choice."

Nick: "I don't know. I guess because they were all born that way.

"What is that? What's the point of a question like that?"

Luke: "On the one hand, you say that race is an artificial construct, but then you see certain actions...that seem contrary to [Nick's] stated race-means-nothing [attitude]."

Nick: "OK."

What exactly is the point of being a libertarian if it means you don't feel free to speak the truth about the world around you?


My homepage and blog is iSteve.com

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