First Drafts - The Prospect magazine blog

Just when you thought the dust was settling over the Jim Watson race/IQ affair, the row has re-erupted in the blogosphere, with William Saletan, Slate’s national correspondent, writing a series of articles defending the proposition that there are systematic and measurable differences in intelligence between the races, and that there is “strong evidence” that these is a genetic component to these differences. He’s been taken to task at Crooked Timber, among other places—Henry Farrell describes the “’scientists’” (scare quotes in the original) on whom Saletan relies to bolster his argument as “demonstrable charlatans and cranks.” It’s difficult to credit that a journalist as senior as Saletan would be as lazy with his research as some of his critics allege on a topic as flammable as this, but to these untutored eyes at least, he does seem to have rather been skewered.

A rather more minor race war recently erupted on this side of the Atlantic, when New Labour activist and blogger Alex Hilton made the spectacularly bad judgement that it would be a good idea to “out” the 22-year-old daughter of a Tory MP for having quoted, on her Facebook page, a (black) friend of hers using the term “nigga.” After the story reached the Standard, Hilton dug an ever deeper hole for himself with a article for the Guardian’s Comment is Free, which opened:

I’m half Indian; my father was a refugee from Uganda in the 1970s, but I look white to most people. Some people have told me that has given me a specific view of racism - like a black man looking out of a white man’s body.

The subsequent comments demonstrated a unanimity very rarely encountered in the CiF pigpen, and are well worth browsing through if you’re having a slow Monday. Hilton eventually caved in and issued a grudging apology on his blog, Recess Monkey.