Sunday, May 2, 2010

In Defense of Stephanie Grace (Or Business As Usual in the Modern University) - UPDATED

Pictured: Stephanie Grace

UPDATE:
Yelena Shagall has been revealed as the leak source. She appears to be a conservative or Beltway libertarian. For much more information on her, please see the end of the post.

When I first read about the Stephanie Grace controversy a few days ago, I didn't bother to write about it because there didn't seem to be any point. White people get attacked for being "racist" all the time. The only difference was that this person was a young female student rather than an older white man with a PhD. I figured that someone in the HBDer/paleocon/alt right blogosphere more eloquent than myself would write everything there is to say about it. Surprisingly, no one has, so combined with the fact that the liberal attack on Grace has taken on an enormous intensity, I figured I would give the story a shot.

Upon Googling "stephanie grace harvard," I was greeted with headlines screaming about how this young college student had sent a racist e-mail. This sounds serious. Did she advocate lynching? Did she recruit people to join the Ku Klux Klan or the National Socialist Movement? Did she refer to blacks as "cockroaches" and advocate killing them all? Did she advocate the forced repatriation of blacks back to Africa?

Well, no. It turns out she broke the Commandment of Liberalism: Thou shalt not dishonor a Negro. Six months ago this Harvard law student had engaged in a conversation about race at a private dinner party. Following the party she sent an e-mail to participants clarifying her views in which she stated "I absolutely do not rule out the possibility that African Americans are, on average, genetically predisposed to be less intelligent."

Eventually, she got into a fight with a person she had sent it to, a certain Yelena Shagall, who then leaked it to the Black Affirmative Action Recipients Association Law Students Association. From there it got spread accross the Internet, apparently first to Above the Law.

Let me reiterate. A student attending a PRIVATE dinner is being crucified over a single PRIVATE e-mail she sent SIX MONTHS AGO in which she described the POSSIBILITY of racial differences in intelligence. Yet, liberal blogs responded to the e-mail with a fury matched only by that of a crowd of blacks who have just learned that KFC has just run out of chicken in the middle of the lunch rush.

The first blog I read about this story on was Feministe, where Jill Filipovic (a female attorney who writes about how evil the rich are on her blog, while at the same time posts literally thousands of pictures on her Flickr account of her travels all over the world, meaning she is either very upper-middle class or rich herself) noted that the racism was "self-evident" and proceeded to write about how law schools are basically racist themselves and they should focus more on "social justice" and "racism." Apparently, in her view universities don't waste enough hours and gigadollars to propogandize multiculturalism. It's obvious Jill has never taken a sociology, history, or English class at a modern American university.

She updated her post and laughably attempted to tackle the subject of race and intelligence. This gem is an example of her thoughts on the topic: "Intelligence, too, is impossible to separate from environment and socialization, again making it impossible for anyone to say with absolute certainty that there is absolutely no biological or genetic difference at all ever between racial and ethnic groups." Well, the fact is, even when blacks grow up away from the ghetto, they still have low IQs relative to whites of their social class. The Minnesota Transracial Adoption Study and plenty of other studies have demonstrated this.

The next paragraph down, she claims "I take people who argue that maybe there are race-based genetic differences that determine intelligence about as seriously as I take people who argue that maybe God did create the earth in 7 days with all humans and animals in the exact same form as we find them today." HBDers will of course see the irony in that statement. Liberals claim to support evolution, but they really do not. They believe that it ended the moment the first human crossed the Sinai. They are the ones who are like creationists, not the people who believe evolution continues to this day.

Various other liberal websites picked up on the story. Gawker reported in its typical method of gossipy, contentless-writing. The harpies of Jezebel published their own smear piece. Note that neither of them bothered to refute her statement regarding the possibility of black intellectual inferiority. Maybe they did some research in order to disprove her views and they discovered that research on race and intelligence has proven her to be correct, so instead, they just smeared her as a racist. The reaction from these two websites is understandable. Jezebel and Gawker have always struck me as the type of websites frequented by people residing on the left half of the bell curve who only care about gossip and headlines rather than substance.

Eventually, the Harvard Law School Dean, Martha Minow, learned of it and naturally condemned it and gave the typical liberal discourse on diversity and equality, once again without actually bothering to refute anything Grace wrote. It seems to me that the dean of a major university should have better ways to spend her time than by making statements regarding private e-mails of students, but enforcing liberalism is far more important than education in modern American universities.

A couple mainstream conservative blogs covered this story, too. Ann Althouse, a law professor and antagonist of Feministe and Feministing, didn't even bother to defend her views. Instead she attacked Minow for her hypocrisy regarding the diversity of ideas, being too cowardly to actually discuss the possibility that blacks are less intelligent than whites.

Unfortunately, like James Watson and most other people who bring up the idea of HBD in public, she ended up revealing herself to be a coward by grovelling before political correctness. According to the Boston Globe, she sent the Black Law Students Association an apology containing the following: “I am deeply sorry for the pain caused by my e-mail. I never intended to cause any harm, and I am heartbroken and devastated by the harm that has ensued. I would give anything to take it back.’’ Then Grace distanced herself from her previous comments by writing "I emphatically do not believe that African-Americans are genetically inferior in any way. I understand why my words expressing even a doubt in that regard were and are offensive."

Despite her pathetic, sniveling apology, liberals want her to loose her clerkship with a United States Circuit Court Judge. Liberals always demand apologies from the politically incorrect, but they never end there. As the sagas of Trent Lott, Don Imus, Larry Summers, and James Watson attest, whenever liberals receive an apology from someone who offends Negroes, they then seek to destroy that person. In her original e-mail's conclusion, she asked its recipients to not "pull a Larry Summers on [her]," so it is obvious she knows how the liberal smear machine works. Instead of giving them what they wanted, she should have stood her ground and defended her views. She wouldn't have been any worse off. Maybe she even would have provoked one of those "dialogues about race" liberals are always clamoring for.

Since she won't defend her own views, I will. The fact is, Stephanie Grace was right.

It is "self-evident," as Jill of Feministe would say, that blacks are intellectually inferior to virtually every other race (save Australoids). Virtually every measurement of intelligence, from the various IQ tests, to SATs, to simple high school graduation rates has demonstrated that there is an intellectual gap between whites (and Asians) and blacks. Since the 1960s, billions of dollars have been spent to close this "achievement gap," with very little change in black performance compared to that of whites. The chasm is still gaping.

Even disregarding all of the statistics from decades of testing, historical and contemporary events demonstrate that is undeniable that any country or region inhabited primarily by blacks is a cesspool of violence, crime, poverty, corruption, and virtually every other ailment of humanity. Even when blacks inherit a prosperous land, they ruin it. Zimbabwe, the Breadbasket of Africa when it was called Rhodesia, abandoned its currency last year due to hyperinflation. South Africa developed nuclear weapons under Afrikaner rule, but now they have trouble merely keeping the power on. Detroit was a prosperous city in the 1950s, but forty years after white flight the wilderness is reclaiming much of it. If blacks were, as liberals claim, intellectually equal to whites, then they should have had no problem maintaining these white civilizations. Instead, they trashed them.

Compare Europe's black colonies with its Asian ones. Hong Kong, Singapore, and Macau were European-ruled for a long time. The modern cities were essentially built by the Europeans. Yet, when they were decolonized, instead of running them into the ground, the Asians who took over maintained them as modern cities. Coincidentally, East Asians have a higher average IQ than blacks (and whites, for that matter).

Additionally, its worth noting that Grace doesn't fully endorse the idea of racial differences in intelligence. She just thinks that it is possible. I wonder how liberals and blacks would respond if a true believer in human biodiversity such as Richard Lynn or Jared Taylor were to speak at Harvard Law?

This whole story is utterly ridiculous. The fact that this received national attention demonstrates yet again how pathetic and delicate liberals and blacks are. A student at a private university sent one private e-mail six months ago. Big. Fucking. Deal. These liberal crybabies need to grow the fuck up and stop turning every slight against blacks into a national controversy.

I think the reason why they did so in this case has to do with the fact that it was young woman at Harvard who wrote this. Note that Feministe, Gawker, and Jezebel were basically the ones who covered the story first. All three are havens for educated, liberal feminists. And the only thing educated, liberal feminists hate more than white men are conservative women.

Regardless of the reason for the controversy, the lunacy of the modern university has been revealed once again, just as it was in 2005 with Larry Summers and again in 2009 with Henry Gates. Had Grace defended herself, we might have had a minor improvement in its situation. Instead, she struck the colors, as most whites do against blacks, granting liberals and blacks yet another victory in their war against White America.

The full text of her e-mail follows:

.. . .. I just hate leaving things where I feel I misstated my position.

I absolutely do not rule out the possibility that African Americans are, on average, genetically predisposed to be less intelligent. I could also obviously be convinced that by controlling for the right variables, we would see that they are, in fact, as intelligent as white people under the same circumstances. The fact is, some things are genetic. African Americans tend to have darker skin. Irish people are more likely to have red hair. (Now on to the more controversial:) Women tend to perform less well in math due at least in part to prenatal levels of testosterone, which also account for variations in mathematics performance within genders. This suggests to me that some part of intelligence is genetic, just like identical twins raised apart tend to have very similar IQs and just like I think my babies will be geniuses and beautiful individuals whether I raise them or give them to an orphanage in Nigeria. I don't think it is that controversial of an opinion to say I think it is at least possible that African Americans are less intelligent on a genetic level, and I didn't mean to shy away from that opinion at dinner.

I also don't think that there are no cultural differences or that cultural differences are not likely the most important sources of disparate test scores (statistically, the measurable ones like income do account for some raw differences). I would just like some scientific data to disprove the genetic position, and it is often hard given difficult to quantify cultural aspects. One example (courtesy of Randall Kennedy) is that some people, based on crime statistics, might think African Americans are genetically more likely to be violent, since income and other statistics cannot close the racial gap. In the slavery era, however, the stereotype was of a docile, childlike, African American, and they were, in fact, responsible for very little violence (which was why the handful of rebellions seriously shook white people up). Obviously group wide rates of violence could not fluctuate so dramatically in ten generations if the cause was genetic, and so although there are no quantifiable data currently available to "explain" away the racial discrepancy in violent crimes, it must be some nongenetic cultural shift. Of course, there are pro-genetic counterarguments, but if we assume we can control for all variables in the given time periods, the form of the argument is compelling.

In conclusion, I think it is bad science to disagree with a conclusion in your heart, and then try (unsuccessfully, so far at least) to find data that will confirm what you want to be true. Everyone wants someone to take 100 white infants and 100 African American ones and raise them in Disney utopia and prove once and for all that we are all equal on every dimension, or at least the really important ones like intelligence. I am merely not 100% convinced that this is the case.

Please don't pull a Larry Summers on me.''

UPDATE:

I managed to find the name of the leaker via a comment on a posting of OneSTDV and confirmed it with other sources. Her name is Yelena Shagall. She is a Belarusian-born Jew from Skokie, IL.

Her Facebook page indicates she is a graduate of the University of Illinois at Chicago (class of 2006), where she majored in political science and mathematics (winning an award in that department), and is a Harvard graduate student in the class of 2010 currently living in Cambridge, MA. Her Facebook profile pic (above) is the typical slutty picture that a lot of college girls seem to put up on Facebook, replete with pseudo-gang signs.

She is a right-leaning individual having ties to numerous conservative organizations. She has ties to various Beltway libertarian groups, too. At UIC she dabbled in Objectivism, was involved with the College Republicans (she was UIC's CR vice president in 2003), and attended Cato University in summer 2004. She had a column in the Chicago Flame through which she expressed viewpoints that were a mixture of snarky collegiate neoconservatism and economic libertarianism (the combination of viewpoints that get libertarians seen as just Republicans who like to party), including the typical female conservative criticism of feminism (where they bash feminism while reaping all of its benefits to women). She wrote at least two articles regarding race, though neither of them express support for HBD. Her libertarian views are pretty much a joke, though, as she supported the war in Iraq and when Bush won in 2004, remarked that "it's going to be OK."

At Harvard Law, she was an officer of its Federalist Society in 2008. More interesting is the fact that she worked with the Institute for Justice, a Beltway "libertarian" law firm, as a "summer clerk or intern" in 2008. She is the woman in the green suit jacket in the picture below. (As an aside, why is it that young women are incapable of dressing professionally? The men in the picture are wearing full suits, but the women are wearing short sleeved shirts and one has a skirt with bare legs. They look pretty unprofessional contrasted with the men.)



She appears to be a Zionist, having led a counter-protest at UIC against a pro-Palestinian protest.

Her e-mail address is
Yelena.Shagall@gmail.com

Yelena, welcome to the Internet.

9 comments:

  1. Obviously, Ms. Shagall is just jealous that she isn't as pretty as Ms. Grace. But honestly neither of them should be allowed to vote, much less become lawyers.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I hope Ms. Shagall's reputation is forever intertwined with this exceedingly petty squabble.

    Nice summary of the story.

    ReplyDelete
  3. As an aside, why is it that young women are incapable of dressing professionally?

    Funny coincidence - I just learned what that is true at my office. The men dress in short or long sleeves, always with collars, often with ties, and dress slacks. The women are capri pants, or some other kind of pants, never skirts or dresses, ill-fitting t-shirts, and sneakers or sandals. The reason for the difference is: the dress code is completely different for women than it is for men.

    It's just a rule, that's all, it's just a bit more formal than the rule that Hostile Work Environment lawsuits will be taken seriously if they are pursued by women, and scoffed at if they are pursued by men.

    ReplyDelete
  4. I actually find I'm more "in the zone" when I dress formally.

    ReplyDelete
  5. wow, Harvard Law student Yelena Shagall sounds like a total cunt. I certainly wouldn't want her in my BIGLAW office.

    I'd be worried that she would forward private firm e-mails to others.

    ReplyDelete
  6. @B Lode:
    One of the reasons why your company (and pretty much every other employer out there) has a more lenient dress code for women is probably that they are afraid of a woman suing them for "sexual harassment" if a male manager tells a female employee not to dress like a slut. In modern America, feminists and women in general will vilify men who try to dictate womens' dress.

    I remember two years ago Debbie Schlussel covered a story on her blog about an newspaper article in which a small businessman mentioned his dress code required nylons for women, but not ties for men. He eventually was forced to change this policy after being hounded by women all over the country (many probably would consider themselves "conservatives" too) because they thought it was discriminatory. Of course, there are plenty of businesses where the men wear ties while the women go around half-naked, plus the men probably wore socks with their pants, so requiring women to wear hose with skirts was hardly "discriminatory." But that didn't stop the harpies from tearing him apart.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Yeah, that sounds about right.

    One thing I harp on (probably too much, no one likes a broken record) is that unequal power to create hostile environment suits is a crystal on which bigger double standards grow. It's not like dress code REALLY matter, and it's not like MOST women are going to take their more lax dress codes as the go-ahead to start making a huge list of demands, but every organization has its free riders.

    Needless to say my office has a few notable female free-riders - I just can't imagine a man missing that many days of work without either getting fired or shamed into changing his ways. Me and the ladies can't stand them, but the dirty looks (I try to suppress mine, naturally) don't have any effect. It's ... odd.

    Which is to say nothing of the "totally useless" men these women complain about, support, and reproduce with. There has to be a place in the world for the unambitious male; they seem like a terrible waste. Yet I wouldn't be the first to hire a man with four kids by three girlfriends, who can't keep his trousers up in the literal sense either (gangsta fashion being cool everywhere), who always seems bored and distracted....

    ReplyDelete
  8. Shagall has serious issues and should never be taken seriously. I know her personally, she's also lesbian and pops anti-depressants like M&Ms. Zionist bitch can't stand normal people and she is completely jealous of girls with goals..

    ReplyDelete
  9. Genetics can be responsible for general physical differences between races such as average height and weight, skin color, susceptibility to diseases, and much more.

    Why is it so bad to admit it can also lead to general differences in the brain? After all, the brain is a physical object.

    Stephanie Grace was right.

    ReplyDelete