From the earliest days of the civil rights movement, a taboo on accepting inherent racial differences in intelligence was already deeply embedded in American intellectual life. An amusing demonstration of the power of the taboo is found in a pro-segregation 1961 book called Race and Reason, written by Carleton Putnam, who had been chairman of the board of Delta Air Lines. The argument presented was Cofnasesque – by refusing to emphasize biological differences between the races, Southerners were left defenseless against their enemies in debates over segregation. The problem was that white Southerners loved blacks too much to tell the truth about them.
White Southerners understood the Negro and in large measure loved him. They realized that the agitation rending the South originated with organized white minorities in conjunction with mixed-bloods well over on the white side of the spectrum. They deplored the deterioration this agitation was producing in existing race relations in the blacker South. Yet they could scarcely bring themselves to hurt their own. The South, after generations of experience, had developed customs and a way of life with the Negro that took his limitations into consideration with a minimum of friction and a maximum of kindness. It was entirely against these customs, these adaptations, openly to analyze and publicize the reasons for them.
Segregationists didn’t completely avoid race science arguments in all contexts. Putnam’s book itself became popular, and was even endorsed by Senators Strom Thurmond of South Carolina and Richard Russell of Georgia. Around this time, the governor of Alabama commissioned a study on race differences in intelligence to be used in desegregation cases, and the resulting work was a 1962 book called The Biology of the Race Problem, written by a UNC anatomist named Wesley Critz George.
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Elon Musk just tweeted a video of me talking about race differences. The Hereditarian Revolution is happening.
Cofnas might wind up saving affirmative action.
You'll notice that affirmative action is taking a whomping lately at the hands of the Trump Administration ,and there isn't, so far, much pushback. A little understood reason for this is that in 2026, few Americans recognize how big the IQ gap is between blacks and whites (and, especially, between blacks and Asians). It's been taboo to talk about the data for so long that almost nobody knows the real numbers anymore
Many Americans now assume that affirmative action in elite institutions is fairly marginal, that, say, 20% of the blacks at Harvard are there due to affirmative action.
So, they reason, we could get rid of affirmative action at Harvard and the percentage of black students might drop from 10% to 8%. So, what's the big deal! Now, all 8% of the blacks at Harvard know they got in legitimately based on their high IQs and strong work ethics! It's a win-win (except for the small number of blacks currently being let into Harvard on racial preferences).
Cofnas pointsout that Harvard's internal numbers suggest that if Steven Pinker's plan for Harvard to admit solely on academic merit, then only 0.7% of Harvard undergrads would be black. He extrapolates, reasonably, that that means under purely meritocratic hiring, Harvard's black share of its faculty would fall toward (but never quite get to) zero percent.
Cofnas haters hate this revelation more than anything else. They constantly cite this datapoint from Harvard's own deposition in the SFFA Supreme Court case as an obviously racist hallucination Cofnas dreamed up out of the blue because he hates blacks.
But, maybe, a few of the brightest onlookers will realize that Cofnas is just citing facts. At super-elite institutions like Harvard, the race gap in IQ is so big way out at the right tail of the bell curve that racial preferences are the only way to get even just a few percent blacks into Harvard's student body and, especially, faculty.
I've long joked that they should make a sequel to Nic Cage's "Book of Secrets." In that second National Treasure movie, Cage's treasure hunter steals the President's Book of Secrets which reveals who shot JFK, what happened at Roswell, etc.
It should be called "National Treasure: Ivy League Presidents' Book of Secrets." When Cage finally gets his hands on the Harvard president's padlocked book of secrets, it turns out to be a dog-eared first edition of "The Bell Curve."
It's clear that Ivy League presidents understand how big the race gap in test scores is and that nobody has a solution for it other than racial preferences for blacks. But, ironically enough, THEY CAN'T TELL ANYBODY. It's widely considered Nathan Cofnas-level racism to reveal that blacks need affirmative action to have even low single digit percentage representation in ultra-elite organizations.
For example, Ruth Bader Ginsburg believed in affirmative action for thee but not for me. She needed the smartest law clerks. So, only 1 of her 159 clerks, Paul Watford, was black.
But few know facts like that anymore because race realism has been so demonized. So, affirmative action is currently in really big trouble because it is considered racist to point out how much blacks need it.