Product Description

Michael Levin’s 1997 masterpiece, Why Race Matters, quickly became a classic, and just as quickly went out print. Used copies of the hardcover edition have sold for up to $500.00. New Century Foundation is proud to offer this affordable softcover edition. It includes every word of the original, plus a new foreword by Jared Taylor.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #296287 in Books
• Published on: 2005-11-15
• Binding: Paperback
• 415 pages

Review
Levin’s mastery of the subject is evinced in his book’s amazingly broad and detailed scope and analytical depth. -- Arthur R. Jensen, U.C. Berkeley

Levin’s mastery of the subject is evinced in his book’s amazingly broad and detailed scope and analytical depth. --Arthur R. Jensen, U.C. Berkeley

Philosopher Michael Levin has delivered one of the most authoritative and incisive treatises on the importance of race ever written. -- J. Philippe Rushton, University of Western Ontario

Philosopher Michael Levin has delivered one of the most authoritative and incisive treatises on the importance of race ever written. --J. Philippe Rushton, University of Western Ontario

Why Race Matters does exactly what the title promises—it removes all illusions about the insignificance of race. -- Jared Taylor, editor, American Renaissance

Why Race Matters does exactly what the title promises—it removes all illusions about the insignificance of race. --Jared Taylor, editor, American Renaissance

About the Author
Michael Levin was born in Brooklyn, NY, in 1943. He attended Stuyvesant High School, Michigan State University, and Columbia University, where he received his Ph.D. in Philosophy in 1969. He teaches at the College of the City of New York (CCNY) and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His position at CCNY was threatened in 1991 when attempts were made to revoke his tenure because of his public statements related to race differences. These efforts were turned back by a Federal court decision. Prof. Levin has written four books, including Feminism and Freedom in 1987, and is currently at work on a book about free will. He has published widely in professional journals, magazines and newspapers. He is the father of two grown sons, and currently lives with his wife in New York City. He has run in five New York City marathons, most recently in 2004. While Prof. Levin's professional interests focus on epistemology and metaphysics, he thinks philosophy can also help clarify more down-to-earth issues. His interest in group differences was sparked by both the emergence of feminism, which denied obvious facts about the sexes in the name of patently unfair demands on men, and by the denial of the very existence of "intelligence" in the name of equality.

Customer Reviews

A Masterpiece Book Reissued
Philosopher Michael Levin has delivered one of the most authoritative and incisive treatises on the importance of race ever written. Why Race Matters is must reading for anyone interested in the debates on race, IQ, crime, welfare, affirmative action, and multiculturalism. Levin cross-examines the stockpiles of statistical data, psychological test scores, and behavioral genetic analyses to brilliantly illuminate the logical pitfalls and stumbling blocks in so much of what has been written on the subject. His powerful logic digs deep and his courageous inferences vault forward. With panache and the occasional snort of humor, Levin seems to be always bang on target. I especially recommended this book when it first came out in conjunction with my own Race, Evolution, and Behavior but now I should definitely add Richard Lynn's two new books (2006) as well.

Rebuttal to R. Nelson
The purpose of this review is to correct some of the blatantly false assertions in R. Nelson's review "Bell Curve beat him to the punch, overall ineffective."
First, if the question of why Black children are incapable of learning involved only poor Blacks, then genetic deficiency would not be an obvious answer. However, everyone who has studied this problem knows that the real question is why the children of Black doctors, lawyers, and corporate executives do worse in school and on academic tests than the children of White and Oriental manual workers. Moreover, study after study has found that Black parents value academic achievement more highly than White parents and give their children more academic help than White parents; and Black children do more homework than White children, have a higher estimation of their intelligence than White children and higher expectations of future academic attainment (S. Farron, The Affirmative Action Hoax, pages 75-90).
Second, the description of Jewish, Arab, and Korean store owners "sucking the blood from these poor neighborhoods" shows an incredible lack of elementary common sense. The reason that these people own the stores in Black neighborhoods is that they offer better products at lower prices than competitors. Would these neighborhoods be better off without them? Let us look at an actual example. In most of East Africa, Indians owned nearly every retail outlet (in many areas, every one). When they were driven out - by government expulsion and/or mob violence - Blacks did not replace them. "The commercial life of these towns declined from main streets of busy shops to simple open-air markets of hawkers and fruit-sellers sitting in the mud" (P. Theroux, Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town, pages 285-6, 288, 322-3, 344).
Third, no one who has read a single speech that Abraham Lincoln made after the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act could possibly think that he did not care whether slavery existed. In his first public response to the Kansas-Nebraska Act (at Peoria in October 1854), he said, "I cannot but hate [slavery]. I hate it because of the monstrous injustice of slavery itself." He repeated those words often, including in his first debate with Stephen Douglas in their contest for senator from Illinois in 1858. In that election, the Republicans got more votes, although Douglas was elected; and Illinois may have been the most racist non-slave state.
Fourth, in the presidential election of 1860, the Republican Party's campaign centered around the evil of slavery and opposition to its extension (E. Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War); and Abraham Lincoln carried every non-slave state, except New Jersey, where he gained half the electoral votes.
Fifth, the North began the Civil War to preserve the Union; but after January 1, 1863 (the Emancipation Proclamation) its purpose was to end slavery. Has Nelson never read the Gettysburg Address?
Sixth, Blacks definitely benefit greatly from the presence (not the benevolence) of Whites. The higher the proportion of Whites among whom Blacks live, the better off Blacks are. During the 1980s, when South Africa was ruled by a universally execrated White government, it attracted 1.5 million Black migrants from Black-ruled African countries (W. Williams, South Africa's War against Capitalism, page 147). Blacks in Brazil live better than Blacks in South Africa; and Blacks in the USA live better than in Brazil.
Seventh, the most careful, extensive, and cited study of White-Black adoption found that the average IQ of interracial Black-White children adopted in infancy was nearly exactly half-way between the average IQ of White and Black children who were raised from infancy by the same families (Intelligence 19, 1 (1994), pages 13-27).
Eighth, Northern Blacks have a much higher proportion of White genetic input than Southern Blacks.
Ninth, the relative academic and occupational success of Jews, Nordics, Italians, Irish, Latinos, and Blacks strikingly confirms the importance of IQ. Their average IQ differs in exactly that order.

Thank God for Jewish intellectuals
Two different interpretations of the book:

1. From a non-racial and non-political interpretation, you have to admit that this is a very well-written book. Be warned before you buy the book that it is written at a graduate level. It is very high-brow so you will most likely need a dictionary in your lap as you go through it (no matter what your IQ is). The frequent use of high-level mathematics by a philosophy professor is also impressive. The bibliography at the end is very lengthy, showing the extensive research that Dr. Levin went through in writing the book. So just from this perspective alone, the book deserves 5 stars.

2. A review for the hardback edition made the comparison to Galileo and Darwin. I think that comparison is very accurate. There seems to be so much emotion and hatred directed toward anyone, who, like any good liberal is supposed to do, looks at scientific evidence and comes to a conclusion. In the same way that heliocentrism was eventually shown to be the accurate explanation of the universe rather than geocentrism, Dr. Levin does a good job at objectively analyzing scientific evidence, and coming to the conclusion that DNA rather than environment is the most plausible explanation for human differences. An excellent point he makes is the research on the intelligence of identical twins, which suggests that their IQ's are mostly genetic in origin.