It’s quite timely now that the racists are trotting out their favorite theory that gets trotted out every few years, smacked down, and then trotted out again once they figure everyone has forgotten the last smackdown, the theory that the IQ gap between whites and blacks must reflect fundamental, immutable, genetic traits, ergo a racist caste system is organic and not the product of oppression. Lord Saletan played the racist sucker for this go-round, making ridiculous claims about having poured over the evidence and having to accept (with a supposedly heavy heart) that the IQ fundamentalist, KKK-propaganda generators were right. Gladwell politely and semi-obliquely calls bullshit on Saletan’s claims of heavy research.
I suppose this round is over, but let me just finish it off with a hearty simelsesque "blow me" to all the people who excuse Saletan's racism by pretending it's merely knee-jerk contrarianism. If you make the claim that black people are stupid, assert that anyone who denies this is equivalent to a creationist, rely on the junk science of explicit racists to make your claims, and manage to studiously avoid the vast numbers of very smart people who have repeatedly pointed out that this stuff is bunk, then the conclusion is unavoidable. Will Saletan may be a perfectly lovely person who has lots of black friends, but his only "contrarianism" here was his eagerness to embrace junk theories of racial superiority. While issues of race and racism manifest themselves in complex ways in our society, the belief in the innate inferiority of one culturally defined racial subgroup relative to another pretty much is the root definition of racist thinking.