Jason Richwine, PhD

Sometimes when people say they'll give a PhD to anyone, you think they're kidding, maybe even half joking. But apparently Harvard gives PhDs to people who ascribe to what is nothing short of eugenics redux. A lot has been made this week about Jason Richwine's work as an academic and as a member of that bastion of intellectual life, The Heritage Foundation. According to Richwine, if you're a Latino immigrant, your children are going to have low IQ and your grandchildren are also going to have low IQ. Furthermore, this is a guy who inherently believes that if you are white you are innately smarter than any black person you come across. To put it into context, if you take a black guy at an Ivy League school and a white guy at your local community college, the white guy is going to prove to be the smarter of the two. A white guy from the trailer parks of Detroit is instantly smarter than a black guy at Oxford.

This sort of bullshit is naturally expected from Nationalists, but for one who dares call himself an expert in public policy, Mr. Richwine is a fucking imbecile. You cannot purport to hypothesize about any given population's intelligence without ever considering the environmental aspects of that population. Take the Castro brothers from San Antonio for instance. They're children of immigrants, yet they graduated from Stanford and Harvard. I suspect they have higher IQs than Mr. Richwine and the douchebags the Heritage Foundation puts together. Genetics have little to do with IQ. You give any child the kind of access to books, good teachers, safe communities that white kids get and you will see just how smart they are. Richwine is a disgrace to Harvard's reputation.