John Derbyshire - Comments On Race and Multiculturalism

Comments On Race and Multiculturalism

In April 2012, Derbyshire wrote an article for Taki's Magazine titled "The Talk: Nonblack Version." The article was a response to reports in the news media of 'talks' given by African-American parents to their children warning them against white authority figures. The article, which he couched in terms of purported advice he had given his own children on dealing with African Americans, describes 5% of black people as "ferociously hostile" to whites. He then advises his readers to avoid settling in black neighborhoods, avoid events that draw large numbers of black people, and refrain from helping black people who seem to be in distress. He also advises white readers to scrutinize black politicians more heavily than white ones, to cultivate friendships with the handful of "intelligent and well socialized blacks" for reasons of public relations, and argued that the average intelligence of black people is lower than that of white people. Derbyshire's column immediately provoked condemnation from across the political spectrum. Derbyshire's editor at the conservative publication National Review, Rich Lowry, described the piece as "appalling." On April 7, Lowry announced that Derbyshire had been dismissed from National Review: "We never would have published it, but the main reason that people noticed it is that it is by a National Review writer. Derb is effectively using our name to get more oxygen for views with which we'd never associate ourselves otherwise. So there has to be a parting of the ways." In response to the commentary provoked by his piece, Derbyshire wrote a more extensive explanation of the points made in the article on his home page.

Derbyshire also defended his position in an interview with Alex Kurtagić for the white nationalist American Renaissance magazine.

After the National Review termination, Derbyshire was picked up by VDARE, an anti-immigration website which he has written in since. A 2012 statement by him on the site that "White supremacy, in the sense of a society in which key decisions are made by white Europeans, is one of the better arrangements History has come up with" attracted strong criticism. He responded by arguing that African-Americans implicitly agree given that they have been willing to live in the majority white U.S.