Following up on this post: Derbyshire has been fired by National Review.  Here is an interesting article about it. Ta-Nehisi Coates, who always has interesting things to say, puts the matter succinctly:

Let’s not overthink this: John Derbyshire is a racist. Declaring such does not require an act of  of mind-reading, it requires an act of Derbyshire-reading:

I am a homophobe, though a mild and tolerant one, and a racist, though an even more mild and tolerant one, and those things are going to be illegal pretty soon, the way we are going.

I guess it’s admirable that Rich Lowry is taking time away from pondering why people think he’s a bigot, to denounce Derbyshire. But ‘Derb’ told you what he was in 2003. And National Review continued to employ him. That’s who they are.

What else is there?

What we can expect now, I suppose, are charges of reverse racism, which exercise the right far more than real racism.

On my endless commute I’m currently listening to a course on Social Psychology from UC Berkeley.  Social Pyschology experiments often seem to me to be exercises in proving the obvious.  But today the (very funny) teacher was talking about  studies done by Devah Pager providing evidence of continued racism in hiring, even for candidates with absolutely identical backgrounds and qualifications.  Here’s an overview of what she found. Was this result obvious?  Maybe to blacks, but not necessarily to me.  Certainly not to the right.