3 - Michael Levin

Summary

Unlike Reno Wolfe and Jared Taylor, Michael Levin heads no white protest or white racial advocacy organization. Even though he is loosely affiliated with Taylor's group and has attended American Renaissance conferences, Levin is by profession a full-time academic who teaches philosophy courses at the City University of New York Graduate Center and City College. He is included in this anthology primarily on the basis of the controversial and well-publicized positions he has taken in recent years on a number of contemporary black/white issues, as well as because of his even more controversial book, Why Race Matters: Race Differences and What They Mean (Praeger, Westport, Conn., 1998). As Levin explains in this interview, he became interested in issues of race largely as a result of the national controversy that first emerged in the 1970s over affirmative action policy and the issue of compensatory justice for the victims of past racial oppression. In the following interview as well as in his book, Levin argues that black people today are owed no compensation or special regard by whites for their current distress, because that distress – real though it may be – has little to do with the wrongs of the past. The main reason that black people today have such difficulty establishing stable families, succeeding in school, and controlling their socially destructive impulses toward violence, criminality, and sexual license, Levin contends, is rooted in their differential genetic endowment.