1,938 words

John Staddon
Inevitable Differences: An Inquiry into Human Variation
Washington, DC: Academia Press, 2026

One of the most promising trends that emerged in 2025 is the spread of “black fatigue,” in which increasing numbers of whites are expressing their weariness with violent or boorish behavior by blacks. Some people even make middle class livings primarily by commenting on videos of blacks “chimping out” in public. It seems as if society—or at least a large portion of it—has been released from some mass spell cast upon them that caused them to not just tolerate but accept and take seriously anti-social behavior that would be condemned and ruthlessly stamped out in more ordinary times.

For those who have long been tuned into the realities of race in this country, this intensified disgust with black loutishness might elicit little more than a brief “meh.” But black fatigue may very well be an important step in the pro-white direction. It is an entry point into a mindset that rejects mainstream beliefs on race—particularly the universal equality of all races in mind and behavior. Social attitudes are fluid; for instance, according to analytics giant Gallup, pro-Israel sentiments in the U.S. have dropped from 64% in 2018 to 36% in 2026. There is certainly hope for other opinion reversals.

The everyday anti-social behavior exhibited by blacks extends to intellectual life. Black academics and public intellectuals today spew out wild claims and dare anybody in the mainstream to object—with severe penalties such as loss of employment or cancellation awaiting those who accept the challenge. Black scholars proposing dubious theories receive enormous grants, lucrative book deals, and prestigious job offers; their ideas are taken seriously, and they are feted with awards. Even conservatives who critique black scholars tend to pull back on the throttle a bit for fear for their own careers. Conservative critics often make excellent critiques of individual works by black scholars whose work crosses the line of plausibility, but rarely do we see black scholarship attacked as a general rule.

But retired Duke University research psychology professor John Staddon has done so in his new book, Inevitable Differences: An Inquiry into Human Variation. He clearly suffers from black fatigue, and he does not hold back in his skewering of black scholarship. He is hardly a White Nationalist—he still supports maintaining a colorblind, multicultural meritocracy. But he makes it clear that he is disgusted by the “anything goes” atmosphere that exists for the black intelligentsia.

The book begins with an explanation of the fact-value distinction. When racial values and facts conflict, people “avert their eyes to avoid the whole topic,” according to Staddon. With brains turned off to rational treatment of the subject, “ideology fills the void.” (Staddon 13)

This is frequently the case when it comes to group racial differences in such areas as IQ. Artificial Intelligence engines such as GPT are programmed to answer according to how today’s elites want people to believe. Staddon queried GPT about racial IQ differences, and received the following declaration:

The focus should be on understanding and addressing the social determinants that contribute to observed differences in test scores and cognitive outcomes, rather than attributing these differences to race. (Staddon 14)

Staddon interprets this to mean that “GPT is telling us we shouldn’t really even be asking the question.” (Staddon 14) The non-existence of racial differences beyond superficial matters such as appearance cannot be questioned in (most) black intellectual circles. We are expected to buy into the ideological belief that differences in behavior are the result of “exogenous” causes—those arising from the environment’s influence. “Endogenous” causes, which arise from within the individual, are to be ignored—even if they are both reliable and predictable, as in the case of IQ.

The goal of these mental hijinks is “social justice,” which in the end, according to Staddon, comes down to “reparations.” Somehow, all inequality is equated with injustice. If “racism” is not blatant or even visible, it is secretly embedded in the structure or system.

Attacking these claims is where Staddon shines. He doesn’t hesitate to describe the supposedly “rich social science literature conceptualizing structural racism” as “worthless.” [Staddon 35] For example, he suggests that the writing of Ta-Nehisi Coates—supposedly one of the leading black intellectuals of the 21st century—uses “faulty logic,” is “fundamentally unjust,” and is “unimpressive as any kind of reasoned argument.” (Staddon 45-6) Staddon treats other well-known black thinkers in the same candid fashion.

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He points out how Coates duplicitously quoted from John Locke, claiming that the English philosopher wrote that somebody “who has received any damage has . . . a particular right to seek reparations.” What Locke really said is that a person has “a particular right to seek reparations from the person who harmed him.” (Staddon 46) This is something very different indeed, arguing against the sort of reparations across generations that Coates and his fellow agitators demand.

Staddon argues (citing black journalist Keith Richburg) that life today is so much better for blacks in the United States than in Africa that if anybody should pay reparations, it is black Americans. (Staddon 48)

Staddon reveals how Coates, from the very start of his career, has viewed writing “as war,” noting that “Truth is the first casualty of war.” (Staddon 53) Coates expresses what many far greater intellects refuse to do—that power is everything. This seems to be true for a large percentage of black intellectuals, some of them chronicled in Staddon’s book. They are at war; truth be damned, what matters is taking power by any means possible.

Staddon suggests that sub-par black scholarship has been hidden in the excessive proliferation of academic journals and departments. (Staddon 74) Much of the worst nonsense is published in tiny niche journals, where research standards are almost non-existent. Readers and editors of larger, more general academic journals might recoil from black scholars’ wild unsupported claims, but not so with the niche audiences that are in full agreement with the ideas proposed. This gives unqualified black intellectuals a foothold on campuses, since it allows them to “publish” rather than “perish” in the academic meatgrinder.

But very often, black scholars proposing nonsense need not hide in obscurity; they are hired by the top universities, published by the top publishing houses, and treated as among our nation’s leading intellectual lights. Two are sociologists Eduardo Bonilla-Silva and Tukufu Zuberi. Bonilla-Silva teaches at prestigious Duke University while Zuberi is a professor in the toney Ivy League (the University of Pennsylvania). Their 2008 volume, White Logic, White Methods: Racism and Methodology, was published by the esteemed academic publisher Rowman and Littlefield. And Zuberi was one of several hosts of the long-running PBS series “History Detectives.” Staddon relates how Bonilla-Silva and Zuberi “scorn” the idea of objectivity and suggest that minority groups, by virtue of their experiences, see the world more realistically than do the majority. They also make political activism and the pursuit of truth interchangeable. Bonilla has even referred to “the devil of objectivity.” This attack on the very nature of what constitutes truth is commonplace among black scholars; Staddon cites another black professor at a top-tier university, Vanderbilt’s Michael Eric Dyson, who wrote about “this spurious, mythical notion of objectivity and universality.” (Staddon 83)

Staddon retorts that “without the possibility of objectivity, there is no science. Truth may be elusive, it cannot be a personal preference.” (Staddon 83) And that explains much of his motivation for writing the book. As the author of several books on scientific methodology, his irritation at black scholarship arises from a different direction than the incessant attack on whites, coming instead because of the arrogant contempt shown for the scientific process. He believes in time-tested ideals of honesty, rigor, and fairness when it comes to investigating existence, and even writes (naively) of his hope for a “return to common sense colorblindness and individualism.” (Staddon 70) Counter-Currents readers will largely understand that the colorblind meritocracy ship has already sailed, but there is something beautiful about Staddon’s mid-20th-century vision of the impartial pursuit of knowledge, which was, of course, created under the umbrella of European white civilization.

Perhaps the most controversial aspect of Inevitable Differences is that it openly questions black intellectual capability in new and old ways. Staddon even dares to bring up Francis Galton’s (Darwin’s cousin who is regarded as the “Father of Eugenics”) “fourfold method for evaluating a race,” summarized as: (Staddon 91)

1. The propensity to produce exceptional men.
2. The ability to engage in productive labor.
3. The relative position of natives to visitors to their country.
4. The number of “half-witted” men.

Needless to say, some races don’t fare particularly well with such a test. When it comes to today’s black intellectuals, Staddon writes that “it may well be that the cognitive abilities of some black scholars are so dominated by, let us say, the power of language, metaphor, and affect, as to make it especially difficult to reason logically, or perhaps just to acknowledge the force of reason.” (Staddon 84) He suggests that Bonilla-Silva’s and Zuberi’s depiction of ordinary logic as “white logic”—that is, logic specifically employed only by whites—is an attempt to disguise, and thereby overcome, their own cognitive liabilities. (Staddon 86) In other words, many black so-called scholars can’t think very well and cannot accept their mental deficiencies.

Unfortunately, as Staddon points out, the academic establishment has avoided the unpleasant but obvious conclusions from such a clear lack of intellect. Instead, it has instead fawned over and pandered to mentally deficient “scholars.” Not only are the above black “intellectuals” all tenured professors at institutions where, if they were judged according to objective criteria, they would never be accepted for admission as undergraduates, but instead their “ideas” have been promoted and permitted to spill over into the policy world. And the attacks on actual thought keep coming: Dyson once wrote that “reason itself is a servant of the white world and endorses white experience.” (Staddon 94-5) Zuberi has suggested that whites deliberated “developed statistical analysis to explain racial inferiority”—a claim Staddon describes as “a silly allegation with zero supporting evidence.” (Staddon 89)

And this “anti-thought” is indeed making inroads into the mainstream. Black scholarship increasingly relies on untestable “storytelling” rather than falsifiable hypotheses—storytelling is now advocated by the ABA (American Bar Association) as a useful ingredient in legal argument. (Staddon 115). Subjective “lived experiences” are commonly treated as empirical evidence in social science research. Race is commonly regarded as “a product of social thought and relations,” not a fact of biology. (Staddon 113) The point of this intellectual transformation, writes Staddon is “not truth, but a covert revolution.” (Staddon 109)

This book is part of a growing tendency for “normies” to exhibit such racial realist attitudes as black fatigue. Once they arrive at that point, they may take further steps closer to being openly pro-white, including the “anti-anti-white racism” of pundits like Jeremy Carl, Matt Walsh, and Tucker Carlson, who identify and decry the bigotry against whites yet still cling to the multicultural status quo. Just a few years ago, such topics were verboten in the mainstream, yet now they are appearing with regularity.

And that is very promising. Our numbers need to grow. Very often, the process of becoming pro-white is akin to a long journey—as each assumption of the multicultural, colorblind society is proven to be false, some individuals move further in the direction of openly advocating for the white cause. Staddon’s current position lies several degrees away from full-on white advocacy—but he’s at least encouraging normies to make the difficult first step away from treating black scholarship as somehow worthy of serious attention. It’s good to see increasing movement in the right direction.