Book summary “Taboo”: summary

Introduction

You live in an era of rigid political dogmas where you are expected to accept mainstream narratives on race, crime, and privilege without question. When you point to conflicting data, you face social censure or accusations of bigotry for violating modern cultural taboos. This environment prevents you from having honest discussions about pressing social problems.

Conventional political narratives about race, crime, and privilege are contradicted by empirical data, which shows that culture, individual behavior, and socio-economic factors largely determine success.

Wilfred Reilly examines ten forbidden facts and controversial cultural claims to test them against actual statistics and historical research. You will see an analysis of police shootings, crime rates, group performance, affirmative action, and immigration policy.

• Does systemic racism cause police violence?
• Are interracial crime rates driven by white supremacy?
• Can cultural shifts explain demographic gaps better than genetics?

1. Police Shootings and Crime Rates

There is no statistical epidemic of police officers murdering African Americans, and racial disparities in police encounters are driven entirely by underlying differences in violent crime rates.

Fewer than 1,200 people of all sexes and races are killed annually by American police officers. Blacks make up 13 to 14 percent of the overall U.S. population but account for 22 to 24 percent of individuals killed by police.

In 2015, roughly 258 of the people killed by police were Black. Exactly 17 unarmed Black people were killed by white cops in 2015.

Demographics of Police Force

Department of Justice figures indicate the Black rate of serious and violent crime is roughly 2.5 times the white rate. Harvard economist Roland G. Fryer used regression methods and controlled for suspect demographics and weapons. Blacks were 27.4 percent less likely to be shot at by police relative to non-Black, non-Hispanics in Fryer's controlled models.

At least 75 percent of the males killed by police in a typical year are white or Hispanic Caucasians. Alton Sterling was shot dead by two white police officers on July 5, 2016. Freddie Gray had been arrested and charged eighteen times in the seven years since turning eighteen.

The Ferguson Effect

Discretionary police stops in Chicago dropped by an astonishing 90 percent between 2015 and 2016. Nearly 900 additional Blacks were killed in 2016 compared with 2015, bringing the total of Black homicide victims to almost 7,881.

2. Interracial Crime and Media Bias

Interracial violent crime is statistically rare and predominantly committed by people of color against whites, while mainstream media heavily disproportionately amplify isolated incidents involving minority victims.

Federal crime data show that roughly 85 percent of white murder victims and 93 percent of Black murder victims are killed by an assailant of their own race. When interracial crimes do happen, they skew roughly 75 to 80 percent POC-on-white, largely due to demographic and economic factors. Author Tim Wise noted that out of about 520,000 single-offender interracial violent crimes in 2008, roughly 82.5 percent were Black-on-white and only 17.5 percent were white-on-Black.

Media Asymmetry

Mainstream media heavily disproportionately amplify isolated incidents of white people calling police on minorities while ignoring far more severe instances of POC-on-white violence. Media outlets focus heavily on viral street arguments and calls to authorities involving white individuals, branding them as systemic harassment while providing little to no national coverage of horrific interracial crimes committed against white victims.

Cases like BBQ Becky, Permit Patty, and Pool Patrol Paula generated national outrage and cost the individuals their jobs, whereas brutal multi-victim crimes like the Knoxville Horror received virtually zero mainstream media attention. The Knoxville Horror involved Tennessee college students Channon Christian and Hugh Christopher Newsom being carjacked, raped, tortured, and murdered by multiple Black assailants in 2007.

Activists and media platforms push unverified claims of racist attacks or police abuse to drive social justice narratives, frequently resulting in death threats against innocent people even after video evidence disproves the allegations. Activist Shaun King shared an unverified claim by Sherita Dixon-Cole that she was raped by a Texas state trooper, generating over 55,000 shares and severe threats against officers before body camera footage proved the claim was entirely false.

Conspiracy Beliefs and Polarization

Polling and academic studies indicate that persistent media framing of systemic racial hostility convinces many citizens that the government actively engages in genocidal plots against minority communities. A study from Oregon State University and the Rand Corporation evaluated by the Washington Post found that roughly half of surveyed Black Americans believed HIV/AIDS was man-made, with significant percentages attributing it to a government laboratory, the CIA, or deliberate genocide.

The constant presentation of society as irredeemably racist causes exhaustion and resentment among white Americans, driving some toward separatist or reactionary viewpoints. Alternative blogs like Simon Wolfe's Iron Legion argue that progressive programs have failed to improve race relations and conclude that racial groups should politically and socially separate.

3. Group Performance and Cultural Determinism

Different demographic groups display wide variations in crime and cognitive test scores, but historical evidence and immigrant success prove these gaps are cultural and environmental rather than genetic.

You can observe wide variations in violent crime and incarceration rates across different demographic groups. Data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics and the National Crime Victimization Survey show that African Americans and other minorities experience higher rates of violent crime. These groups account for a disproportionate share of prison populations and homicides. Victim self-reporting surveys and arrest probability studies demonstrate that these figures mirror actual crime commission rates rather than racially targeted policing.

According to Department of Justice data from 2013, the 4,379 African Americans prosecuted for murder exceeded the combined total of all other racial groups prosecuted that year, despite non-Black Americans numbering roughly seven times as many people.

The statistical disparities break down into several distinct measures:

• African American violent crime rate is 2.5 times the white rate (Department of Justice, 2012).
• Asian American violent crime rate is 25-30 percent of the white rate.
• Blacks accounted for 39.4 percent of the prison and jail population while making up 13 percent of the total population.
• Black incarceration rate is 3,161 persons per 100,000 versus 487 persons per 100,000 for whites.
• African Americans accounted for 51.3 percent of those formally charged with murder in 2013.

Working-class Caucasians dominate several major categories of negative social behavior and mortality, such as suicide, auto wrecks, and opiate overdoses. Modern cultural discourse often downplays severe social pathologies affecting poor and working-class white Americans. Data from agencies like the CDC and NHTSA reveal that middle-aged working-income white men account for a massive share of suicides, traffic fatalities, and fatal drug overdoses.

In 2014, the overdose death rate for whites between the ages of 25 and 34 rose to five times its 1999 level, impacting poorly educated Caucasians the fastest.

Violence and Social Pathologies

Urban minority men heavily dominate active shooting incidents and random urban gun violence, which rarely stem from hate crimes. Local police department reports and independent urban studies show that the vast majority of shooting victims and active shooters in major American cities are Black or Hispanic. This violence is overwhelmingly driven by gang activity and local disputes rather than external racial oppression.

In Chicago in 2011, 75 percent of murder victims and 71 percent of their murderers were Black, with almost none of these homicides resulting from hate crimes committed by whites.

Specific urban metrics highlight this concentration of violence:

• In New York City, Blacks made up 67.5 percent of all arrests for non-fatal shootings and Hispanics made up 29.2 percent.
• In Philadelphia, 85.6 percent of identified non-fatal shooting offenders were Black.
• A review of 358 mass shootings found that 75 percent of victims whose race could be identified were Black.

Intelligence and Higher Education

Tested IQ scores vary widely across global nations and demographic groups, but historical and demographic shifts prove these gaps are primarily cultural rather than genetic. While international and domestic testing shows clear IQ disparities, evidence such as historical score changes among oppressed European immigrant groups demonstrates that intelligence metrics are highly malleable. Substantial recent gains by Black Americans and matching test scores in controlled environments further support this view.

Thomas Sowell documented that early 20th-century American military tests showed European immigrant groups like Italians, Greeks, and Poles averaging in the 80s, scores that later rose to national averages as social integration occurred.

Global and domestic metrics illustrate these intelligence and educational divides:

• Global IQ scores vary from a high of 107 for Hong Kong down to a low of 59 for Equatorial Guinea.
• Black Americans have gained as many as 7 IQ points on whites over a thirty-year span.
• The median Black IQ crossed the 90 mark in states like New Jersey, New York, and Michigan by 2006.

Research involving children of American servicemen and German mothers, alongside recent nationwide data on multiracial high school students, shows that when environmental disadvantages and racism are removed, performance gaps disappear or reverse. The Eyferth study in the 1950s found that mixed-race children fathered by Black GIs and raised by German mothers performed intellectually on par with or slightly above pure white control groups.

Standardized test score gaps between demographic groups create major representation imbalances in higher education that necessitate preferential admissions policies. Because metrics like the SAT act as cognitive ability tests, average scores differ markedly between white and Asian students compared to non-Asian minorities. Without large-scale race-norming and affirmative action, the representation of underrepresented minorities at elite universities would be exceptionally low based strictly on test cutoffs.

In 2005, out of more than 150,000 African Americans who took the SAT, only 244 scored 750 or above on either the math or verbal sections.

4. Performance Predicts Success Over Prejudice

Quantitative analysis shows that cultural behaviors, family structure, and individual performance predict economic and social success far better than external racism.

The mainstream debate over group disparities is locked in a false dichotomy between Sharptonites who blame racism and Jensonites who blame genetics. You can look past this Continuing Oppression Narrative by examining quantitative evidence. Quantitative scholars using linear and logistic regression regularly find that adjusting for cultural behavioral differences completely eliminates most large intergroup gaps normally attributed to racism or genetics.

Thomas Sowell demonstrated that massive performance gaps exist between genetically identical or near-identical groups, proving that culture and habits drive success more than race. Sowell pointed out historical and global examples where distinct white or Asian subgroups experienced massive disparities in income, literacy, and professional attainment due to differing cultural backgrounds.

During the 1960s in Malaysia, the Chinese minority earned over one hundred times as many engineering degrees as the Malay majority.

Economic Adjustments

When modern quantitative analysis adjusts for regional, educational, test score, and work experience variables, the wage gap between Black and white professional men almost entirely disappears. Economist June O'Neill's research analyzed by Dinesh D'Souza shows that controlling for standard objective factors leaves less than 1 percent of the wage gap directly attributable to racism. Overall, Black men earn 82.9 percent of white wages. After adjusting for region, schooling, age, test scores, and work experience, the wage ratio reaches 99.1 percent.

While resume audit studies show some evidence of entry-level hiring discrimination against applicants with criminal records or stereotypical Black names, the practical impact is minor and confined to specific niche sectors. Devah Pager found that 34 percent of whites without criminal records received callbacks compared to 14 percent of Blacks without records. The same study recorded a 5 percent callback rate for Blacks with a criminal record. An NBER study showed that applicants with stereotypical Black names received 33 percent fewer employer callbacks.

The Crisis of Fatherlessness

The absence of a father in the home is a primary driver of contemporary social pathology, poverty, educational underperformance, and youth violence across all racial groups. Children from fatherless homes face a 400 percent increased likelihood of poverty compared to two-parent households. Among high school dropouts, 71 percent are fatherless. Native-born African Americans experience a 75 percent illegitimacy rate.

Structural and economic disadvantage factors predict crime equally across neighborhoods regardless of racial composition, proving crime is not driven by racial predisposition or white racism. Sociologists Lauren Krivo and Ruth Peterson examined Columbus, Ohio neighborhoods and found strong correlations between crime and factors like poverty, joblessness, and female-headed households.

Successful minority and immigrant groups thrive despite obstacles because they possess specific cultural traits like a superiority complex, hunger, and impulse control rather than blaming external racism. Amy Chua and Jed Rubenfeld observed that high-performing groups such as Indian Americans and Nigerian Americans achieve exceptional educational and income milestones through intense work ethic and strong family structures. Indian Americans reach a median household income of $100,295, ranking them as the highest-income group in the United States. Furthermore, 17 percent of all Nigerians in the United States hold master's or professional degrees.

Nigerian Americans make up less than one percent of the Black population in the United States but comprise roughly one quarter of all Black students at Harvard Business School.

5. Redefining Racism and Hate Crimes

Mainstream attempts to redefine racism to exclude minority groups ignore actual hate crime statistics, global conflicts, and the presence of racial supremacist organizations outside the white majority.

Progressive scholars have attempted to redefine racism into multiple complex categories where only dominant white groups can be racist. You encounter expansive terms such as representational, discursive, and institutional racism. Scholars like Dr. Nicki Lisa Cole list seven forms of complex racism, while consultant Robin Hughes identifies ten signs of institutional racism. This framework defines any system producing racial disparities as inherently racist.

Scholars list examples like the SAT exam, movie stereotypes, and corporate awards lacking demographic parity as systemic racism.

The Disparate Impact Flaw

Treating numerical outcome disparities as definitive proof of discrimination ignores the reality of differing cultural traits and group competencies. The doctrine of disparate impact assumes that neutral rules causing lower selection rates for protected classes are prima facie evidence of discrimination. This legal theory ignores underlying group variations in performance metrics like test scores or physical traits.

Thomas Sowell pointed out that for twelve consecutive years from 2001 to 2012, every home-run leader in baseball's American League was Hispanic, and Indian Americans have won the Scripps National Spelling Bee for seven consecutive years.

Minority Racialist Organizations

Reference standards like the Oxford English Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, and the Anti-Defamation League maintain that racism is individual prejudice or discrimination based on biological inferiority. FBI and independent crime statistics show that minority offenders commit a substantial share of racially motivated hate crimes. Brian Anderson noted that in 2013, 24.3 percent of all hate crime offenders were Black, while 52.4 percent were white, against a 63.7 percent non-Hispanic white population share. FBI data from 2012 showed that 22 percent of 3,467 racially motivated hate crimes resulted from anti-white bias.

Prominent minority organizations explicitly promote biogenetic racial supremacist theories yet receive widespread mainstream tolerance. The Nation of Islam teaches official doctrinal theology that white people are a mutant, predatory race created by a mad scientist named Yakub 6,600 years ago. The Southern Poverty Law Center estimated the core membership of the Nation of Islam to be between 20,000 and 50,000 persons in 2007.

6. Privilege, Affirmative Action, and Appropriation

Universal white privilege is a crude concept that ignores social class, while affirmative action and the incoherent doctrine of cultural appropriation create modern campus segregation.

Liberal author Gina Crosley-Corcoran wrote about surviving severe poverty in northern Illinois without heat or running water while still arguing she benefited from white privilege, though she did not discuss whether people would trade those racial benefits for a heated house. Social class is by far the most decisive privilege in modern society, vastly outweighing the predictive power of race. Adjusting for nonracial variables eliminates almost all financial gaps attributed to racism, and social status accounts for the majority of the privilege one enjoys in life. 80 percent of all respondents on debate.org agreed that social class is more important than race or ethnicity.

Quantitative social scientist Sean Reardon demonstrated that the test-score gap between poor children in the bottom decile of income and wealthy kids in the 90th percentile has expanded and is now more than 50 percent larger than the Black-white achievement gap. Dennis Prager notes that the poverty rate is 7 percent among two-parent Black families, compared to 22 percent among whites in single-parent homes.

Cultural Exchange

Affirmative action policies provide massive, measurable institutional advantages to minorities in collegiate admissions and corporate hiring. Legally instituted in 1967 via the Philadelphia Plan, affirmative action requires federal contractors and universities to undertake aggressive recruitment and preferential hiring or admissions to achieve proportional representation. At elite universities, efforts to diversify student bodies result in a massive test score bonus for minority applicants because elite schools are competing over a very small pool of high-scoring minority students. This translates to a 400-point bonus for minority students at the highest-ranking American colleges and universities. The SAT score gap between Blacks and whites is 177 points, while the gap between Asians and Hispanics is 194 points.

High-performing minority groups like Asian Americans are increasingly penalized by rigid diversity quotas in elite higher education. Because elite institutions maintain stable caps on the percentage of Asian students admitted despite a massive increase in high-scoring Asian applicants, qualified Asian students face a severe admissions penalty compared to other groups. Throughout the twenty-first century, the percentage of Asian students admitted to Harvard remained at a stable 21 percent despite rising applicant qualifications. Students for Fair Admissions filed lawsuits against Harvard, the University of North Carolina, and the University of Texas-Austin, accusing them of rejecting qualified Asian students in favor of less-qualified applicants. Asian American students must score 150 points higher on the SAT compared to white students to have the same chance of admission at several elite colleges.

Some conservative commentators argue for the existence of black privilege based on mainstream media double standards and specialized organizational allowances. Proponents point to instances where minority public figures or activists are treated with leniency or given platforms after severe controversies, contrasted with immediate professional ruin for white figures making minor offensive remarks. A 2011 study found that 55 percent of all whites said white Americans experience racial discrimination today. Al Sharpton helped lead protests during the Freddy's Fashion Mart controversy where seven people were killed and was later successfully sued for slander, yet he hosts a show on MSNBC and is treated as an emeritus figure.

The concept of cultural appropriation is logically incoherent and would completely destroy the mutual exchange of human civilization if enforced. Virtually every element of civilized life, from farming and jet engines to food and music, relies on borrowing inventions across cultures, making the moral prohibition against it entirely arbitrary. Modern jet and rocket engines were developed by Germans, small cars and hibachi grills by the Japanese, and Guinness Stout was bottled in Ireland.

The rise of tribalist concepts like cultural appropriation and white privilege has directly catalyzed a return to formal segregation on college campuses. Student groups across the country have begun demanding complete racial and identity-based separation, including exclusive safe spaces and residential housing floors. Thedemands.org lists 76 different four-year colleges featuring student demands for segregated campus spaces. At UCLA, the Afrikan Student Union insisted on an Afrikan Diaspora floor and an Afro-house residence hall made available exclusively to Black students.

7. Sane Immigration Policy

A sensible immigration policy should prioritize legacy citizens and national economic health by enforcing strict, performance-based entry requirements.

Declines in national average standardized test scores can be largely explained by demographic changes resulting from immigration rather than random educational fluctuations. While mean test scores for American whites remained stable over a 50-year period, the expansion of lower-scoring groups from 10 percent to 40 percent of the test-taking pool drove down national averages. Conversely, the overall stability of recent U.S. SAT scores is partly maintained by the exceptionally high performance of other immigrant minority groups such as East Asians, Indian Americans, and Jews. In 1972, the combined math/verbal SAT score for whites was 1039, compared to 1061 for whites in 2015. By contrast, the 2015 mean SAT score was 911 for Mexican Americans and 1121 for Asians.

Welfare and Economics

U.S. immigration has never been an open-entry process and has historically maintained selective legal standards, including strict rules against becoming a public charge. Since the late 18th and 19th centuries, federal law has regulated citizenship and barred criminals, individuals with contagious diseases, polygamists, and political radicals. The core principle of the public charge rule ensures that aliens immigrating to the United States are able to support themselves and do not become dependent on government welfare. In a typical year, Ellis Island recorded a rejection rate between 2 percent and 20 percent.

Immigrant households use federal welfare programs at significantly higher rates than native households, driven primarily by lower education levels and larger family sizes. According to Center for Immigration Studies research, 51 percent of immigrant-led households use at least one federal welfare program compared to under 30 percent of native households. This high usage is not driven by malice but by lower average educational attainment and larger numbers of children, coupled with access to means-tested programs through citizen children born via birthright citizenship. The annual net cost to taxpayers per immigrant household in federal welfare reaches $6,234, compared to $4,431 in benefits received by median native-headed households. In 2015, the cost was $5,692 for illegal immigrant-headed households, $6,378 for legal immigrant households, and $8,251 in benefits used by households led by recent Mexican and Central American immigrants.

The modern open-borders movement includes calls to completely eliminate Immigration and Customs Enforcement and treat immigration law enforcement as fundamentally illegitimate. Organizations like the Detention Watch Network and the Indivisible Project campaign to defund or abolish ICE, framing routine deportations of undocumented immigrants as cruel and unnecessary. Publications like The Nation and HuffPost have argued that enforcing immigration law aligns with white nationalism or that open borders similar to the European Union should be adopted. Some modern academic and social justice perspectives reject the traditional melting pot and cultural assimilation ideals in favor of permanent multicultural separation.

Proposed Policy Solutions

The author outlines four essential cornerstones for immigration reform: ending chain migration beyond nuclear family units, repealing birthright citizenship to stop maternity tourism, expanding medical and criminal vetting, and requiring proven employability and self-sufficiency while barring immigrants from means-tested welfare. Under current law, 226,000 visas per year are granted to extended family categories. You can implement these reforms through concrete measures:

• Restrict preferred family-based immigration to the spouses and minor children of current naturalized citizens.
• Repeal the anchor baby rule of birthright citizenship by legislative or judicial fiat.
• Require all immigrants to be sane, non-criminal, able-bodied, healthy, and free of long-term degenerative medical conditions or contagious epidemic diseases.
• Demonstrate employability before admission via a job offer, contract, or qualifying score above roughly 88 on a culture-fair IQ test.
• Bar legal and illegal immigrants from accessing means-tested welfare programs for a trial period of a decade.

8. The Fallacy of the Alt-Right

Alt-right claims regarding immutable genetic IQ gaps and racial ethnostates are empirically false and destructive to national unity.

Large majorities of white Americans perceive substantial discrimination against Caucasians in contemporary society. A 2017 poll by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and Harvard University found that 55 percent of all whites believe there is discrimination against white people in America today. Among respondents, 19 percent experienced job application discrimination, 13 percent felt discriminated against regarding equal pay or promotions, and 11 percent faced discrimination applying to college. This survey of 3,453 U.S. adults included nearly 1,000 whites.

White opposition to welfare spending increases significantly when individuals are primed with the prospect of becoming a demographic minority. Researchers Robb Willer and Rachel Wetts found that white subjects told whites would remain the majority proposed cutting $28 million from federal welfare, while those told whites would become a minority proposed cutting $51 million.

Critique of Racial Claims

The alt-right claim of massive, immutable genetic IQ gaps between racial groups is empirically false and relies on outdated data. Jared Taylor used older data claiming a 15 to 18 points lower Black IQ average, ignoring modern studies showing narrowing gaps and higher test scores for multiracial children. A 2017 Brookings Institute report by analyst Jonathan Rothwell concluded that mixed-race children score equally with white children in science, math, and writing, and outperform them in reading.

Global data shows little to no direct correlation between a nation's average IQ and its domestic crime rates or economic development. Ghana and El Salvador share similar average IQ scores, yet El Salvador recorded vastly higher murder rates per 100,000 citizens. In comparison, Ghana reported 2 to 3 annual murders per 100,000 citizens, Russia recorded 10 murders per 100,000 people, and El Salvador reached 70 murders per 100,000 persons in 2011.

The Benefits of Diversity

Alt-right thinkers frequently confuse racial diversity with ethnic diversity and mistakenly treat internal ethnic conflicts as racial ones. Brutal conflicts in Uganda and the former Yugoslavia involved distinct ethnic groups like Serbs, Croats, and various Ugandan tribes who are genetically indistinguishable within their respective races. The alt-right also invents a narrow definition of whiteness that falsely excludes many genetically identical Caucasian populations from the Middle East and Eastern Europe. U.S. courts established in 1915 and reinforced in the 1940s that individuals of Arab descent are legally classified as Caucasian whites.

The primary policy proposal of the alt-right—breaking the United States into racial ethnostates—would completely destroy the country. Hard-right writers like John Ingram and Arthur Kemp, whose book Nova Europa sells at a $5.95 Kindle price, have suggested partitioning the United States into regional enclaves or relocating white populations to Eastern Europe. These fantasies ignore complex urban demographics such as a 50.7 percent white and 24.7 percent Black population breakdown in Dallas as of 2010.

Managed diversity acts as a powerful engine for cultural richness, athletic excellence, and technological innovation. Foreign-born professionals make up 37 percent of Silicon Valley employees, and immigrants account for 33 out of 85 American Nobel Prize winners since 2000. These diverse contributions help fuel the nation that has won 2,399 Olympic medals, leading all-time.

10 Key Ideas

1. There is no statistical epidemic of police officers murdering African Americans, and racial disparities in police encounters are driven entirely by underlying differences in violent crime rates.
2. Interracial violent crime is statistically rare and predominantly committed by people of color against whites, while mainstream media heavily disproportionately amplify isolated incidents involving minority victims.
3. Different demographic groups display wide variations in crime and cognitive test scores, but historical evidence and immigrant success prove these gaps are cultural and environmental rather than genetic.
4. Quantitative analysis shows that cultural behaviors, family structure, and individual performance predict economic and social success far better than external racism.
5. Mainstream attempts to redefine racism to exclude minority groups ignore actual hate crime statistics, global conflicts, and the presence of racial supremacist organizations outside the white majority.
6. Universal white privilege is a crude concept that ignores social class, while affirmative action and the incoherent doctrine of cultural appropriation create modern campus segregation.
7. A sensible immigration policy should prioritize legacy citizens and national economic health by enforcing strict, performance-based entry requirements.
8. Alt-right claims regarding immutable genetic IQ gaps and racial ethnostates are empirically false and destructive to national unity.