Shockley's Racism Circus Comes to Yale

Put Shockley in a corner with his portable cassette and he would sit happily, expounding on the virtues of his "Voluntary Sterilization Bonus Plan," oblivious to all. But nobody is willing to do that. Instead college students have this habit of trotting him out under the guise of free speech, to debate something that most of them--like the 600 protesters outside Becton Hall at Yale last week--know already; the non-relativity of racism. The only thing different from Princeton, Indiana or Nebraska was that the Yale hosts concocted even more of a sham.

Rather than pitting Shockley against a geneticist, or even a man who is committed to an anti-racist view, the Young Americans for Freedom choose National Review publisher William Rusher '50.

The tone of the debate would be clear from the outset. Earlier that day Rusher slammed Shockley for forming what he considered conclusions that "are in the main line liberal."

Some friction did exist between the two. The National Review publisher charged in his first 20-minute segment that he would oppose the government stepping in and sterilizing allegedly genetically inferior blacks. But his view was not formulated out of humane considerations. Rusher simply said he could not, in good conscience, trust the government to run a railroad," let alone do a good job of sterilizing the nation's blacks. But Rusher never contested any of Shockley's theories. He did say that he and Shockley may "have some differences of opinion," but only on the point of the validity of using IQ scores as a measure of happiness--and that judgment "is merely a layman's perspective."

Rusher did not try to thwart Shockley's incessant stream of statements about heredity determining 80 per cent of our intelligence. He skirted Shockley's assumption that the "agony of the American Negro" could be related to his genetic properties, an assumption that Shockley claims could be wrong in only one out of 20,000 cases.

Attacks like "his intentions are good"--something heard a few times in the cordial exchange--did little to counter Shockley's well-woven arguments, which through years of practice have made his detractors powerless to pick out the individual strands of racist thought that criss-cross his speech.

"Our reasons for bringing Shockley here are three-fold," a YAF law student began. "We wanted to refute his statist views (on government intervention into private lives); we wanted to vindicate Yale's students after their performances last year, and to check Yale's commitment to free speech." But YAF president Eugenc Meyer explained this strange free speech test with a neat historical analogy: "The problem of Hitler was not that he spoke, but that he was allowed to shut people up."

Shockley spoke first in his grandfatherly tone, deftly turning talks of sterilization into a defense of motherhood, and racial inferiority into easily sliced apple pie.

He made the sterilization of Negro rural women, whom he labelled the most genetically inferior, sound so innocuous as to be something even Johnny Carson would be willing to tackle.

The almost totally white audience reacted warmly to Shockley, greeting him with the applause usually worthy of a debate winner. But that should have been predictable. YAF had filtered out any possible dissenters, either by their exclusionary ticket policy--100 of the 265 seats went to YAF members--or by the deterrent of more than 20 plainclothesmen who checked and rechecked the stubs, and searched for cameras and tape recorders, banned from the event for fear of some sort of insurrection. Those in the first row had to be careful at the end of the debate not to be trampled by autograph seekers and congratulators. who thanked Shockley for braving the 600 protesters upstairs.

It is hard to imagine where an organization could find a man who was willing to discuss the only the implementation of the bonus plan--its bureaucratic impossibilities, and government meddling. But the YAF reached into its libertarian bullpen and produced the agreeable Rusher. This slow, just plain boring speaker (one Yale dean lunged for a book which he gleefully read upside down for a couple of pages in mid-argument) never moved beyond the gospel according to William F. Buckley. His laissez-faire attitude even extended to his unpolished debating techniques, apparently not improved by his stint on T.V.'s "The Advocates."

Both men stabbed in the dark, but Shockley drew the most blood, only because his sword was more finely honed. But neither wanted to hurt each other, or even to prove each other wrong.

"It wasn't a very scholarly debate," a disappointed Yale student said after enduring the questions and answers that perenially appear each time a college invites Shockley to stump. But nobody should have expected the debate to be any more than vaudeville genetics. Shockley's claims have little to do with scholarly or even controversial issues, and even if they did this debate wouldn't bring them out because there are simply not that many sides to the issue of racism.

If anything, the encounter showed that Shockley is best left alone in that corner, babbling at his mike, playing back his clever retorts, and priding himself for being able to arouse the ire of so many on a subject he knows so little about.