The Atlantic Notices Race Realism

The Atlantic magazine reports:

That term—noticer—has become a thinly veiled shorthand within segments of the right to refer to someone who subscribes to “race science” or “race realism,” the belief that racial inequities are biological.

I think he means that racial differences are largely biological, but not entirely.

Take Nick Fuentes, a 26-year-old white nationalist whose many followers call themselves “Groypers.” He has repeatedly argued that white people are intellectually superior, and praised people who believe in race science. In a single podcast interview in 2022, Fuentes said that “there is a genetic basis” for Black people committing criminal acts and that Black people are “more antisocial and have higher incidences of sociopathy and on average a lower IQ.”

If true, being antisocial and sociopathy might be a lot more important than lower IQ.

Race science is wrapped up in the right’s attack on Kamala Harris as the “DEI candidate.” The implication is that Harris’s success can only be attributed to her race and gender, not her intellect or experience. To a race-science proponent, that’s just what the data say.

Can there be any doubt about that? Left-wing support for Harris nearly always mentions her race and sex. The DNC speeches emaphasized it a lot. Republicans, not so much. Nobody speaks highly of her intellect or experience.

No matter how hard people try, however, race cannot be reduced to the results of an IQ test. There is more to the complicated genetic, cultural, economic, and historical realities of race than a few lines on a chart. When I asked Sailer to explain the links between race and intelligence, he said that he doesn’t “see strong reasons to assume that intelligence is all that different from a trait like height, which is clearly driven by both genes and environment.” He cited regions of Serbia and South Sudan as having tall populations despite being relatively poor, suggesting that health and nutrition are not the primary explanation for average national height.

Genetics may play some role in the average height in these two countries, but intelligence is not like height. As three prominent psychologists have written, “Modern DNA science has found hundreds of genetic variants that each have a very, very tiny association with intelligence, but even if you add them all together they predict only a small fraction of someone’s IQ score.” Furthermore, that race is not a biological phenomenon is the consensus view among geneticists, biologists, and anthropologists, building on generations of empirical research.

Here is how those psychologists summarize the argument:

1) Intelligence, as measured by IQ tests, is a meaningful construct that describes differences in cognitive ability among humans.

2) Individual differences in intelligence are moderately heritable.

3) Racial groups differ in their mean scores on IQ tests.

4) Discoveries about genetic ancestry have validated commonly used racial groupings.

5) On the basis of points 1 through 4, it is natural to assume that the reasons for racial differences in IQ scores are themselves at least partly genetic.

They accept steps 1-4, but not step 5.

To escape that conclusion, a lot of academics deny that race exists at all.

If Harris is elected, she will not deny race. She has supported paying racial reparations. You can be sure that racial animosity will get much worse.