academics: stop making race realists seem honest and smart.
averages are useful.
edit: my apologies! I accidentally set this post to “paid commenters only.” This was an honest mistake.
Race realism1 is the following set of beliefs:
There is an “Asian IQ,” which is the highest, around 105.
There is a “white IQ,” which is lower than the Asian IQ, at 100.
There is a “brown IQ” (Arab/Mestizo/Indian), which is lower than the white IQ, at around 90.
Finally, there is an “African/aboriginal IQ,” which is between 60 and 85.
All of these IQs are genetically determined, and any national variations within races can be blamed on the history of communism/poverty/geography/culture.
Most race realists adhere to these general beliefs, but when pressed, some might make some exceptions. Those who adhere to these beliefs strictly can be referred to as “race essentialists.”
For example, a racial essentialist would claim:
If a population deviates from the median “racial IQ,” that is due to racial mixing. For example, Albanians are mixed with Turks, which lowers their IQ.
Actually, Turkish IQs are higher than Albanian IQs, so Turkish admixture can’t explain Albanian IQ.
Here’s another example:
“Conservative whites in rural areas are less intelligent than liberal whites in urban areas.” When confronted with this fact, a race essentialist will respond,
“Impossible! All whites regress to the basal white IQ. Any differences are just due to lack of opportunity / outsourcing / anti-white discrimination / globalists / Jewish conspiracies to divide and conquer the white race.”
On the other hand, if you say, “there exists a black nation which outscores an Asian nation,” a race essentialist will respond,
“That’s a trick, that’s only because those blacks are being given an unfair advantage by affirmative action. If it wasn’t for whites they would still be living in huts. Blacks are the dumbest race and can never outscore Asians in the same environment.”
This isn’t a useful way to look at the world, and it has increasingly poor predictive power as non-white countries advance economically and escape the suppressant effects of pollution,2 malnutrition, and inbreeding, and illiteracy:
The national IQ of Filipinos is 78; of Tibetans is 81; of North Koreans is 88;
of Kosovans is 78;3 of Moldovans is 88; of Serbians is 91; of Ukrainians is 92;
of Bolivians is 81; of Mexicans is 86;
of Moroccans is 76;
of Gabonese is 79.
The idea that “Asians are always the smartest” and “Africans are always the dumbest” doesn’t fit the data. Gabonese (African) are smarter than Moroccans (Arabs), Kosovans (Europeans), and Filipinos (Asians). Assuming that Gabon is a worse place to live than those other countries, we would expect that if Gabonese immigrants traveled to those other countries, their IQ would increase even further.4
There are two possibilities:
Environment plays a role. Due to extreme malnutrition, sub-Saharan IQs are being suppressed, and we should expect them to increase when exposed to western conditions.5 However, there is less reason to believe that the IQ of Serbians is going to increase with further economic development. Therefore, we should expect to see greater racial overlap in national IQs with more economic development over time, with some African nations reaching parity with some European and Asian nations.
There is no “racial regression to the mean.” Individuals do not regress to a white, Asian, black, or brown mean, but they regress to a specific national or population mean. Hence, the Ashkenazi-Kosovan gap will remain a full 28+ points, while the Gabonese-Kosovan gap will remain a measly 1 point.
So far, so good. Race realism, or race essentialism, is a pseudoscientific worldview from the 19th century which can be discarded in favor of an environmentalist or national/population-level explanation.
What is not true is the claim that “national IQ is pseudoscientific and meaningless for policy.” When people make that sort of statement, they are lying. Lying is bad in the long-term.
Putting the blood on the door.
Academics are incentivized to say things like “national IQ is meaningless.” This mantra provides a “get out of jail free” card to defend themselves against the charge of racism. Professor Saxbe can say hereditarian things like “populations are genetically selected for IQ,” and “intelligence is 50% genetic,” and then slap on a bizarre non-sequitur to neutralize the effect by confusing people. For example:
“Intelligent is partially genetic. However, national IQ is meaningless because like we’re all mixed up and we evolve every day and tests don’t test anything except testing and we’re all one race the human race.”
This word salad of platitudes works, because the dumbos who say things like “math is racist” can’t hold that many contradictory concepts in their heads at the same time, so they go back to writing hit pieces on Pinker and Murray. When it comes to avoiding cancellation, you don’t have to be an egalitarian, you just have to preface your inegalitarianism with a performative “RACISM BAD” ritual, and that’s enough to keep your job. Like marking your door with blood.
You could also compare these caveat gymnastics with how Catholics come up with fancy and arbitrary terms like “transubstantiation” to defend the church doctrine that a Ritz cracker can make you a God-cannibal. When orthodoxy declares you a heretic for denying doctrine, but the doctrine bumps up against reality, the priest class comes up with over-complicated semantic games to smooth things over and avoid moral violation.
This is a neat trick, and I’m glad it’s working for Professor Saxbe in the short-term. Everyone’s gotta eat. IQ testing is important, and if we didn’t have contradictory rituals of moral politeness to protect it, we’d lose out on a lot of good data. But bad arguments have consequences in the long-term, because bad arguments decrease trust in institutions. At some point, brave people need to stand up and take the short-term heat for the long-term collective social benefit — without going full Nazi-antisemite in the process.6
When you’re a 14-year-old boy who encounters doctrinalism, the reactionary response is to become an atheist or a race realist. If the priest class is lying, the oppositional heuristic is to assume that the inversion of their position is correct. Hence, the Holocaust never happened, Hitler did nothing wrong, the moon landing was faked, etc etc.
This is unfortunate, because the inanities of Catholic cannibalist doctrine do not disprove theism generally, and the inanities of academic anti-racism do not disprove the usefulness of national IQs. Just because academics get some things wrong doesn’t mean they are wrong about everything, and it certainly doesn’t mean that we can invert their positions to arrive at a complete picture of the truth.
Where race realists thrive is in a vacuum where there are only two positions: either you repeat contradictory, unfalsifiable, and meaningless platitudes, or you fly the swastika, assemble the eugenic councils, and fire up the gas chambers. Both of these are dangerous; the latter because it is violent and hateful, the former because it destroys trust in authority. Both positions feed off each other and have a mutually polarizing effect.
Why get all pedantic and nuanced?
This topic deserves special attention because race realists constitute the only faction of the right-wing that are smart enough to win. In the long run, stupid people lose, and I am not worried about the Amish taking over America. I am, however, worried that if you alienate smart people with lies, you create a smart fraction of the right which is highly idealistic and intolerant of deception.
If these people feel like they have nowhere else to turn to, they will tolerate (out of bitterness) all the stupidity of the right-wing — tariffs, conspiracies, Qanon, isolationism, pro-life, toaster-fetishism, anti-vax, anti-feminism, antisemitism — because “at least it’s not as bad as IQ denialism.” I know this isn’t the thinking of most right-wingers or Trump supporters, but I think it is the common thread tying many of the smartest ones together.
By creating a space for nuanced truth telling, this gives the most intelligent sector of the right-wing an “off ramp.” They can be cold-eyed, hard-nosed realists, but they don’t need to be polarized into a coalition with the dumbest, disenfranchised, most regressive, and most hateful elements of society.
There will always be people who believe in race realism, even when shown the evidence otherwise. They will believe it in the same way that they believe in transubstantiation, or that Trump won California. Some people are motivated by selfish, tribalistic, wishful-thinking, rather than idealism or intellectual curiosity. In the same way that America should brain-drain the world, the left should seek to brain-drain the right of its smartest and least lie-tolerant elements by telling the truth in all its nuanced pedantry.
A Case Study in IQ Denialism
Darby Saxbe is a Professor of Psychology at USC. She makes a series of contradictory errors out of a political attempt to separate her pro-natalism from ethnonationalism.
Professor Saxbe believes that having babies solves the crisis of meaning:
I see having babies as an act of resistance within a lonely, disconnected, increasingly transactional society, one that determines your worth by your earnings or your status or your appearance or your “likes.” We are suffering from a [sic] epidemic of meaningless, a collective lack of purpose, a deep nihilism. Having children can be a bulwark against that meaninglessness precisely because it is effortful and unrewarding and unprofitable to care for them; we do it out of love and because we are investing in something larger than ourselves, a sense of lineage and a connection to our history and our future.
Saxbe argues that even if natalism makes us poorer and makes our lives harder, we should still pursue it. In fact, maybe there is virtue in living a poor and difficult life, and maybe wealth and leisure are nihilistic. This argument bears some similarity to Rob Henderson’s concept of Luxury Beliefs. You could also compare it to the “fascist cycle” that “good times make weak men,” except here it is “easy times make lonely women, children make hard times, hard times make life meaningful.”
This is the best argument for natalism, since natalism is costly from a material or economic perspective.7 It’s an honest and respectable position.
However, Professor Saxbe’s position is viewed with suspicion because pro-natalism is usually motivated by racism. If you want to increase the population of America for purely economic reasons, it would be much cheaper to have open borders and incentivize immigration than to incentivize births. After all, babies take 18 years to develop, but immigrants can start working on day 1. But if you believe that white babies are superior to non-white babies, then open borders is less attractive, and pro-natalism becomes a relevant policy once again.
If natalists want to spend $5,000 per year (or even $200,000 over a lifetime) to encourage each new birth, but they are opposed to increasing migration, it’s reasonable to assume that they view migration as extremely costly.8
Professor Saxbe is clear on this point:
if you care about higher birth rates and think that more babies are good, you should be grateful to immigrants for being willing to have kids in this country
But most people talking about “low birth rates” are cultural conservatives with concerns about white genocide. If you’re in favor of open borders, the problem of natalism solves itself automatically. It’s only immigration restrictionists who complicate the problem.
When Professor Saxbe points this out, she is greeted with a large amount of pushback from her “own side.” Most people who are in favor of open borders are not pro-family; most people who are pro-family are anti-immigration. In order to defend herself against the charge that she is not a “real natalist,” she wrote an article denouncing race realism. This article was quixotic.
Quickly Questioning “Quixotic”
Efforts to preserve a particular culture by guarding its gene pool are quixotic, because both gene pools and cultures inevitably evolve over time to incorporate new and disparate influences.
I am not sure what to make of this word, “quixotic,” which means resembling the Spanish chivalric hero Don Quixote; possessing the desire to do noble and romantic deeds, without realism and practicality; exceedingly idealistic.
I don’t think Professor Saxbe means to imply that guarding the white gene pool is “exceedingly noble and romantic to the point of being idealistic.” The term “impossible” or “difficult” was inappropriate, so “quixotic” was ambiguous enough to fit the implication.
It is possible to guard a gene pool. If immigration into America shut down tomorrow, that would limit genetic inflow. If non-whites were deported, America would have a greater resemblance to its historical genetic profile of 1619 to 1965. Claiming that this is impossible because “cultures inevitably evolve over time” is a disingenuous form of selective nihilism.
When claiming that a task is “quixotic” or impossible, it is important to qualify that statement with a timescale. It is impossible to live forever; is it therefore “quixotic” to seek to lengthen one’s lifespan?
Tasks are not rendered impossible as a result of “the inevitable passage of time which destroys all things.” This type of argumentation would never be applied to any other policy. Here are a few examples of how this argument is fallacious:
Efforts to improve the GDP by increasing free trade are quixotic, because, as we all know, the Earth will eventually be swallowed by the sun, rendering all economics nil.
Efforts to build up the military by constructing ships and tanks and planes are quixotic, because both weapons and vehicles inevitably evolve over time. Military technology is constantly changing, therefore, it is quixotic to defend oneself with weapons.
Efforts to fight crime with policing and DNA evidence are quixotic, because criminals and crimes inevitably evolve over time.
If the timescale is limited to the next 10 years, it is possible to improve the economy, to improve the military, or reduce the rate of crime; and it is also possible to slow the rate of genetic change within America by restricting immigration.
Whether this is good or costly is another question, but calling it “quixotic” is just a way of implying that it is impossible while maintaining semantic ambiguity to avoid the weakness of the argument from being exposed.
The 1924 Immigration Act, for example, was quite effective in “guarding the gene pool” of America for 41 years. From 1924 to 1965, the population genetics of America were relatively static (compared to present day), as was the conscious intention of the law. It worked! Not very quixotic. After 1965, population genetics began to change slowly, and since that point, the rate of change has increased as tens of millions of immigrants have flooded into the country.
Restricting immigration is the opposite of “idealistic, romantic, and noble” — it is petty, close-minded, and parochial. But it’s not difficult or impossible to do. You just start throwing innocent people into prison camps, and immigrants stop coming. I don’t think that’s good, but claiming that it’s “quixotic” is black-and-white thinking. Just because genes are always changing doesn’t mean that the rate of change cannot be slowed.
IQ matters, without genetic causality.
One of the concerns of the ethnonationalist pronatalists is that new immigrants will dilute an existing gene pool with their “low IQ” stock. I’m putting “low IQ” in quotes because the descriptor is ridiculous. As a psychologist, I was trained to administer IQ tests, and I know first-hand how culturally contingent they are… Moreover, IQ is only partially heredity – about 50% genetic – and is also shaped by culture and environment.
This is a bad argument. Even if we were to assume that IQ was 100% environmental, with no genetic component whatsoever, IQ still matters.
Imagine, for example, that we poisoned 800 million children with lead.9 Would those children be more or less intelligent as a result? Unless you yourself have lead poisoning, you should be able to answer the question: the children would be less intelligent.
Here’s another easy question: would those less intelligent children have lower or higher IQs? Ok, you’re keeping up with me, great job!
Final question: if one country had more lead poisoning than another, which country has a lower national IQ? BOOM! You just validated the meaningfulness of national IQs in the absence of genetic causality.
Measuring the Brain.
Lead poisoning is environmental.10 But the low IQ of those with lead poisoning is biological, not culturally contingent.
The brain is an organ. Like any organ of the body, it performs a function. The function of the muscles is to exert force over time, and we can measure this output as strength. One of the functions of the brain (among many)11 is processing intelligence, which we can also measure. Intelligence is much more complicated than physical strength, but just because it is complicated does not mean we cannot measure it.
In fact, it is because of how complicated the brain is that measurements of intelligence end up being rather reliable. Think of it in this way: if I cut off your arms, would this necessarily impact your leg strength? No… not necessarily. But if I lobotomized the left side of your brain, would this impact the functioning of your right half? Absolutely! This is because the brain is a holistic, interconnected system. If one part is damaged, the whole system suffers.
There are some people who have incredible forms of intelligence in one area, but low intelligence in another area. They used to be called idiot savants; now they are called “individuals with savant syndrome.” Both those individuals are rare; most of the time, the functioning of the brain in one area of intelligence correlates with the functioning of the brain in other areas.
Still, there is no such thing as an “ideal brain” or an “ideal body” because different brains and different bodies have different functions in different environments. Building muscles is costly in terms of energy, as is building brains. We didn’t evolve for infinite strength or infinite intelligence. Historically, IQs between 60 to 130 have been good enough to get by with, and anything beyond that was subject to diminishing returns.
Now that humans have access to economies of scale, the rewards of intelligence do not diminish, but actually provide compounded economic returns. But from an evolutionary perspective, these exponential economic returns do not result in exponential fertility advantages, so we are still not evolving to develop higher levels of intelligence — quite the opposite.
Given the inverse correlation between intelligence and fertility, we need to be pushing back against any roadblocks that exist to solving this problem, including social taboos.
This is why I am so fanatical about environmental pollution (not CO2): we could be losing trillions of dollars due to the effects of pollutants on IQ. Corporate lobbyists have been fighting hard to suppress research into the impact of pollution, because they don’t want to have to bear the costs that they are imposing on humanity with their dangerous pollutants.
Anyone ignoring IQ or dismissing it as a “meaningless number” or “purely cultural” is in serious danger of neglecting our greatest asset as human beings: our brains.
Defending IQ as the best metric we have to measure intelligence isn’t saying that we couldn’t improve the metric, or that the metric has always been perfect in the past. It’s good to be humble about the limitations of psychometrics. IQ isn’t everything! But it is something. Saying that “national IQ is meaningless” is dangerous misinformation, which helps corporate polluters hide their crimes. If we can’t be honest about the problem, we’re that much further from socially responsible solutions.
IQ isn’t Copyrighted.
Any time someone posts something that confidently states an average IQ within a particular race or ethnicity, it’s a giveaway that their understanding of heredity effects on intelligence likely stopped with Hernstein [sic] & Murray’s The Bell Curve, which was published in 1994 and widely debunked at the time.
This is a strawman.
We can measure the IQ of individuals. Then, we can average those IQs together to find the average IQ of a race or ethnicity. We can do the same thing for any trait:
Height
Grip strength
Immune function
Life expectancy
Income
Education level
Crime rate
I confidently state that we have racial statistics on all these traits. That has nothing to do with Herrnstein, Murray, or The Bell Curve. Racial statistics existed before them, and they will continue to be valid after they are dead. Denying that we have these statistics does not make you a moral or well-read person. Claiming that Murray and Herrnstein have an eternal copyright on racial statistics is an appeal to colorblindness (the idea that there are no average racial differences) and playing guilt by association.
Height is a valid scientific measurement; average height is a valid scientific measurement. There’s nothing magically racist about IQ that makes it invalid once you average it for a group. It might “sound” more racist, but that’s a problem of how rhetoric is interpreted by the masses (who might believe that intelligence is 100% heritable, or something), not a problem with the practice of measurement and averaging.
DNA doesn’t Refute National IQs
DNA science… refutes the idea of “national IQs.”
This is the least accurate statement in the article. National IQs exist, independent of their causes. No amount of DNA science can disprove national IQs.
Let’s say that national IQs were environmentally determined. For example, let’s say that each country’s IQ was causally determined by a combination of nutrition, exposure to pollutants, exposure to violence (spanking or trauma), early childhood education, literacy rates, and healthcare. This would not “refute the idea of national IQs.” National IQs still exist, whether they are moral or immoral, just or unjust, genetic or environmental. It is not scientific to dismiss national IQs as a meaningful statistic because you find them to be unfair.
A statistic is meaningful if it is predictive. If I have statistics on average height, I can make educated guesses about groups of individuals based on their group affiliations. I can say things like, “it is more likely for a Swede to be taller than a Pygmy than the reverse,” even while this likelihood is not deterministic. But height isn’t super useful — IQ is a much better predictor of life outcomes than height.
National IQs have bearing on policy. Imagine a war in Europe between NATO and Russia, where millions of women and children would flee to America as refugees to escape the conflict. Understanding the national IQs of those refugees would be helpful in determining policy.
How much do we need to expand colleges to accommodate new students? How many more police do we need? Should we expect our welfare system to be overwhelmed, or should we prepare for a budget surplus from new taxpayers? National IQ helps us predict all these things. It is not the sole determining factor, but it is not “meaningless” or “refuted” or “debunked.”
Now, instead of European refugees, imagine that there was a war in the Congo, and Dr. Saxbe proposes that we let in 100 million Congolese, “because national IQs don’t matter; they are meaningless, refuted, debunked.” Willful ignorance of the facts would lead to poor planning. This is true even if the Congolese immigrants would have children who have equal IQs to American children. You cannot equate the mass migration of 100 million European refugees with 100 million Congolese refugees. It is not true to say that “national IQs have no bearing on policy.”
Even if national IQs were 100% environmentally determined, environmental effects are epigenetically heritable. If a mother gets lead poisoning, she can pass on the deleterious effects to her children. Even if national IQs were 100% environmental, 100 million Congolese refugees would not be equivalent to 100 million European refugees, even in the second generation. Their children would have lower IQs due to the effects of epigenetic inheritance — even if there were no initial genetic differences whatsoever between Europeans and Congolese.
Consider the impact of cultural practices like cousin marriage. Cousin marriage lowers IQ. The normalization of cousin marriage among Pakistanis lowers IQ over time. This is true even if the starting population of Pakistanis and non-Pakistanis is exactly genetically identical. Bringing in a massive population of insular, ghettoized, culturally self-isolating Pakistanis will not resolve itself when those Pakistanis have children, because their cultural practices suppress IQ. National IQs are real and relevant, even if we presume initial genetic homogeneity.
The Homogeneity Fallacy
Professor Saxbe claims that, in order to take IQ into account, we must first believe that ethnic groups are “monolithic entities” rather than “fluid, variable, and multifaceted ones.” This is a fallacy.
Let’s say we have a prison full of people. Some of these people are murderers; some of them were falsely convicted; some are thieves; others are pedophiles; some cheated on their taxes; and some of them are prison guards!
Would you advocate for opening up the prison and letting anyone walk out the door, just because the prison population is “fluid, variable, and multifaceted”? Hopefully not!
You can have a population which is diverse, and at the same time, make informed and educated policy decisions around that population. Having information about that group, like IQ, is always helpful. Denying the usefulness of this information is a denial of the general usefulness of statistics. It is a moralist claim made to avoid offending sensibilities, not a scientific one.
Weak Predictors aren’t Pseudoscience.
Professor Saxbe claims that national IQs are imperfect, and have “weak predictive power,” compared to “other policy levers.” She is mixing evaluative tools with ameliorative tools.
Evaluative tools in immigration admissions would be things like:
national IQ
national incidence of terrorism, violence, or war
cultural / religious compatibility
Ameliorative tools would be things like:
eliminating birthright citizenship
restricting welfare to citizens
implementing e-verify
building a border wall
“other policy levers”
I agree that IQs are an imperfect tool, and they have weak predictive power — but there is no perfect tool with absolute predictive power. Every country has wonderful people, and every country has terrible people. Given our desired outcomes, it is reasonable to consider restricting immigration on the basis of the evaluative principles available to us. Using national IQ does not restrict us from using others at the same time — the more the merrier.
National IQ need not be the only evaluative principle. It is disingenuous to claim that, by considering national IQ, we therefore must exclude other evaluative tools.
Let’s say IQ tests have nothing to do with intelligence, and they are simply a “cultural compatibility test,” where Asians somehow score higher than whites. So be it! A cultural compatibility test still sounds useful to me.
Professor Saxbe claims that IQ tests don’t measure IQ — they measure test-taking ability and preparation. Putting aside the obvious fact that intelligence aids in both of these tasks… What’s wrong with selecting immigrants on the basis of test-taking ability and preparation?12 There is nothing morally wrong with preferring immigrants who are prepared and competent over immigrants who are illiterate and sloppy.
The irrelevance of causation:
Although it’s true that you might find mild inherited differences between populations due to different selection pressures over time, the predictive power of these differences on an individual’s success is much weaker than, say, whether they can access health care or universal pre-K, or whether their parent is incarcerated in a foreign megaprison for daring to immigrate here with tattoos.
Professor Saxbe conflates the hereditarian hypothesis for group differences and the existence of group differences. She believes that if she can refute hereditarianism, then magically, environmental differences also disappear, or don’t matter for policy anymore. This is ridiculous.
It doesn’t matter whether differences are due to poor healthcare, poor education, parental incarceration, culture, environment, an act of God, or genetic selection pressures. That has no bearing on whether those differences exist.
Since the parental environment is highly influential on the traits of children, this means that extremely healthy, intelligent, highly-educated, peaceful parents are more likely to have healthy, intelligent, highly-educated, law-abiding children — independent of genetics (for example, in the case of adoption). Similarly, sickly, dumb, drop-out criminals are more likely to have sickly, dumb, drop-out criminal children — independent of genetics.
When you consider the fact that first-generation immigrants also congregate in ghettos, Chinatowns, or other ethnic enclaves, you also have to add peer-aggregate effects on child development. Immigrants bring their nation with them and reproduce their home environment, which makes cultural norms much stickier than they might otherwise be in the case of individual migration.
If the only thing you know about a person is who their parents were, you can assume that this individual is, statistically speaking, more like their parents than the general population. This is not just true for individuals; it is also true for groups of people. If you bring in millions of people with 3rd world parents, the qualities of the children will be a mixture of the host country and the origin country, on a pure environmental basis alone.
One can point to examples of rags-to-riches stories among Jews and East Asians as evidence that parental traits have nothing to do with their descendants. But that is clearly not the case for blacks, Hispanics, or native Americans. Relying on every immigrant group to be like Jews and Asians is a selective and inconsistent expectation.
The irrelevance of Racism
If the argument is that “racism is causing intergenerational failure 60 years after civil Rights,” then the problem to be solved is racism, which does not seem to be an easy problem to solve. Given that racism is costly to solve, it stands to reason that mass immigration will not result in instantaneous assimilation, but will introduce significant additional inter-group conflict. Who or what is to blame for racism is immaterial.
Population-level crime and violence are policy choices, too, shaped by histories of exploitation, poverty, and inequality. Redress the poverty and inequality and people naturally behave more prosocially and societies get more cohesive.
Professor Saxbe’s plan to “redress the poverty” caused by “histories of exploitation” has failed for the last 60 years. Racial gaps persist. Her solution? Bring in more minorities. Apparently, if you have failed to solve racism against one group, the obvious solution is to bring in more groups to be racist to. Eventually, this will “overload the racism” and break the system of white supremacy. Whites will be such a tiny, powerless minority that racism will no longer be possible.
Sike! I really pranked you there, didn’t I? Non-white societies are much more racist than white societies. In fact, interracial marriage increases racism. Mass immigration won’t eliminate racism, it will just make the racism more violent, cartoonish, and brutal.
The irrelevance of Epigenetics
The most exciting recent developments in gene science are in the field of epigenetics, which has discovered that environmental stressors can actually alter DNA in ways that can persist across generations. Epigenetics research puts an additional nail in the coffin of essentialist ‘race science’ because they tell us that group distinctions are shaped by our policy choices over time.
Professor Saxbe claims that if people are dumb due to malnutrition, poverty, lead poisoning, then it’s ok to let them into the country, because that’s not genetics, and non-genetic differences don’t matter. This is like claiming that Reagan was right to release violent schizophrenics from the insane asylums, because schizophrenia could be epigenetically induced.
“We thought that schizophrenia was genetic — then we learned that it was epigenetic! That’s when we realized it was totally cool to let schizophrenics roam the streets, wild and free. Epigenetic, after all. That schizophrenic who burnt your house down? Yeah, epigenetic.”
It is immaterial and irrelevant whether or not suboptimal behavior is genetic or epigenetic when we are discussing the subject of mass immigration. It doesn’t matter whether a population is poor, violent, or criminal because of environmental reasons, genetic reasons, or epigenetic reasons. So long as that population is poorer, more violent, or more criminal, there is an increased probability of net cost when bringing that population into the country.
In general, immigrants to America are poorer than native-born citizens, but they are not especially violent or criminal. This is not the case in Europe, where immigrants have a much higher rate of crime and violence than the general population, and are vastly overrepresented in the prison system. These are facts; calling them racist does not change them.
The science of epigenetics does not change immigrant crime rates. Instead of beating the audience over the head with red herrings and calling them racist, Professor Saxbe would have a stronger argument for open borders if she acknowledged the potential costs and then compared them with the net benefits. I am certainly open to that argument, but moralizing whether it’s the immigrants’ “fault” or not is immaterial to policy.
Lies About Ethnonationalism
Ethnonationalism is premised not just on the idea that certain ethnic groups are smarter or better than others, but that ethnic groups represent unitary or static entities rather than dynamic and evolving ones. In truth, we are all mutts, and we share much more of a global common heritage than many of us realize.
This is a tired platitude which convinces no one.
Ethnonationalism is bad for many reasons — if you don’t believe me, take a look at what’s going on in Gaza. The Palestinians believe they are indigenous and have the right to expel the Israelis, and vice versa. Now we’ve got Pakistan going off against India — a terrible situation for everyone. If all groups renounced ethnonationalism, they could live within the same political system and not kill each other over blood and soil. This might sound like a pipe dream, but I think we’ve done a better job of suppressing ethnonationalism in America than the Israelis, Palestinians, Pakistanis, and Indians.
But the idea that “ethnicities evolve” is not going to convince anyone to stop identifying as Palestinian, Jewish, Pakistani, or Indian. Telling people their ethnic identity is fake is insulting and ineffective. Seriously — tell Jews that they have no right to Israel or no special descent from Abraham because “ethnic groups evolve.” Keep trying that on Palestinians, Pakistanis, and Indians, and let me know how that works out for you.
The argument becomes ridiculous when applied to breeds of dogs:
Dog breeds are not unitary or static entities. Dog breeds are dynamic and evolving. In truth, all dogs are mutts, and all dogs share much more of a global common heritage than many of us realize.
You’re not going to morally shame dog breeders to stop breeding their dogs with this moralistic sham-science.
There is nothing wrong with opposing ethnonationalism on moral grounds. I would also oppose “breed-nationalism,” which would be the claim that “America belongs to Pit bulls, and all other dogs should be deported.” But it is not true that “Pit bulls don’t exist, because dog breeds are dynamic, evolving, and part of a global heritage.” This isn’t a genetic argument on my part, because you can say the same thing about religions:
“Christians don’t exist, because religions are dynamic, evolving, and part of a global heritage. Christianity is a mix between Judaism and Greek philosophy — meaning that it doesn’t exist and we shouldn’t mourn its loss.”
All religions and species on Earth are dynamic, evolving, and part of a global heritage. The dynamism of a category, the process of evolution, and the shared ancestry of all living things in the Big Bang do not invalidate the category of “species.”
We are a mix of indigenous hunter-gatherers, Eurasian hunter-gatherers, Neolithic farmers from the Levant/Anatolia (now modern Turkey), Neolithic farmers from Iran, and herders from the Pontic-Caspian steppe. … In other words, “white” people are made up of bits and pieces from not just Europe, but populations including Iran, Turkey, India, and probably Mongols, Huns, North Africans, and whoever else washed up on our shores.
You can do this with any dog breed. A Labradoodle is a mix of a Labrador and a Poodle. This fact tells us nothing about the morality of breeding and preserving Labradoodles.
Let’s take this a step further: imagine that we mixed every single large dog breed together — Huskies, Great Danes, Mastiffs, Dobermanns, and German Shepherds. Then, imagine that we mixed every small dog breed together: Chihuahuas, Pomeranians, Dachshunds, and Pugs.
Would we then conclude, since both of these mixtures are “mutts,” that they are identical? Would we then moralize, and say it is improper to prefer large dogs over small dogs, because of some ancient genealogy?
The fact that a particular breed of dog, or ethnicity of human, is descended from several distinct populations does not reduce or eliminate the uniqueness of that particular breed or ethnicity.
These arguments are bad and ineffective, and are not winning the war against ethnonationalism. They repel and polarize people to the other side. Ethnic identities exist, and that there is nothing “unscientific” about the desire to preserve them.13
We can acknowledge these facts, and also morally advocate that these efforts at self-preservation should be restricted within the legal framework of equality before the law, in order to prevent violent warfare or genocide, as occurs so often throughout history to the present day.
If ethnic/racial groups are not particularly meaningful and we share more genetic commonalities than differences, the whole notion of pronatalism that boosts the births of one group over another starts to seem silly.
Ethnic groups are meaningful, independent of genetics. This becomes clearer when we consider the position of religious pro-natalists, who want more Christian babies, or more Muslim babies, or more Jewish babies.
Professor Saxbe has the right to claim that those desiring more Jewish babies are “silly,” but this isn’t an argument. It is simply name calling. No amount of population genetics, genealogies, or epigenetic research will ever deconstruct a people’s desire to live. That’s not how identity works.
Lies about Hybrid Vigor
We are all shaped by migration and assimilation, and that’s a good thing. Genetic diversity makes us hardier, more resistant to disease, better looking, and more resilient.
This isn’t true.
Multi-racial people are more mentally ill.
Multi-racial people have worse immune function than whites as pertains to the following diseases:
Vitiligo
Systemic lupus erythematosus
Rheumatoid arthritis
Psoriasis
Pernicious anemia
Myasthenia gravis
Multiple sclerosis
Inherited metabolic diseases
Inflammatory bowel disease
Fibromyalgia
Celiac disease
Amiodarone induced thyrotoxicosis
If life expectancy is a good proxy for health, we should expect mixed-race people to live longer. But in England and Wales (2011-2014), mixed-race people were less healthy than Asians, Bangladeshis, black Africans, black Caribbeans, and Indians.14 No hybrid vigor.
But wait, didn’t Professor Saxbe provide us with three really sciency links proving that hybrid vigor is definitely real, and mono-racial people are inbred freaks? Let’s click and find out!
Her first link is a study from China showing that people who belong to … different variants of Chinese people … had better health outcomes. It is a gross misrepresentation to use such a result to claim that racial mixing is generally “genetically superior.”
Her second link has nothing to do with humans at all. It has to do with plant seeds. Seriously? What kind of pseudoscience is this?
Her third link claims that mixed-race people are more attractive. Let’s dive into that.
Are mixed-race people more attractive?
Professor Saxbe is quick to jump to the conclusion that “IQ tests are totally cultural with no biological relevance.” By contrast, she is equally quick to assume that hybrid attractiveness is biologically conditioned by our deep ancestral instincts, which desire genetic fitness above all,15 while not bothering to consider the role of social conditioning. This is a hypocritical double standard of biased and motivated reasoning. It’s possible that attraction to mixed-race people is at least partially a product of seeing mixed-race people overrepresented in advertisements or Hollywood, creating an implicit association between mixed-race people and wealth and status.
If mixed-race people were healthier, smarter, and genetically superior specimens, we would expect that people with higher socio-economic status would prefer to date them over dating monoracially. This is because people with higher socio-economic status have greater sexual capital and greater access to sexual choice, while people with lower socio-economic status have to “settle” and accept what they can get. Rich people should tend to date interracially much more often than poor people.
This is not what we find.
Among whites, those who date monoracially were more intelligent than those who date multi-racially. Among non-whites, the results were inverted: blacks and Hispanics who dated mono-racially were less intelligent. This contradicts “hybrid vigor theory,” but conforms to “status-caste exchange theory,” the idea that whites in America have the highest sexual market value — not mixed-race individuals.
White women who do date interracially tend to be poorer than those who date monoracially:
“Mixed-race couples with one black partner live in neighborhoods with poverty levels of 21 percent on average, compared with average rates of just 9 percent for [mono-racial] white couples.”
A study of adolescents which focused on dating, rather than marriage, was consistent with this pattern:
In accordance with the status-caste exchange theory, some scholars find that whites who enter into interracial relationships come from lower socioeconomic status than whites who marry within their own group, whereas this relationship is the reverse for the minority group members (Crowder and Tolnay, 2000; Qian, 1997; Kalmijn, 1993)16
If phenotypic difference makes partners more attractive (in pursuit of hybrid vigor), high SES whites should show a larger preference for black partners than lower SES whites. But the opposite is true. As whites become more wealthy (more sexually selective), they less frequently date blacks. When humans are given greater sexual choices, they opt against diversity in favor of phenotypic17 similarity.
Another study found that students who date interracially are at a higher risk for depression than students who did not date at all and students who dated within their race.18 Either interracial dating was causing the students to become depressed, or depressed students are more likely to date outside their race.
Heightened levels of depression among adolescents dating interracially reinforces “research [that suggests] that interracially married adults are more vulnerable to psychological distress than those in same-race partnerships.”
It’s possible to blame all of this stress and depression on racism, but there’s no win for the hybrid vigor hypothesis by revealed preferences. If you are a multi-racial child, your parents are more likely to be divorced, more likely to be depressed, and more likely to be poor. If your mom is white, she is less likely to be intelligent than other white moms. You are more likely to die sooner and have more diseases. None of this sounds “vigorous” to me.
A study on cross-regional partnerships in China doesn’t disprove this. A study on cross-breeding beans doesn’t disprove this.
Maybe multi-racial people have more attractive faces — let’s grant that point. But people don’t date faces — they date people, with personalities, bodies, careers, and degrees. People claim that they are attracted to multi-racial faces. But the data is clear: whites with higher SES (and greater sexual choice) consistently choose to date mono-racially, and when they do date multi-racially, they avoid the most extreme phenotypic difference. That indicates that, given the opportunity, whites prefer phenotypic similarity — not hybrid vigor.
This is also reflected in the finding that more homogenous communities have higher fertility. It’s easier for whites to find attractive partners when there are more whites available to date.
Whites may claim that multi-racial faces are more attractive, but this doesn’t match their revealed preferences. When given the choice, whites avoid interracial dating — it is poor whites who prefer it. The idea that poor whites are more “vigorous” is also easily disproven.
The professor vigorously denounces the immoral thought of racial preferences (*gasp!*), when such a preference is mono-racial. But when it comes to preferring multi-racial partners, eugenic claims of genetic superiority via hybrid vigor are now fair game!
Here’s an idea: maybe the professor is right. White people really are totally mixed up mutts, like Professor Saxbe claims. And maybe… it’s that mixed-up hybrid vigor that makes whites so intelligent, healthy, and wealthy! In comparison, populations of Pakistanis, Indians, and Africans are inbred. That would be a consistent application of her “hybrid vigor” theory, right?
But let’s not take these crazy theories about “hybrid vigor” to their logical conclusion: such ideas are outdated 19th century pseudoscience, being peddled by cranks and kooks who perversely think that link to studies about beans to prove a point about humans. We now have hard, empirical data which disproves hybrid vigor.19
Feel free to date interracially, or monoracially! But don’t let someone tell you that you’re genetically inferior for being monoracial. You’re fine the way you are!
Historical Inconsistency
The perceived distance between a Polish person and an Irish person, or an Italian and a Brit, was incredibly vast. These groups spoke different languages, practiced different religions, had different customs and histories, and upheld different values.
Professor Saxbe argues that because, historically, people were racist against Poles, Irish, and Italians, concerns about mass immigration today are unfounded. There was conflict, but it was stupid. Therefore, history surely won’t repeat itself with more stupidity! This is a self-refuting argument.
The fact that Poles, Irish, and Italians (you forgot native Americans, blacks, and Jews) all had conflicts with the WASP population isn’t a point in favor of immigration — it’s an argument against it, at least in the short-term.
The rise of American communism and anarchism was led by immigrants. Massive labor strikes were led by immigrants. FDR could not have won in 1932 without immigrants.
Here are some strikes and bombings led by immigrants:
Mario Buda, killed 40 Americans in the Wall Street Bombing
Samuel Gompers, led the Seattle General Strike of 60,000 workers
Carlo Valdinoci, blew up the house of the Attorney General
C. E. Ruthenberg, organized a riot of 20,000 communists
John Fitzpatrick, Mother Jones, William Z. Foster (second generation): led a strike of 365,000 steel workers
The idea that mass immigration was peaceful, easy, or comfortable is historically ignorant or willfully deceptive. To suggest that future mass immigration will be problem-free by reminding us of the fraught history of immigration is… a curious strategy. It might all work out in the end, or maybe someone ends up in reservations, illegal settlements, or expelled. A better argument needs to be made for why we won’t repeat the problems of the past. “We’re less racist now” isn’t convincing with Trump in charge, and Shiloh Hendrix getting paid more than I’ve made in a lifetime to drop n-bombs.
Instead, the fact of inter-ethnic conflict should be taken as a given, and a good faith argument should be made to convince the audience that this can be overcome with an aggressive policy of assimilation. The audience should have their concerns acknowledged and assuaged, rather than dismissed.
Lies About Assimilation
If we care about preserving anything that unifies us, it might be cultural traditions, but cultural traditions are collective policy choices… We can welcome new arrivals and help them find common cause with us, or we can punish and isolate them, creating worse conditions for assimilation.
I don’t believe that Civil War reenactment or Episcopalianism can be forced upon immigrants as a result of “policy choices.” It should be acknowledged that every wave of immigration erodes the previous culture that existed. This could be positive overall for the country, but it is a loss for the culture being erased.20
Historically, American assimilation didn’t occur because the new arrivals were given free money and a groveling apology about white guilt. Assimilation occurred because new arrivals were ruthlessly bullied for being different — different accents, different religion, different clothing. It was all ridiculed, sometimes violently. My family was excluded for being different, and they assimilated in response!
Saxbe is one of the most WASPy names I’ve ever heard of, so despite her insistence that “my French and German ancestors were bullied,” I don’t think her family was recently exposed to the ordeal of civility. I think she’s forgotten what it’s like to be excluded from the country club — therefore, she doesn’t see the utility of hazing the newcomers. But hazing is how the military assimilates new recruits. The “kindness theory of assimilation” isn’t an effective way of forging a new identity. Sometimes recent immigrants can be more hostile to illegal immigrants than WASPs, saying “I came here the fair way, and they cheated.”
When groups assimilate together, they do so through violence, rape, coercion, domination, and supremacism. Anglo-Saxons and Celts merged together to form the English — but it wasn’t a peaceful process. When the Romans brought their language to Iberia and Gaul, that wasn’t peaceful either. The Germanization of Prussia was undertaken by crusaders in the Drang nach Osten. People undergo cultural shifts in identity all the time, but it’s not kindness that gets the job done.
If we wanted to unite all Americans of all colors under a single culture, that requires American nationalism and American chauvinism. If you want conformity to a cultural norm, Islam shows us how you can bring a multi-racial coalition for a common cause: with fanatical, evangelical, uncompromising religious fundamentalism.
I’m not in favor of this. The ideal represented by the founding fathers, and the liberals of Switzerland, was a society capable of providing liberty for different philosophies to live with independence, dignity, and peace within a market-based legal framework. Such a framework allows people to preserve their particularities without being attacked as “pseudoscientific,” or being shamed as racist for wanting their own ethnicity to breed at replacement rate. The term “racism” should be reserved for acts of outward hostility, which unfortunately seem to be on the upswing.
Underlying such a system, however, is a commitment to truth and freedom. Using slurs instead of arguments degrades liberalism and increases polarization.
summary.
I reject Professor Saxbe’s framing. National IQs are a useful measurement even if:
they were 100% environmentally determined
other measurements exist
they only measure test-taking ability and preparedness
they are only weakly predictive of future success (weak correlations are not pseudoscientific).
Imagine you are swiping on a dating app, looking for a nice handsome man to date.21 You notice there are 1,000s of profiles, and hundreds of them are matching with you. How do you filter them?
Or, to use a less romantically charged metaphor, let’s say you’re an employer who has 1,000s of resumes on your desk for an open position. How do you filter them down to decide who you will interview?
The problem of filtering from a large applicant population is the problem of our immigration system. We can filter on anything we like: English proficiency, vaccination status, national IQ, number of push-ups performed in one minute, or willingness to pledge an oath of allegiance to King Trump.
Some of these filters are obviously good (I do not want sickly unvaccinated people coming into the country). Some of them are obviously bad (I do not want Trump loyalists of any origin flooding into the country). National IQ strikes me as a benign filtering tool. Even if it ended up being totally random, sometimes a random filter is better than none at all.22 It is especially useful because administering IQ tests to every immigrant is time consuming, and even if we did do this, national IQs still help us understand regression to the mean.
Professor Saxbe believes that 50% of the variation in intelligence is genetic — I find that to be an enormous overestimation, and her hereditarian hypothesis strikes me as overconfident. I maintain that filtering immigrants by national IQ would be rational even if intelligence were 100% environmental.
Professor Saxbe’s belief that there are “mild inherited differences between populations due to different selection pressures over time” is granting far too much than is necessary for my argument. We do not need to believe that “populations” (ethnicities) have evolved (selective pressures over time) to have “inherited differences” in order to believe that national IQs are a benign filter of immigrants.
Are filters really necessary?
There are some people who believe that America should admit every single immigrant on the planet — all 7 billion, if they want to come. But even if that were your position, it would still take time to process all of those people. Why not exercise the slightest amount of caution, and prioritize the immigrants from Singapore and Japan before the immigrants from Niger and Sierra Leone?
Let me take this a step further, to illustrate the principle to the most extreme extent.
Let’s say you truly believed that every human being on the planet has an absolute human right to come into America, and we should under no circumstances discriminate on any basis, not even vaccination status. Let’s say you also believe that we should pay people to move to America, because we desperately need workers to grow the economy.
Who would you pay, and how much?
Well, if you were wise, you would pay the Japanese and Singaporeans more, and the Nigeriens and the Sierra Leonese less. This is because of the expected return on investment. Data on immigration and expected income done in the Netherlands and Denmark show a clear correlation between expected lifetime income and national IQ. If you don’t like IQ scores, use national PISA scores instead.
It would make sense to offer Japanese people $114,000 to move to America. It doesn’t make as much sense to offer that pile of cash to Somalians. This is true even if Japanese people and Somalians were genetically identical. For a more racially-neutral example: it makes more economic sense to pay South Koreans to move to America than to pay North Koreans to move to America. This is because people don’t magically leave their childhood behind when they migrate.
In effect, we do pay immigrants to move to America. We provide them with free police, firefighters, ambulance rides, emergency room services, Medicaid, food stamps, roads, and safety from warfare. And for their kids, we offer free public schools, vaccinations, college opportunities and scholarships, and affirmative action.23 Wow! I can’t think of any non-white country that actually has a racial quota where immigrants can come in and take advantage of programs and opportunities specifically designed to help the non-majority ethnic group. America is truly exceptional.
The value of the free stuff that immigrants receive just by stepping foot in the country is roughly $55 a day. If you don’t believe me, go to Somalia and tell me how much you would pay per day for functioning roads, cops, firefighters, hospitals, etc, etc…
All of this isn’t free. It is paid for by the taxpayer. I am in favor of restricting welfare usage for native citizens only, but this still doesn’t solve the problem. Roads are, in effect, a welfare payment. Cops, firefighters, and ambulances are a welfare payment. If a person lives in the country, legal or illegal, they are being paid to be here.
Hopefully, that person makes the decision to work and contribute to the economy so that they are a net contributor rather than a net financial drain. But how can we predict that kind of behavior? National IQ isn’t a bad idea.
If you don’t like this definition because you think race realism is just hereditarianism, I think that’s a poor semantic scheme because hereditarianism is its own concept, and conflating the two leads to a loss of information and ability to differentiate concepts. For example, Professor Saxbe is a hereditarian (she thinks IQ is 50% genetic and populations have been selected for IQ), but she is not a race realist.
Pollution is accumulating over time in the 1st world, and decreasing in China, so this is helping to equalize things. Although in countries like the Philippines, Indonesia, and India, there’s a case to be made that environmental pollution is actually getting worse over time.
Kosovan IQ is not the product of a “mixture of Europeans and Turks,” because Turkish IQ is 90.
I’ve never been to Gabon, but I don’t expect to see any Filipinos immigrating to Gabon in search of a better life.
African Americans are descended from west African tribes who were kidnapped and enslaved by other Africans and have an IQ of 85. However, this is a selected population of people who lost wars and were enslaved, so assuming that IQ contributes to war-fighting ability, we should assume this population to be selected for low IQ. If a different kind of selection were performed, say, for African immigrants with PhDs, there is no reason why this ceiling of 85 could not be surpassed. Regression to the mean does not erase this selective pressure. The children of Nigerian immigrants do better than the children of slave-descended African Americans.
I’m looking at you, Kevin McDonald!
Even if you believe, as natalists do, that there are net economic benefits to society for having children, it is difficult to argue that individuals benefit economically from having children. Correlation doesn’t equal causation, so the fact that people with children tend to earn more is not a good argument — it only demonstrates that more competent people are more likely to have children, not that the presence of children leads to higher earnings. Furthermore, when you subtract the cost of childrearing from those higher earnings, the advantage disappears. No one who is trying to maximize their personal wealth can justify having children — it must be justified by other means.
The problem of low migrant productivity could be solved by *reducing* entitlements for immigrants — making them pay their own way, which would select for productivity and reduce fiscal burden. Natalists, however, make this less likely, because they advocate for *more* welfare in the form of a baby-making reward.
OH shit we actually did this.
Unfortunately, epigenetic inheritance means that the children of mothers with lead poisoning end up being less intelligent as well.
The brain also keeps the heart pumping and the lungs breathing, which isn’t very smart, but it is very useful.
Potentially you could run into the problem of elite Goodharting, but I think that’s too advanced for this discussion.
It is no more “unscientific” to prefer whites than it is “unscientific” to prefer Dobermanns. Science has nothing to say whatsoever about phenotypic preferences. You can’t disprove a preference with a genealogy.
Is the fact that whites had the 2nd lowest life expectancy is evidence of racism against whites in England and Wales? I will let Professor Saxbe answer this one (I will not hold my breath).
This isn’t true, of course. People frequently value social convention (money, fashion, status, interpersonal loyalty) over genetic fitness (muscles, athleticism, intelligence).
Hongyu Wang and Grace Kao (2007). Does Higher Socioeconomic Status Increase Contact Between Minorities and Whites? An Examination of Interracial Romantic Relationships Among Adolescents, Social Science Quarterly, Vol. 88, No. 1, pp. 146-164.
Read the whole article here: https://annas-archive.org/scidb/10.1111/j.1540-6237.2007.00451.x
In this case, blacks are assumed to be the most phenotypically distinct from whites, thus producing the most “hybrid vigor.”
"Interracial daters have greater odds of risk for depression than their non-dating and same-race dating peers"; Miller, B. (2014). What are the odds: An examination of adolescent interracial romance and risk for depression. Youth & Society, 49, 180-202. doi.org/10.1177/0044118X14531150
By the way: most of the research on facial attractiveness is about Asian-white mixes, not white-black mixes. This research on white-black mixes only tested the reaction of black respondents, not white respondents. If anyone can show me a study where they separate white respondents from black respondents and show them white-black mixes, you win an internet point.
The clash between Protestantism and Catholicism played a part in the rise of both Evangelicals and Atheists, so all of the consequences of losing our religion can be traced back to waves of immigration. In Europe, this played out much earlier, in the 1930s, largely as a result of the rise of socialism, which was much more popular in Europe than America (30% of Europeans voted [and still vote] socialist, as opposed to only maybe 9% of Americans).
(Professor Saxbe is happily married, sorry fellas)
Hence, the value of credentialism to employers.
Ending soon, sign up now before this offer ends!
I've been reading about IQ and interacting with racists for years and never heard a race realist or racist claim that Indians and Latinos have the same IQ. Never heard one say all members of the same race have the same genetic IQ. Never heard the phrase "brown IQ" either. Honestly, I've never heard anyone claim this stuff. Can you actually name a prominent race realist who makes the claims you mentioned here?
Thanks for taking the time to engage so deeply with my writing. Your article is very good, and you make some excellent points that I'll need to think about more carefully. You are correct that in my earlier piece I am primarily seeking to take issue with the "race essentialists" and not with the more nuanced points regarding IQ that you lay out in your article.
What's strange is that you originally restacked my article with a flippant statement about how, as a white woman, I am clearly too fragile to acknowledge the existence of racial difference because it makes me "uncomfortable." If you had actually argued with me about the merits of my points then we would have had a more fruitful exchange and I would have acknowledged that you are correct on many levels here.
I think that introducing an IQ screening process for prospective immigrants to the U.S. is a very bad idea, for many reasons.
By the way I was using "quixotic" in accordance with this dictionary definition: "unrealistic and impractical." Those who wish to preserve a particular gene pool think (wrongly, IMO) that they are pursuing an idealistic and noble goal but it is not an attainable or sensible one.