Race Realism
Or to give it it's proper name - pseudoscientific racist b/s, seems to be popular again. I often read a site called the genetic literacy project where I came across a blog post by an American geneticist who explained in layman's terms why the idea that low IQ or violent behaviour is associated with race is b/s. It's summed up by this
It has often been noted that black people perform worse than white people, on average, on various standardized tests. Naturally, racists love to jump on this statistic as evidence for genetic interracial racial differences in cognitive ability. And of course, their logic is faulty. The scientific method says that you can’t infer a genetic effect between two groups when you haven’t controlled for environmental factors. I’m not even going to get into whole question of what IQ is, or whether IQ tests actually measure important neurological characteristics accurately.
Bears repeating
The scientific method says that you can’t infer a genetic effect between two groups when you haven’t controlled for environmental factors
That should be the end of it but he goes on to explain regression to the mean etc. He also brings up something that racists often forget, Sub Saharan Africans and particularly African Americans have greater genetic diversity than Europeans and Asians. This means if race and genes were a factor in IQ diversity, African Americans would have higher IQs than their European American counterparts as Dr Tenneseen points out - The fact that the observed pattern is in the other direction suggests that it has nothing to do with genetics. Of course it's blindingly obvious that African Americans grow up in a different environment to White Americans, even the well off middle classes.
https://adaptivediversity.wordpress.com/2016/12/10/race-ed/#more-1840
This doesn't mean there aren't genetic differences between geographical populations, of course there are, they just don't line up with the obsolete classifications of race. Skin colour is an obvious example. You can spot the difference between someone from Iceland and someone from Uganda, well done, they're separated by over 60 degrees of latitude. But where does white skin stop and black skin start? Nowhere is the answer, it's a continuum. In fact anyone who has read Tacitus will know he describes the Silures (a Welsh tribe) as dark skinned with curly hair.
There's been alot written about medicine and race recently and it's true some medical conditions are more common in some geographical groups, but that's not a great basis for assigning race as it doesn't exclude all other people or include all one race. It's probably more useful to know the geographical location of your relatives than what ethnicity you call yourself. Black people can get cystic fibrosis and white people can get sickle cell anaemia.
It's been a long time now since the Human Genome was sequenced and we now have thousands of whole genome sequences from every part of the world and there's still no scientific support for racist theories, just dubious, badly designed social science studies.
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.