Criticism of "Kind" Racists

Is believing black people to be inferior okay if you don't hate them?

Many modern day racists don't see themselves as racists because they don't actively hate people of other races. They may even be the people who can claim "some of my best friends are black." Yet they hold the view that humans can be divided into biological races, and that these races can be ranked on average intelligence and propensity for violence. That is basically the dictionary definition of racism. This is one of the Oxford Dictionary definitions of racism:

the belief that different races possess distinct characteristics, abilities, or qualities, especially so as to distinguish them as inferior or superior to one another

In the view of these "kind" racists, the sever overrepresentation of African-Americans on crime statistics is not a consequence of a being part of a marginalized group which have been denied the same opportunities as others for generations, but rather hard biological reality. It is in their genes.

The Deeper Problem with "Kind" Racism

While I have encountered countless "kind" racists over the years, I will specifically address my latest discussion partner Justin Mindgun. We have had a respectful discussion, so I hope I can honor the spirit of that discussion while also calling a spade for a spade. I don't want this story to be seen as a specific attack on Justin, but on the ideas he represents, because it is so much bigger than one person.

I don't think Justin sees himself as a racist but rather a truth teller. Let me address this quote:

I don't have a negative opinion of Black people and I don't believe that traits make any group of people superior. If anything, my belief in human differences has made me more accepting of people. I don't think that intelligence necessarily makes a better person - some of the finest people I've met aren't very smart, and I've worked with some geniuses who were garbage.

This simply is not as enlightened view as I think Justin believes. Much of the worst consequences of racism in our history has been rationalized along similar lines. Justin writes:

I want us to create environments that help all people to thrive. I don't think the current system is remotely fair to Black or White people.

While he may not hate black people this is exactly the kind of argument that has been used to rationalized segregation and apartheid. Many who supported such systems saw it as the best solution for both parties. Justin has previously remarked on how one of the cities he lived in California was a very civil, organized and low crime city. Basically a little paradise because black people were excluded.

Parallels between Racism and Sexism

This attitude on race is not very different from when I talk to sexists who assure me they love women. What they mean is that they enjoy the company of women, their affection, love, appearance, voice etc. But at the end of the day they do not see women as equals. Rather women are seen as a form of children who must be guided. When women are reduced to emotional beings who cannot think properly for themselves it excuses patriarchal control. "You must allow your husband to be in charge, because it is better for you."

Racist and Sexist Paternalism

This kind of "nice" racism has much the same consequences. It is ultimately paternalistic. In this world black people are treated as children who must be guided and managed by white people. The problem is that the people you belittle are not going to stand for it and accept it.

That is why I see people like Justin Mindgun so eager to see research on biological races pursued. Whether conscious or not I think the desire is for the lesser people to accept the lower status and stop protesting it. I remember much the same argumentation from the time of the civil rights movement. Many white people were upset that Martin Luther King and others "stirred up" the black people. In their minds everything worked just fine the way it was. Everyone knew their role. The black folks knew they were supposed to keep their heads down and accept white supremacy. It was all such a wonderful system. I see some white people speak of Apartheid South Africa the same way today. Errol Musk, Elon Musk's father spoke exactly like this about Apartheid. The black people were "taken care of." In his mind they were little children best managed by the whites.

You can see many in the old Confederacy speak of slavery in the same terms. In their minds it was just good for blacks to be owned by whites. Some of these people seemed to genuinely think they had made a system that was best for blacks.

When Your Wellbeing Relies on Racism

Upton Sinclair 1878–1968. American novelist and social reformer said:

It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.

I think this logic very much applies here. It is hard for people who benefit so strongly from an exploitative system to see the negative of it for those exploited. We are prone post rationalize what benefits us.

If I asked you how important is oil to Norwegian prosperity, what would you say? Most of you would say "a lot." What if I told you that cotton in 1800s America, picked by slaves was a bigger part of US exports than oil is to Norway today? It gives a sense of perspective on why rationalizing slavery was so important to Americans. What better way than to suggest this is what black people are best suited for? What about presenting it as almost a humanitarian good? "We are taking care of them."

In fact many Southerners bought so deeply into this total bullshit that they were shocked when slaves they had been close to left them after the civil war. They thought they had been loved by their slaves. Many would come across as enlightened and nice people to you. Thomas Jefferson, one of the American founding fathers, was one of them. From wikipedia:

Thomas Jefferson, the third president of the United States, owned more than 600 slaves during his adult life.

He was also not willing to accept that slavery somehow disadvantaged black people:

In 1785, Jefferson published his first book, Notes on the State of Virginia. In it, he argued that blacks were inferior to whites and this inferiority could not be explained by their condition of slavery.

His support of slavery ran deep:

As U.S. Secretary of State, Jefferson issued in 1795, with President Washington's authorization, $40,000 in emergency relief and 1,000 weapons to French slave owners in Saint-Domingue (modern-day Haiti) in order to suppress a slave rebellion.

And remember this is a guy who is revered all over the US. Held up as one of the greatest US presidents. He kept as slaves women who by all accounts looked white (three quarters white). Read up on Sally Hemings for instance. He had children with these slaves. In essence Jefferson was a rapist.

Why do I bring up the story of Thomas Jefferson? Because a lot of racists can appear to be enlightened, friendly and respected. But that does not mean anything they actually advocate should be seen as good or moral. Most people like to see themselves as good people and rationalize to themselves their beliefs, no matter how wrong they are.

Why Evolution is Unlikely to Have Given us Races of Different Cognitive Ability

Let me walk through some of Justin's arguments.

To summarize my perspective, humans are just like pretty much every species on this planet, with regional variations and subsequent differences in behavioral traits. That used to be the dominant view of scientists previous to WW2, but due to the crazy racial policies of the Nazis, new theories of social constructivism became popular.

Notice how Justin suggests that racial ideology was always fine, it just got a bad name because of Nazis. You can see the similar about people holding onto Nazism after WW2. They will claim it was a good ideology just badly executed. This is what I mean by racism with a friendly face: "Okay racism worked out bad that time, but this time it will be good. We will have a much friendlier form of it."

This was scientifically justified by the claim that humans evolved in Africa and then migrated across the world, where some minor changes happened based on environment (skin color), but no major changes in the last 200,000 years. Modern genetic research has killed this theory. We know there has been recent evolution, we know about genetic bottlenecks, we know about genetic drift from isolation. We know that ancient humans interbred with Neanderthals and Denisovans. We suspect there were actually two root populations in Africa and not one (according to recent paleogenetics research).

This claim blends accurate facts with misleading framing. It’s not true that modern human populations have been isolated for 200,000 years:

• Anatomically modern humans originated in Africa 200,000–300,000 years ago, but non-African populations only left Africa 50,000–70,000 years ago.

• That gives only 2,000–3,000 generations for adaptation—not nearly enough for complex psychological traits like intelligence to diverge drastically.

• European, East Asian, and other population clusters formed well after that migration—many as recently as 10,000 years ago during or after the Neolithic revolution.

So the idea that any modern racial group has had 200,000 years of separate evolution is simply false. Most of human genetic history is shared.

In other words the time available for significant genetic change is quite short. But some changes have happened:

• Lactose tolerance in Northern Europeans and some East Africans

• High-altitude adaptation in Tibetans and Ethiopians

• Skin color variation tied to UV radiation

The argument from people like Justin and other race realists is that if our bodies can go through these kinds of changes then our brains should as well. Among "race realists" it is popular to mock the idea that we are equal with:

"Evolution stopped above the neck, don't you know?"

But all this claim does is betray a fundamental misunderstanding of evolution and genetics. The physical changes talked about are:

• Single-gene or small-scale adaptations

• Driven by clear, strong environmental pressures

• Often emerged in the last 5,000–10,000 years

Human intelligence is completely different. Let me explain why:

• Cognitive traits like intelligence are highly polygenic (influenced by hundreds or thousands of genes)

• Cognitive traits like intelligence are highly polygenic (influenced by hundreds or thousands of genes)

• Cognitive traits like intelligence depend heavily on complex developmental processes that require stable environments to express themselves properly.

Let us take lactose tolerance as an example. In early pastoral societies, being lactose tolerant could literally be the difference between life and death. Dairy was a critical food source. If you couldn’t digest it, you’d be malnourished—especially during droughts or winters with few other food options. This gave a very high selection advantage—some studies estimate selection coefficients of up to 0.1–0.2, which is huge in evolutionary terms.

Intelligence does not have anything like that kind of massive evolutionary pressure. Survival depended more on social cooperation, local knowledge, and luck than on scoring higher on anything resembling an IQ test.

Dying of malnutrition creates urgent evolutionary pressure. Slightly better abstract reasoning does not—especially when everyone is already intelligent enough to survive.

At normal mutation rate, it is estimated that the time required for one beneficial mutation to fix in a population is around 35,000 years—and that’s optimistic. And that is simply not enough to fundamentally later intelligence. Intelligence is not markedly affected by single genes. It is a highly polygenic trait.

That's not to say that racial theories previous to WW2 were correct - they had limited understanding of genetics. The core assumption that human variations exist was correct, but they hadn't discovered DNA yet and were making assumptions based on Mendelian theories of inheritance.

Here Justin tries to come across as reasonable, and I suspect he sees this as a reasonable claim. But Justin’s framing dramatically understates how wrong pre-WW2 racial theories were, especially those promoted by the Nazis.

Nazi racial theory wasn’t just premature—it was pseudoscience, designed to justify power, conquest, and extermination. It included:

• Ranking “Aryans” as biologically superior to all other races

• Claiming Jews were biologically corrupt, deceitful, and parasitic

• Treating Slavs as subhuman (Untermenschen)

• Promoting forced sterilization and eugenics

None of this followed from evidence. Even at the time, many scientists disagreed or pushed back, especially those in anthropology and emerging genetics. Nazi measurements were total garbage. They used:

• Cranial measurements to estimate intelligence or moral worth

• Facial angles to infer behavior

• Blood purity laws based on crude ancestry guesses

Even with the knowledge available then, these methods were deeply flawed and had no predictive power. They were cherry-picked to fit ideology, not honest attempts at classification.

Yes, DNA hadn’t been discovered yet—but basic population genetics already existed. The idea that complex traits are influenced by many genes—and by environment—was understood in outline.

The Nazis ignored this to push deterministic, binary ideas about “race purity,” which don’t follow from Mendelian inheritance. They didn’t just lack information—they rejected what was known.

Is Universalism an Anachronism?

Justin brings up Universalism:

To hold the claim that universalism is true now would require some sort of human exceptionalism in my opinion.

So to me, universalism is an anachronism. It's a dying theory that won't be around much longer. Also, from what I read on the internet, that seems to be the zeitgeist. Essays like this (https://ladydrummond.substack.com/p/growing-up-anti-white) wouldn't have been written even 10 years ago, and more people are openly discussing the topic.

Problem is that universalism is a moral and political philosophy, not a scientific claim about genetic sameness. Justin is confusing normative ethics with descriptive biology—a common and dangerous category error.

Universalism doesn’t claim that all humans are genetically identical. It says:

All humans are morally equal and deserve equal rights, dignity, and opportunity—regardless of group membership.

That principle is the foundation of:

• Human rights

• Liberal democracy

• Equal protection under the law

• Anti-slavery, anti-segregation, and anti-genocide ethics

So to say universalism is “dying” is effectively to say:

• We should stop treating people as morally equal

• It’s okay to distribute rights or opportunities based on group averages

• Hierarchies of human value are permissible again

That’s not just a “shift in zeitgeist.” That’s a regression toward hierarchical, exclusionary ideologies—often rooted in the very racial theories Justin claims to disavow

The Causes of Racial Disparities

As I like to repeat, I do not entirely rule out that there are racial differences in cognitive ability. My claim is simply that this is implausible. First of all because there is no clear definition of biological races and it is not a concept accepted by most evolutionary biologists. And as I have already discussed in this article given that intelligence is a highly polygenic trait (affected by a large number of genes) there is simply not enough evolutionary time for racial differences to have evolved.

But let me address Justin's point:

If I am right, then whatever moral arguments we make are somewhat pointless. I do acknowledge that environment and history are important factors, but I think they are often used as post hoc explanations for disparities. No doubt some disparities are caused entirely by the environment, but it is that along with genetic factors that causes most of the differences.

First of all I think this is to turn reality completely on its head. Actual history is riddled with examples of how we have used the different conditions people live under as post hoc explanations for disparities. Africa is an excellent example. The underdevelopment of Africa has all through history been used to rationalize racist viewpoints.

But we have solid arguments debunking such claims. I cover many of them in this story:

I show there how climate and geography are the primary reason for why Africa is underdeveloped, not some kind of presumed inferiority of its people.

And as I covered in this story, we already have plenty of research that questions racial discrepancies being caused by genetics:

And we must learn from history. We have kept making these false claims and been proven wrong repeatedly. "Race realists" claimed with absolute certainty that Southern Europeans were less intelligent than Northern Europeans. They had the IQ scores to "prove" it:

Turns out they were wrong. That large difference in IQ score between Northern and Souther Europeans in the 1920s was purely environmental.

Another damaging fact to the idea that IQ differences between blacks and whites are primarily genetic in origin:

During World War I, Army IQ tests were administered to soldiers. White soldiers from Georgia, Arkansas, Kentucky, and Mississippi scored lower on mental tests than black soldiers from Ohio, Illinois, New York and Pennsylvania

– Otto Klineberg, Race Differences, NY: Harper and Brothers, 1935, pp. 183-184.

People who do not know history, geography and society in much detail are prone to jump to conclusions on race. That is why I devout so much of my writing to help people understand how geography and climate has been such a massive factor in what areas develop and which ones don't. You can read my treatment of numerous prosperous cities around the world:

That story covers the many interest unique climate and geographic conditions that provide massive advantages to particular geographic regions. But these advantages change with time. A climate and geographic location which is a great benefit 2000 BC could be a great disadvantage 2000 AD. This is part of the reason why civilizations rise and fall over time.

Many believe culture is an outcome of race but any closer examination show that such beliefs are bonkers:

Self Delusions of "Kind" Racism

All through history the worst kind of racist regimes have been upheld by people who have seen themselves as kind, generous and not hateful. Was Thomas Jefferson a classic foaming at the mouth hateful racist? No, of course not, but he kept 600 slaves. He hunted them down if they tried to flee. He impregnated them whether they wanted it or not. He financially supported crushing of a slave revolt.

So I do not put that much stock in the mannerism of racists. Hence I am critical of this argument by Justin:

I don't have a negative opinion of Black people and I don't believe that traits make any group of people superior. If anything, my belief in human differences has made me more accepting of people. I don't think that intelligence necessarily makes a better person - some of the finest people I've met aren't very smart, and I've worked with some geniuses who were garbage.

You simply cannot say that you do not have "negative opinions" about black people when you deem them as less intelligent and more prone to violence and crime. In our exchange Justin would repeatedly tell me about how much more black on white violence there was in the US, and give me numerous links to horrendous crimes done by black people against whites.

I deeply question somebody suggesting they do not have prejudice against black people when so much of their responses is about convincing me that black people are barbaric and violent.

Saying that dumb people can be nice, is somewhat of a cop out to sugar coat your own prejudice in my humble opinion. It is rather irrelevant when you want the whole structure to change in a way that disadvantages the people you claim to not have prejudice against.

Remember Justin suggested that one of the cities he lived in was much better off from excluding black people. "I got nothing against you but I think it is better that you don't live in my city," is not a very convincing argument.

Justin tells me his ideal:

I want us to create environments that help all people to thrive. I don't think the current system is remotely fair to Black or White people.

That is in fact not very different view from segregationists, apartheid or Nazis. They all tried to sell us on the idea that keeping races apart was the best thing for everyone. Remember Nazis did not originally gas Jews. The mass murder of Jews took 8 years before it became Nazi policy. Before that the Nazis actually cooperated with Zionists to send Jews to Israel. In other words the Nazis were fine with Jews living as long as they did not live in Germany.

American South and South African Apartheid was a different twist. It sold itself on the idea that somehow each race lived in equality, but that if you entered the area of the other race it had to be in a controlled fashion. Much like how Americans gave Native Americans reservations. Look how nice we are, you get your own area where you can do as you like. Never mind that it was always the worst areas. And as soon as any important resource was discovered on native lands the old agreements would be torn up by whites and the native Americans deported to a new dump.

This paternalistic attitude that whites have somehow done all their discrimination for the benefit of the other is of course complete hogwash. The whole "separate but equal" never worked.

I have noticed that the American right has over the years been very good and coopting progressive language to advance racial discrimination. To quote Justin again:

If we set the value of human of human beings as contingent on their traits, then we are setting ourselves up for disaster.

Justin is trying to flip the script and suggest that somehow the progressive ideas around race are somehow discriminatory. It rings hollow when Justin has earlier suggested that a city without blacks is a much more pleasant place. Clearly he is not holding blacks as his equals but as a pest that must be kept at bay.

The progressive view is not that blacks must be equal in mental capacity to whites to have equal value. Rather we are simply observing that the other side is trying to advance racist policies. They seek to justify those racist policies by appealing to the idea that black people are inferior to whites. The "some of my best friends are black" rhetoric isn't going to cover up that fact.

The Path Forward for America

A reoccurring theme among the "race realist" American right is the idea that everything good has been tried and it didn't work so we must revert to segregationist society or apartheid. The latter is never spelled out because everyone knows that is taboo to say today. But that is clearly implied when you suggest a city works really well when black people got kept out.

Justin makes this claim:

Epistemic humility is important, and I've certainly been wrong more than right in my life, but for this issue I would need to see some sort of theory that could explain why universalism could still be possible.

In earlier part of our debate we did go back and forth on whether one has actually done much to raise up black people. To a Scandinavian, such as myself, it is frankly laughable to hear Americans portray their welfare system as generous. It simply isn't.

The US is the only country almost in the world at this point with no national paid maternity leave. Norway introduced that in 1908 while it was still dirty poor. The US in 2025 is one of the richest countries in the world by far.

It still doesn't have any guaranteed paid vacation for its workers. Tens of millions re without health insurance still. Even relatively poor countries still cover all their citizens with health insurance today.

Unemployment benefits tends to be limited and bad. Higher education is not free or cheap. The US is among the worst places when it comes to affording higher education. And there are poor alternatives for e.g. vocational training. In my native Norway e.g. we have great opportunities in high-school for those who are not fond of academic work. They can take vocational training to become carpenters, welders, cooks, electricians and many other professions. The go into apprenticeship and get proper certification of their skills.

Germany has similar kind of system. It is something BMW and Daimler Benz noticed when they came to the US was lacking. They employed high skilled labour in their factories in Germany because they had a system that produced such labour. They factories was organized around that assumption. In the US they had to build up educational facilities that mimicked German high-school to have a way to man their factories.

Basically the US gives very limited choices for success for those who are not from very academic families or who do not have a natural aptitude for academic work.

It doesn't take a genius to put together that this will disadvantage African-Americans. During the time of slavery they were punished and killed for daring to learn to read and write. Denying African-Americans education has a long and ugly history. That may not be the case today but history carries over to the future.

Let me exemplify with the immigrant heavy area I live in Oslo. Many of the parents in this area have little education themselves. It means they often lack a reading culture. Hence they are not reading for their children in early childhood. And they cannot help their own children very well with homework. This is a significant enough problem that we created a homework help center here. Other parents, such as myself, could volunteer to help immigrant kids with homework. I did that for a while. And I can promise you the need was massive. It really required far more time than I was able to supply.

My own kids were far ahead in reading by the time they started school. There is nothing surprising about that. Both me and my wife come from families which strongly embraced reading. My own mother is a journalist who reviewed books, and my father is a teacher. Our house was overflowing with books. I came from a home with parents who absolutely adored books and it meant I had exposure to so many great books and comics as a child.

My wife is much the same. Her mother was a librarian. Our kids got some of the best of children's literature from early age because we had a lot of books we remembered from our own childhood we could pick. We also remember the joy of reading in childhood well enough to identify books we think our children would love.

And I have seen this impact in the neighborhood clearly between kids with parents who love books and those who don't. This is just one example of how the past carries through to the present. My parents did not become book lovers out of the blue, they also had parents who loved books.

The civil rights movement is quite young. It is from the 1960s. There are simply not that many generations to effectuate profound change. And let us also challenge the idea that nothing has changed. A lot has in fact changed despite right-wing America doing its best to sabotage that change.

It was not like after the 1960s African Americans were suddenly treated as equals with equal opportunity. The fight against equality kept going every decade. Ronald Reagan basically ran on a platform of racist dog whistles. One beloved one by racists was the Ronald Reagan myth of the Welfare Queen. From Washington Monthly:

The so-called welfare queen is among the most potent, persistent, and pernicious stereotypes ever deployed in modern politics. Popularized by Ronald Reagan, then weaponized by other conservatives, the welfare queen represents Americans’ ugliest assumptions about who receives public assistance.

Political scientist Anne M. Whitesell argues in a new book, Living Off the Government :

The public identity of the welfare queen—the poor, single African American woman whose poverty was caused by her own laziness and promiscuity—is still the driving force in creating welfare policy,”

So by the 1980s you have very clear political push to exclude black people from benefits. We can also look at the years after the end of segregation of public goods got closed down. For instance public swimming pools all over America got shut down as soon as African Americans were allowed to use them. White Americans did not want to have a public swimming pool if it meant sharing it with African Americans.

There are a lot of stories like this covered in the book "The White Storm: How Racism Poisoned American Democracy" by Swedish journalist Martin Gelin who spent decades in the US.

For me to cover all the ways in which African Americans have been thwarted in America is too much for me to cover in this article. But anyone who actually cares about this issue can find a lot. I would also highly recommend the book Gang Leader for a Day as well as An American Dilemma by Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal. He traveled the US in the 1930s and what is interesting about his book is that so many of the current arguments about race in America was pretty much the same then as today. It was the same idea that African-Americans had equal opportunities and that any disadvantage they experienced was all of their own making.

Anyone should be deeply skeptical of anyone claiming that America has done a great job raising up African Americans or the poor in general. You could also read The Conscience of a Liberal by economist and Nobel laureate Paul Krugman that details a lot of why some kind of social democracy never had a chance in the US. Racism has always been a major hinderance in developing any serious welfare state.

The sorry state of the American "welfare state" was put on full display during the COIVD19 pandemic. In most countries normal assistance and programs kicked in almost automatically as a response. Not so in the US. Republican representatives got questioned about why the various state welfare programs were not actually managing to get aid out. They had to admit publicly that they had deliberately made them complex and difficult to use as to deter people from seeking aid.

The result is that the US had to resort to writing out cheques to everyone in a desperate measure to keep people from starving. Even my wife who hasn't lived in the US in decades got a cheque. It is illustration of the kind of second rate welfare system they US has which really isn't capable of reacting effectively to the needs of people.

And as these Republicans representative begrudgingly had to admit, that is a feature, not a bug.