I think one reason for that is that it's such a nuclear topic in terms of assassinating character that very few that aren't explicitly racist will decide it is worth even inquiring.
But if you want names I don't think Noah Carl and Nathan Cofnas are explicitly racist.
I consider myself lucky in having had a mother who, unlike many other people I’ve met over my lifetime, did not even subtly express prejudiced or disdainful sentiments about people of other races and cultures. On the contrary, she, though being of Croatian heritage, openly enjoyed watching/listening to the Middle Eastern and Indian subcontinental dancers and musicians on the multicultural channel.
Most memorable for me was being emphatically told at a very young and therefore impressionable age by her about the exceptionally kind and caring nature of our Black family doctor. I believe that in doing so she had a positive and lasting effect on me.
Racism or racist sentiment is typically environmentally developed/acquired during childhood, often enough even passed down generationally, if not also genetically. Especially if it’s deliberate, rearing one’s very impressionable young children in such an environment of baseless contempt and overt bigotry amounts to a formidable form of child abuse.
If racists won’t do it for plain moral reasons, they then should do their own children a big favor by NOT passing down onto them such destructive anti-social/-societal sentiments and perceptions (including stereotypes and ‘humor’), since such rearing can readily make life much harder for those children.
It fails to prepare them for the practical reality of an increasingly diverse and populous society and workplace. It also makes it so much less likely those children will be emotionally content or preferably harmonious with their multicultural and multi-ethnic/-racial surroundings.
Children reared into their adolescence and, by extension, young adulthood this way can find themselves seemingly always feeling angry yet not really knowing exactly at what. They also may feel self-compelled to move to another part of the land, where their own ethnicity/race predominates, preferably overwhelmingly so.
This serious social/societal problem can/should be proactively prevented by allowing preferably-all young children to become accustomed to other races/cultures/faiths, etcetera, in a harmoniously positive manner.
Thanks for sharing your story. I had a bit of unique childhood in that regard as well since my father was a teacher in Uganda and spent a lot of time traveling around Africa in his youth. So I grew up with a house full of shields, spears and instruments from Africa as well as stories and pictures. I think it is part of that Norwegian explorer tradition. Everyone has that urge to go out, travel and see the world after generations of people who were sailors on all the seven seas.
Anyway I like to possibly make a slightly provocative counter point. Sorry, I just like to challenge everyone a bit even people I feel most kinship with.
Thing is that people of a different race might sometimes be total assholes. Not for genetic reasons but cultural. If you grow up with much worse material conditions. Worse opportunities etc you may end up more volatile. More violent, aggressive and less intelligent. That is the power of environment. We may on average all have the same potential in our genes but we are not all given the same environment. Some of us get more lucky than others.
Now, why do I say this? Because I want people to not loose faith because they get bad experiences with some people who look different. I think if we preach a very rosy picture of all people in the world and when people actually hit reality and it doesn't look so pretty they can become disillusioned and totally flip ideology. I have seen that several times before.
Make take is basically: People that look different from you can in fact be nasty to you. But try to keep in mind that this is most likely the circumstances they grew up under and not a permanent condition. Believe in the ability of long term change. If it is not a biological phenomenon, then by improving the environment of marginalized people we can also change how they are. How they behave and succeed in society.
Basically if you avoid some minority gangs late at night that doesn't mean you are racist. Racism would mean you think those people can never change because of their bloodline or skin color.
All I am saying is don't expect perfection from people. People of all sorts of backgrounds are along different paths and may not all have reached the same level of prosperity and opportunity... yet.
Thanks for the interesting reply. ... As individuals we can resist flawed yet normalized human/societal nature thus behavior; and if enough people do this and perform truly humane acts, positive change on a large(r) scale may result.
Perhaps somewhat relevant to this are the words of American sociologist Stanley Milgram, of Obedience Experiments fame/infamy: “It may be that we are puppets — puppets controlled by the strings of society. But at least we are puppets with perception [and] awareness. And perhaps our awareness is the first step to our liberation.”
... Still, it could be that the human race so desperately needs a unifying fate-determining common cause, that an Earth-impacting asteroid threat or, better yet, a vicious extraterrestrial attack is what we have to collectively brutally endure in order to survive the longer term from ourselves.
Humanity would all unite for the first time ever to defend against, attack and defeat the humanicidal multi-tentacled ETs, the latter needing to be an even greater nemesis than our own formidably divisive politics and perceptions of differences, both real and perceived — especially those involving race and nationality.
During this much-needed human alliance, we’d be forced to work closely side-by-side together and experience thus witness just how humanly similar we are in the ways that really count. [Then again, I was told that one or more human parties might actually attempt to forge an alliance with the ETs to better their own chances for survival, thus indicating that our deficient human condition may be even worse than I had originally thought.]
Yet, maybe some five or more decades later when all traces of the nightmarish ET invasion are gone, we'll inevitably revert to those same politics to which we humans seem so collectively hopelessly prone — including those of scale: the intercontinental, international, national, provincial or state, regional and municipal. And again we slide downwards.
For sure! In my native Norway we saw that during Nazi occupation. Before the war the left and right in Norway was very divided and in serious conflict with each other. During the war people found themselves working together with political opponents against the Nazis.
After the war it made it possible for the left and right to get along much better. I have read similar things about Ukraine, that it was a lot more divided country before the war. Now Ukraine has developed a very strong sense of purpose and unity. Although it is very sad that so much horror should be brought on them to achieve that.
There may be peace some time, but the effects of the war will linger on in people's memory. The people who injured, family members killed or raped.
Nazi occupation of Norway was much less brutal, but the hatred of Germans remained for a very long time. I still felt that growing up in the 1980s. I kind of made a point of not having ill will towards Germans because I don't think people can keep being judged for their ancestors.
You know kids didn't know that a German was a human being. Many kids thought based on how grownups talked about Germans that they were a kind of dangerous animal.
Excellent article! I love that you included links to your other articles on the subject too.
I doubt this kind of article itself will change any racist's mind directly, but giving anti-racists tools to combat ignorance and disinformation might just make a difference in the long run.
Thanks, that is exactly what I want to achieve, help arm fellow left-wingers with arguments. I used to be quite far out on the right, and one of the reasons for that is that I am a kind of technical detail oriented person who studied physics, chemistry, engineering etc.
What gave me a negative perspective on the left early on was that I felt the arguments were too emotional and feelings oriented. It took me a while to realize that the right wasn't really any better. It is just different emotions.
And I came to realize that there is a lot of truth behind what many people intuit, even if they cannot articulate it perfectly. I think many people can sense or understand at an intuitive level quite well that a lot of the racism stuff doesn't make sense. But they cannot always spell it out in detail.
I really want to help people be able to spell out in detail what they already know in an intuitive sense.
We got to make sure that in any debate, it is made clear that it is the right who are driven primarily by emotions and feelings rather than actual facts.
Mind you I am not opposed to feelings playing a role. There is a lot of truth there, but we need some hard facts too to back those feelings up.
I love your writing style: factual, open-minded, scientific. As for discussions, in my experience people are often talking about different things completely, their perception of reality based upon their personal experiences, biases and indeed emotions. I often find it helpful to think through the logical consequences of opinions. In the case of racism, they are pretty obvious (e.g. slavery, WWII). I doubt many right wing voters actually want those consequences. So a useful framework is short term versus long term. And like you often say, a rudimental knowledge of history is very important!
No, why? Those numbers give reason to think environment plays a huge role. What about those numbers make you think it is mostly genetic? Walk me through your thinking.
The frame is that: children will get either equal(more or less) or less than their parents but the general genetic ceiling is their parents IQ[if the parents were kept in perfect least restrictive environement].
In low SES setup parents and environemnts are doing a lot of random destructive/restrictive things (abusive parenting/exposure to lead/weird chemicals whatnot), so outcome differs.
High SES environment(more likely to also have parents who were high SES) would more likely allow whatever built in to go where it wants to be.
The numebrs seem to confirm that theory that heritability is more in high-SES environment.
But this applies to ANYTHING. In a very optimal environment genes will dominate for almost any traits. That is like saying water is wet.
That does not mean IQ variations we see around the world and between population are mostly genetic. As that would assume optimal environments everywhere, which is just not the case.
Then I guess you'd be open to the possibility of hereditary racial or race-like grouping IQ difference showing up as the world becomes more fair and equal. (similar to comparing high SES black vs white IQ now for example) I got a different impression reading the article initially.
Sure, but I just don't think that is what we are going to see. Everything we know thus far points to the fact that the opposite will happen. Race differences in IQ measurements will narrow relative to what they are today.
Today so much difference is created due to significant environmental differences. Logically speaking there is not good reason to assume they will stay fixed or expand. Most likely they will shrink.
The white-black gap in the US e.g. has been shrinking steadily, and the IQ score of Africans in Africa is narrowing with relation to Europe.
The previous gap of around 25-30 IQ points between Northern and Southern Europe has completely disappeared.
In 1917 Northern blacks outperformed white Southerners on IQ scores, showing the impact of environment on IQ scores.
I kinda agree with your prediction but not really. The problem is with how "race" is recognized socially is a jumbled mess of a lot of genetic heritage, it's not specific enough. So it's probably going to more or less average out as effects of racism and other inequalities die off.
But if the genetic distances were well mapped out to create groups and then high SES twin study and whatnot are done on them, there could be persistent difference in IQ.
But the finding doesn't say that in low-SES setup, the children are necessarily lower IQ than their parents. It says that very little of the variation is explained by their parents, which can also be above their parents
True. There I was trying to imagine parents who themselves grew up high SES and then their children were raised in low SES, children's IQ would be about equal or less than their parents.
Heritability is not about assigning percentages of a person’s IQ to genes vs. environment. It’s a measure of how much variation in IQ across a population is associated with genetic variation — and that proportion changes depending on the environment. So, moving from high to low SES changes how genes express, not whether genes ‘stop contributing’
Watching Trump and his cronies, there's no question which race has the lowest IQ.
I'm a white male with a Masters degree, so I do believe I'm allowed to say that.
I think the most discrediting thing about the vast majority of race realists is that almost all are clearly and explicitly racist to begin with.
I think one reason for that is that it's such a nuclear topic in terms of assassinating character that very few that aren't explicitly racist will decide it is worth even inquiring.
But if you want names I don't think Noah Carl and Nathan Cofnas are explicitly racist.
I consider myself lucky in having had a mother who, unlike many other people I’ve met over my lifetime, did not even subtly express prejudiced or disdainful sentiments about people of other races and cultures. On the contrary, she, though being of Croatian heritage, openly enjoyed watching/listening to the Middle Eastern and Indian subcontinental dancers and musicians on the multicultural channel.
Most memorable for me was being emphatically told at a very young and therefore impressionable age by her about the exceptionally kind and caring nature of our Black family doctor. I believe that in doing so she had a positive and lasting effect on me.
Racism or racist sentiment is typically environmentally developed/acquired during childhood, often enough even passed down generationally, if not also genetically. Especially if it’s deliberate, rearing one’s very impressionable young children in such an environment of baseless contempt and overt bigotry amounts to a formidable form of child abuse.
If racists won’t do it for plain moral reasons, they then should do their own children a big favor by NOT passing down onto them such destructive anti-social/-societal sentiments and perceptions (including stereotypes and ‘humor’), since such rearing can readily make life much harder for those children.
It fails to prepare them for the practical reality of an increasingly diverse and populous society and workplace. It also makes it so much less likely those children will be emotionally content or preferably harmonious with their multicultural and multi-ethnic/-racial surroundings.
Children reared into their adolescence and, by extension, young adulthood this way can find themselves seemingly always feeling angry yet not really knowing exactly at what. They also may feel self-compelled to move to another part of the land, where their own ethnicity/race predominates, preferably overwhelmingly so.
This serious social/societal problem can/should be proactively prevented by allowing preferably-all young children to become accustomed to other races/cultures/faiths, etcetera, in a harmoniously positive manner.
Thanks for sharing your story. I had a bit of unique childhood in that regard as well since my father was a teacher in Uganda and spent a lot of time traveling around Africa in his youth. So I grew up with a house full of shields, spears and instruments from Africa as well as stories and pictures. I think it is part of that Norwegian explorer tradition. Everyone has that urge to go out, travel and see the world after generations of people who were sailors on all the seven seas.
Anyway I like to possibly make a slightly provocative counter point. Sorry, I just like to challenge everyone a bit even people I feel most kinship with.
Thing is that people of a different race might sometimes be total assholes. Not for genetic reasons but cultural. If you grow up with much worse material conditions. Worse opportunities etc you may end up more volatile. More violent, aggressive and less intelligent. That is the power of environment. We may on average all have the same potential in our genes but we are not all given the same environment. Some of us get more lucky than others.
Now, why do I say this? Because I want people to not loose faith because they get bad experiences with some people who look different. I think if we preach a very rosy picture of all people in the world and when people actually hit reality and it doesn't look so pretty they can become disillusioned and totally flip ideology. I have seen that several times before.
Make take is basically: People that look different from you can in fact be nasty to you. But try to keep in mind that this is most likely the circumstances they grew up under and not a permanent condition. Believe in the ability of long term change. If it is not a biological phenomenon, then by improving the environment of marginalized people we can also change how they are. How they behave and succeed in society.
Basically if you avoid some minority gangs late at night that doesn't mean you are racist. Racism would mean you think those people can never change because of their bloodline or skin color.
All I am saying is don't expect perfection from people. People of all sorts of backgrounds are along different paths and may not all have reached the same level of prosperity and opportunity... yet.
Thanks for the interesting reply. ... As individuals we can resist flawed yet normalized human/societal nature thus behavior; and if enough people do this and perform truly humane acts, positive change on a large(r) scale may result.
Perhaps somewhat relevant to this are the words of American sociologist Stanley Milgram, of Obedience Experiments fame/infamy: “It may be that we are puppets — puppets controlled by the strings of society. But at least we are puppets with perception [and] awareness. And perhaps our awareness is the first step to our liberation.”
... Still, it could be that the human race so desperately needs a unifying fate-determining common cause, that an Earth-impacting asteroid threat or, better yet, a vicious extraterrestrial attack is what we have to collectively brutally endure in order to survive the longer term from ourselves.
Humanity would all unite for the first time ever to defend against, attack and defeat the humanicidal multi-tentacled ETs, the latter needing to be an even greater nemesis than our own formidably divisive politics and perceptions of differences, both real and perceived — especially those involving race and nationality.
During this much-needed human alliance, we’d be forced to work closely side-by-side together and experience thus witness just how humanly similar we are in the ways that really count. [Then again, I was told that one or more human parties might actually attempt to forge an alliance with the ETs to better their own chances for survival, thus indicating that our deficient human condition may be even worse than I had originally thought.]
Yet, maybe some five or more decades later when all traces of the nightmarish ET invasion are gone, we'll inevitably revert to those same politics to which we humans seem so collectively hopelessly prone — including those of scale: the intercontinental, international, national, provincial or state, regional and municipal. And again we slide downwards.
For sure! In my native Norway we saw that during Nazi occupation. Before the war the left and right in Norway was very divided and in serious conflict with each other. During the war people found themselves working together with political opponents against the Nazis.
After the war it made it possible for the left and right to get along much better. I have read similar things about Ukraine, that it was a lot more divided country before the war. Now Ukraine has developed a very strong sense of purpose and unity. Although it is very sad that so much horror should be brought on them to achieve that.
There may be peace some time, but the effects of the war will linger on in people's memory. The people who injured, family members killed or raped.
Nazi occupation of Norway was much less brutal, but the hatred of Germans remained for a very long time. I still felt that growing up in the 1980s. I kind of made a point of not having ill will towards Germans because I don't think people can keep being judged for their ancestors.
You know kids didn't know that a German was a human being. Many kids thought based on how grownups talked about Germans that they were a kind of dangerous animal.
Excellent article! I love that you included links to your other articles on the subject too.
I doubt this kind of article itself will change any racist's mind directly, but giving anti-racists tools to combat ignorance and disinformation might just make a difference in the long run.
Thanks, that is exactly what I want to achieve, help arm fellow left-wingers with arguments. I used to be quite far out on the right, and one of the reasons for that is that I am a kind of technical detail oriented person who studied physics, chemistry, engineering etc.
What gave me a negative perspective on the left early on was that I felt the arguments were too emotional and feelings oriented. It took me a while to realize that the right wasn't really any better. It is just different emotions.
And I came to realize that there is a lot of truth behind what many people intuit, even if they cannot articulate it perfectly. I think many people can sense or understand at an intuitive level quite well that a lot of the racism stuff doesn't make sense. But they cannot always spell it out in detail.
I really want to help people be able to spell out in detail what they already know in an intuitive sense.
We got to make sure that in any debate, it is made clear that it is the right who are driven primarily by emotions and feelings rather than actual facts.
Mind you I am not opposed to feelings playing a role. There is a lot of truth there, but we need some hard facts too to back those feelings up.
I love your writing style: factual, open-minded, scientific. As for discussions, in my experience people are often talking about different things completely, their perception of reality based upon their personal experiences, biases and indeed emotions. I often find it helpful to think through the logical consequences of opinions. In the case of racism, they are pretty obvious (e.g. slavery, WWII). I doubt many right wing voters actually want those consequences. So a useful framework is short term versus long term. And like you often say, a rudimental knowledge of history is very important!
I've written a critique here:
https://jewamongyou.com/2025/05/21/iq-race-and-racism/
> High-SES children: 0.72 heritability, shared environment 0.15
> Low-SES children: 0.10 heritability, shared environment 0.58
This seems like a good reason to think it's mostly genetics, I didn't get why you dismissed it.
No, why? Those numbers give reason to think environment plays a huge role. What about those numbers make you think it is mostly genetic? Walk me through your thinking.
The frame is that: children will get either equal(more or less) or less than their parents but the general genetic ceiling is their parents IQ[if the parents were kept in perfect least restrictive environement].
In low SES setup parents and environemnts are doing a lot of random destructive/restrictive things (abusive parenting/exposure to lead/weird chemicals whatnot), so outcome differs.
High SES environment(more likely to also have parents who were high SES) would more likely allow whatever built in to go where it wants to be.
The numebrs seem to confirm that theory that heritability is more in high-SES environment.
But this applies to ANYTHING. In a very optimal environment genes will dominate for almost any traits. That is like saying water is wet.
That does not mean IQ variations we see around the world and between population are mostly genetic. As that would assume optimal environments everywhere, which is just not the case.
Then I guess you'd be open to the possibility of hereditary racial or race-like grouping IQ difference showing up as the world becomes more fair and equal. (similar to comparing high SES black vs white IQ now for example) I got a different impression reading the article initially.
Sure, but I just don't think that is what we are going to see. Everything we know thus far points to the fact that the opposite will happen. Race differences in IQ measurements will narrow relative to what they are today.
Today so much difference is created due to significant environmental differences. Logically speaking there is not good reason to assume they will stay fixed or expand. Most likely they will shrink.
The white-black gap in the US e.g. has been shrinking steadily, and the IQ score of Africans in Africa is narrowing with relation to Europe.
The previous gap of around 25-30 IQ points between Northern and Southern Europe has completely disappeared.
In 1917 Northern blacks outperformed white Southerners on IQ scores, showing the impact of environment on IQ scores.
I kinda agree with your prediction but not really. The problem is with how "race" is recognized socially is a jumbled mess of a lot of genetic heritage, it's not specific enough. So it's probably going to more or less average out as effects of racism and other inequalities die off.
But if the genetic distances were well mapped out to create groups and then high SES twin study and whatnot are done on them, there could be persistent difference in IQ.
But the finding doesn't say that in low-SES setup, the children are necessarily lower IQ than their parents. It says that very little of the variation is explained by their parents, which can also be above their parents
True. There I was trying to imagine parents who themselves grew up high SES and then their children were raised in low SES, children's IQ would be about equal or less than their parents.
Heritability is not about assigning percentages of a person’s IQ to genes vs. environment. It’s a measure of how much variation in IQ across a population is associated with genetic variation — and that proportion changes depending on the environment. So, moving from high to low SES changes how genes express, not whether genes ‘stop contributing’