“the particular brand of systemic racism that we are familiar with today is not an inevitable product of human perception […] it is the product of a particular history” – Understanding Race (2022)

I can’t believe this trash was published by the British equivalent of an Ivy League school.

Article Contents:

  1. Introduction
  2. Debunking claims made by ‘Understanding Race’ (2022)
    Claim 1: Human races exist.
    Claim 2: Different (racial or ethnic) groups have different abilities.
    Claim 3: Skin color is a useful feature for defining racial groups.
    Claim 4: The geographical varieties of humankind have deep roots in time.
    Claim 5: Physical differences among people from different areas of the world are biologically meaningless
    Claim 6: We can tell if there are genetic races just by looking at patterns of variation of humans.
    Claim 7: Arguments against the existence of genetic races are semantic.
    Claim 8: Modern genomic techniques (e.g. ADMIXTURE and PCA analysis) clearly show the genetic existence of races.
    Claim 9: Ancestry means race in humans.
  3. Conclusion

1. Introduction

This blog was recently mentioned in a book called ‘Understanding Race‘ (very inappropriate name) as an example of why “scientific racism” is wrong. Apparently, not wanting Whites to be ethnically replaced is pure evil or whatever. The book was written by two Left-Wing academics from the American Museum of Natural History, Rob DeSalle and Ian Tattersall (pictured below), and published last year by the UK’s Cambridge University.

AMNH cucked to BLM mobs during the mostly peaceful Anti-White Revolution of 2020. It also promoted ShutDownSTEM (source).

This pair of activist-academics have been whining about “scientific racism” for a few years now. Their previous book was published by Columbia University, the academic epicenter of pseudoscientific race-denialism and Cultural Marxism, home to Franz Boas, Richard Lewontin, and the Frankfurt School. Apparently, DeSalle is from the AMNH’s Sackler Institute for Comparative Genomics, which was bankrolled by the same Sackler Family that used opioids to genocide Americans. Very dirty money. I didn’t look into Tattersall’s connections but I’m sure they’re just as shady.

I didn’t read their book (I don’t want to buy it), but I was sent screenshots of the final chapter, which summarizes the authors’ arguments. They claim to debunk the following “misconceptions” about race:

  1. Human races exist.
  2. Different (racial or ethnic) groups have different abilities.
  3. Skin color is a useful feature for defining racial groups.
  4. The geographical varieties of humankind have deep roots in time.
  5. Physical differences among people from different areas of the world must mean something biologically.
  6. We can tell if there are genetic races just by looking at patterns of variation of humans.
  7. Arguments against the existence of genetic races are semantic.
  8. Modern genomic techniques (e.g. ADMIXTURE and PCA analysis) clearly show the genetic existence of races.
  9. Ancestry means race in humans.

I’ll counter-debunk all of their bogus claims below.

2. Debunking claims made by ‘Understanding Race’ (2022)

Unfortunately, the authors provided zero citations in this chapter — or anywhere else in their book, judging by their references section, which contained no citation numbers. So, the authors’ claims are essentially baseless, because dumping a bunch of random books in your references section is not a valid form of citation. I’ll debunk this garbage anyway. Claims made by Understanding Race are labeled ‘UR’ and my debunking is labeled ‘TB.’

Claim 1: Human races do not exist

UR:

Race isn’t real because humanity has “awkward complexities.” It is “impossible [to divide] the peoples of the world into four, or five, or even a couple of dozen definable groups” because humanity is “variable in so many different ways that no system depending on defined groups can capture that variability.”

TB:

Leftists are notorious for exaggerating the world’s complexity. They obsessively fragment reality into smaller and smaller pieces, until they’re left with an incoherent jumble of indefinable nothingness. Racial classification is not difficult; these charlatans are just trying to confuse people.

Modern races are defined by differences in key phenotypic traits such as skeletal structure, muscle mass, fat distribution, hair texture, body hair, and pigmentation (hair, eye, skin). There are six “major races” (shown below) among modern humans, which are equivalent to animal subspecies and can be logically subdivided into various “minor races” or “subraces.” This is supported by modern genetic data, centuries of anthropological research, etc. More info and citations later.

UR:

Mixed-race people exist, therefore “categories within the species [are] impossible to define.”

TB:

This is called the “continuum fallacy” and it can be debunked by a five-year-old child. It goes like this: “X and Y are two extremes on a spectrum. There is no clear point at which X becomes Y, therefore, X and Y do not exist.” A color spectrum is shown below. Can you identify blue, green, and red? No, you cannot, because colors do not exist. There is only one color, the rainbow color.

Furthermore, even the most chauvinistic “racial supremacists” do not argue that human races are sharply defined with no gradations or mixed populations — a key feature of the subspecies definition is that they can interbreed. Plus, the fact that mixed-race populations exist at all is evidence that races exist. How can an organism be a mixture of something that does not exist?

UR:

“[Since the Ice Ages, humans have been] interbreeding until the species is one glorious mishmash.”

TB:

Bizarre, fetishistic language. This is not a scientific argument but an ideology-driven perversion. Plus, during the Ice Age, anatomically modern humans interbred with completely different human species (Neanderthals, Denisovans, Homo erectus, unknown ghost hominins, and so on).

So, should we also declare that species do not exist? After all, various animal species can interbreed and produce fertile hybrid offspring (see: prizzly bear, coywolf, etc.). Why don’t we just abolish the entire field of biological taxonomy? Too many fuzzy boundaries. Get rid of it all.

Claim 2: Different (racial or ethnic) groups do not have different abilities

UR:

Although “geographical origin may generally correlate with social or economic disadvantage, and thus with educational or economic achievement” when “nonbiological influences are factored out, the correlation disappears. […] Historical factors, not biological ones” are what is important.

TB:

Typical Leftist ‘blank slate’ mumbo-jumbo: Race is only skin deep, all humans are identical in ability despite their differences in appearance, and the only reason that some races outperform others is due to “oppression” and “racism.” Blah, blah, blah. We’ve heard the same nonsense for decades. No sane person believes it.

I could write about stuff like crime statistics, studies that control for socioeconomic status, and so on, but their claim that “different racial/ethnic groups do not have different abilities” can be effortlessly debunked with a few non-controversial examples of environmental adaptation, as covered in a 2018 study by Ilardo & Nielsen:

  • Arctic peoples, including Siberian Chukchi and Evenks, American Inuits, and Siberian Saami are genetically adapted to live in polar climates. They have increased cold tolerance and are capable of eating a very high-fat diet, based on fish and marine mammals, which impacts their weight, height, etc.
  • The mountain-dwelling Amhara of Ethiopia, Quechua and Aymara of South America, Tibetans and Himalayans of East Asia are all genetically adapted to live at high altitudes. Tibetans, in particular, have a unique genetic adaptation inherited from ancient Denisovans (see: Science 2014).
  • Marine hunter-gatherers of South East Asia are genetically adapted to diving and sea fishing. They are capable of diving to depths of over 100 feet for several minutes.

Lactase persistence (the ability to drink and digest milk as an adult) is another undisputed and non-controverisal example. This adaptation is “common in people of European ancestry as well as some African, Middle Eastern and Southern Asian groups, but is rare or absent” in other racial groups (Itan et al 2010).

Of course, we can discuss all of the “positive stereotypes” and environmentally adaptive quirks in the world. Nobody is “offended” when you say that East Africans dominate Olympic long-distance running (Atlantic 2012) thanks, in part, to their unique genetic traits (Zani et al 2022). Things only get controversial when people discuss the cognitive differences between various racial and ethnic groups. The simple fact is that 84% of all human genes are expressed in the brain (University of Edinburgh 2012) and the morphological differences between races are dwarfed by neurological differences (Wu & Zhang 2011).

Why is this so contentious? Because you can debunk the entire Globalist experiment by pointing out that IQ is 80% genetic (Bouchard 2013), that some human groups are smarter than others (Lynn 2002), and that these factors heavily influence group-level socioeconomic variation.* IQ-denial is the lynchpin of modern blank slateism, which exists for one purpose: Tricking gullible White people into accepting mass migration and multiracialism.

* See: Here, here, here, here, here, etc.

Claim 3: Skin color is not a useful feature for defining racial groups

UR:

Skin pigmentation “is one of the few variations that has a clear adaptive basis, dark pigmentation being hugely advantageous in the tropics (where our species evolved) and mildly disadvantageous at high latitudes.” However, it “doesn’t reliably define any larger groupings within the human species” because similar skin tones “can be arrived at by multiple genomic pathways” and “people with apparently the same skin color may have entirely disparate histories.”

TB:

Nobody defines race by skin color alone; we define it by phenotype, i.e. the sum of all observable characteristics. All taxonomic groups (e.g. species or subspecies) have been defined this way since the days of Aristotle: Organisms can be recognized as “groups” when all members share the same set of distinguishing characteristics (Historia Animalium 322 BC). Skin color is a useful metric, but only as one component of a larger classification system.

That being said, we have only discovered two gene mutations that cause “white” skin (SLC24A5/SLC45A2) and two mutations that cause “black” skin (MFSD12). As far as we know, having white or black skin is physically impossible without these respective gene variants (on top of other skin-lightening and -darkening genes), which are almost entirely restricted to the world’s “white-skinned” and “black-skinned” races, respectively. (See this study or this study for some basic information on pigmentation).

Finally, skin color is the most recognizable phenotype variation in humans and groups have used it to classify and identify one another for thousands of years. For example, the name ‘Ethiopia’ is derived from the ancient Greek term ‘Aithiops’ (Αἰθιοπία), a compound word that literally translates to “burned-face” (from: αἴθω/aitho “I burn,” ὤψ/ops “face”). In other words, Ethiopia means “Land of the Burned-Face People.” Similarly, the ancient Chinese described “Western Barbarian” Indo-Europeans (Yuezhi and Wusun) as having skin that is “reddish-white” and looking “like macaque monkeys” due to their “green eyes and red hair” (see: The Western Regions by Wan Zhen and Book of Han by Yan Shigu).

Claim 4: The geographical varieties of humankind do not have deep roots in time

UR:

Human variation is “within-species” and “within a very young species at that.”

TB:

Nobody has classed human races as separate species since the polygenism debates of the 1800s. Human major races are roughly equivalent to subspecies, defined as:

Two or more populations within the same species that have become physically and behaviorally distinct from one another due to geographic or ecological separation and divergent evolution. Subspecies can successfully interbreed to produce fertile offspring when their territories overlap but generally avoid interbreeding.

So, that is:

  • Geographic or ecological separation
  • Different appearance
  • Different behavior
  • Can interbreed to produce fertile offspring
  • Generally avoid interbreeding

All of these characteristics are clearly applicable to human races. Furthermore, being distinct in just one of these characteristics is enough for some scientists to classify an organism as a distinct subspecies.

UR:

“All biological differences among modern human beings are of extremely recent origin” and “all variations we see outside the continent of Africa are a product of no more than the last 70,000 years.”

TB:

The “age” of a species has no relation to the number of subspecies it diverges into. Some very old species have no subspecies at all (e.g. Greenland sharks, 2 million years old), while some very young species have countless subspecies (most dog breeds originated during the “Victorian era breed explosion” (Parker 2017)). Modern Humans have experienced accelerated evolution and rapid divergence: “human evolution has sped up in the past 40,000 years and has become 100 times faster in the past 5000 years alone” (Science Journal).

Claim 5: Physical differences among people from different areas of the world are biologically meaningless

UR:

“The vast majority of the differences we see among people from different parts of the world” have no “adaptive significance” and have “simply lingered around” because they “don’t cause problems.” They also claim that the variations that do have biological significance cannot be “usefully explained by any concept of ‘race.'”

TB:

This is classic Leftist language: Being as vague and convoluted as possible to intentionally confuse the audience.

Their first argument is that the micro-level differences that distinguish one African from another somehow disprove the macro-level differences that distinguish Africans as a whole from East Asians and Europeans. This is equivalent to arguing that cars and trucks do not exist because a sportscar differs from a taxi. We do not define racial groups (or any taxonomic group, for that matter) by every minute variation, but by the few major distinguishing features.

Their second argument is that any racial phenotype can appear anywhere on the planet at random; it is entirely coincidental that Africans evolved in Africa, Europeans in Europe, and Asians in Asia. In reality, most racially distinguishing characteristics are obvious environmental adaptations and the result of natural selection at some point in time: Skin pigmentation, eye shape, body hair density, bone density, muscle fiber composition, etc. Plus, the “concept of race” simply applies to humanity the same standards of classification that are applied to the rest of the natural world.

There is a reason why Left-Wing charlatans don’t say things in plain English – you’d see through their lies like a pane of glass.

Cars and trucks do not exist. There is only one vehicle, the motorvehicle:

Claim 6: We cannot tell if there are genetic races just by looking at patterns of variation of humans

UR:

Their claim is such obnoxious psychobabble that it isn’t worth typing out. See below screenshot.

TB:

This is known as the “univeriate fallacy.” It’s a standard Left-Wing rhetorical trick whereby they demand univariate solutions to multivariate problems. In layman’s terms, they’re arguing that race doesn’t exist because racial groups cannot be defined by one single trait (e.g. skin tone, eye color, or geographic location).

“Show me the brown eyes race! You can’t? Well, I guess your classifications are invalid – haha! Better luck next time, you Fascist Nazi bigot.”

Left-Wing activist-academics also do this with sex to claim that “gender” is a spectrum: “My feeling is that since there is not one biological parameter that takes over every other parameter, at the end of the day, gender identity seems to be the most reasonable parameter” — ‘Sex Redefined’ (Nature Journal, 2015)

Again, the authors of Understanding Race have phrased this insanely disingenuous argument in the most convoluted way possible just to confuse their audience. Most people will nod along with something that sounds smart, even if they don’t understand it at all.

Claim 7: Arguments for the existence of genetic races are semantic

UR:

The idea that arguments against the existence of race are semantic “neglects the importance of taxonomic thinking and trivializes the science of taxonomy.” They state that “the rules of taxonomy should be followed in any designation of a species, subspecies, or race epithet.”

TB:

This paragraph was particularly absurd because it’s 100% projection. Taxonomy is a science with rules that should be followed, but these crooks haven’t followed any of them. They’ve invented their own arbitrary classification criteria (like “number of races = number of continents” or “race = only skin pigmentation”) and then declared that human racial classification is invalid because races do not fit their ridiculous, fabricated criteria. Their disgraceful book defiles the science of taxonomy.

Claim 8: Modern genomic techniques (e.g. ADMIXTURE and PCA analysis) not do clearly show the genetic existence of races

UR:

“[The claim that PCA and ADMIXTURE show genetic races] is clearly a misuse of these statistical techniques. The misconception conflates the results from genetic or genomic analysis using clustering methods like PCA, STRUCTURE, or tree building as being relevant to testing the hypothesis that races exist in a genetic context. […] More importantly, clustering approaches like STRUCTURE and PCA are best used to visually summarize data and pose new hypotheses, and should not be used to test hypotheses.”

TB:

They’re really clutching at straws with this word salad sophistry. This paragraph may sound smart but, once again, it’s just jargon-riddled gibberish. Let’s break this down sentence-by-sentence…

1. “[The claim that PCA and ADMIXTURE show genetic races] is clearly a misuse of these statistical techniques.”

Translation: “If you get results that we don’t like, it’s because you’re misusing the software.”

2. “[This] misconception conflates the results from genetic or genomic analysis using clustering methods like PCA, STRUCTURE, or tree building as being relevant to testing the hypothesis that races exist in a genetic context.”

Translation: “Genetic testing is not relevant to testing if something exists genetically.”

3. “More importantly, clustering approaches like STRUCTURE and PCA are best used to visually summarize data and pose new hypotheses, and should not be used to test hypotheses.”

Translation: “Data should not be used to test hypotheses.”

Only a lunatic or a liar could write such nonsense. All of the aforementioned genomic techniques (explained in the image below) are perfectly valid and have been used in countless genetic studies to identify human population clusters and their genetic ancestry. Races, subspecies, species, and so on are simply clusters of organisms that descend from the same ancestral populations and share a high level of genetic similarity as a result.

The authors’ ludicrous claims are easily debunked by a few examples of these genomic techniques in action taken from peer-reviewed studies. Even a complete layman can intuitively recognize that the results below accurately map to reality.

Here is a “K=6” admixture analysis of the modern human species (Lazaridis 2014). It divides human ancestry into six main genetic components, which clearly correspond to the six “major races” identified by anthropologists of yore. [Note: See a more detailed breakdown of this study’s admixture analysis in this article].

This principal component analysis (PCA) of modern humans worldwide shows obvious clustering between different regional populations, which correspond closely to racial groups (Haber 2016). Note: This PCA groups populations by region, rather than genetic ancestry (hence some “Near Easterners” cluster with East Africans, and so on).

A PCA of modern West Eurasians reveals ethnic clustering and a clear genetic difference between Europeans and Middle Easterners (Lazaridis 2014).

I could devote an entire article to human principal component and admixture analyses, but how about some data on dogs and other wolf-like canines (vonHoldt 2011)?

Claim 9: Ancestry does not mean “race” in humans

More brain-rotting nonsense. This is like saying “subatomic particles does not mean electrons.” Yeah, no kidding, electrons are a type of subatomic particle. Race is a type of ancestry.

3. Conclusion

I wasn’t going to respond to “Understanding Race” because its arguments are mind-manglingly disingenuous but I thought someone might find this useful. I’ll eventually write a more succinct “debunking race denialism” or “what is race?” article summarizing all key arguments.

I suppose it is important to expose the insane sophistry of modern academia. I have no idea how these people deal with the cognitive dissonance or how they live with themselves after spreading all of these lies. Race-denialism is the foundation of anti-White politics since it is selectively applied to Whites. Black Lives Matter? Totally legit. Stop Asian Hate? Totally legit. Are White people to blame for all of the world’s problems? Of course they are! Should White people continue to exist? Umm… No, actually, because of racism, and anyway, White people are a meaningless social construct, you Nazi bigot.

Claiming that “race isn’t real” but only applying this theory to one race in practice is genocidal rhetoric, and we see the results of this every day. Just last week, a White father of two was murdered by a generic “BIPOC” of indiscernible racial origin who screamed about “White privilege” as he stabbed him to death. In England, where “Understanding Race” was published, 20,000 girls are raped by pedophile gangs every year. Even the Left-Wing British media called it “an epidemic of grooming.” Most of the victims are White, most of the “groomers” are non-White.

Academics have a lot to answer for. They invent all of these evil theories and teach them to our elites, who put them into action. They take their dirty money from people like the Rockefellers — or, in this case, the Sacklers — and spew monstrous bile wrapped in a façade of love, peace, and harmony.