If You Were to Say "White People Have Good Genes," Yes, That Would Be Racist!
Deep Dives
Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:
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Heritability
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The article centers on the distinction between individual genetic influence and group genetic claims. Understanding heritability—the proportion of phenotypic variation attributable to genetic variation—is essential for grasping why individual genetic advantages don't translate to group-level claims about races.
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Human genetic variation
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The article discusses how genetic differences work at individual versus population levels, mentioning allele frequencies, population genetics, and why racial categories don't map cleanly onto genetic groupings. This Wikipedia article provides the scientific foundation for those claims.
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Scientific racism
1 min read
The author explicitly argues that claims like 'white people have good genes' constitute racism rooted in biological hierarchy. This article provides historical context on how such claims have been used pseudoscientifically, helping readers understand what the author is arguing against.
Longtime readers are aware that I have had to wrestle with the distinction between genetic influence on individuals and genetic influence on groups, such as racial groups or sexes, ever since publication of my 2020 book The Cult of Smart. The book argues that our educational discourse fails in part because we refuse to accept that there are genetic influences on intellectual ability and thus on academic outcomes. As I said at the time, I was moved to write it in part because I was frustrated by how discussion of the racial achievement gap dominated education research, policy, and rhetoric; an early working title, in fact, was After the Achievement Gap. It seemed and seems to me that this fixation could eventually lead us to a future where we achieve racial proportionality in educational outcomes and yet still have vast numbers of failing students, just without obvious racial gaps. For those failing students, the elimination of said gaps would not be of much comfort. And yet my experience doing education research and coursework in grad school showed that the whole apparatus funneled attention back to race again and again.
My book was therefore an argument for focusing on individual educational differences, not genetic. I don’t, as it happens, think that the racial achievement gap is genetic in origin, and the book said so. I’m of course not suggesting that no group differences have genetic influence; skin color is a paradigmatic case of there being obvious differences in environmental pressures (UV index) leading to different adaptations (differing average levels of melanin) that are passed down through biological parentage. I don’t think it’s true, though, that our perceived educational gaps are the result of genetic factors, but rather of a vast number of environmental, economic, and social influences that are each of very small effect. (Which is why individual variables and interventions so rarely seem to matter, in the research record, and also why the problem is so difficult to solve.) I’m not here to debate that topic today - I don’t have the rest of my life - but to point out the senselessness of mistaking the individual claim for the group.
Alas….Unsurprisingly, the usual suspects declared that the book was making the exact argument it was not making and had the exact focus it did not have. Mostly this was just dishonesty and petty personal politics regarding a
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