The Right's Obsession With Race and IQ

Donald Trump has a long history of being a racists.  Indeed, as far back as the early 1970's the Trump companies settled a discrimination suit with the Department of Justice over its refusal to rent to black tenants.  Trump may say he "has black friends" but he only likes blacks with lots of money - all the rest he disdains.   From the outset of his campaign launch in 2015, tirades and lies about non-whites has been a hallmark of Trump's campaign.  Worse yet, he has green-lighted racism and made it respectable on the political right - remember his comments about the Charlottesville neo-Nazi rampage - and MAGA cultists regardless of their claims that racism doesn't motivate their support for Trump are lying to both themselves and anyone who questions their allegiance to someone as foul and morally bankrupt as Trump. Throw in racist evangelicals and it is a toxic brew where skin color and religious dogma define who is acceptable and worthy and who is not.  A result is that bogus "race science"  - something common under Jim Crow - is making a comeback and further fueling racial animus. A piece in The Atlantic looks at this discredited justification for bigotry being embraced on the political right and amplified in the face of Kamala Harris' rising poll numbers.  Here are column highlights: 

“Joining us now is Steve Sailer, who I find to be incredibly interesting, and one of the most talented noticers,” Charlie Kirk said on his internet show in October. Kirk, the 30-year-old founder of Turning Point USA, a right-wing youth organization, slowed down as he said “noticers,” looked up at the camera, and coyly flicked his eyebrows.

That term—noticer—has become a thinly veiled shorthand within segments of the right to refer to someone who subscribes to “race science” or “race realism,” the belief that racial inequities are biological. In his interview with Kirk, Sailer noticed that “Blacks tend to commit murder about 10 times as often per capita as whites, and it’s not just all explained by poverty.” . . . He has claimed that Black people tend to have lower IQs than white people (while Asians and Ashkenazi Jews tend to have higher IQs). Sailer says that nurture plays a role, but generally concludes that differences between racial groups exist in large part because of inherent traits.

Sailer has written for decades about race science, but his appearance on Kirk’s show—one of the most popular on the right—came amid a year in which he has earned newfound prominence. In June, he also appeared on Tucker Carlson’s web show.

Sailer’s move into the spotlight, though significant on its own, marks something larger: Race science is on the rise. The far right has long espoused outright racism and anti-Semitism, especially in the Trump era. But more right-wing gatekeepers are shrouding that bigotry in a cloak of objectivity and pseudoscientific justification. They see race not as a social construction, but as something that can be reduced to genetic facts.

Race science is hardly a new idea. During Jim Crow, the idea was used as justification for sterilizing Black people. In Nazi Germany, the veneer of science and biology was used as a pretense for genocide. In recent decades, race science has chugged along in the U.S., mostly subterraneously. It has occasionally popped out into public view, in many cases to be met with swift condemnation. A version of that played out in 1994, when Charles Murray and Richard J. Herrnstein published The Bell Curve, which argues, in part, that race and intelligence are linked.

More recently, after the Unite the Right rally held in Charlottesville, Virginia, early in the Trump presidency, race science was boosted by far-right figures such as Stefan Molyneux and Richard Spencer, though not to the extent or with the conviction it is now.

What’s different now is that race science is moving into the open. Sailer may have once been a fringe oddity as well, but these days his views are broadcast to the millions of people who listen to Kirk and Carlson. Neither Carlson nor Kirk pushed back on Sailer’s views: “Steve, what you’re doing is so important,” Kirk told him.

Other peddlers of race science also have the ear of those in power on the right. Take Nick Fuentes, a 26-year-old white nationalist whose many followers call themselves “Groypers.” He has repeatedly argued that white people are intellectually superior, and praised people who believe in race science. In a single podcast interview in 2022, Fuentes said that “there is a genetic basis” for Black people committing criminal acts and that Black people are “more antisocial and have higher incidences of sociopathy and on average a lower IQ.” . . . . He has also made inroads with elected Republicans; in 2022, Fuentes dined with Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago.

Like Fuentes, Bronze Age Pervert, a prominent far-right influencer on X who has dabbled with race science, is especially popular with young conservatives. His book, Bronze Age Mindset, reportedly became a popular read among congressional and White House staffers during the Trump administration. Much of his message essentially boils down to this: Some people are better than others, there is a natural order, and Black people are definitely at or near the bottom of it.

The gospel of race science has not fully caught on with the broader MAGA masses yet, but you can see how it’s starting to trickle out. Race science is wrapped up in the right’s attack on Kamala Harris as the “DEI candidate.” The implication is that Harris’s success can only be attributed to her race and gender, not her intellect or experience.

Attempts to legitimize racial animus have a clear purpose. Even though racism persists in the U.S., overt racism is still extremely unpopular. Attempts to advance racist beliefs have to work within that paradigm. Trump’s Muslim ban was racist, but it hid under justifications of national security and counterterrorism. Trump’s attempts to stake his claim as a “law and order” candidate are a revival of Richard Nixon’s similar strategy in the 1960s to energize racist voters without being racist out loud. When Trump has accidentally pierced the veil, as he did when he referred to predominantly Black nations as “shithole countries,” he has tried to deny having said so in the first place. Race science is used as a crowbar to try to overturn the idea that racism is bigoted. Instead, its adherents insist, they are simply acknowledging a cold, hard truth about the world.

The allure of a supposed truth of racial statistics is about more than data, of course. For certain white people, it can be appealing to believe that you have been shut out by a “system that doesn’t recognize your genius, because it’s set to the demands of the grubby many,” as the conservative thinker Sohrab Ahmari, who has written about the creeping eugenic tendencies of right-wing youth, told me. DEI measures in the workplace may not be why a white person hasn’t succeeded in their career, but they become easy scapegoats. This feeling of racial aggrievement can fester at a time when the cost of housing, food, and health care have all hit new highs relative to income. Economic vulnerability helps keep ideas like race science fertile.

What makes the return of race science such a problem is that once the logic has taken hold, it is hard to root out: The natural order has already been settled. The poor are dysgenic and disgusting. The rich are heroic and smart. Everything is in its place.