(((Forward))): Human Biodiversity is "pseudoscientific Alt-Right racism"
There’s a piece of the “alt-right” puzzle of bigotry you need to know more about: “human biodiversity.”
An ideological successor to eugenics, human biodiversity (HBD) is, like eugenics (from the Greek words for “good” and “breeding”) primarily a euphemism. Ostensibly, HBD refers to the scientifically proven (and therefore apolitical) genetic differences between groups of humans. The term fuses biological and liberal language into a benign-sounding neologism, like “neurodiversity,” a key term within the autism rights movement.
But it is just pseudoscientific racism, updated for the Internet age.
“Human biodiversity” appropriates scientific authority by posing as an empirical, rational discourse on the genetically proven physical and mental variation between humans. It uses the language of genetics to underscore, for example, the prevalence of Mongolians in sumo wrestling, the IQ scores of black people or the inbreeding patterns of Ashkenazi Jews. The refrain of HBD bloggers and forum commenters is that the (gene-driven, according to them) dissimilarities they outline are “non-negligible” or “non-trivial” and have, accordingly, social policy implications. Though it has a rational, policy-wonk zing to it, that’s just Internet forum-ese for “you’re genetically distinct from us and should be treated differently.”
Recently, the conservative “journalist” Milo Yiannopoulos boosted awareness of the HBD proponents when he name-checked a couple of HBD gurus in his article “An Establishment Conservative’s Guide to the Alt-Right.” He brought the term human biodiversity — coined by Steve Sailer in the mid-90s — to a wider audience. Sailer, a blogger for several conservative websites with racial preoccupations, including Taki’s Magazine, the Unz Review and VDARE.com, has said of human biodiversity (in an interview with the H.L. Mencken Club, one of 40 hate groups in Pennsylvania) that it’s both a field of study and a political movement, because it has to “fight for its right to exist.”
The other writers in the HBD community are former journalists, science grad students and a lot of comment-section laymen. Sailer, who founded the Human Biodiversity Institute, maintains a blog at the Unz Review, writing about the dating prospects of Asian men and the inadequacies of gay men and lesbians, among other things.
Reddit hosts a human biodiversity forum, though membership is by invitation only, and the site has flagged the forum as racist. A racist Reddit forum called Coontown runs an online resource dump and lexicon called HBD Bibliography, which is linked with a Twitter account of the same name. (A Redditor with the username TheZizekiest posted an exhaustive, three-part rebuke to the sources compiled by HBD Bibliography on Reddit.) Elsewhere on the Internet, a woman calling herself “hbd chick” runs a wide-ranging personal blog on HBD; she seems particularly consumed by the inbreeding habits of Ashkenazi Jews and the genetic makeup of Europeans.
Though many in the HBD community are Internet autodidacts — people with little to no scientific training who spend their free time learning the scientific argot — some are trained scientists with an expertise in animal biology or statistics. One such writer, Razib Khan, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California-Davis’s Department of Animal Science, has been writing about human biodiversity for many years. He briefly had a job at The New York Times as a writer for its Opinion section, before Gawker reported that he’d contributed to the virulently racist Taki’s Magazine and written to VDARE.com, an anti-immigrant website.
(1/2)
