Frequently Asked Questions About Race

A dialogue about controversial topics

What is a race?

A race is a subspecies of humans, who differ genetically from others due to geographic isolation creating, over generations, distinct patterns of genotypic frequency and collections of traits which mark these individual races out as unique from others.

Or, in simpler terms, a race is a really big extended family of families with traits and other things in common just like your own family.

What is an ethnicity?

Within races, there are further subcategories of ethnic groups with even smaller genetic variation. Although ethnicity was historically defined as a subset of race, marking it a biological category, it is now typically used as a term distinct from race, comprising both a cultural and biological component; ethnic groups typically have a sense of shared kinship and culture.

What is a Nation?

Just as race and ethnicity have been historically conflated, so have ethnic group and nation. A nation typically possesses a more self-conscious, politicised identity – having a nationalism and a claim to sovereignty alongside their sense of relatedness. Nations can also be formed from multiple ethnic groups, a process in which ethnic distinctions wane as they adopt a shared national identity. A nation not only has a sense of relatedness, but a shared history and political unity. So a nation is a politicised, self-conscious community of shared origin.

What is Nationalism?

Nationalism is a much more contested idea than ethnicity.  Nationalism as a political ideology asserts that the sovereignty of nations should be a guiding moral principle in politics. This abstract understanding of nationalism was only popularised after the 18th century. Nationalism, as it is more commonly used, refers to the more particularist claim of a national group for sovereignty or recognition as a nation-state, or more generally a politics that is based around loyalty to a nation. Often, sociologists will confuse debate around this by pointing to the recency of the idea of universal nationalism to say the latter, more particularist nationalism, is also a recent invention, though the historical record says otherwise.

Have a read of how this particularist kind of nationalism manifested in pre-modern states in my essay on ethnopolitics in the Roman Empire.

What is a nation-state?
A nation-state is a state that identifies itself with one particular nation, and whose sovereignty is seen to rest in representing the will of this nation. Its people are seen not as subjects but as a historically bound collective represented in the state.

But we’re all one race, the human race!

The concept of subspecies is not controversial in genetic science. It would be extraordinary if homo sapiens had not developed distinct genetic clusters after millennia of geographic isolation. Indeed we can easily identify these clusters genetically, and they match up remarkably well to what has historically been understood as the races of the world prior to genetic science. We all recognise these differences intuitively: we know Joe Biden is White and Kanye West is Black. New immigrants who come to the West easily intuit who is White, Black, Arab etc.

But what about mixed race people? Aren’t there lots of people who don’t fit into any race?

Not only are there individuals who do not neatly fit into one race, there are entire groups! So-called Mestizos in Latin America are a mix of Native American and European ancestry. Ashkenazi Jews originate in the Middle East, but have a lot of European admixture and often display very distinctive European features. But these cases don’t disprove the existence of race. They are hybrids of two distinct races and may develop into a fully distinct race with sufficient geographical and cultural separation. For a mixed race individual, the same is true. Over a generation or two of breeding within one race their grandchildren would be hardly distinguishable from the rest of that race. It would be fallacious to think that edge cases of individuals who fall between clearly distinct genetic clusters mean that those clusters do not exist. In fact, that people can even point to “edge cases” itself betrays the recognition of distinct races into which such people can not be easily sorted.

What races are there?

The anthropologist Charles S. Coon identified twelve distinct races in his Races: A Study of Race Formation in Man. Dr. Edward Dutton calls these the twelve races of classical anthropology¹, and they match up remarkably well to later developments in our knowledge of genetics. These are:

1. Sub-Saharan Africans

2. Northeast Asians

3. Europeans

4. South Asians

5. Southeast Asians

6. North Africans and Middle Easterners

7. Native Americans

8. Arctic Peoples

9. Pacific Islanders

10. Australian Aboriginals

11. Bushmen

12. Pygmies

I’m skeptical of these categories. Who exactly is included in White? How light does their skin have to be? I have a friend from Iran with light features, is he White?

White just refers to people of European descent – the European race. It isn’t merely a description of skin colour. So Italians, French, and Germans are all White, but Persians and Arabs are not, regardless of differences in complexion. The easiest way to visualise this is to look at scatter plots generated from the application of principal component analysis (PCA) to human genetic clusters. This is a statistical procedure that allows us to identify and visualise patterns of variability within a large dataset on a simple two dimensional graph:

As you can see, we can identify distinct ethnic groups of shared ancestry. There is also a larger cluster of European or White groups, noticeably distinct from Middle Eastern ethnic groups. While you can find some “white” looking people outside European ethnic groups, they would not be included in this White genetic cluster. Of course, this genetic mapping alone does not capture what it means to be White, Europeans have a shared history and many shared cultural practices which mark them as distinct from other racial groups. But this is not just an “imagined community”, it maps on to an objective genetic reality.

So are Italians, Slavs, Irish people White?

Yes, all those groups fall into this larger European genetic cluster.

My college professor told me there was a time when Italians and Irish weren’t considered White. This shows how amorphous the term is. Maybe we will eventually include other groups that we don’t think of as White now.

It’s worth noting that many of the narratives people accept on this topic came from the highly ideological field of Whiteness studies. The book that really ignited the “Irish weren’t White” narrative, for example, was Noel Ignatiev’s How the Irish Became White. Harvard professor Ignatiev was editor of the journal Race Traitor, whose stated goal was to “abolish the white race.” The Whiteness studies narrative is that “Whiteness” is an oppressive, racist social construct, and up to the 20th Century European ethnic groups like the Italians and Irish weren’t admitted into the fiction of the White race. Only when they learned to hate Black people and adopt the colonial, supremacist ideology of Whiteness did American WASPs allow them entry to the club, and by extension into the ruling, White supremacist caste of the United States.

This doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. While it is true that ethnic identity was much stronger in America when these groups were first emigrating there, Irish and Italians had no problems being accepted to the US as fellow European stock. The first citizenship law of the United States, passed in 1790, limited naturalisation to “free white persons”, and immigration laws were similarly designed to keep the country White until they were repealed in the 1960s. Neither Irish nor Italians were considered as distinct for laws passed banning racial intermarriage, or for any other kind of official segregation. There was no question of barring Italians and Irish from White-only labour unions. While interracial marriage was highly taboo right up to the mid-20th Century in the United States, there wasn’t a similar taboo against WASPs or Germans marrying Irish or Italian-Americans. This isn’t to say there wasn’t distinction and often enmity between these different European ethnic groups within the US – there was – but there was never a sense that any of these groups were a racial other like Blacks or Asians.

English and Irish people didn’t see themselves as the same race when they were in conflict for centuries, or Croatians and Serbians, or French and Germans…

Acknowledging the reality of race does not undermine the reality of distinct ethnic groups. It is true that Europe has a long, bloody history of ethnic conflict. This just underscores how important it is to take group identity, in the form of both race and ethnicity, into account when we look at politics.

One of the great things about Europe is its cultural and ethnic diversity. Part of what determines the importance of identity is proximity to other groups. The religious differences between Catholic Croatians and Orthodox Serbs became much more important when those two groups were in ethnic conflict. For a 17th Century French commoner who had never travelled more than a few miles outside his birthplace, his French identity would be less important than his local and regional identity. When France was on a European stage in competition with other large European nations, French identity became more important to people in France. Similarly, White racial identity became far more relevant to Europeans when they migrated to new world countries like the United States and were in contact with other races.

If racial and ethnic identity are both real, then what are White people in America, Canada or Australia? Many Americans I know have ancestry that’s a mix of European ethnicities. Should they just pick one to identify with?

It would seem a bit silly if someone whose family had been in America for three centuries claimed to be a German nationalist on the basis of his German ancestry. Though European immigrants had a strong ethnic identity when they emigrated to the new world, this has tended to dissipate over generations as their children and grandchildren lose connection to their parents’ country of origin. Intermarriage is obviously common as well – no one in Australia is really concerned if the person they are having children with is more Irish or English.

Even if individuals in these countries still identify with their particular country of ancestral origin, this isn’t happening on any politically relevant scale. Whites in the new world become, over generations, White. Someone in America or Canada can claim to be Croatian, but they probably have a lot more in common with the other White people in their country than with anyone in Croatia. Not for any of the reasons Whiteness studies professors tell us – about being accepted into hierarchies of dominance or adopting the ideology of White supremacy – but because without the separation of national borders and culture, Europeans are too racially similar to maintain their distinctness over generations. The same has not been true between races.

So are Whites in countries like America and Canada just generic Whites without an ethnic identity?

Certainly not! White Americans are not the same people as White Australians or the Québécois. Not only are they separated by thousands of miles, but they have unique histories, customs and even language. White Australians are neither generic White people nor part of a civic identity of Australia without a racial or ethnic component. They are White Australians, a unique ethnic group and the state-forming people of the nation of Australia.

Although these are relatively new ethnic groups, that doesn’t undermine their reality. Neither does their being descended from a mix of other ethnicities. Just as English descended from the mix of Angles and Saxons, a White Australian ethnicity developed through a generational mix of ethnic groups from the British Isles. And just as Anglo and Saxon are no longer relevant or even identifiable identities among modern English people, English, Scottish and Irish are not very relevant identities for modern White Australians.

When we hear “the German people” we think of markers of German culture, the German flag, a German-looking person, perhaps with blonde hair. When we hear “the Australian people” or “The Canadian people”, we do not think of a generic, universal White person, but distinct White people with their own flags, cultural markers and customs.

Talk of race sounds very antiquated. I’ve read modern scientists abandoned the idea of race. Don’t they now agree it’s just a social construct?

Race denial and egalitarianism became popular for political and ideological, rather than scientific reasons since the Second World War. Events like the UNESCO statements on race popularised the idea that racial differences were insignificant, but post-war planners were very ideologically motivated by moving away from the racialist ideas which were now stained by association with Nazi Germany. The so-called Boasian school of anthropology, inspired by the works of German-Jewish immigrant Franz Boas and his students, was also highly motivated by ideology, with members of the school typically being committed egalitarians with strong feelings against nationalism

It’s popular today to make pronouncements about race being a social construct, just as it is to proclaim there are no meaningful sex differences – with some ideologues going so far as to claim that sex in humans isn’t binary. Usually, this is more of a philosophical word game than a real challenge to the claims of race realism. In a certain sense, race is a social construct the same way an atom or a labrador is. They are labels we socially construct to identify something in the real world. Race denialists will focus on examples of how racial classifications underwent shifts in their social usage to say the whole concept is meaningless. If we took this attitude far enough, we would end up agreeing concepts like dog breeds or different types of furniture are useless social constructs as well. What matters is they map onto something real. And for all the grandiose claims of “experts” throwing out race, when anthropologists are polled anonymously the results can be rather different to what the media presents: a 2001 study found that 75% of Polish anthropologists accepted the existence of race.²

But if race were just a social construct, why would we be able to predict so much by assuming it? Scientists can tell what race someone was by their skeleton, the bacteria in their mouth, and even by brain scans. Increasingly, we are developing AI which can easily identify people’s race. AI is now capable of identifying people’s race from chest x-rays, spine radiographs, and even mammograms. According to an article in the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering, researchers:

found that their models could predict race with high accuracy—a striking finding, as human experts are unable to make such predictions by looking at x-rays. The researchers also found that the AI could determine self-reported race even when the images were highly degraded or cropped to one ninth of the original size, or when the resolution was modified to such an extent that the images were barely recognized as x-rays. The research team subsequently used other non-chest x-ray datasets including mammograms, cervical spine radiographs, and chest computed tomography (CT) scans, and found that the AI could still determine self-reported race, regardless of the type of scan or anatomic location.

Unfortunately, some people are so committed to the denial of race that they hear this and think we need to work harder to program this out of AI! But if the medical field took race denial seriously, there would be significantly worse outcomes. Race is an important factor in determining if donors of organs and bone marrow will be a match for patients. According to Leukemia charity Gift of Life, “ethnicity is the key to a perfect match between donor and recipient”. Medical professionals and charities have to be a bit more honest about this, because non-Whites are less likely to become donors than Whites, leading to a problem of more non-Whites dying due to lack of available donors. You might think race is a social construct, but your body certainly doesn’t see it that way.

Maybe racial categories are important for things like medicine, but so what if we have some anatomical differences? This doesn’t tell you anything about who a person is. Our personalities have nothing to do with race.

If we accept that genes determine us to a great degree, there is absolutely no reason to think this would apply only from the neck down. In fact, it is now estimated that at least a third of of the genes that make up the human genome are expressed primarily in the brain. So if anything, we should see even more variation between races when it comes to cognitive ability and personality traits. And this is exactly what we find. One of the most powerful findings of genetic science is that the greatest genetic differences between human races are neurological – the most immediately recognisable differences like skin colour and pigmentation are well down the list.

I’m not sure how much these matter, what reason is there to think any of this affects behaviour?

There are some differences between races which are very relevant when we try to make sense of society. One of the clearest examples is IQ. Obviously, differences in intelligence have a huge impact on outcomes. Higher IQ people will typically experience better outcomes in education, have greater opportunities for careers in more sought after professions, and generally make decisions which will lead to more prosperous life outcomes. Of course, this differs from individual to individual, but when we take groups of millions of people, differences in IQ will really be reflected in differences in material outcomes.

What do we know about IQ differences between races?

Testing on IQ has shown large gaps between races, both across countries, and within multiracial societies like the United States, where there is typically about a 15 point difference between White and Black Americans. The differences by race between countries are even greater. Richard Lynn in his 2006 book Race Differences in Intelligence reviewed an array of literature on global IQ testing to make calculations of the average IQ for different countries and races. This was the largest review of global data on national intelligence ever collected, surveying over 500 studies. In the final analysis, East Asians scored highest, with a measured average IQ of 105, while groups like Australian Aboriginals (62) and Sub-Saharan Africans (67) had measured IQs in the 60s. Lowest were Pygmies and Bushmen, who Lynn concluded had a measured IQ of 54. Europeans typically score around 100.

Some have argued these low scores for some races are misleading, what has not been disputed is that a significant gap exists. Lynn actually did conclude the very low African result was partly due to environment – mostly nutrition – and even put an estimate on how much of the difference between African and European scores could be attributed to environment:

I estimated that sub-Saharan Africans have a phenotypic IQ of 67 and a genotypic IQ of 80. Thus, I estimated that the adverse environment reduces their IQ by 13 IQ points and that genetic factors reduce their IQ by 20 IQ points, compared with Europeans. Thus, 43 percent of the low IQ in sub-Saharan Africa is attributable to adverse environments and the remaining 57 percent is attributable to genetic factors.

The most recent research from the US shows similar patterns, with East Asians scoring highest and Blacks scoring lowest at about 85. Blacks in America scoring higher than African Blacks could partly be explained by their high admixture with White people: African Americans are estimated to have 24% European admixture. Central and South Americans score higher than Blacks but lower than Whites, in the low-mid 90s range.

I doubt we can take IQ tests very seriously for comparing different groups, since they will be culturally biased by whoever set the questions.

Although people often dismiss IQ testing this way, no one has been able to actually show how IQ tests have racism built into them. We have developed IQ tests which have no verbal dimension at all, simply testing a person’s understanding of patterns and shapes. These tests can be administered to people regardless of their language. Some, like the Raven’s Progressive Matrices, have been studied extensively to test their reliability across cultures and education level, and found to contain no discernible bias.

Sample question from the Raven’s Progressive Matrices

Also, if tests are culturally biased to favour White people, as some claim, why do Asian immigrants to the West score higher than native White people? And why hasn’t someone demonstrated how flawed they are by showing that Blacks go on to outperform how they score on these tests, for example by getting higher grades or doing better in their career. In fact, what we see is their outcomes are consistent with what IQ testing would predict.

Does this mean you think Whites are innately superior to Black people?

Everyone who acknowledges race differences in IQ acknowledges that East Asians score higher than White people. This doesn’t mean they are Asian supremacists. Races have different aptitudes and differ in all kinds of ways. Take athletic ability: it doesn’t take a great study to notice that Blacks excel in sports like basketball and American football. Blacks make up 73% of the players in the NBA, while being about 13% of the American population. The Olympics is a great showcase of the natural athletic ability of different countries and races. We find that East Africans from countries like Ethiopia dominate long-distance running. The last four Olympic marathon champions are from East Africa. In the 1988 World Cross-Country Championships, the top 10 finishers were all from Kenya or Ethiopia.

Interestingly, here there is also an evident racial difference between African races. West Africans do not excel at long distance racing, but they dominate sprint races. The top five record holders at the 100 metre sprint distance are all of West African origin (representing either Jamaica or the United States).

A 2017 article from the Daily Beast explained very well how athletics have presented the reality of racial differences:

Running is the most egalitarian of sports, a natural laboratory. Unlike the props and costumes required for, say, fencing, or the intense coaching demanded of gymnastics, one can just lace up and go for a jog. Ethiopia’s Abebe Bikila proved this quite memorably in the 1960 Rome Olympics, when—shoeless, coachless, and inexperienced—he won the marathon.

Theoretically, then, the medal podium for runners should resemble a rainbow of diversity. But just the opposite has happened: running has become segregated. The trends are eye-opening: Among men, athletes of African ancestry hold every major running record, from the 100m to the marathon. Of the past seven Olympics men’s 100m races, all 56 finalists have been of West African descent.

What explains this astonishing overrepresentation in an “egalitarian” sport like running? Well, Blacks are simply naturally superior at running. It does not make me a Black supremacist to acknowledge this anymore than it makes me an East Asian supremacist to note their higher average IQ. Acknowledging these often stark natural differences, does not commit one to believing in some kind of metaphysical hierarchy of races. This kind of thinking is just ideology interfering with us taking an impartial view on reality.

It makes sense things like running ability would have a strong genetic component, and differ a lot between races, but I think intelligence is more fluid. It seems likely that poverty and inequality is lowering the scores of under-privileged groups like Black people. If a Black person was raised by a wealthy White family, I bet any IQ gap between them would disappear.

Thankfully, we don’t need to speculate on this interesting hypothetical. We now have decades worth of research in so-called “twin studies”. This includes studies of genetically identical twins who were separated from an early age and raised in, sometimes drastically, different conditions. These studies are uniquely able to provide insight in the age-old question of nature vs. nurture. The results have generally shown that about half the difference in some traits, like religiosity are inherited. But for something like IQ, this rises to about 75%.

The Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart (MISTRA) was a landmark study on this topic. When it began in 1979, the consensus was firmly on the nurture side of the equation. The study examined the lives of 137 pairs of twins who had spent an average of 95% of their lives apart. On the important question of IQ, MISTRA determined a heritability of 0.70, meaning IQ is 70% “nature”. Perhaps the more surprising finding was how similar the twins reared apart were in many aspects of their personality. The twins often shared remarkably idiosyncratic personality traits and habits, including a pair, raised on separate continents, who both shared a hobby of collecting rubber bands and enjoyed startling people with loud sneezes in elevators.

The study found that “On multiple measures of personality and temperament, occupational and leisure-time interests, and social attitudes, monozygotic twins reared apart are about as similar as are monozygotic twins reared together.” Even when it came to dental health and the physiological composition of the immune system, it was genes, not environment that played the biggest role, even when the twins had very different diets:

In spite of different environmental exposures to antigens, the predominant factor(s) determining total immunoglobulin and isotypic antibody levels in these twins was genetic rather than environmental.³

Other twin studies have matched up quite well with the findings of MISTRA, much to the frustration of egalitarians and progressives who believe all can be brought to the same level of achievement with the right support.

Intelligence consistently ranks as one of the most heritable traits. Some recent research concludes a heritability of IQ as high as 80% – a higher number than earlier twin studies – and actually rises with age. A 2018 study on hundreds of twins in Serbia found that cognitive ability is:

“largely determined by certain genetic factors, which are hereditary, while success in school is mostly determined not only by genetic factors but also by social and environmental factors”.

Perhaps these differences explain some of the disparities in wealth and education. There is still a lot of racism in our society though, this doesn’t explain why Black people are so targeted by the police. American prisons are full of young Black men.

The simple reason Black people are targeted more by police, and comprise most of the prison population is the simplest explanation: they commit more crime. In fact, for as long as race and crime has been recorded in the United States, Blacks have been represented well beyond their share of the population. According to FBI statistics from 2018, “Of the murder victims for whom race was known, 53.3% were Black or African American”. Keep in mind that just over 13% of the American population is Black. Not only are they overrepresented per capita, they make up the majority of known murder perpetrators despite being about one eighth of the population. Based on these statistics, Blacks are overrepresented at a greater rate compared to the non-Black segment of the population than men are compared to women. So overrepresentation among the prison population is no more surprising than overrepresentation of men: also in 2018 the FBI reported that 53.3% of arrests for murder were of Black Americans.

These figures have actually been climbing in recent years, especially since the explosion in Black Lives Matter activism after the death of George Floyd in 2020. In 2020, Blacks made up 56.5% of murder offenders. This climbed to 60.4% in 2021, another record high. When you further break these statistics down by sex as well as race, it means the 6% of the population who are Black males are responsible for over half the violent crime. Digging more into these figures reveals some staggering realities. Based on FBI data from 2021, it can be calculated that Black males have a 4.5% chance of committing murder in their lifetime. This means that based on current data we can expect about one in 22 Black men to become a murderer in their lifetime, compared to about one in 425 White men. If there is a permanent, large Black prison population in America, it is only reflective of all trends we see in crime statistics.

These differences are definitely alarming, but I think poverty probably explains what causes crime more than any other factor.

A lot of people assume poverty causes crime, and it does seem like a reasonable assumption. But we should also consider that many of the traits which might cause one to make decisions which could lead to poverty – lower impulse control, lower intelligence, laziness – might also make one more likely to engage in crime. So a correlation between poverty and crime – which does exist – is certainly not evidence of causation. If it were, we would expect crime to increase in times of economic decline and increased poverty, but in fact, the trend has often been the opposite. Crime rates in America fell by about one third between 1934 and 1938 in the aftermath of the Great Depression. Studies that have found a relation between poverty and crime have generally found the relation to be quite small – nowhere near enough to explain the vast disparities between races.

But when it comes to the interrelation of race, poverty and crime, we can compare races with similar rates of poverty and observe how this affects crime. In New York, Asians actually have a higher rate of poverty than Blacks, yet Blacks are still vastly overrepresented in crime rates compared to Asians, with a per capita murder rate almost nine times higher. The poverty rate of Latinos and Asians is the same in New York (23%), but Latinos also have much higher crime rates than Asians.

On a country-wide level, Blacks and Hispanics have a similar poverty rate, so there is a lot of data for comparison on this question. As Ron Unz writes:

Consider that both blacks and Hispanics currently have similar national poverty rates in the one-third range, more than double the white figure, and each constitutes well over 20% of our urban population. However, major cities with substantial poverty but few blacks usually tend to have far lower levels of crime. For example, El Paso and Atlanta are comparable in size and have similar poverty rates, but the latter has eight times the robbery rate and over ten times the homicide rate. Within California, Oakland approximately matches Santa Ana in size and poverty, but has several times the rate of crime.

Asians and Latinos have lower crime rates, but Blacks are at a greater disadvantage due to America’s history of racism. If they started from an equal position as new immigrants their outcomes might be similar.

Here, we can compare Black crime rates in other Western countries, which have no history of slavery or segregation, and where Blacks are a new immigrant group like any other. In the UK, blacks make up only 3% of the population, but 13% of murder suspects, a similar overrepresentation to the United States. London offers an even better example for comparison, as Blacks comprise 13% of its population, the same as their share of the United States. As of 2018, Blacks made up 48% of murder suspects.

In 2022, the London Assembly reported that “Despite making up only 13% of London’s total population, black Londoners account for 45% of London’s knife murder victims, 61% of knife murder perpetrators and 53% of knife crime perpetrators.”

Recall again that Blacks in the United States were 60.4% of murder suspects in the US in 2022. Despite the historical differences of the Black story in the UK and America, their representation in crime statistics is remarkably similar. Looking to the European continent, in 2023 it was reported that Africans are responsible for 42% of crimes on public transport in France while making up just 3.2% of the population. In the Paris region, this climbed to 52%, and 69% of violent crimes on public transport, including sexual assault. Such consistent trends of overrepresentation simply cannot be explained with purely environmental explanations.

There are certainly problems with race relations between Black and White people across the West, but it is entering dangerous territory to use statistics like this to whip up fear of immigration. There is no link between immigration and crime.

There is definitely a strong link between immigration and crime. A 2017 study on Germany found an increase in refugee intake led to an increase in crime, as did a 2022 study from Turkey. Homicide data collected on EU migration over an eleven year period showed that every one percent increase in immigration was associated with a 3.6% increase in the homicide rate.

Across European countries that record crimes by ethnicity, non-Europeans are significantly overrepresented. A 2017 study found that 84% of violent rapes in Sweden were committed by men with a non-European background, despite making up 10% of the population. The most represented groups were Somalis, Eritreans, Algerians, Iraqis and Gambians. The number of convicted criminals among second-generation immigrants in Denmark is 51% higher than among native Danes. Non-Swiss nationals make up almost half of homicide and rape perpetrators in Switzerland. In the Netherlands, individuals with a non-Western background account for 14% of the population, but make up 40% of violent assaults and drug offences. We could go on country by country, but the clear pattern is that non-White groups commit far higher rates of crimes of all kinds when they immigrate to Western countries.

Even if there are differences between races, I don’t understand why these differences would have any impact on crime.

We are still learning a lot about how genetics impact behaviour in all sorts of ways. If we accept there are significant differences between races, it only makes sense these differences would be reflected in propensity to anti-social behaviours too. For example, we know that higher rates of testosterone in men makes them more likely to engage in impulsive and aggressive behaviour, which makes them more likely to engage in criminality. There is a well established difference in total testosterone levels between races, especially between young men. Blacks have the highest testosterone levels, while Asians rank lowest, correlating with their ranking in violent crime statistics.

Increasingly, scientists are able to study how specific genes and their interactions influence antisocial behaviour. Important in this regard has been study of the MAOA gene, dubbed “the warrior gene”, since abnormal versions often result in aggressive behaviour. One variant of this gene in particular has been identified as significantly raising the probability that the individual possessing it will engage serious crime. Scientists discovered that this version of the gene is found in just 0.1% of Caucasian males, but in 5.2% of African-American males – remarkable evidence for racial differences in propensity to anti-social behaviour.

Well, I admit a lot of what you’ve said is quite convincing. But honestly, I have non-White friends and it makes me uncomfortable talking about these arguments which seem to justify bigotry.

Different groups of people are different in all sorts of ways – it’s a basic fact and it’s no tragedy that we aren’t born as fungible blank slates. Diversity – cultural and biological – makes the world an interesting place.

Whatever the facts say about group differences, it’s not an excuse for cruelty or reason not to treat people with equal dignity. Recognising our differences, it’s easier to come at each other with an attitude of mutual respect and not live in frustration trying to bend reality to suit our ideals.

1. Dutton, E. (2020) in Making sense of race. Whitefish, MT: Washington Summit Publishers.

2. Kaszycka, Katarzyna A., Goran Štrkalj, and Jan Strzałko. "Current views of European anthropologists on race: Influence of educational and ideological background." American Anthropologist 111, no. 1 (2009): 43-56.

3. Segal, N. L. (2012). Born together-reared apart: The landmark Minnesota twin study. Harvard University Press.