Category: race

A hyperbolic and misguided article in the New England Journal of Medicine, prompted by the death of Jason Arday

August 30, 2026 • 8:45 am

Although the respected New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) has the right to publish what it wants, and African-American gynecological oncologist Kemi Doll has the right to write about what she thinks, their intersection in a new NEJM “voices” piece is hyperbolic and misguided to the point of toxicity. Doll’s article simply poisons the debate about merit versus “equity” in America by simply asserting that there are “structural” intentions held by academics to kill—literally exterminate—black professors. The thesis is in Doll’s first sentence—her topic sentence:

“They are trying to kill us.”

And yes, she means that literally.

Doll’s short op-ed, which you can access below, is so over the top that the NEJM has itself gone off the rails, embarrassing itself by publishing it. Its assertions are either distorted or wrong, and there’s no evidence of a conspiracy to exterminate black scholars. Doll’s “evidence” rests on two academics who committed suicide, one being Jason Arday, the Cambridge University professor of sociology who apparently committed suicide after his plagiarism and made-up stories came to light (see my posts about him here).  To Kemi Doll, Arday died because the allegations against him were intended to kill him.

That, of course, is nonsense. The story is complicated, but to couch it as people wanting Arday to die is a ridiculous simplification. There may have been a bit of racism motivating some of Arday’s critics, but most of it came from the realization that Arday, a professor without much merit as well as a serial liar, was promoted largely because of his ethnicity and his claimed disability (he said he was severely autistic). It was an obvious case of ideological capture of academia, a case so clear that it has now become acceptable to talk and write about ethnicity versus quality—a topic previously taboo.

You can read the NEJM piece by clicking on the screenshot below.

I’ll quote a lot of it starting from the beginning. The quotes are indented, and my comments are flush left.

They are trying to kill us.

When Black academics say this, I imagine folks outside of our community think we are being hyperbolic. We are not. I think my non-Black colleagues are starting to get a taste of this as they realize how diabolically opposed to our own well-being most of the movements of our federal health agencies seem to be these days. It’s appalling and scary and also — yes, welcome. This is how it feels to know that there are systemic pressures working against your success, your well-being, and in the case of Jason Arday — your life.

Note that Doll cites racist “systemic pressures” that are aimed at ruining the carers of black academics and even killing them. In fact, the opposite is true.  Affirmative action, DEI, and the “racial reckoning” that’s been occurring for a long time have given minority academics, including women, a leg up. These initiatives, which led to Arday’s promotion and, indeed, sacralization, is clearly what got him the Cambridge professorship in the first place. Until Arday’s fabulism and plagiarism were revealed (starting with a post by Nathan Cofnas, who clearly didn’t want Arday to die), Arday was on a pedestal, told by his own chairperson at Cambridge that “We are so lucky to have you. You are the best in the world in terms of the research that you do.” Doll continues:

Jason Arday had the distinction of being the youngest Black professor in the University of Cambridge’s history. His publications specifically focused on race and racism in the British educational system, and he didn’t shy away from using his own life in his examples. After the deliberate targeting of his veracity as an academic by another former Cambridge professor, dismissed due to his racism and white supremacist views, Prof. Arday came under intense scrutiny with regard to his Ph.D. thesis and the stories in his memoir. Besides making the point that his Ph.D. advisor and the university cleared him of any deliberate plagiarism allegations, I want to be clear that I don’t care whether or not any of these allegations against Prof. Arday were true. None of them were worth his career. And certainly not his life.

Note the penultimate statement: Doll didn’t care whether any allegations against Arday were true. But if they were true (they include made-up positions he put on his c.v.), and they seem to be, then he was unqualified for his position at Cambridge. Remember that Arday killed himself only after Cambridge decided to investigate the allegations. Did anybody predict that those allegations would lead to his (presumed) suicide? I don’t think so, but Doll argues that his death was not only predictable, but engineered by academia and the media:

But Black academics know that we will always be held to a different standard, and it will look “fair” to most until perhaps we are dead. Dr. Antoinette “Bonnie” Candia-Bailey of Lincoln University expressed the severe stress, pressure, and undue criticism she weathered in her position before her suicide in 2024. Dr. JoAnne A. Epps, Executive Vice President and Provost of Temple University, and Dr. Orinthia T. Montague, President of Volunteer State Community College, died enduring the unique stressors of their jobs. Prof. Claudine Gay was hounded by accusations of plagiarism and ousted by Harvard, who bent to those who simply could not stomach a world where a Black woman was president of such a storied institution. Today, I took a moment to appreciate that she is still with us, thank God.

I urge you to check those references for suicide caused by stress, pressure, and criticism. Yes, Candia-Bailey killed herself after claiming she was bullied in academia, but Epps “died. . . . after becoming ill onstage at a memorial service, the university said.” The reference to Orinthia Montague says nothing about suicide, and I can find nothing about that in other places (e.g., here) What is ludicrous about Doll’s claims here is that she simply asserts that the last two died because of “stress and pressure”. But, for crying out loud, being a president or provost of any college is a stressful job, and there is no evidence that Montague or Epps had sufficiently more stress than other administrators because they were black, crossing a stress threshhold that led to death. Neither death is attributed to suicide, so Doll simply asserts that they were due to blackness-induced pressure. Didn’t the NEJM even check the links?

As for Claudine Gay, she was asked to resign by the Harvard Corporation because she did not handle well the allegations of antisemitism at Harvard (she had to clarify her position several times), because she was credibly accused of plagiarism, and because she could no longer lead the University effectively. Rather than boot her out of the Presidency, Harvard stood by her (even dismissing her plagiarism accusations as only examples of “duplicative language without appropriate attribution“) until the pressure from the Corporation became too great. Indeed, some people, as in NYT link I just gave, argued that Harvard was going easier on Gay than it was on students who might have done the same thing.  I see no evidence that Harvard wanted to dump Gay because she was black. Indeed, why was she appointed President if there were structural pressures to ruin her career?

At any rate, Gay landed on her feet. Though she resigned the Presidency, Harvard Magazine says that Gay returned to the faculty as professor of government and of African and American studies, earning “a base salary of $1,397,749, plus other compensation of $150,802 (again, principally the value of a University-provided official residence)”. I don’t know another regular humanities professor making nearly $1.5 million per year! Clearly, Harvard was not trying to ruin her career.

More:

The message to Black academics is clear. Come in, be great and indeed be excellent, but don’t dare dream too big. Don’t dare shine too bright. Walk the line of excellence and humility with perfect grace, and be ready to fight for your life.

The lesson is really that your ethnicity (and, in Arday’s class, his claimed early disability) can elevate you to prestige. Beyond Arday and Candia-Bailey, the argument that universities and academia are trying to exterminate black people is nonexistent.

Doll does mention one white man who lost his job after accusations of falsified data:

In contrast, as a white man, you can rise to be president of Stanford University, and after your falsified data is found and has set back an entire field of research for years — you will only lose your job and then quickly find another one as the CEO of a $1 billion biopharma start-up. Beyond this single story of nauseating privilege, it is a fantasy to act like plagiarism, falsified data, and suspicious, unreproducible results are not major and common problems in academia. We have entire websites devoted to attempting to keep pace with the number of scientific papers retracted amid scandal. Scroll through the recent posts on Retraction Watch and let me know how many of those investigators have been hounded, literally, to death by the news media. I hear the assertions that the British press is particularly vicious and unabashedly racist, which contributed to hundreds of articles attacking Prof. Arday in a matter of days. However, this country is not far behind. The New York Times, before his body was even laid to rest, asserted on social media that Arday’s death was a result of “race, diversity, and academic hiring.” Sure.

I won’t list other white academics who lost their jobs for plagiarism or other accusations, or even killed themselves as a result, as that’s just playing an anecdotes game. Yes, Marc Tessier-Lavigne resigned from Stanford after wonky and apparently falsified data were found in a paper he co-authored, but, like Claudine Gay, he landed on his feet. And remember, the attention directed to Arday was only tangentially because he was black, for it was his ethnicity and claimed disability, as well as the accusations of fabulism and plagiarism that Cambridge University at first ignored, that gave the story its viral status. The striking part was the realization of how far ideological capture had gone in academia—so far that a man totally unqualified for a professorship had gotten there without anybody looking too closely at his qualifications. (Indeed, I think the NEJM publishing Doll’s palpably ludicrous analysis is itself an example of ideological capture of the journal.)

At the end, Doll bemoans her own fate, telling us that she pretty much has it as bad as did Arday, although that cannot be true. She also analogizes her accusations of racism to lynching, for lynching is the subject of the song “Strange Fruit,” made famous by Billie Holiday in 1939 (bolding below is mine):

As someone who introduced herself here as being in it for the long haul in academia, I am in contemplation this week. Not because I am considering leaving, but because it’s important to query whether my systems and boundaries for my own well-being are strong enough to withstand the ever-present winds of white supremacy and anti-Blackness. Are my bonds with my fellow Black academics well-tended to? Are my filters to keep nonsense out of my inbox tight enough? Do I need to ratchet up my “No”s even further?

In these times where trees bearing strange fruit are on the rise (again) in the U.S. South, where Black mothers everywhere heard about Nolan Wells long before it was in the mainstream media, I don’t believe there is such thing as hyperbole. They are trying to kill us. They always have been.

And yet, we are still here.

Rest in peace, Jason Arday.

Ask yourself if you’re an academic: are colleges and universities trying to deny jobs to minorities, impede their progress, or even trying to kill them by putting in motion processes that they know will result in suicide? I’d say that, in these days of DEI, it’s the precise opposite.

But why did the NEJM even publish such a palpably misguided and hyperbolic piece? I would answer this way: the journal’s editors were trying to signal their virtue. And that’s ideological capture.

The taboo idea you can’t discuss in academia

March 20, 2026 • 10:00 am

My friend the Belgian philosopher Maarten Boudry is writing about what he calls, correctly, “the most dangerous idea in academia”—an idea that can get you banned or even fired if you even suggest it. It is, of course, the notion that different “races” differ on average in IQ or intelligence. It’s such a hot potato that many people think that research looking for any differences should be banned or strongly discouraged. (This, of course, is because any potential outcome save exact equality among groups is said to inevitably cause racism and bigotry.)

I’ll leave aside here the idea of what “races” are, for Luana and I explained our take in our Skeptical Inquirer paper “The Ideological Subversion of Biology.”  We can use instead either the notion of “self-defined races” (the boxes one ticks on a form) or, as Luana and I wrote, human populations:

Before we handle this hot potato, we emphasize that we prefer the words ethnicity or even geographic populations to race, because the last term, due to its historical association with racism, has simply become too polarizing. Further, old racial designations such as white, black, and Asian came with the erroneous view that races are easily distinguished by a few traits, are geographically delimited, and have substantial genetic differences. In fact, the human species today comprises geographically continuous groups that have only small to modest differences in the frequencies of genetic variants, and there are groups within groups: potentially an unlimited number of “races.” Still, human populations do show genetic differences from place to place, and those small differences, summed over thousands of genes, add up to substantial and often diagnostic differences between populations.

We discuss some differences between populations and self-diagnosed “races” that are known. There are also known differences in IQ, but the taboo question is whether any of those difference reside in the genes. On this subject I, like Maarten, am agnostic, as I simply don’t know the literature well enough (and am not sufficiently interested in it) to form an opinion.

Click on the screenshot below to read Maarten’s take:

Maarten was impelled to write the piece because one of his colleagues at Ghent University, Nathan Cofnas, is in big trouble because he’s promoted the most inflammatory version of The Forbidden Question: that a substantial portion of the differences in IQ between American blacks and whites (a phenotypic difference of about 15 points) is genetic:

My guest Han van der Maas, a renowned intelligence researcher at the University of Amsterdam, explained that individual IQ differences are highly heritable, but that he does not believe in differences between ethnic groups. His statistical and methodological arguments (e.g. Simpson’s paradox) convinced me at the time. Still, he hedged his bets: future evidence might yet reveal such differences, and we should not try to cancel researchers who claim such differences are real.

Forty-five colleagues from my former philosophy department (and hundreds more in a letter to the rector) clearly think otherwise. They are urging the rector to fire Nathan Cofnas because he claims that the IQ gap between racial groups such as whites and blacks in the US—differences that are themselves well documented—have largely genetic causes, rather than environmental ones like socio-economic disadvantage or discrimination. He makes the same claim about the higher scores of East Asians and Jews (which exceed those of white Europeans, by the way). They dismiss all of this as “pseudoscience and racism.”

The question is whether Cofnas should be fired for his claim, and whether the research supposedly supporting it should be banned.  I would argue that the answer to both questions is “no”, but researchers have to be very careful and sensitive in pursuing it.  Maarten quotes the paper by Luana and me about this (his words indented, ours doubly indented):

Now, I perfectly understand why many people are shocked by Cofnas’s claims, and I agree that such hypotheses should be treated with utmost caution. As my friend Jerry Coyne wrote with Luana Maroja in their influential article The Ideological Subversion of Biology:

In light of the checkered history of this work, it behooves any researcher to tread lightly, for virtually any outcome save worldwide identity of populations could be used to buttress bias and bigotry.

Still, this clearly falls within the scope of academic freedom. If you are not prepared to extend academic freedom to ideas you fiercely disagree with, you do not really believe in academic freedom.

In light of calls for Cofnas’s firing, a number of people have signed an open letter defending Cofnas’s right to study this topic (or any reasonable topic); the letter is at the link below:

My colleagues Peter Singer, Francesca Minerva and Jeff McMahan wrote an open letter defending the academic freedom of Nathan Cofnas. I have signed it as well, together with luminaries such as Steven Pinker, Alan Sokal , Susan Blackmore, Scott Aaronson, and Bryan Caplan. Here it is in full:

And the letter, which is short:

A statement in support of Nathan Cofnas’s Right to Academic Freedom of Expression

Two separate statements have recently been issued by members of Ghent University, in Belgium, calling on the university to rescind the appointment of Nathan Cofnas as a postdoctoral researcher. One claims that his views “violate the university’s code of ethics and are morally beneath contempt”.

We oppose this attack on academic freedom. While we are not endorsing any specific claims Cofnas has made, we believe that academics must be able to put forward controversial or provocative claims without fear of losing their employment. Of course, other academics should be free to criticise or repudiate those claims.

The statements mentioned above do not even attempt to engage with Cofnas’s empirical claims. Disagreements, whether about empirical claims, ethical principles, or the interpretation of the ethical code of a university, should be settled through free inquiry and open, civil discussion.

We commend Petra De Sutter, Rector of Ghent University, for her statement to the Belgian newspaper De Morgen, that “As a university, we have a responsibility to create space for debate, but also to ensure an environment where people feel heard and respected.”

We agree that creating space for debate is an essential element of a university, and that space for debate should not be closed unless this is a last resort to prevent a clear threat of lasting substantial harm.

Note that the letter takes no position on the data itself; it’s a letter about whether Cofnas should be granted academic freedom to do his work.  As Maarten himself says, “As most of the signatories, I do not endorse Nathan Cofnas’s claims and remain agnostic on the issue.”  Luana and I, along with 145 other academics, signed this letter, with some signers named above.

It’s a sign of the ideologically-infused and chilling atmosphere in biology that one has to think for even a second before agreeing with the letter.  Now you might think that finding genetically-based IQ differences betwen populations might cause “a clear threat of lasting substantial harm,” but for reasons outlined in our paper, Luana and I don’t agree.  There are potential upsides in such data, just as there are potential upsides in looking at interpopulation data on medical conditions (the goal is to help individuals, not to demonize one group or another). After all, we don’t even know how the data will come out.

And it’s not at all clear whether finding out that an interpopulation difference has genetic causes will lead to increased bigotry. Since genetic contributions to being gay have been found, prejudice against gays has decreased, not increased. If you reject free will and accept determinism due to genes, physics, and one’s environment, one might see genetically-based differences as “forgiving,” for you cannot be blamed for the genes you get from your parents and that reflect long evolutionary histories.

Maarten goes on to show the difference in long-distance running abilities between Ethiopians and Kenyans on one hand and the rest of the world on the other (these are population differences rather than differences between the classically-defined “races”.  Though I don’t know whether there have been tests to show that these differences are genetic (potential studies could include adoption at birth, rearing in different environments, and so on), I would be willing to bet that they are. But, as Maarten says, “measuring intelligence is far more complicated than crossing a finish line.”

Boudry adds that Cofnas has sometimes been brusque in his public pronouncements about his work, but this is not uncommon among academics:

Finally, what about Nathan Cofnas’s vigorous activism alongside his academic work? It is true that Cofnas is far less measured in his Substack posts than in his academic publications on IQ. For instance, his flippant way of expressing a statistical point about the racial IQ gap in academic achievement (similar to the point above about long-distance running) seems almost deliberately incendiary:

Under a colorblind system that judged applicants only by academic qualifications, blacks would make up 0.7% of Harvard students. […] In a meritocracy, Harvard faculty would be recruited from the best of the best students, which means the number of black professors would approach 0%.

Cofnas is also very combative in his attacks on “woke ideology”, and he genuinely believes only a “hereditarian revolution” can truly dismantle it—otherwise, we’ll be stuck fighting symptoms rather than root causes:

Until we defeat the taboo on hereditarianism, our victories will always be temporary. Every time we cut off a tentacle of the DEI monster, it will grow back.

I’m not convinced, but it’s a clever argument, and I’d encourage you to check it out with an open mind.

Finally, Maarten points out one harmful side effect of demonizing people for the kind of work they do in academia:

Calling for the dismissal of anyone who even touches the third rail of ethnic differences in IQ is also strategically unwise. Such attempts often fuel the phenomenon of “red-pilling.” When academics appear determined to suppress a dangerous idea at all costs, people naturally become suspicious: What are they trying to hide? The result is a further erosion of trust in academia.

And that is not just a made-up reason. When the public perceives scientists to be espousing a political or ideological cause in their research, their view of science is eroded. Have a look at this paper showing that when the journal Nature, in a first, endorsed a political candidate (Joe Biden) for U.S. President in 2020, it reduced the public trust not just in the journal, but in scientists themselves.

Do weigh in below, and because the issue is a sensitive one, you might want to answer this poll.

[poll id=”54″]

Glenn Loury and John McWhorter video: an interesting show

June 1, 2025 • 11:00 am

As I say repeatedly, I find it very difficult to listen to long videos (and long podcasts without visuals are even worse). But I happened to click on the one below, part of the biweekly Glenn Show dialogue between Glenn Loury and John McWhorter, and found it quite worthwhile, even though it’s a bit more than an hour long (Loury gives an advertisement between 11:12 and 13:14). It’s interesting because of the topics: wokeness, race, and their intersection, and McWhorter (with whom I’m on a panel in three weeks) is particularly interesting.

The first thing we learn is that Loury has left (actually been fired from) the rightish-wing Manhattan Institute. He explains why in his website post “I was fired by the Manhattan Institute. Here’s why.”:

 In short, I think they disapproved of my opposition to the Gaza War, my criticisms of Israel’s prosecution of that war, and my praise of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s meditations on the West Bank settlements.

Well, I knew that Loury was a stringent critic of Israel, but praising Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “meditations” on the West Bank, meditations that followed just 10 days visit in the Middle East and did not even mention Palestinian terrorism, isn’t something to praise.  At any rate, since Loury retired from Brown, he’s contemplating his next move, and hints that the University of Austin (UATX) has been courting him.

That leads to a brief discussion of whether schools like UATX are the wave of the future: schools that can teach humanities courses without them being polluted by extreme “social justice” mentality. Both men ponder whether universities like that are the wave of the future, and whether regular universities will devolve into “STEM academies”.  That, in turn, leads to a discussion, mostly by McWhorter, about music theory and how that, one of his areas of expertise, has been polluted by wokeness.

The biggest segment of the discussion involves McWhorter’s recent visit to Washington’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, and his thoughts about it (read his long NYT op-ed piece, which is very good, here). McWhorter characterizes it as not a dolorous place but a “happy place,” and one that gives a balanced view of black history—a view in which black people are more than simple oppressed people who serve to remind the rest of us of their guilt. It portrays as well, he avers, the dignity and positive accomplishment of African Americans. (McWhorter compares the dolorous view of black history with the narrative pushed by Nikole Hannah-Jones of the 1619 Project.)  His description makes me want to visit that museum more than ever (I haven’t yet been but will, and I must also visit the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum).

Finally, they discuss the question of whether they were wrong to be so hard on DEI, given that some aspects of it (e.g., a call for equality) are positive. Here McWhorter is at his most eloquent, saying that, given the overreach of DEI, it was imperative for both of them to have criticized it. As McWhorter notes, the extreme construal of DEI did not “fight for the dignity of black people” and, he says, in the face of that extremist ideology, their silence would not have been appropriate. Loury agrees.  At this point McWhorter brings up Claudine Gay, ex-President of Harvard, claiming that she was hired simply because she was a black woman, which was “wrong and objectifying.” (Only McWhorter could get away from saying something like that.) The elevation of Gay, says McWhorter, was the sort of thing they were pushing back against when they opposed DEI.

This is worth a listen, and I’ve put the video below.

Once again, if both sex and race are social constructs, why is it okay to declare you’re of your non-natal sex, but not your non-natal race?

May 12, 2025 • 9:30 am
I was just reading Richard Dawkins’s engrossing essay on sex, gender, and wokeness, and something struck me—a notion that’s not original since it occurred to Rebecca Tuvel when she wrote her infamous essay for Hypatia, a feminist philosophy journal, on “transracialism” Tuvel’s essay pointed out the philosophical and moral parallels between declaring you’re a member of your non-natal “race” (again, I prefer “ancestry”) and declaring that you’re of  your non-natal sex.  Yet Tuvel’s philosophical analysis of this issue, an analysis which I applauded, got her in hot water. As Wikipedia notes:

 

The feminist philosophy journal Hypatia became involved in a dispute in April 2017 that led to the online shaming of one of its authors, Rebecca Tuvel, an assistant professor of philosophy at Rhodes College in Memphis.  The journal had published a peer-reviewed article by Tuvel in which she compared the situation of Caitlyn Jenner, a trans woman, to that of Rachel Dolezal, a white woman who identifies as black. When the article was criticized on social media, scholars associated with Hypatia joined in the criticism and urged the journal to retract it.  The controversy exposed a rift within the journal’s editorial team and more broadly within feminism and academic philosophy.

In the article—”In Defense of Transracialism”, published in Hypatia‘s spring 2017 issue on 25 April—Tuvel argued that “since we should accept transgender individuals’ decisions to change sexes, we should also accept transracial individuals’ decisions to change races”.  After a small group on Facebook and Twitter criticized the article and attacked Tuvel, an open letter began circulating, naming one of Hypatia‘s editorial board as its point of contact and urging the journal to retract the article. The article’s publication had sent a message, the letter said, that “white cis scholars may engage in speculative discussion of these themes” without engaging “theorists whose lives are most directly affected by transphobia and racism”.

On 1 May the journal posted an apology on its Facebook page on behalf of “a majority” of Hypatia‘s associate editors. By the following day the open letter had 830 signatories, including scholars associated with Hypatia and two members of Tuvel’s dissertation committee. Hypatia‘s editor-in-chief, Sally Scholz, and its board of directors stood by the article.  When Scholz resigned in July 2017, the board suspended the associate editors’ authority to appoint the next editor, in response to which eight associate editors resigned.  The directors set up a task force to restructure the journal’s governance.  In February 2018 the directors themselves were replaced.

And of course Rachel Dolezal was also demonized when she was outed as having been born white although claiming she was black. She was fired as president of the local NAACP, and, as Wikipedia notes, “dismissed from her position as an instructor in Africana studies at Eastern Washington University and was removed from her post as chair of the Police Ombudsman Commission in Spokane over ‘a pattern of misconduct'”. All for saying she was black when she was born white. I do believe Dolezal assumed her black identity honestly. It didn’t seem to be a ruse, and, indeed, why would she fake being a member of an oppressed minority unless she really believed it. It surely wasn’t a trick or a ruse.

Richard has been writing about this disparity/hypocrisy for years, most notably in his website post, “Race is a spectrum. Sex is pretty damn binary.”  The title is of course correct, but pointing it out on Twitter cost Richard the 1996 Humanist of the Year Award from the American Humanist Association. And that was for simply raising the question of any relevant difference between being “transracial” or “transsexual”. The AHA acted shamefully in that case, and I’ve washed my hands of it.

Indeed, since race is more spectrum-ish than is sex, it would seem to be MORE JUSTIFIABLE to say you’re a member of a non-natal race than of a non-natal sex.  After all, people like Barack Obama are of mixed ancestry, and can claim whatever they want with biological justification (in his case, white or black).  But if he felt more Asian, why couldn’t he claim he was Asian? After all, race, like sex, is supposed to be a social construct.

This came back to me when I considered the case of Kat Grant and her essay for the Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF), which I documented here. That fracas resulted in my published response being taken down, with the consequence that I resigned from the FFRF along with Richard and Steve Pinker.  And the FFRF declared that it dissolved the honorary board of which we were all members (though, curiously, it’s still on the web). Grant’s essay, “What is a woman?” implicitly accepted sex as a social construct and ended this way (bolding is mine):

All of this is to say that there is an answer to the question “what is a woman,” that luckily does not involve plucking a chicken from its feathers. A woman is whoever she says she is.

Yes, a woman is whoever she says she is. Clearly, sex is a social construct here, and you can be whatever sex you want, regardless of your natal gamete-producing system.  Grant was widely applauded by many on the gender-extremist side, while my response was taken down by the FFRF for being hurtful and offensive (you can still read it here, here or here).

 

This fracas, which I call “The KerFFRFle,” has reminded me of the seeming hypocrisy of regarding both sex and race as social constructs, but allowing you to declare whatever sex you feel you are, but not allowing you to declare whatever race you feel you are. Transracialism would seem especially laudatory because one would think it would be a bold move to declare you’re of an oppressed minority group. (Again, I prefer “ancestry” or “population” to “race” for reasons I’ve explained many times.)

I am not taking a stand on these issues here, but merely trying, as did Richard, to understand the difference.  And so I ask readers?

Why is it okay (indeed, applauded) to be transsexual but not transracial?

 

Nature tackles race and eugenics in a torturous and tortuous article

May 11, 2025 • 11:30 am

Yes, folks, the science journals are still flaunting their virtue in articles that are similar to a gazillion articles published before. This time (and not the first time), the article is torturous because the assertions are mostly misleading.  And it’s tortuous because it weaves back and forth between two themes: eugenics and the assumed beneficial effect of diversity on scientific productivity. And the material in the article contradicts some of its own claims. The author, Genevieve L. Woicik, is identified as “an associate professor of epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health,Baltimore, Maryland, USA.”

You can read the article by clicking on the title below, or find the pdf here.  If you were to read it without knowing better, you would get two false impressions:

  1. The world, and especially America, is gearing up for a big bout of eugenics.
  2. Race is a social construct that has nothing to do with biology

I see no evidence for #1 unless one is oblivious to reality, while #2, as Luana and I showed in our paper on The Ideological Subversion of Biology, is misleading. I recommend you read section 5, which is headed by one of the statements about genetics and evolutionary biology that we consider misleading: ““Race and ethnicity are social constructs, without scientific or biological meaning.”

Moreover, the discussion tacitly admits that, yes, populations do have biological differences. As Luana and I wrote in our paper, we don’t like using the word “race” because in its classical form, it is misleading. Instead we say this:

Before we handle this hot potato, we emphasize that we prefer the words ethnicity or even geographic populations to race, because the last term, due to its historical association with racism, has simply become too polarizing. Further, old racial designations such as white, black, and Asian came with the erroneous view that races are easily distinguished by a few traits, are geographically delimited, and have substantial genetic differences. In fact, the human species today comprises geographically continuous groups that have only small to modest differences in the frequencies of genetic variants, and there are groups within groups: potentially an unlimited number of “races.” Still, human populations do show genetic differences from place to place, and those small differences, summed over thousands of genes, add up to substantial and often diagnostic differences between populations.

I prefer “populations” which are still not social constructs and do have biological meaning. But our paper shows how and why, so read section 5, which is not long.

Finally, Woicik’s article calls on all scientists to push back against racism and eugenics, and of course all people of good will should do so when they can. But her article is of a Chicken Little bent, as the first claim is wrong and the second distorted (as the progressives say, “it lacks nuance”).

Click below to read, or find the pdf here. It’s only two pages long

Here are the main topics:

Eugenics.

Let’s first take up the author’s overheated claim that “eugenics is on the rise again,”  I suppose if you trawled the white-supremacist or tinfoil-hat literature, you could find a few people who espoused eugenics (the sterilization, prevention of breeding, or even murder of members of minority groups), but really, that idea is dead as a doornail in science and in the public (when was the last time you found a call for eugenics in the MSM or in a biology textbook?)  Even Trump, despite his brief remark below, has not espoused eugenics.

In fact, Woicik cites only three bits of evidence for her claim that eugenics is on the rise:

In 1924, motivated by the rising eugenics movement, the United States passed the Johnson–Reed Act, which limited immigration to stem “a stream of alien blood, with all its inherited misconceptions”. A century later, at a campaign event last October, now US President Donald Trump used similar eugenic language to justify his proposed immigration policies, stating that “we got a lot of bad genes in our country right now”.

. . . . At a hearing in February, the now-confirmed head of the US Department of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr, reiterated his past comments that Black children should receive different vaccine schedules from white children because of variations in their immune systems.

Kennedy’s motives in this regard are unclear. But after making numerous demonstrably false statements about vaccination, he is providing another layer of reasoning that the scientist whose work Kennedy cites described as “twisting the data far beyond what they actually demonstrate” while promoting racial essentialism: the false belief that people of different ‘races’ have inherently distinct biology2,3.

and this:

In the United States, a reactionary political movement has ridden a populist wave into power, using dog-whistle rhetoric about race. This has happened just when scientists have the knowledge — and tools — to make strides towards a more equitable world.

Geneticists and others must stand against a global rise of white nationalism, which seeks to leverage scientific racism for eugenicist goals, and stop its talking points from entering the mainstream political discourse.

She does mention one case of race-motivated shooting, but that is murderous bigotry, not eugenics, which is the initiative of a government or professional body.  One cannot argue that each race-related shooting (including shooting of whites by minorities) is an instance of “eugenics.”

The only evidence for a rise of eugenics here is a throwaway remark by Trump.  The RFK Jr. statement may be misguided, but there are some “racial” differences in responses to treatment.  The last statement says that white nationalism has “eugenicist goals”.  Perhaps some extremists do, but I simply do not hear calls for the public, the government, or the scientific community to reinstitute eugenics in America.  Of course it would be bad to call for that and do that, but the threat of eugenics is simply not a problem.

The falsity of denying genetic differences between populations. The first thing to remember is what Luana and I wrote:

Of what use are such ethnicity clusters? Let’s begin with something many people are familiar with: the ability to deduce one’s personal ancestry from their genes. If there were no differences between populations, this task would be impossible, and “ancestry companies” such as 23andMe wouldn’t exist. But you don’t even need DNA sequences to predict ethnicities quite accurately. Physical traits can sometimes do the job: AI programs can, for instance, predict self-reported race quite accurately from just X-ray scans of the chest.

This along shows that there are biological differences between populations, and even those populations that are “self-reported races”, like white, black, Hispanic, or Asian.  But Wojcik, even disses the ancestry-testing companies. Wojcik:

One public-facing area is direct-to-consumer ancestry-testing services. These use computational algorithms to model the genetic similarity between individuals and reference populations to draw conclusions about people’s geographical origins. Many have pointed out that these services — which rely on geopolitical and ethnic categories — might be exacerbating racial essentialism.

Again we have a hyperbolic statement here; Luana’s finding out that she has ancestry that’s Hispanic, black, native American, and from other groups does not “exacerbate racial essentialism.” Ask yourself: have you ever seen anybody turn into a racist when they get their 23andMe results?

Here are a few more instances of biological differences between either populations or self-reported races cited by Luana and me. Have a look at the first study, involving “self reported race”:

Even the old and outmoded view of race is not devoid of biological meaning. A group of researchers compared a broad sample of genes in over 3,600 individuals who self-identified as either African American, white, East Asian, or Hispanic. DNA analysis showed that these groups fell into genetic clusters, and there was a 99.84 percent match between which cluster someone fell into and their self-designated racial classification. This surely shows that even the old concept of race is not “without biological meaning.” But that’s not surprising because, given restricted movement in the past, human populations evolved largely in geographic isolation from one another—apart from “Hispanic,” a recently admixed population never considered a race. As any evolutionary biologist knows, geographically isolated populations become genetically differentiated over time, and this is why we can use genes to make good guesses about where populations come from.

. . . More recent work, taking advantage of our ability to easily sequence whole genomes, confirms a high concordance between self-identified race and genetic groupings. One study of twenty-three ethnic groups found that they fell into seven broad “race/ethnicity” clusters, each associated with a different area of the world. On a finer scale, genetic analysis of Europeans show that, remarkably, a map of their genetic constitutions coincides almost perfectly with the map of Europe itself. In fact, the DNA of most Europeans can narrow down their birthplace to within roughly 500 miles.

We give other evidence, taking care to show that differences do not equate to a hierarchy. Populations have differentiated over time genetically, both through natural selection and genetic drift. Differences due to selection, like lactose tolerance or low-oxygen tolerance, cannot be equated to an overall superiority, only to a better ability to leave your genes in the environment wher eyou evolved.  Differences between populations will create racism only if people are motivated to be bigots.  Luana and I quote Ernst Mayr on this, who apparently was a far clearer thinker about genetics than both the author of this paper (who seems desperately afraid of differences even of the 23andMe type) and many others:

The great evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr stated it well:

Equality in spite of evident non-identity is a somewhat sophisticated concept and requires a moral stature of which many individuals seem to be incapable. They rather deny human variability and equate equality with identity. Or they claim that the human species is exceptional in the organic world in that only morphological characters are controlled by genes and all other traits of the mind or character are due to “conditioning” or other non-genetic factors. … An ideology based on such obviously wrong premises can only lead to disaster. Its championship of human equality is based on a claim of identity. As soon as it is proved that the latter does not exist, the support of equality is likewise lost. (Mayr 1963)

Thus, although the classical races are to some extent social constructs, they also jibe with biological differences. Wojcik:

. . . . there is broad consensus among researchers that social constructs of descent-based identity, such as race and ethnicity, do not align with genetic groupings. On the other, there is growing awareness that diversity matters for sound science and effective policy, including in health care. Embraced together, these two concepts have strengthened science and increased benefits to health.

This is misleading, as you can see by comparing the multivariate and principal-component genetic analyses that match very nicely with geographic locations.  As we said, there are “groups within groups within groups,” and thus we prefer to use the word “populations”. Here’s a genetic cluster analysis of Europeans by country of birth, which, as we note above, coincides remarkably well with geography. Are there “races” here? Well, no, but there are populations, and those populations are different in a consistent way that tells us something about geography and biology (people mate with those geographically close to them. Note as well that genetics has also helped us reconstruct the history of human migration out of Africa and across the globe.

 

Wojcik admits several times that there are genetic differences between populations.  This seems to be at odds with her thesis. Bolding is mine:

For example, the likelihood of people having haemoglobinopathies (inherited disorders that affect red blood cells) varies substantially depending on where in the world a person lives. In some regions of India, carrier rates for the blood disorder β-thalassaemia are estimated to be higher than 8%, whereas in areas of China, they can be as low as 2.7%. This heterogeneity would be missed if researchers simply grouped study participants as ‘Asian’, a term that refers to nearly 60% of the global population. Similarly, using the category ‘Hispanic’ without considering other factors would fail to reveal that the genetic variant associated with Steel syndrome, a rare genetic bone disorder, is more common in people from Puerto Rico than in those from the Dominican Republic or Mexico5.

But of course! We know this because researchers did NOT group populations as “Asian”.  Here’s another admission that geographic location is relevant to biology:

The availability of large-scale multimodal data and advanced statistical and computational tools is making it easier than ever for researchers to stop relying on race or ethnicity as proxies for biology or structural and social determinants of health. Instead, they can interrogate the effects of many well-defined variables, from people’s genetics and geographical location to their diet and income.

Again, genetics and geographical location (which of course differ among populations) are said to be relevant to biology and health.

The author seems to believe that physicians practice “race-based medicine”, but any doctor that doesn’t look beyond one’s self-identified or other-identified race or ancestry when diagnosing problems is a dreadful doctor. I’ve never met one—not even one asking me if I was an Ashkenazi Jew, which is what my genes tell me I am.  And yes, self-described race is associated with clinical risk, though some of that could be due to cultural differences among people of different ancestries.

Diversity.

Although Wojcik claims that race is a social construct, she also tells us that “diversity”–clearly of “self-defined race”—is something we need because higher (social-construct) diversity within groups leads to higher productivity and more valuable outcomes. While I agree that we need to increase diversity throughout society by affording all people equal opportunities from birth, that doesn’t mean that the sources cited bo Wojcik are dispositive:

Reports from the US National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine, for instance, emphasize the need for more-diverse groups of participants to be included in genetics and genomics research2, as well as in biomedical research more broadly3. They also stress the importance of a diverse workforce — which has consistently been shown to result in higher productivity, as well as in work that has a greater impact on people’s lives.

But there are many other studies showing no effect or negative effects, and these have been summarized by Lee Jussim in his report “The downsides of DEI“, which has compiled all available studies on aspects of this topic. Go to the section called “diversity does not produce its promised benefits.” As Lee said:

I curated this list to make it easy in situations like this to track down relevant resources.  And any article touting the joys of diversity for science/performance that simply ignores
these articles is more propaganda than science.  This is true even if it is unintentional, failing to know about the existence of evidence contrary to the claims one is touting is, at best, the scientific equivalent of negligent malpractice.

Wojcik apparently hasn’t looked at these papers, many of which are recent.

According to Jussim’s data, the trope that more diverse groups always produce better outcomes is not strongly substantiated, although some studies show a weak effect. We should strive for diversity of groups simply because it will increase as an indicator of more equal opportunities from birth.

My point is simply that in calling for a reformation of science and society, Wojcik is making hyperbolic claims that are, more often than not, unjustified.  Races (or populations) don’t differ in meaningful biological ways, society is on the verge of adopting eugenics, and diverse groups don’t always do better than homogeneous ones. Of course I am not touting racism here, but I do maintain that we’re not on the verge of eugenics, and that differences between populations are biologically meaningful and will become more so as we learn more.

Near the end there is more hyperbolic rhetoric that verges on a call for censorship (my bolding):

Geneticists and others must stand against a global rise of white nationalism, which seeks to leverage scientific racism for eugenicist goals, and stop its talking points from entering the mainstream political discourse.

Of course I abhor white nationalism, even though I don’t think its goals are eugenics, but, regardless, I’m not calling for censorship in debates about race. Sunlight, they say, is the best disinfectant, and scientists need to engage with civility on all topics, including the hot potato of race.  Unfortunately, this article fails to do that. It is not a piece of science, or even of scientific analysis, but a tendentious ideological screed.

h/t: Roy

 

Now it’s Trump vs. the Smithsonian, and a NYT piece about human races

April 2, 2025 • 10:20 am

On March 17 Trump issued a new executive order, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” And its goal is largely to prevent the dissemination of divisive or negative views of American history, instantiated, for Trump, in the Smithsonian Institution’s new exhibit on sculpture and identity. Here’s the “purpose” of the EO:

 Purpose and Policy.  Over the past decade, Americans have witnessed a concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth.  This revisionist movement seeks to undermine the remarkable achievements of the United States by casting its founding principles and historical milestones in a negative light.  Under this historical revision, our Nation’s unparalleled legacy of advancing liberty, individual rights, and human happiness is reconstructed as inherently racist, sexist, oppressive, or otherwise irredeemably flawed.  Rather than fostering unity and a deeper understanding of our shared past, the widespread effort to rewrite history deepens societal divides and fosters a sense of national shame, disregarding the progress America has made and the ideals that continue to inspire millions around the globe.

The EO then concentrates on a new exhibit at the Smithsonian that deals with race and power:

Once widely respected as a symbol of American excellence and a global icon of cultural achievement, the Smithsonian Institution has, in recent years, come under the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology.  This shift has promoted narratives that portray American and Western values as inherently harmful and oppressive.  For example, the Smithsonian American Art Museum today features “The Shape of Power:  Stories of Race and American Sculpture,” an exhibit representing that “[s]ocieties including the United States have used race to establish and maintain systems of power, privilege, and disenfranchisement.”  The exhibit further claims that “sculpture has been a powerful tool in promoting scientific racism” and promotes the view that race is not a biological reality but a social construct, stating “Race is a human invention.”

Other institutes also get this kind of treatment, including The National Museum of African American History and Culture and Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.  The Order then decrees that the Department of the Interior must prevent such “divisive” exhibits. Part of Trump’s Diktat to the Department of the Interior telling it what it must do:

(i)    determine whether, since January 1, 2020, public monuments, memorials, statues, markers, or similar properties within the Department of the Interior’s jurisdiction have been removed or changed to perpetuate a false reconstruction of American history, inappropriately minimize the value of certain historical events or figures, or include any other improper partisan ideology;

(ii)   take action to reinstate the pre-existing monuments, memorials, statues, markers, or similar properties, as appropriate and consistent with 43 U.S.C. 1451 et seq., 54 U.S.C. 100101 et seq.,and other applicable law; and

(iii)  take action, as appropriate and consistent with applicable law, to ensure that all public monuments, memorials, statues, markers, or similar properties within the Department of the Interior’s jurisdiction do not contain descriptions, depictions, or other content that inappropriately disparage Americans past or living (including persons living in colonial times), and instead focus on the greatness of the achievements and progress of the American people or, with respect to natural features, the beauty, abundance, and grandeur of the American landscape.\

It’s clear that Trump is aiming for a somewhat sanitized version of American history, closer to that of the old sanitized history textbooks we had in junior high and far, far distant from the claims of the 1619 Project.  Of course the truth is somewhere in between: America and its founders had high and admirable ideals, but fell down when it came to the “all men are created equal” with the same “unalienable rights” part.  All people (not just “men,” which to them presumably meant “people”) were not treated as if they were created equal, and the institution of slavery led to the worst war in American history (the Civil War killed 1.5 times the number of Americans who died in WWII and more than ten times the number of American deaths in the Vietnam War).

And bigotry did not end after the Civil War, of course. Immigrants were largely denied opportunities, blacks still faced Jim Crow treatment, and we incarcerated American citizens of Japanese descent during WWII.  Our history, while progressing now towards equality of opportunity, has been checkered, and it’s wrong to hide that from people.

On the other hand, it’s misleading to pretend, as woke culture does courtesy of Ibram Kendi et al., that racism is still built heavily into American laws and that all white Americans are bigots determined to hold down minorities. Yes, identity politics is distorting America, but the remnants of the past nevertheless can be seen in the lower well-being and achievement of some minorities, and we need to remedy that as best we can.

In contrast, Trump seems to want to hide America’s past under a basket.  I haven’t seen the Smithsonian’s exhibit so I can’t pass judgement on it, but the NYT, highlighting Trump’s order, takes another tack: it addresses, and pretty much denies, the existence of human race. Read the article by clicking the headline below or find it archived here.

The tenor of this article, which is poorly researched but laden with quotes, is that human races do not exist and are merely a social construct.  A few excerpts to that end:

The president’s order noted, among other things, that the show “promotes the view that race is not a biological reality but a social construct, stating ‘Race is a human invention.’”

In interviews, several scholars questioned why the executive order appeared to take issue with that view, which is now broadly held. Samuel J. Redman, a history professor at University of Massachusetts Amherst who has written about scientific racism, said that “the executive order is troubling and out of step with the current consensus.” He added that pseudoscientific attempts to create a hierarchy of races with white people at the top were seen “in places like Nazi Germany or within the eugenics movement.”

and   

“Race does not provide an accurate representation of human biological variation,” the statement reads. “Humans are not divided biologically into distinct continental types or racial genetic clusters. Instead, the Western concept of race must be understood as a classification system that emerged from, and in support of, European colonialism, oppression, and discrimination.”

“It thus does not have its roots in biological reality, but in policies of discrimination,” the statement says. “Because of that, over the last five centuries, race has become a social reality that structures societies and how we experience the world. In this regard, race is real, as is racism, and both have real biological consequences.”

This is the view throughout the article, and it’s both right and wrong, which means it’s misleading.  The “classical” view, which is that there are a finite number of distinct groups, distinguishable by morphology and with few or no intermediates between groups, is wrong.  Thousands of years ago, when human populations began differentiating in geographical isolation from one another, and were was on the road to formation of distinct biological “races” and then species, this definition may have be closer to accuracy. But human mobility and interbreeding had long since effaced the distinctness of populations. We have groups within groups within groups.

But populations that are genetically distinct continue to exist, and that is what the article neglects. You can call them “races” or “populations” (my preference) or “ethnic groups”, but there’s no doubt that the human species is geographically heterogeneous, with geographic barriers like the Sahara or the Himalayas demarcating the more distinct populations. Further, you can often identify people’s ancestry from their genes. Otherwise, companies like 23andMe wouldn’t work at all.

But I am getting ahead of myself.  Writing about “race” these days is a hot potato because even discussing it implies that you are ranking populations, which no rational person does any more.  But ignoring the genetic distinctness of populations, based on frequency differences in many genes among populations from different areas, affords a fascinating and informative look into the history of human migration, selection, and so on.

There are few sensible pieces written on the topic of race. Most of them argue that race is a social construct without any biological basis.  But I want to be a bit self-aggrandizing and recommend one section of the paper “The ideological subversion of biology” that Luana Maroja and I wrote for the Skeptical Inquirer. It’s free at the title link. The paper takes up six ways that evolutionary biology has been distorted by ideologues. The part you should read is section 5, which starts like this (it is not long but I urge it upon you):

5. “Race and ethnicity are social constructs, without scientific or biological meaning.” This is the elephant in the room: the claim that there is no empirical value in studying differences between races, ethnic groups, or populations. Such work is the biggest taboo in biology, claimed to be inherently racist and harmful. But the assertion heading this paragraph, a direct quote from the editors of the Journal of the American Medical Association, is wrong.

and a few excerpts from that section (there are references to all statements):

. . .old racial designations such as white, black, and Asian came with the erroneous view that races are easily distinguished by a few traits, are geographically delimited, and have substantial genetic differences. In fact, the human species today comprises geographically continuous groups that have only small to modest differences in the frequencies of genetic variants, and there are groups within groups: potentially an unlimited number of “races.” Still, human populations do show genetic differences from place to place, and those small differences, summed over thousands of genes, add up to substantial and often diagnostic differences between populations.

Even the old and outmoded view of race is not devoid of biological meaning. A group of researchers compared a broad sample of genes in over 3,600 individuals who self-identified as either African American, white, East Asian, or Hispanic. DNA analysis showed that these groups fell into genetic clusters, and there was a 99.84 percent match between which cluster someone fell into and their self-designated racial classification. This surely shows that even the old concept of race is not “without biological meaning.” But that’s not surprising because, given restricted movement in the past, human populations evolved largely in geographic isolation from one another—apart from “Hispanic,” a recently admixed population never considered a race. As any evolutionary biologist knows, geographically isolated populations become genetically differentiated over time, and this is why we can use genes to make good guesses about where populations come from.

More recent work, taking advantage of our ability to easily sequence whole genomes, confirms a high concordance between self-identified race and genetic groupings. One study of twenty-three ethnic groups found that they fell into seven broad “race/ethnicity” clusters, each associated with a different area of the world. On a finer scale, genetic analysis of Europeans show that, remarkably, a map of their genetic constitutions coincides almost perfectly with the map of Europe itself. In fact, the DNA of most Europeans can narrow down their birthplace to within roughly 500 miles.

One more:

On a broader scale, genetic analysis of worldwide populations has allowed us to not only trace the history of human expansions out of Africa (there were several), but to assign dates to when H. sapiens colonized different areas of the world. This has been made easier with recent techniques for sequencing human “fossil DNA.” On top of that, we have fossil DNA from groups such as Denisovans and Neanderthals, which, in conjunction with modern data, tells us these now-extinct groups bred in the past with the ancestors of “modern” Homo sapiens, producing at least some fertile offspring (most of us have some Neanderthal DNA in our genomes). Although archaeology and carbon dating have helped reconstruct the history of our species, these have largely been supplanted by sequencing the DNA of living and ancient humans.

We go on to discuss the taboos of race (the most taboo-sh being studying differences in mentation and IQ among groups) as well as some of the advantages of knowing the genetic differences among human populations.

The point I want to make is that, when you’re talking about “race,” you don’t want to throw out the baby with the bathwater. Yes, the classical idea of “races” is largely wrong, but we should not pretend that all human populations are genetically identical, or that the existing genetic differences aren’t diagnostic or of interest.  The NYT article above, however, says nothing like that. Instead, it emphasizes the viewpoint expressed above:

“Race does not provide an accurate representation of human biological variation,” the statement reads. “Humans are not divided biologically into distinct continental types or racial genetic clusters. Instead, the Western concept of race must be understood as a classification system that emerged from, and in support of, European colonialism, oppression, and discrimination.”

“It thus does not have its roots in biological reality, but in policies of discrimination,”

You can see how this is misleading.  Populations are not absolutely distinct, but are distinguishable genetically if you use many genes. And populations do tend to statistically cluster by geography, because geographic isolation promotes genetic differentiation. (Again, this is how ancestry companies figure out where your genes came from.) And yes, of course, “race” was used to prop up colonialism, oppression, and discrimination”. That’s the bathwater we should throw out. But we should keep the baby, which is recognizing that human populations are not genetically identical, and that the genetic differences among them give useful information about several topics. Just read section 5!

Ibram Kendi moves from Boston University to Howard University

February 2, 2025 • 9:40 am

When Ibram X. Kendi (born Ibram Henry Rogers) was all the rage, and Boston University (BU) gave him his own Antiracist Research Center, I decided I’d better read his famous book, How To Be an Antiracist.  I found the book’s popularity puzzling, as it was a not-too-coherent mélange of autobiography and questionable but authoritative Diktats about racism, which was that it was ubiquitous, a feature of all white people, and that any law or rule that wasn’t explicitly antiracist was racist.  Further, if you are not actively involved in antiracist work, you are a racist.  As the NYT wrote, quoting a sentence from the first edition of Kendi’s book:

“The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination,” Kendi wrote, in words that would be softened in a future edition after they became the subject of criticism. “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.” In other words, two wrongs do make a right.

Well, that was arguable, but in general I found that the book didn’t cohere, though of course its message resonated at the time, what with Black Lives Matter and all, and sold a gazillion copies. Kendi became the doyen of antiracism (his female counterpart was Robin DiAngelo), and Boston University set up a center run by Kendi, funded by $10 million from a donor, and, over the next three years, it got a further $43 million in grants and donations.

Given all this, I wasn’t too surprised to learn that, given the incoherence of his book—and I’ll admit that I haven’t read Stamped from the Beginning, which some of my friends like, and which won a National Book Award—BU’s Antiracist Research Center was not a success.  It was dogged by accusations of mismanagement, and really never did anything. Nineteen employees of the Center (nearly half of its staff) were laid off and BU launched an investigation, which, although it found no issues of misuse of money, decided to hire a management consultant firm, whose recommendations led to a revamping of the center about a year ago. On this site I reported on a discussion of Kendi’s efficacy by John McWhorter and Glenn Loury, and said this (Loury was responding to McWhorter’s statement that he didn’t understand the joy that Kendi’s downfall was provoking):

Loury responds that yes, Schadenfreude is not a great emotion, but he feels that Kendi is an “empty suit”—a “little man behind the curtain”—who “doesn’t know anything.”  Loury asserts it’s not really about Kendi, but the failure of the extreme antiracist extremists, like Black Lives Matter or the 1619 Project to make any progress.

I agree with Loury about the problems of an unequipped Kendi being made the symbol of a movement, and if you read his book How to be an Antiracist, you’ll see the intellectual vacuity of his ideas. McWhorter agrees that Kendi was chosen to be the symbol of that movement, and wasn’t equipped to lead it, but that’s no reason to be angry at him.  In response, Loury asserts that the man is a fraud, and so he does show a bit of Schadenfreude, for Loury adds that Kendi is an “embarrassment and an absurdity.”  Isn’t that Schadenfreude?

In response, McWhorter says that Kendi was thrust into a position for which he was not equipped, and it was not his fault that his Institute fell apart. (McWhorter says that what Boston University did in founding Kendi’s antiracist center  “was an insult to black achievement.”)  In other words, Loury blames Kendi for taking money and doing what he was unequipped to do, while McWhorter blames society and Boston University for thrusting Kendi into a job that was irresistible in order to do performative antiracism.

Now I learn from this tweet, followed by reporting (see below) that Kendi has left BU for Howard University, a historically black institution in Washington, D.C.

You can read about Kendi’s move in many places, including BU Today, the Boston Globe, Axios, The National Review, and The Washington Post (I haven’t found a mention in the New York Times).  The Center will close on June 30 when its charter expires, and Howard University has also given Kendi his own institute:

Kendi will start at Howard this summer as a history professor and director of the tentatively named Howard University Institute for Advanced Research, according to the university. He will also bring with him the Emancipator, a digital magazine focused on racial inequity that was founded with the Boston Globe but has since gone independent.

The new institute will research the African diaspora through the lens of racism, technology, climate change and a host of other subjects, said Howard Provost Anthony K. Wutoh, and bring on fellows for each academic year with projects they propose. The effort will be funded largely through donors, though Wutoh said the specifics are not yet finalized.

As to why Kendi is leaving BU, the only guesses are from the National Review, which indicts a lack of productivity of the Center and speculates that Trump’s new DEI initiative may have been responsible:

Despite the generous funds, only two new research papers [from the BU institute] had been produced by the time of the employee layoffs. The exact count of total research papers is unclear.

“Despite all the headwinds we faced as a new organization founded during the pandemic and the intense backlash over critical race theory, I am very proud of all we envisioned, all we created, all we learned, all we achieved—the community we built, the people we helped and inspired,” Kendi said in a statement Thursday.

“To all the faculty, staff, administrators, students, supporters, and Boston community members, I feel honored to have been able to do this work with you over the last five years,” he added. “I am departing for an opportunity I could not pass up, but what connected us at CAR remains, especially during this precarious time. Our commitment to building an equitable and just society.”

The center’s closure and Kendi’s departure come as President Donald Trump roots out diversity, equity, and inclusion practices within the federal government and threatens to do the same in the private sector if corporations and universities fail to abandon the leftist ideology.

Taking the hint from the Republican administration, universities are halting research projects and shuttering offices related to DEI, according to the Wall Street Journal. Public higher-education institutions are reversing course because they could lose federal funding if they continue maintaining their diversity and inclusion efforts.

I’m not sure about the involvement of Trump’s DEI plans here, but I do have a few remarks. First, I don’t feel any joy that Kendi is leaving BU, even if he was sort of deep-sixed for non-productivity.  If McWhorter and Loury are correct, Kendi was simply unequipped to run a big institute. (As a side note, he also had stage 4 colon cancer, but appears to have survived it; and he did a lot of his work while waiting to see if he would be cured. That diagnosis is a huge burden to carry.) Kendi may, as they said, be good at helping with the “racial reckoning,” but appears to lack managerial skills (he’s only 42).

Second, I think that, in view of what happened at BU, Howard is making a mistake giving Kendi his own institute. As nearly everyone who’s studied the BU debacle admits, Kendi is unequipped to run a big institute. On the other hand, he’s published many books and shows no lack of scholarship, and his presence at Howard will undoubtedly be a magnet for students.  In my view, they should have just made him a professor, but one without an institute to run.  At any rate, we’ll see how the new Howard University Institute for Advanced Research will fare.

In the meantime, here’s Howard University’s welcome: