scientific racism

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RWW

VID

02/26/2026

Last year, racist, antisemitic, and deeply misogynistic theocratic fascist Christian nationalist pastor Joel Webbon conducted a lengthy interview with fellow Hitler-loving racist, misogynistic, antisemitic, homophobic,Christian nationalist, fascist, white nationalist Nick Fuentes.

Since the beginning of the year, Webbon has been releasing weekly installments from this ten-part series of programs. During a recent episode on "race realism"—which, in this case, is just a modern euphemism for scientific racism—Webbon asserted that it is fair to generalize that all black people are impulsive and lazy and that all Jewish people are subversive.

"I could say all people—and you have to understand the disclaimer; all people [is] a generalization. Of course, there are exceptions—but in a general sense, I would say all white people are suicidal, [have] toxic empathy, and [are] cowardly," Webbon said. "That's why the West is falling apart."

"And then I feel like I could also say all black people are impulsive [and] lazy," he continued. "Of course, there are exceptions. I'm not thinking of Thomas Sowell, I'm not thinking of Clarence Thomas."

"And I think I could also, to go one step further, say all Jews are subversive," Webbon added. "There would, of course, be some exceptions there as well."

"I can say those things and not say, 'And therefore I hate them, or I wish them harm, or I would mistreat them as a lower class of citizens, or deprive them of certain rights,' but I can still prejudge," Webbon declared. "I know that among these people, because the apple doesn't fall too far from the tree, race is a tribe, it's an extended family and I know that this family has these kinds of characteristics, both good and bad. Here are some of the bad ones in particular."

"If this is a black man who's a member of my church and a friend, I'm not thinking about any of that," Webbon said. "But if it's a perfect stranger and I've never met before, then I'm thinking of [the bad characteristics]. I do this with white people. I meet a random white person in 2025, and I'm thinking, this guy's probably a cuck, he's probably cowardly ... and I have a fairly high statistical chance of being right. I don't think that that's mean. I don't think that's a sin."

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Why Elon Musk Needs Dungeons & Dragons to Be Racist

Adam Serwer

The fantastical roots of “scientific racism.” (The Atlantic)

NYT PUNKED

FAIL? JRNL?

AN 7 25

The New York Times on Thursday published a story questioning New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani's past statements about his racial background based on a tip it received from a proponent of "race science."

The Times piece in question focused on Mamdani's college application to Columbia University in which he listed both "Asian" and "Black or African American" as his race.

Although both of Mamdani's parents are of Indian descent, he was born in the African country of Uganda and lived there for the first five years of his life. Mamdani told the Times that he checked the box on the application for "Black or African American" because he considers himself an American who was born in Africa. He emphasized that he does not identify as Black and argued that he found it difficult to express the complexity of his racial background given the options on the application.

However, what is stirring controversy about the Times piece isn't so much its content but the source of its information. The Times acknowledges that the information on Mamdani was culled from a large hack of a Columbia database and that it received a copy of Mamdani's application from "an intermediary who goes by the name Crémieux on Substack and X," whom it describes as "an academic who opposes affirmative action and writes often about I.Q. and race."

A report from The Guardian's Jason Wilson published earlier this year shows that the Times is vastly underselling its source's extreme views on race. As Wilson documented, the "Crémieux" cited by the Times is a man named Jordan Lasker, whose writings regularly defend the work of "race scientists" who use I.Q. test results to argue that Black people are mentally inferior to other races.

IFrame Content

"Crémieux runs a Substack also featuring posts on the supposed relationships between race and I.Q.," Wilson explained. "A prominently featured post there seeks to defend the argument that average national IQs vary by up to 40 points, with countries in Europe, North America, and East Asia at the high end and countries in the global south at the low end, and several African countries purportedly having average national IQs at a level that experts associate with mental impairment."

Another report from Talking Points Memo's Hunter Walker found that Lasker has regularly posted about a racial "I.Q. gap" and has even suggested that there are "genetic pathways of crime." On his X account, Lasker has mused about the differences in brain sizes between Black and white Americans and between women and men more generally.

Brandon McEuen, a historian at Wayne State University who specializes in teaching about the history of the eugenics movement, slammed the Times for not only relying on Lasker as its source for the story on Mamdani but also for granting him anonymity.

"The decision to keep Lasker anonymous is ridiculous since his name has already been published in other outlets that don't provide softballs for eugenicists," he wrote on his Bluesky account.

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AN 3 25

From Vice President JD Vance to SpaceX/Tesla/X.com CEO Elon Musk, natalism is a high priority for the MAGA movement. Vance famously attacked Americans who don't have biological children as "childless cat ladies," and both Vance and Musk are obsessed with the idea that Americans aren't having enough kids.

A conference specifically focused on natalism and billed as the Natal Conference 2025 is scheduled for March 28-29 in Austin, Texas. And according to The Guardian's Jason Wilson, the speakers include "promoters of race science" and "self-described eugenicists."

Wilson, in an article published on March 3, reports, "Natalism, in its current, often right-wing iteration, encourages high birth rates, and Musk has been a vocal proponent. He also maintains a large compound home near Austin, where reportedly, he plans to house some of his children and two of their mothers."

The March 28-29 event's website, Wilson notes, embeds a tweet from Musk, who wrote, "If birth rates continue to plummet, human civilization will end." The event is being organized by far-right natalist Kevin Dolan.

According to Patrik Hermannson of the U.K.-based nonprofit Hope Not Hate, the views being promoted at Natal Conference 2025 are influenced by "the modern race science movement."

Wilson quotes Hermannson as saying, "It's about having more babies, but it's important to ask whose babies. It's about promoting the idea that certain people should have babies that have been improved with positive eugenics."

Tickets for Natal Conference 2025 are going for $1000 for one person or $1900 for two people.

According to Wilson, "One of the speakers at the conference is billed under a social media alias, Cremieux, but The Guardian has corroborated that the account is apparently run by Jordan Lasker, a long-time proponent of eugenics. The @cremieuxrecueil X account has been boosted or engaged with dozens of times by that platform’s proprietor, Elon Musk, often on the topic of falling birthrates."

READ MORE:[Alarm sounded as Trump’s recent moves threaten to upend the Constitution*

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NO LNX

Alternet

How white supremacy prevented America from having single-payer healthcare

Thom Hartmann December 16, 2024

In the wake of the assassination of UnitedHealth CEO Brian Thompson, Americans are wondering out loud why we’re getting ripped off by giant insurance companies when every other developed country in the world has healthcare as a right and pays an average of about half of what we do — and gets better outcomes.

As I point out in The Hidden History of American Healthcare: Why Sickness Bankrupts You and Makes Others Insanely Rich, and brought up with Joy Reid on her program last week, America is:

— The only developed country in the world that doesn’t recognize healthcare as a human right,

— The only country with more than two-thirds of its population lacking access to affordable healthcare and a half-million families facing bankruptcy every year because somebody got sick,

— The only country in the developed world where over 40% of the population carries $220 billion in medical debt,

— And the only country in the developed world that has, since its founding, enslaved and then legally oppressed and disenfranchised a large minority of its population because of their race.

These things, along with UnitedHealth’s $370 billion in revenue and $32 billion in profit, are connected.

Roughly 60 percent of Americans would have had to take out a loan or otherwise borrow or beg for money to deal with a single, unexpected $1,000 expense.

Yet annual family medical copays and out -of-pocket deductibles averaged $6,575 in 2023, when the Kaiser Family Foundation did a comprehensive survey of Americans. This strikes minorities particularly hard, which, it turns out, is not an accident.

The simple fact is that, were it not for slavery, white supremacy, and the legacy of “scientific racism,” America would have had a national, single-payer healthcare system in 1915, just 31 years after Germany put into place the modern world’s first such program.

At the center of the effort to prevent a national healthcare system — or any form of government assistance that may even incidentally offer benefit to African Americans — were Frederick Ludwig Hoffman and the Prudential Life Insurance Company, which promoted his “science based” racial theories to successfully fight single-payer health insurance.

Racism is the main reason that America doesn’t consider healthcare a human right and provide it to all citizens, in contrast to every other developed country in the world. Racist whites, particularly in the South, have worked for over a century to make sure that healthcare is hard for Black people and other minorities to get.

And their biggest ally, their founding spokesperson in the post–Civil War era, their biggest champion right up to the 1940s, was a man that most Americans have never heard of.

In 1884, 19-year-old Frederick Ludwig Hoffmann left Germany for America after failing at a number of job attempts and being rejected for the German Army because he was “physically deficient” and frail, standing five-foot-seven and weighing a mere 110 pounds. He arrived in New York with $4.76 in his pocket, speaking “not a word of English” but determined to prove wrong his mother’s assessment that he was a “good-for-nothing.”

From this humble beginning, Hoffmann went on to become one of America’s most influential statisticians and analysts of public health, making numerous consequential discoveries about how industrialization was killing American workers.

He dropped the last n in his last name, became so fluent in English that his accent was nearly indistinguishable, and married into an upscale Georgia family. By 1920 he was an American citizen, vice president of America’s largest insurance company, and a national authority on the now-discredited pseudoscience called scientific racism.

In 1908, his article “The Mortality from Consumption [tuberculosis] in the Dusty Trades,” published by the US Department of Labor, produced the first national efforts to reduce lung damage in the workplace. He also published the first work (1915) linking tobacco to lung cancer.

From this, he became vice president of the National Tuberculosis Association (today known as the American Lung Association) and later demonstrated the connection between exposure to asbestos and the disease that killed my father, mesothelioma (a bit of data that asbestos companies worked to keep hidden for the next 80 years).

But Hoffman’s most controversial lifelong obsession was with the relationship between disease, race, and society.

On one of his first trips to Georgia, he wrote, he came across a book by Dr. Eugene R. Corson, a Georgia obstetrician, titled The Vital Equation of the Colored Race and Its Future in the United States. It was apparently an updated or shortened version of Corson’s widely read “The Future of the Colored Race in the United States From an Ethnic and Medical Standpoint,” published in 1887 in the New York Medical Times.

This was just after the failure of Reconstruction, and a widespread topic of speculation, particularly in the South, was whether Black people would soon outnumber white people in that part of the country.

The Ku Klux Klan and others calling for wholesale slaughter and suppression of Black people claimed that they were more likely to have larger families because they were “more prolific,” code for “excessively sexual,” a charge that had persisted from the earliest days of slavery and led to the murder of Emmett Till (among others).

However, the “scientific” racists of the day, like Corson, thought differently. Corson led a movement suggesting that people of African ancestry, now lacking “the protective womb of slavery,” would die out for the simple reason that the Black race was “inferior to whites.”

Corson promoted the Klan’s argument that “the simpler the organism, the simpler the genesis and the greater the prolificness.” But, he said, white people would prevail because they were less likely to die of disease, citing Herbert Spencer’s Theory of Population Deduced from the General Law of Animal Fertility.

While Black people might have more children, Corson wrote, white people would still outnumber them because Black fecundity “is more than compensated for by the ability [of white people] to maintain individual life.”

Enslaved people from Africa had found themselves in a civilization “of which [they are] not a product” and thus were less likely to be successful in “the struggle for existence.” Therefore, Corson wrote, Black people “must suffer physically, a result which forbids any undue increase in the race.”

The discovery of this theory, called the racial extinction thesis, electrified Hoffman, and he spent the rest of his life promoting it, while campaigning to stop any sort of movement toward a national health insurance program that might prevent or slow down the extinction of Black people in America.

In August 1896, the American Economic Association published a book that represented a turning point in Frederick Hoffman’s life and sealed the fate of single-payer health insurance in America. It was Hoffman’s magnum opus, summarizing decades of compiled statistics on Black versus white mortality, proving, according to Hoffman, once and for all, that for Black people, “gradual extinction is only a question of time.”

In Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro, Hoffman set out not only to repeatedly make and statistically prove the above claim, but also to prove that anytime white people tried to help Black people, particularly by offering them healthcare services, the result was disaster for both.

Noting that “the Negro has failed to gain a foothold in any of the northern states,” Hoffman wrote, “he is in the South as a permanent factor . . . with a tendency to drift into the cities, there to concentrate in the most undesirable and unsanitary sections . . . and the evil effect will be more felt by the cities which are thus augmented in population of an undesirable character.”

In great detail, Hoffman spent about 300 pages documenting, with exhaustive tables and statistics, the fact that Black people were more likely to die as a result of everything from malaria to tuberculosis to childbirth.

And it was all because of their race, Hoffman argued:

“The decrease in the rate of increase of the colored population has been traced first to the excessive mortality, which in turn has been traced to an inferior vital capacity. . . . This racial inferiority has, in turn, brought about a moral deterioration . . . sexual immorality . . . diminished social and economic efficiency . . .”

And that represented a danger to white people, Hoffman wrote.

The participation of freed Black people in the contemporary labor pool and in society overall, he wrote, “in the course of years must prove not only a most destructive factor in the progress of the colored race, but also in the progress, social as well as economic, of the white race brought under its influence.”

Slavery had actually been good for Black people, Hoffman believed, and the abolition of slavery at the end of the Civil War was only going to speed up the demise of that race.

“Nothing is more clearly shown from this investigation,” he wrote, “than that the southern black man at the time of emancipation was healthy in body and cheerful in mind. He neither suffered inordinately from disease nor from impaired bodily vigor.”

But with abolition, formerly enslaved people were “tending toward a condition in which matters will be worse than they are now, when diseases will be more destructive, vital resistance still lower, when the number of births will fall below the deaths, and gradual extinction of the race will take place.”

While Hoffman pioneered linking causal conditions such as asbestos and carcinogen exposure to sickness, he was so blinded by racism that a modern reader of his book constantly finds himself shouting, “But these things are also true of poor whites! These are caused by discrimination and poverty!!”

At the time, though, the vast majority of white Americans agreed with him. He was echoing the white cultural and scientific consensus of the late 19th and early 20th centuries when he wrote:

“Given the same conditions of life for two races, the one of Aryan descent will prove the superior, solely on account of its ancient inheritance of virtue and transmitted qualities which are determining factors in the struggle for race supremacy. The lower races, even under the same conditions of life, must necessarily fail because the vast number of incapables, which a hard struggle for life has eliminated from the ranks of the white races, are still forming the large body of the lower races.”

And, according to Hoffman and the other white “scientific racists,” the problem wasn’t just physical inferiority. The deepest “problem of the Negro,” Hoffman wrote, was moral:

“All the facts prove that a low standard of sexual morality is the main and underlying cause of the low and anti-social condition of the race at the present time. . . . The conclusion is warranted that it is merely a question of time when the actual downward course, that is, a decrease in the population will take place. In the meantime, however, the presence of the colored population is a serious hindrance to the economic progress of the white race.”

For those well-intentioned white people who wanted to help out the people who were a mere generation or two away from slavery, Hoffman and his colleagues had one simple bit of advice: Don’t even try.

In 1980, David Koch famously ran for vice president of the United States under the banner of the Libertarian Party, an organization founded a few decades earlier by big business to give an economic rationale and political patina to their simple theory that economics were more important than democracy, and the quality of life of working people should be decided in the “free marketplace” instead of by unions or through democratic processes via government regulation.

In this, Koch and his Libertarian friends were echoing Frederick Hoffman.

In his 1896 book Race Traits, Hoffman laid out his “scientific” assertion that when government steps in to help people, it invariably ends up hurting them instead. Not only should there be no government assistance given to help African Americans recover from three centuries of property theft, forced labor, and legal violence, but it is scientifically wrong to even consider the idea.

White people and government programs to better the lives of Black people, Hoffman wrote, deserve “the most severe condemnation of modern attempts of superior races to lift inferior races to their own elevated position.”

The damage done to Black people by offering them any sort of help, government assistance, or even a minimum wage, he wrote, is “criminal” behavior for a “civilized people.”

Hoffman pointed to Native Americans to prove his point:

“Few races have made such a brave struggle for their own preservation; few races can boast of so high a degree of aboriginal civilization. . . . An iron will can be traced upon the countenance of nearly every Indian of note.”

But it was government help, Hoffman wrote, that destroyed the American Indian.

It wasn’t “adulterated whiskey nor the frightful consequences of sexual immorality, spread around the forts and settlements of the whites,” that was “sufficient” to destroy Native Americans. It was charity.

“The most subtle agency of all,” he wrote, sounding like Ronald Reagan or David Koch, “governmental pauperism, the highest development of the theory of easy conditions of life, did what neither drink nor the poisons of venereal disease could do, and today the large majority of the tribes are following the Maories and Hawaiians towards the goal of final extinction.”

White Americans rationalized their brutality toward Native Americans and African Americans by saying that it was simple evolutionary biology: only the strong survive, and when the weak are allowed to propagate, it weakens the overall human race.

“Easy conditions of life and a liberal charity are among the most destructive influences affecting the lower races,” Hoffman concluded, “since by such methods the weak and incapable are permitted to increase and multiply, while the struggle of the more able is increased in severity [by the increase in taxes and regulation].”

And it’s not just charity.

“All the facts prove,” Hoffman wrote, “that education, philanthropy, and religion have failed to develop [among Black people] a higher appreciation of the stern and uncompromising virtues of the Aryan race.

“Instead of making the race more independent, modern educational and philanthropic efforts have succeeded in making it even more dependent on the white race at the present time than it was previous to emancipation.”

Free education — as any Libertarian can tell you — is more dangerous to the souls of people than slavery. And free healthcare is even worse.

Sounding like a modern-day acolyte of Ayn Rand, Hoffman wrote:

“Instead of clamoring for aid and assistance from the white race, the negro himself should sternly refuse every offer of direct interference in his own evolution. The more difficult his upward struggle, the more enduring will be the qualities developed.”

And, like Ayn Rand, David Koch, and Ronald Reagan, Hoffman believed that these were eternal truths independent of race:

“No missionary or educator or philanthropist extended aid or comfort to the English peasant class during its darkest days, to the earliest settlers on the coast of New England, or the pioneer in the forests of the far West. . . . [I]t is extremely rare to find a case where easy conditions of life or liberal charity have assisted man in his upward struggle. Self reliance . . . must be developed, and thus far have not been developed by the aid of charity or liberal philanthropy.”

This libertarian ideal is still pervasive in our modern fragmented healthcare system, and in the midst of the COVID-19 crisis in 2020 it resulted in thousands of daily American deaths, disproportionately hitting racial minorities.

The “compulsory health insurance” (what today we’d call Medicare for All) movement of the early 20th century was as much (and possibly more) about getting paid sick leave as it was about covering doctor visits and hospitalization, because healthcare was so cheap that an unpaid week at work was a bigger hit to the wallet.

But workers wanted both.

The most successful effort of the era came out of an organization that a small group of progressive economists put together in 1905 and 1906, known as the American Association for Labor Legislation (AALL).

Their initial efforts were directed at paid sick leave, workers’ compensation insurance, child labor laws, and workplace safety standards. To that last end, they were actively using the kinds of statistical analysis that Frederick Hoffman had both used and popularized to do everything from laying out his theories on race to showing an association between tobacco use and lung cancer.

Hoffman joined the AALL to promote their efforts…at least that was his claim.

A charitable reading of his motivations was that his statistical research on workplace phosphorus poisoning and lung disease overlapped with their efforts, and they were an organization that, at that time, was held in high regard. He did, after all, consider himself — and was, in a very real way — a major force for reform in public health and workplace safety arenas.

A less charitable motivation is posited in Daniel T. Rodgers’s 1998 book Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age. Rodgers wrote:

“On the AALL social insurance committee, he became the [Prudential] company’s mole. . . . Hoffman took credit for blocking the drafting of any resolutions at the AALL’s social insurance conference in 1913. During the framing of the association’s model health insurance bill, he dragged his feet, obstructed, pressed in vain for company initiatives in the medical insurance field, and informed his employers — more and more certain that public health insurance was ‘distinctly pernicious and a menace to our interests.’”

Despite Prudential and Hoffman’s efforts, government-funded health insurance was gaining popularity in America (and being adopted across Europe).

In 1912, Theodore Roosevelt made a third-party bid for the presidency, forming the Progressive Party (with its Bull Moose logo), and called for “the protection of home life against the hazards of sickness, irregular employment and old age through the adoption of a system of social insurance.”

Jane Addams (Hull House founder), dressed in suffragette white, seconded Roosevelt’s nomination to wild cheers and applause; Roosevelt rallies routinely drew tens of thousands of people, and more than 200,000 people showed up in Los Angeles to support him and the party.

Roosevelt’s endorsement of “social insurance,” including health coverage, both reflected and reinforced a growing national sentiment, and in 1915 the AALL called for every state to support a program of health insurance. Prudential hadn’t yet gotten into the business of insuring health (they would in 1925), but they could see the writing on the wall.

In 1916, the AALL endorsed health insurance provided through a network of local and statewide mutual companies and called for those policies to also provide a small death benefit to cover funeral costs, which would have competed directly with the funeral coverage that was Prudential’s main cash cow.

Hoffman wrote to the company, “We, of course, cannot compete with Compulsory Insurance, including a death benefit of, say $100.” He then resigned “in disgust” from the AALL and begin a campaign, sponsored by Prudential, to stop state-funded health insurance.

Hoffman and Prudential weren’t alone in their concern: the Insurance Federation of New York told their members:

“This is only the entering wedge; if once a foothold is obtained it will mean attempts to have such State Insurance of all kinds...”

The AALL produced model legislation that was taken up in 1916 by eight states, including California and New York, the former via a ballot initiative and the latter in the New York legislature. In addition to calling for policies that would pay all costs of healthcare, the AALL’s legislation called for up to 26 weeks of paid sick leave.

Picking up steam, the American Medical Association endorsed the AALL’s model legislation as well. The battle was joined.

Hoffman’s Prudential-sponsored campaign to prevent any state from adopting a statewide nonprofit health (and death benefit) insurance program went into overdrive through 1916–1920. He traveled to Germany several times to chronicle, in minute detail, the failings of the kaiser’s system that had been operating since 1885.

Prudential, in 1905, had been swept up in New York’s Armstrong Investigation, and so, as historian Beatrix Hoffman (no relation to Frederick) wrote, “[b]ecause of their industry’s public image problems, insurance executives knew their opposition to compulsory health insurance would be perceived as brazen self-interest.”

They needed a front man, and the guy who was famous for discovering the causes of numerous public health crises was perfect. Thus, Frederick Hoffman became the most well-known face of a massive, multiyear effort to stop the AALL’s campaign. He was remarkably effective.

In the years between 1916, when he resigned from AALL, and 1920, when nonprofit state-funded health insurance finally died, Hoffman wrote numerous pamphlets trashing the German single-payer government health system, “exposing” corruption in the British efforts at a National Health Service, and arguing that America’s healthcare system would be thrown into chaos and crisis if the AALL’s programs were adopted.

His work was widely distributed, as historian Daniel Rodgers noted: “The Prudential saturated the state capitols with his pamphlets.”

His 1917 pamphlet Facts and Fallacies of Compulsory Health Insurance, and the subsequent More Facts and Fallacies of Compulsory Health Insurance, published two years later, were his most widely cited and most consequential writings.

Historian Beatrix Hoffman wrote that the Facts pamphlet “resembled Race Traits and Tendencies in its impressive presentation of statistics and graphs alongside passionate polemics.” Frederick Hoffman refuted every figure the Progressives used in defense of their plan, from “Misleading Data on German Longevity” to “Misleading Estimate of Cost” and “Disregard of Actuarial Methods.”

Appealing to the Daniel Boone mythos of rugged, independent individualism that didn’t require assistance from government, Frederick Hoffman wrote in More Facts and Fallacies of Compulsory Health Insurance:

“The ever-present menace to democracy and liberty is the perversion of the legislative function [toward providing health insurance].”

Hoffman’s writing and speeches shook America’s political systems, particularly as this German-born “man of science” warned of the dire consequences to American liberty and democracy represented by universal health insurance.

In 1918, John R. Commons — one of the AALL’s cofounders — wrote that almost all the nation’s anti–compulsory health insurance propaganda “originates from one source; all of the ammunition, all of the facts and statistics that may come across, no matter who gives them to you, will be found to go back to the Prudential Insurance Co. of America, and to Mr. Frederick L. Hoffman.”

Prudential paid to transport Hoffman all across America, from media events to congressional hearings to a trip to England to document the horrors of their National Health Service system, which had gone into effect in 1911.

He wrote from London, in a widely read paper, that because of the British National Insurance Act, “The fine spirit of the English working classes, at one time the finest people of that type in the world, is gone, entirely gone.”

Historian Beatrix Hoffman wrote:

“His agitation was tireless, his influence widespread. . . . His reputation as an expert allowed Hoffman to participate in the deliberations of the health insurance commissions of Illinois, Wisconsin, and Connecticut, and to successfully persuade commission members to vote against the plan.”

In 1920, in large part because of Prudential’s efforts and Hoffman’s warnings, California’s voters resoundingly turned down a voter initiative in that state to provide health insurance, and, although New York’s Senate passed the bill, it died in committee in the Assembly.

While the AALL continued to campaign for state-funded health insurance until their dissolution in 1946, they never again gained enough traction to get their proposal before any state legislatures or the US Congress.

Having succeeded in killing state-funded health insurance, Hoffman, in the later 1920s, turned his attention back to his theory that Black people would eventually die out, joining the Eugenics Research Association (whose work was later used by Hitler to justify racial separation and his “final solution”).

In 1929, Hoffman asserted, in the African American publication Opportunity, that “the white race is almost solely responsible . . . for the health progress which the South has made during the last generation” and that Black people moving in large numbers into cities would “lead to a thoroughly unwholesome state of affairs which unquestionably will express itself in course of time in a lower birth rate and a higher death rate.”

Hoffman’s influence lasted long past his death in 1946 (which satisfied his stated desire to live long enough to see FDR out of office). As late as 1984, according to reporting in the Wall Street Journal, Prudential was still collecting premiums from African Americans that were “in some instances more than a third higher” than those paid by whites.

We even see an echo of it in the opposition of southern white racist Senators to Medicare in 1965, arguably leading to the 20% hole in that system that requires MediGap policies to fill.

Were it not for “scientific racism,” America would have long ago joined the rest of the developed world with a competent and efficient national healthcare system. Instead, we’re stuck with for-profit health insurance giants sucking our blood like giant leeches attached to our backs.

NOW READ: Inside the DOGE billionaires' plan to kill Medicare

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http://www.amren.com/archives/back-issues/february-2000/

Black Magic

A cautious but useful endorsement of racial differences.

Taboo: Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports and Why We’re Afraid to Talk About It, Jon Entine, Public Affairs, 2000, 387 pp., $25.00.

reviewed by Thomas Jackson

To the usual yelping that accompanies the slightest dissent from racial orthodoxy, someone has finally written a book that states the obvious: blacks dominate many sports because they have a genetic edge. Bravo for author Jon Entine but bravissimo for Public Affairs publishing, which has broken with what is one of the most conformist and cowardly industries in the country (see Mr. Entine’s account below).

Only two kinds of people will be surprised or offended by this book — crazed egalitarians and people who have never watched the Olympics or a pro basketball game. Since it is the former group that sets the intellectual tone for the country, reviewers will probably either ignore this book or cluck worriedly over it, but whatever happens, another blow has been struck against anti-scientific foolishness.

But is this a good book? For people who like their racial analysis stuffed with facts and close reasoning, and devoid of pulled punches — for people who enjoy Michael Levin, Arthur Jensen, Philippe Rushton, and Richard Lynn — this is thin gruel. It’s breezy and meandering, and does its own share of clucking about the “slippery slope of racism,” but it does a great many useful and important things. And by doing them in a mass-market book that will probably find its way into the hands of a great many sports fans it could accomplish more than books by scholars and scientists.

The first useful thing Mr. Entine does is attack the goofy notion that race is some kind of optical illusion. He argues instead that race differences may be as old as the human species. He points out that whether one accepts the out-of-Africa-recent-differentiation theory or theories of dispersed evolution, “there has been ample time for [racial] differences to have evolved.”

To be sure, there is a great deal of the human genome that is common to all races, but Mr. Entine explains that tiny differences can have huge consequences. After all, he writes, dogs and humans differ in only five percent of their genome, and there are plenty of gene sequences unique to different races. Speaking of dogs, Mr. Entine notes that in 1998 the American Kennel Club recalled the latest edition of The Complete Dog Book after complaints that it perpetuated “pernicious stereotypes” about breeds rather than treating them all as equals. Breeds are the equivalent of races, he explains, adding that “the belief that dog breeds do not have stereotypical personalities is as intuitively ridiculous as claiming that there are no meaningful differences between human populations.”

Different kinds of dogs even get different diseases, just like different races of humans. Why is it so hard to accept racial differences in athletic ability, asks Mr. Entine, when it is widely accepted that the races differ in susceptibility to sickle-cell anemia, prostate cancer, Tay-Sachs disease, osteoporosis, and diabetes?

One of Mr. Entine’s most effective tactics is to use the record book to show just how concentrated certain kinds of athletic performance are in certain groups. The chart on this page, reproduced from the book, is worth studying carefully. It is a percentage analysis by race or country of origin of the 100 fastest times in the eight most common distances in track and field. In the sprints up through the 400 meters West Africans (including British, American, and Canadian blacks who are of West African origin) are crushingly dominant, but they are completely out of the picture at distances greater than 800 meters. Beginning at that distance, other Africans take over — North Africans and East Africans, especially Kenyans. At 5,000 meters, African dominance (here represented in three separate bars) exceeds 90 percent, with the remaining times held by whites. East Asians appear on the chart only in one event, the marathon. As Mr. Entine points out, only genetic differences can plausibly account for such marked athletic specialization by race.

The reason Kenya gets its own separate bar on the graph is due almost entirely to the remarkable running abilities of one tribe, the Kalenjin, who have won 70 percent of Kenya’s Olympic gold medals. Kenya’s Nandi district, in the heart of Kalenjin country, has only 1.8 percent of the country’s population but accounts for 35 percent of its top runners. Mr. Entine reports that the Kalenjin laugh at anything other than biological explanations for their prowess; they know they are naturally gifted runners. Another little-known tribe of prodigies are the Tarahumara Indians of Mexico. Mr. Entine reports they are best in the world at the gruesome 100-mile Leadville, Colorado, race that ends at an elevation of 11,000 feet. They don’t often bother to compete, but have been known to breeze to the finish in traditional sandals rather than running shoes.

In the United States, black dominance of basketball and football is virtually complete, and blacks are over-represented in baseball. For women, too, the racial differences are almost as stark, with whites offering no competition in sprints and not much in basketball. Seventy percent of the players in the National Women’s Basketball Association are black, as were nine of the ten women chosen in 1999 for the first and second all-NWBA teams.

Mr. Entine points out that during the Soviet era, there was a plausible argument to be made that with enough training white women, anyway, could compete with blacks. East German and Soviet women who had been through the national sports factories kept West Africans from dominating the sprints. Now we know that those Communist women looked so mannish and performed so well because they were doped up on steroids and hormones. Coaches wouldn’t let some of them speak to reporters or into a microphone because they had such deep voices. In the decade or so since Communism collapsed and drug testing became more sophisticated, Russian and East German athletes have dropped back in the pack to join the rest of the whites.

100 Fastest Times By Country or Ancestry

East and North Africans do not (yet) dominate women’s middle- and long-distance events, but Mr. Entine says this is only because African societies have kept women out of sports. As more African women start competing, whites and Asians will be squeezed out.

Champion sprinter Frankie Fredericks of Namibia prepares to lose.

Blacks didn’t always crush whites in sports, of course, but this was because many American sports were segregated, blacks got little training, and Africa was a primitive wilderness. Even so, the writing has been on the wall for a long time. Not since the 1950s has a white ball player had the most steals in a season, and it has been 40 years since a white man, Armin Hary of Germany, held the world record in the 100 meters.

Needless to say, it is not just American sports teams that are now larded with blacks. Only two percent of the population of Britain is black, but 20 percent of its pro soccer players are. A track meet between the Canadian and American national teams would settle only the question of who has the fastest Africans.

Physical Differences

What are the physiological correlates of black athletic superiority? Mr. Entine writes that as long ago as 1939, Eleanor Metheny of Iowa State University looked into sports biology and found that blacks had longer arms and legs, a shorter trunk, narrower hips, and heavier bones than whites. Hundreds of studies have since confirmed and supplemented her findings. We now know that West African blacks have more muscle, less fat, hands relatively longer than forearms, and feet relatively longer than lower legs (which are relatively longer than thighs). They have higher serum testosterone levels, which increases muscle mass and aggressiveness, and smaller chest and lung capacities, which is why they wear out at longer distances. Heavy bones and less fat explain why so many blacks are “sinkers” in the pool, and low lung capacity is a problem in swimming events as it is in long-distance running.

West African blacks have a larger percentage of what is called fast-twitch fiber in their muscles, which is what the body needs for explosive bursts of speed. It also helps blacks jump. The best whites can jump straight up 50 percent of their height; blacks can go over 60 percent.

East African blacks have a larger lung capacity than whites and process oxygen more efficiently. They do not suffer as much from lactic acid buildup in their muscles and are therefore less susceptible to fatigue. They naturally have the slim build of good distance runners.

Mr. Entine writes that blacks respond to athletic training more quickly than whites and require less of it. Sprinter Carl Lewis worked out only eight hours a week when he was training for the 1984 Olympics; whites may work out nearly that much in a day. East Africans can reportedly take months off from training but quickly regain top form.

This sort of thing is fascinating and entirely to the point, but there is not that much of it in Taboo. Mr. Entine could have made his case in about 100 pages. The rest of the book is taken up with stories about Kipchoge Keino and other famous Kalenjins, stories about the Communist sports factories, and a long, wandering history of race and American sports. This may be interesting to sports fans, but the chart on the previous page is worth a hundred stories about Jesse Owens and Michael Jordan. The early heavyweight boxer Jack Johnson, who snarled over prostrate white opponents and carried on publicly with white women, was a colorful figure, and very few people know professional football was (re)integrated with no fanfare the year before Jackie Robinson joined the Dodgers in 1947 — but so what? Mr. Entine seems to be trying to parry charges of “racism” with sympathetic accounts of black sportsmen who fought segregation.

Still, he has assembled the necessary facts and they all hang together. What we know about racial differences in biology conforms perfectly with what we see on the playing field and in the swimming pool. So what’s the problem? Why can’t the country admit what everyone knows and make it official? The problem — and the answer to the question in the book’s subtitle — is that honesty about athletics could lead to honesty about intelligence. This is why we have near-universal dishonesty, which leads to all sorts of nuttiness. Mr. Entine quotes Bob Herbert of the New York Times, that praising blacks for athletic ability is “a genteel way to say nigger.” An early pre-publication story about Taboo in the Times, quotes a black who says scientific investigation of athletic ability is an “underhanded way” of saying that blacks are “closer to beast … than they are to the rest of humanity” and it quotes a white as saying, “Didn’t we hear all this in Germany in 1936?” Mr. Entine has collected many examples of this sort of non-thinking.

Sadly for the egalitarians, the evidence for racial differences in intelligence is far more systematic, far more carefully studied, and much better understood than the evidence for athletic differences. Everyone knows this, which is why everyone pretends so diligently and hysterically not to.

Mr. Entine knows it, too, but tries not to show it. He has laced the book with anti-racist pieties, calls the Pioneer Fund “a magnet for white supremacists,” sneers at Lothrop Stoddard and Madison Grant, and writes happily that the 1938 rematch victory of heavyweight Joe Louis over the German Max Schmel-ing “was a knockout blow to the smug Nazis and their legion of Aryan-supremacist sympathizers around the world.” He even stoops to what can only be called disingenuousness: The book’s “only real message,” he writes, is that “for all our differences, we are far, far more similar.” That is not the book’s real message; it is a transparent sop to the censorship commissars.

However, despite all the jabber about “racism,” Mr. Entine is careful never to deny the possibility of intelligence differences. He even writes sentences like: “The evolutionary crucible has left population groups with distinct physiques, musculature, testosterone levels, metabolic efficiency, reaction time, and a slew of other characteristics.” (emphasis added) He even writes that black babies are born after a shorter gestation period and mature more quickly than white babies. He knows, all right.

Some day Americans will start saying what they really think about race. If they can’t yet talk about intelligence let them at least begin with sports. May Taboo sell and sell.

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