|The touchy subject of|
|Racism and racists|
Racial realism or race realism is a pathetically transparent attempt by bigots to rebrand racialist ideologies. It's used by David Duke, and sundry other white supremacists, which should be a big clue. The term is also bandied about quite often by the cranks at VDARE and the Pioneer Fund. The term, quite obviously, is meant to lend a veneer of respectability to racism. However, even the less foaming-at-the-mouth loons who use the term still prattle on about skull sizes and IQ and the "Mongoloids," "Caucasoids," and "Negroids" and other such chestnuts of "scientific" racism. It also allows racists to act indignant when being called on their racism — "I'm not a racist, I'm a racial realist!" Self-appointed racial realists like to call their opponents "race deniers" or "racial difference deniers."
There's many problems with this, of course. One is that human genetics don't work like the race realists wish they did, and they have expended much time and effort trying to cite the occurrences of a gene--for our hypothetical example, let's call it X--in population 1, while X is found an order of magnitude less often in population in 2, and call that evidence of different races. In reality, if one wanted to make human races based on this ('race' being defined as population of the same species with unique traits held entirely by that population), you would have two races--the people with gene X, and the people without gene X--and both populations would have a variety of skin tones in them, and look identical. And if gene X has a mutation (call it X'), then you'd have three 'races' of the human species, all fairly diverse in appearance and characteristics, apart from the presence, absence, or variation of gene X--which certainly isn't how the race realists wish to draw the line.
Population 1 having X occurring at 5%, versus a .5% occurrence in population 2, isn't evidence of different races--it's evidence of genetic drift
- Race, Intelligence and the Limits of Science: Reflections on the Moral Absurdity of “Racial Realism”, Tim Wise
- Intelligent vs. smart: reflections on ‘racial realism’, Crommunist Manifesto
- Typical "racial realist"