I freely admit to being a fan of race realism. Steve Sailer and John Derbyshire do a great job laying out facts, as opposed to the wishful thinking, so popular with the ruling classes. I guess reading outlawed ideas is always going to appeal to a unconventional mind, but race realism has the benefit of being right. Understanding the broad difference between groups of people makes it possible to navigate through the world and make predictions about people and situations. Race realism is useful.

That said, I wonder, what’s the point? This Taki column by Fred Reed is mostly stupid, but it does brush up against this question. I’ve never understood the attraction to the cornpone offerings of Fred on Everything, but that’s an issue of taste. He does have a big following and his opinions probably track with what most white people think with regards to the human condition. Here’s the part that got my attention.

While I want to regard all of humanity as inferior, with regard to particular groups, vile ripples of unwanted evidence occasionally raise their ugly heads (if ripples have heads). Consider Latinos. After living for eleven years in Mexico, I cannot see that Mexicans are any stupider than anyone else. (This, of course, leaves ample leeway for being stupid.) The assertion among fans of IQ is that because of their admixture of Indian blood, Mexicans, and for that matter all mestizos of Latin America, are stupid. I don’t see it.

I know some Irishmen who never touch alcohol, but that does not change the statistics on Irish drinking. There are some black physicists in the university, but that does not change the fact that blacks are under represented in cognitive fields and wildly over represented in the crime stats. Averages are just a general representation of the whole, not an exact description of everyone in the set. How is possible for someone to not understand this? Well, belief is very powerful magic.

In a disorganized way, however, he does touch on three problems that face the race realists. The first is what you see in the Fred Reed column. Unless you are a liberal, you know lots of pleasant people outside your tribe. Most of the people I know are outside my tribe. Whatever the statistical differences, whatever the cultural differences, pretty much everyone has a soft spot in their heart for someone outside their tribe.

That makes discussing this stuff tricky, but not impossible. Where things get dicey is when you move from listing facts to forming public policy based on those facts. Think about it. Let’s say population X is not very bright and prone to violence. Let’s say you lay out the facts to everyone’s satisfaction and there is general agreement that population X is not very bright and prone to violence. Then what? What policy arises from these facts? What would be the point of the policy?

Let’s pretend you can come up with some policy, say for education, that handles the violent stupid people in a humane and productive way. They get some benefit without placing a burden on the rest of society. I don’t know, maybe a colony of some sort where this population is placed. What about the exceptions? What about those pleasant people who are not dimwitted or dangerous? Do you ship them off to the colony too? If so, how do you sell that to the people in your tribe?