Interracial breeding/marriage
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[edit] Introduction
To those who subscribe to racist pseudoscience and revisionist history, interracial marriage represents a threat to their gene pool, their world-view, and civilisation generally.
[edit] Claims
According to racists and separatists, interracial breeding causes a decline in the the IQ level within the dominant race. More generally, one's descendants gradually lose the perceived superior genetic qualities. Coupled with the belief that other races are genetically predisposed to violence and primitive behaviour, this suggests an inherent evil in interracial breeding.
[edit] Criticism
The beliefs of racists are biologically naive, and ignore the well-known phenomenon of "hybrid" or "mongrel" vigor, where crosses are more healthy, and, in the case of animals, more intelligent, than pure breeds. One reason for this phenomenon is that many undesirable genetic traits are recessive and linked by race. A white person, for example, reduces the chances of a child with cystic fibrosis almost to zero by marrying someone who isn't white.
Specific claims for inferiority of other races will be dealt with elsewhere. The argument for preventing intermarriage may be analyzed independently of these: it suffers from a gross logical flaw common to racist arguments from statistics to segregation, which in its general form goes like this:
- Property X is desirable.
- Property X has, or may have, a genetic component.
- There is a statistical difference in average X-ness between black people and white people of which the genetic component is so tiny that most experts don't even agree that it exists. But we do.
- Therefore, we should discriminate against black people.
The problem here is that if it was a good idea to discriminate against people on the grounds of lack of X, then it would be far more sensible to reason as follows:
- Property X is desirable.
- Therefore we should discriminate against people lacking in X-ness, regardless of color.
So, for example, if the racists could achieve their Holy Grail and demonstrate that black people on average have very slightly lower IQ scores, and if I cared, this would be no reason why, in my matrimonial preferences, I should rate a dumb blonde above a black genius. On the contrary, I should still go on judging people's intelligence, not by the color of their skin, but by their intelligence, exactly as I do now.
Yet the racists, with their concern for the precious genetic heritage of the white race, are not campaigning to prevent smart white men from marrying dumb blondes: although this happens, I am told, quite frequently. And this calls into question the integrity of racists who offer this argument against interracial marriage. It's almost as if they had some other reason for opposing "miscegenation", such as being racist bigots.
One curious by-product of racist views on interracial marriage is the curious but oft-repeated assertion that interracial marriage is unnatural because black people are not attractive, combined with a willingness to debate the point with anyone who does in fact find this or that black person attractive. It need hardly be pointed out that if they were right, there would be no need for them to argue the point, nor to establish laws against miscegenation.
