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this post was submitted on 16 Sep 2024
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I'm mildly surprised at Krugman, since I never got a particularly racist vibe from him. (This is 100% an invitation to be corrected.) Annoyed that 1) I recognise so many names and 2) so many of the people involved are still influential.
Interested in why Johnathan Marks is there though. He's been pretty anti-scientific racism if memory serves. I think he's even complained about how white supremacists stole the term human biodiversity. Now, I'm curious about the deep history of this group. Marks published his book in 1995 and this is a list from 1999, so was the transformation of the term into a racist euphemism already complete by then? Or is this discussion group more towards the beginning.
Similarly, curious how out some of these people were at the time. E.g. I know that Harpending was seen as a pretty respectable anthropologist up until recently, despite his virulent racism. But I've never been able to figure out how much his earlier racism was covert vs. how much 1970s anthropology accepted racism vs. how much this reflects his personal connections with key people in the early field of hunter-gatherer studies.
Oh also, super amused that Pinker and MacDonald are in the group at the same time, since I'm pretty sure Pinker denounced MacDonald for anti-Semitism in quite harsh language (which I haven't seen mirrored when it comes to anti-black racism). MacDonald's another weird one. He defended Irving when Irving was trying to silence Lipstadt, but in Evan's account, while he disagrees with MacDonald, he doesn't emphasise that MacDonald is a raging anti-Semite and white supremacist. So, once again, interested in how covert vs. overt MacDonald was at the time.
Yeah, Krugman appearing on the roster surprised me too. While I haven't pored over everything he's blogged and microblogged, he hasn't sent up red flags that I recall. E.g., here he is in 2009:
And in 2014:
I suppose it's possible that he was invited to an e-mail list in the late '90s and never bothered to unsubscribe, or something like that.
I thought that Sailer had coined the term in the early 2000s, but evidently that's not correct
The Wikipedia article on the Human Biodiversity Institute cites the term human biodiversity as becoming a euphemism for racism sometime in the late 90s and Marks' book is from 1995, so there was apparently a pretty quick turnover. Which makes me wonder if hijacking or if independent invention. The article has a lot of sources, so I might mine them to see if there's a detailed timeline.