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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 4, 2026

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For those with knowledge/believers of HBD, what does it have to say about Indians (East Asia), Arabs, & Hispanics (IQ wise)? I've been living in my city and I've noticed Indians tend to live in the nicer neighborhoods. Perhaps just selection effects from immigration? Hispanics have similar problems as black people, what does HBD say about them? Arabs?

Neither Indians (caste system) nor Hispanics (white, black, Amerindian) fit into one group. Hispanic is like saying someone is American. It’s not an ethnicity.

Intresting, so what are the actually "races" genetically speaking? Is it just, black people, whites, than asians? How is it classified?

The 19th century scientific racists worked this out, and it has been confirmed by modern DNA testing. There are three major surviving racial groups, separated by the Sahara, the Great Steppe and the Himalayas:

  • Caucasians, including North Africans, Turks etc. who are white, but also Indians, who are closer to whites than either is to East Asians
  • East Asians
  • Black Africans.

There are then the various groups that didn't develop agriculture and got mostly-genocided when they came into contact with people who did. The pygmies and Khoisan in Africa are genetically distinct races and would be on the list alongside the big three if there were enough of them left. Native Americans (whose ancestors crossed the Bering Strait relatively recently) and Polynesians are subgroups of East Asians. Australian Aborigines have been genetically isolated for long enough that they are de facto a separate race too.

From the point of view of HBD-driven policy, this is complicated by the fact that endogamous sub-populations can be subject to relatively rapid selection for IQ or other pro-social traits (definitely over a timescale of centuries, possibly faster), leading to a hierarchy of desirability that doesn't track the big-picture genetics.

From the point of view of normie ethno-nationalism, none of this is relevant because "white" as an identity group that one can be a nationalist of is a political category and not a genetic one. The ethnogenesis of "whites" happened in America (and South Africa with the need to unite Anglos and Afrikaaners) and largely didn't in other places, and the boundaries of who can assimilate to American political whiteness are roughly "culturally Christian with no visible sub-Saharan African ancestry". The nearest equivalent to political whiteness in the UK is "non-Muslim", with Jews and Hindu Indians being politically whiter-than-white. Vivek winning the Ohio gubernatorial primary suggests something similar could happen in the US, with anyone who is neither Black nor Muslim ending up tarred with political whiteness by the far left and welcome in the politically white coalition on the right.

You can cluster populations into clearly distinct genetic groups using various unsupervised algorithms (i.e. without prior labels about who belongs to which group). If you did this in the United States, those clusters would be highly predictive of which race we label the individuals in that cluster. Mixed race individuals would typically fall between those clusters. You'd also find a kind of substructure inside them: the Indian cluster would contain subclusters, corresponding to different castes and geographies. It, however, would still be in a distinctly Indian cluster. Hispanics would be the messiest group: black Hispanics would fall nearest the USA black cluster, white Hispanics nearest USA whites, and pure Amerindians would be their own thing, closest to Asians but more distant cousins.

Historically, there were gentler genetic gradients between different populations, along lines of historical migration. If you lined up every human in history, you'd see no sharp breaks at all: everyone is predictably a mix of their parents, with a couple mutations. Many of those lineages have died out, though, as they're outcompeted by other lineages; this creates a sharper gradient between adjacent successful lineages.

Races are made up tribes based on people who have more similar genetics and skin coloring. It somewhat works for quickly understanding a few broad groups of people but has trouble with categorizing various shades of brown and brown-adjacent people. Unless brown is a race?

In your question about Indians, Arabs, and Hispanics you reveal the problem with a white/black/asian lens of race - it can't categorize most of the world with just a few categories. If you wanna go into HBD you need to read the research.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tatu_Vanhanen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Lynn

2002, IQ and the Wealth of Nations - this can be your starting point. It's old, and there is much newer stuff but you can get to that later.