By Davis Carlton

Rev. Michael Spangler’s series on race realism posted at the Pactum Institute has prompted a response from Doug Wilson in which he purports to demonstrate “The Shimmering Unreality of Race Realism.” Wilson’s response to Spangler is mostly an exercise in various thought experiments that are supposed to demonstrate how Spangler’s stance regarding the reality of race is incorrect. Wilson takes Spangler to task for stating that racial differences are “relatively permanent,” and that “for all practical purposes, race is immutable.” Wilson claims that there is “extreme mutability of what Spangler is calling race.” He uses this thought experiment to illustrate what he is talking about:

“A black man could easily have a great-grandchild, bearing his last name and everything, within his lifetime, descended from his loins, who could easily pass for a native-born Norwegian. All it would take is for three men in a row, father, son, and grandson, to each marry a blonde Nordic lass. This child I am talking about could easily pass for a Norwegian because he could easily be a Norwegian. Not only that, but he could probably medal in the Olympics as a blue-eyed, blond-haired ski jumper.”

Wilson believes that this example proves that race is not immutable, or to put it another way, that race can change. The proof is that it would be theoretically possible for a black man to have a great-grandson who could pass for a native Norwegian if he, his mulatto son, and his quadroon grandson each married “a blonde Nordic lass.” This may come three generations removed as Wilson says that it could, but it might come later if the great-grandson inherits a higher amount of his black great-grandfather’s sub-Saharan African DNA. Nevertheless it is true that this putative black man married to a Norwegian would have descendants that could easily pass for white Norwegians if his descendants continued marrying Norwegians. Does this prove Wilson’s point about the mutability of race?

No it doesn’t. The key issue is when Wilson says, “[T]his idea of immutability is, speaking frankly, entirely and completely wrong, which we can see immediately if we take it down to the individual level….[Spangler] is not saying that an individual’s race is permanent, because that would be uncontroversial. Of course we can’t change that. But any man can (rather easily) affect the race of his descendants.” The problem is that race doesn’t exist on a merely “individual level.” Race is identified by a set of shared traits and characteristics that the members of the particular race inherit from their common ancestors.

In the example provided by Wilson, the black man doesn’t change his race. He is and always will remain a black man. His immediate descendants are mixed (a category acknowledged in verses such as Daniel 2:43), and his later descendants are of a different race than him. Race hasn’t changed because the same races exist before and after this happens. Ultimately, this particular marriage becomes a deviation in what normally has happened in history.

Wilson’s example actually demonstrates that Spangler is correct in saying that race is relatively immutable. The amount of genetic information that each person inherits is large but still finite. This means that we don’t inherit genes from everyone in our genealogy, but only our recent ancestors and our remote ancestors who we are in our family tree in several places. This video does a good job explaining the different ways in which we inherit DNA from our ancestors. The Norwegian phenotype (the outward traits typical of Norwegians) is based upon the fact that any typical Norwegian descends overwhelmingly from the people who have lived in Norway for many generations and passed these traits down to modern day Norwegians.

Outliers like the black man in Doug Wilson’s example eventually have their genes bred out of the population. This is how distinct traits can be maintained by the various racial and ethnic groups of mankind, even though absolute genealogical purity does not exist. The fact of relative genetic purity which makes Norwegian traits possible also demonstrates that race is “relatively permanent” as Spangler says and is robust enough to withstand occasional outside intrusions like the one that Wilson proposes in his scenario above.

Wilson implicitly understands this, which is why he has to come up with another thought experiment with more favorable numbers. “[I]f we put 500 single blacks and 500 single whites on a deserted island the size of Tahiti, and we ensured that they were all Christians, all spoke English, and were all demographically similar in other ways, and we left them there for some 500 years, when we came back to see what had happened, the thing most likely to have changed would this very thing that Spangler is calling immutable—what he calls race. They would still be speaking English, with their own accent certainly, they would still likely be Christian, at least formally, and they would all be a color that was not one of the two originals. Race is not immutable.”

The whole force of this thought experiment requires Wilson to assume the very thing that he is trying to prove. Wilson assumes that race is simply a difference in skin color in order to propose a scenario in which everyone would be “demographically similar” in all the relevant metrics. Another issue is that we don’t have to take Wilson’s word for what would happen in this situation. We can test Wilson’s assertion in real life. Blacks and whites have been present together in America for over 400 years. Both races speak English (kind of), and both races historically have professed Christianity (with widely varying commitments to orthodoxy), and both have at least some other similarities as well.

Why haven’t the races mixed the way that Wilson supposes in his thought experiment? Wilson mentions that mixing has occurred such that the average black in America has about 20% white ancestry. Nevertheless, race remains just as stark of a reality as ever. This is also true of even more mixed societies like Latin America which have resulted from the mixing of Spanish and Aztec peoples. Race still exists and remains a prominent reality even in these countries. Wilson could respond that the racial balance has always been skewed towards whites in terms of population in that the number of whites has always been significantly higher than the number of blacks. But even with that, the mixing that has occurred hasn’t erased the apparent racial differences as Wilson imagines in his Gilligan’s island thought experiment.

Wilson’s thought experiments only work if one assumes that Wilson is correct from the outset. We have to assume a world very different from our own with an entirely different history. Even if Wilson’s premises are accepted, all that Wilson’s thought experiments would prove at best is that Spangler’s contention that the races are “relatively immutable” would be an overstatement. It wouldn’t dismantle most of what Spangler said about the biological reality of race, most of which Wilson entirely ignores. Miscegenation doesn’t prove that race can change, but only that a person who has children with someone of a different race will have offspring that don’t match their race or those of their ancestors.

Miscegenation could only change the overall traits of a given population if it is practiced in great enough numbers. This is something that the secular globalist order has been promoting for decades. This is because the existence of distinct nations as a source of identity and loyalty is a hindrance to the secular globalist vision of a one world totalitarian state. Miscegenation on the scale needed to destroy whole ethnicities wouldn’t leave separate nations intact with just different appearances. The nations themselves would be utterly destroyed. If Wilson doesn’t believe that ethnicity is intrinsic to national identity (well, for nations other than Israel anyway), then what exactly is a nation? All this seems like a strange position to take for a Christian nationalist.

Speaking of Israel, I find myself once more exasperated by Wilson’s hypocrisy on race, ancestry, and loyalty. Consider what he says in this article about his connection to whites across the globe, “I have virtually nothing in common with a resident of Sheki, a city of 68,000 in the Caucasus Mountains, after which my entire racial category is named…Being loyal to whiteness in itself (apart from those stipulated insurance company issues stated above) is an odd and very superficial move. Not realistic at all.”

Now read what Wilson says about his loyalty to Jews in Israel, similarly located on the other side of the world: “my affection for Israel is personal, in addition to being theological and political. My wife’s great-great-grandfather was Rabbi Cohn, one of my co-grandfathers is a Christian Jew, my kids and grandkids have cousins who are Israeli, and according to AncestryDNA, I myself am 2% European Jewish. Nancy is 11% European Jew, her mother 26%. What all this amounts to is that our family would be much more involved on an active personal level if terrorists overran Israel than we would be if terrorists overran Vermont.”

Doug sure has inculcated a love and loyalty for Israel in his family, even though most Jews aren’t Christian and hate Christianity. Wilson apparently sees no contradiction in his staunch and unwavering affection for Israel (in spite of its rejection of Christ) while condemning Kinists for supposedly believing that “the manifest superiority of Western culture” comes from “a shared susceptibility to sunburn.” This is a gross mischaracterization and Wilson knows it. There is simply no way that anyone can read what Rev. Michael Spangler or other Kinists like Ehud have said about race realism and think that this accurately represents their position. But that’s all that Doug Wilson can do at this point. He doesn’t get it because he doesn’t want to get it. All he can resort to is to concoct thought experiments in which race doesn’t matter because race is just a matter of a little bit of difference in melanin content. We know this because Doug Wilson’s thought experiment tells us so. This works just fine until we actually look at the world around us, or read what the Bible says about national identity.