The Epstein Emails Show How the Powerful Talk About Race

""On a different note, you have encouraged me to look at data, no holds barred," Epstein wrote before linking to "Race and IQ: Genes That Predict Racial Intelligence Differences" from the Right Stuff, an openly white-supremacist website and a pioneer of the online alt-right. The article argued that different races have differing levels of intelligence and that there is a genetic basis for the disparity."

"The exchange was included in the Department of Justice's latest public release of the Epstein files and is one of the clearest examples of the disgraced financier's interest in "race science," the pseudoscientific practice of ascribing racial inequities to genetics. It is a way of thinking that has been refuted on multiple levels. IQ is a complex trait that results from a series of factors-many of them cultural and circumstantial-that are not neatly reduced to a specific gene or set of genes."

"Even if it weren't, the consensus among geneticists, biologists, and anthropologists is that race isn't a biological phenomenon. Race-science proponents tend to ignore all of this, as well as any other relevant context, and use correlations between race and IQ (and also things such as race and criminality) as evidence that racial stereotypes are in fact justified. None of this mattered to Epstein, who recurrently expressed his interest in race science beyond this 2016 correspondence."

Jeffrey Epstein exchanged email pleasantries with Noam Chomsky and invited him to his private island, then linked to "Race and IQ: Genes That Predict Racial Intelligence Differences" from the Right Stuff, an openly white-supremacist website. The linked material claimed races differ in intelligence due to genetics. The exchange appears in the Department of Justice release of Epstein files and exemplifies Epstein's interest in race science. Race science attributes racial inequities to genetics and is pseudoscientific. IQ is influenced by complex cultural, circumstantial, and genetic factors that cannot be reduced to specific genes. Scientific consensus holds that race is not a biological phenomenon. Epstein also sought contact with Charles Murray, whose 1994 book The Bell Curve posits a relationship between intelligence and race.

Read at The Atlantic