The Alt Right's 'Asian Exception' Is Cribbed Directly From the White Mainstream
In 2012, white supremacist John Derbyshire wrote a screed at Taki Magazine, a publication formerly edited by Richard Spencer, entitled “The Talk: Nonblack Version.” It was a play off of “the talk” that black parents give to their children in an effort to protect them from police brutality. Derbyshire’s 15 bullet points, written for his own kids, listed numerous reasons why black people are inferior to other races and warned against their “antisocial behavior.”
Derbyshire was swiftly fired from the National Review—a decade too late, given his history of open bigotry. But less noticed at the time was the fact that Derbyshire did not address his “talk” to only white children. At the end of the piece, Derbyshire wrote, “You don’t have to follow my version of the talk point for point; but if you are white or Asian and have kids, you owe it to them to give them some version of the talk.”
This inclusion of Asian people is not unexpected, given the fact that Derbyshire is married to and has children with a Chinese woman. But Derbyshire is part of a greater trend, which Audrea Lim termed “the alt-right’s Asian fetish” in a recent piece in the New York Times. Lim notes that numerous far-right figures like Andrew Anglin, Richard Spencer, Mike Cernovich, and Kyle Chapman have all been romantically involved with women of Asian descent.
But the nebulous acceptance of Asian people goes beyond the so-called “alt-right’s” dating preference; it’s baked into much of the ideology of white nationalism. Take, for example, the far right’s obsession with IQ tests, which builds off of junk intellectuals like Charles Murray, author of the infamous 900-page book, The Bell Curve, and Jason Richwine, a scholar who was fired from the Heritage Foundation after his racist dissertation was dug up (Richwine now writes for the National Review). With this, the far right loves to peddle the thoroughly debunked argument that differences in IQ tests show that black and Latinx people are genetically disposed to be “less intelligent” than white people.
The use of pseudo-science by racists to make their ideas sound more respectable is nothing new. Intellectual racism persists, but the guises change. While Bell Curve-era “race science” was once all the rage, now the online alt-right bangs out WordPress blogs about “human biodiversity” written by users with monikers like hbdchick.
But one pesky problem for racists is that East Asians actually score higher on IQ tests than white people. (As do Ashkenazi Jews, a fact rendered even more complicated when dealing with neo-Nazi and anti-Semitic segments of the far-right.) “It’s almost like [the alt right] having to make that sacrifice,” Keegan Hankes from the Southern Poverty Law Center told me. “If your whole world view is based on this idea that there are meaningful genetic differences, you have to acknowledge that Asians score higher on IQ tests.”
Jared Taylor, who runs the white nationalist website American Renaissance and is one of the most avid hawkers of racist IQ theories, expounded on the “good culture” of East Asians in an interview with Splinter. Taylor spent the first 16 years of his life in Japan and speaks fluent Japanese. He told me that “if whites are to be replaced by some populations other than themselves, it would be better that they be replaced by Asians.” (“You will not replace us” and “Jews will not replace us” are white supremacist slogans, heard most prominently in the far-right’s Charlottesville rally, which resulted in the murder of Heather Heyer by a white supremacist.)
The way many white nationalists view Asians mirror all the same racist tropes you find in more polite society.
Examples abound of tacit approval of Asians. Domestic terrorist Dylann Roof’s manifesto read: “I have great respent [sic] for the East Asian races. Even if we were to go extinct they could carry something on. They are by nature very racist and could be great allies of the White race. I am not opposed at all to allies with the Northeast Asian races.”
These views aren’t the deranged babblings of a lone gunman—they’re found amongst the online alt-right as well. In a recent thread dedicated to discussing the higher IQ of Asian people on 4chan’s /pol/ (ie. “politically incorrect”) discussion board, one person wrote that “asians (not jungle asians) are richer, smarter, more stable, less degenerate. they are objectively better than white and black men.” Another post asked in response to former Google employee James Damore’s recent lawsuit, “Will the google lawsuit and affirmative action bullshit cause whites and asians to finally unite?”