Introducing The Muscle Bio-Diversity (MBD) Movement

There is a new sphere on the internet called Muscle Bio-diversity (MBD). It is composed of black men reviewing the latest literature that describes racial differences on muscle fiber type and athleticism. They have the science to back up the fact that black men are better athletes than white men, and have taken it upon themselves to broadcast this superiority on the internet. They have created dozens of blogs where they review and re-phrase decade-old data. They have invaded other blogs with a flood of comments saying how blacks are better athletes than whites.

Even when a blog post has nothing to do with racial differences in sports, they somehow bring the topic back to black superiority. They have provided an acceptable amount of science for black nationalists to push the idea that white men should be exiled from all sports. An ironic feature of the movement is that none of the most famous MBD’ers are actual athletes.

I just painted a fictional scenario, but the Human Bio-diversity (HBD) sphere is real. It’s a group of people who say than white people are smarter than black people, using IQ studies as proof. A surprisingly balanced summary of their movement, which even Steve Sailor’s declared “not all that bad,” can be found on Daily Kos:

There’s an easy way to differentiate the scientific side of HBD from the racist side: fixation on IQ. These people love to wring the IQ data for every ounce of scientific justification they can find for their racism. They analyze IQ scores by race, religion, gender, national origin, and lots of other factors; I wouldn’t be surprised if one of them hasn’t calculated the correlation coefficient of IQ score with aversion to broccoli. They triumphantly trumpet the results that support their prejudices and quietly ignore results that undermine their prejudices, such as the finding that national IQ scores are correlated with GDP per capita.

Let’s say that white people are indeed smarter than black people. My response to that is… so what? It would be the same as me, a tall person, starting a movement saying that tall people make more money. This very well may be true, but what benefit is there for me to push that assertion unless I’m feeling insecure about my position as a tall person? I enjoy the benefits of being tall every week—I don’t need a scientific study to tell me, just like how a guy with a Porsche doesn’t need to street-race a kid in a souped-up Civic to know his car is faster. I would understand if you want to challenge a specific enemy to an IQ duel, but to brag that your race is better than another race makes me wonder how you see your own intellect. It doesn’t seem all that different than identifying with a sports team.

I’m sure an HDB’er will say that it’s important to know intellectual differences to help manage society, but unless you plan on a eugenic campaign to eliminate those with inferior IQs, HBD theories have no real-world use. I see HBD less as racist than a colossal waste of time that doesn’t even benefit its adherents.

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