There’s nothing real about ‘race realism’

The Jason Arday saga unfolded like a fable: the allegations of plagiarism, staged racist attacks and fabricated achievements captivated the world before his tragic and premature death. In the weeks since, one thing has bothered me: the media’s relative lack of curiosity about the man who helped spearhead the crusade against him, Nathan Cofnas.

Cofnas is a postdoctoral researcher at Ghent University and a former fellow at Cambridge. His trajectory has been extraordinary. The Jewish-American academic built his early reputation dismantling Kevin MacDonald’s pseudoscientific anti-Semitic theories, arguing that sweeping evolutionary claims about Jewish power were methodologically dubious, heavily cherry-picked and fundamentally incapable of proving causation.

He then went on to establish his own biological explanation for Jewish exceptionalism, based on a hereditary, above-average IQ in Jewish populations. Intentionally or not, this move flattered his own ancestry while edging close to granting scientific legitimacy to one of anti-Semitism’s oldest tropes.

Cofnas has since deployed theories of ‘race realism’ against black populations. In a display of pure hubris, he compares his banal ideas in ‘A Guide for the Hereditarian Revolution’ – which advocates rolling back 20th-century civil-rights advances – to Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, a claim as absurd as Jason Arday’s wildest myths.

Across both mainstream and alternative media, interviewers have proved completely incapable of challenging Cofnas. On LBC, Nick Ferrari pressed him on his assertion that, in a meritocracy, ‘blacks would disappear from almost all high-profile positions outside of sports and entertainment’. Yet Ferrari flinched when Cofnas laundered the claim through a Harvard study on undergraduate admissions, which projected black enrolment dropping to 0.7 per cent under strict academic criteria and without a DEI leg up. This let Cofnas falsely attribute his own sweeping generalisations about race to Harvard itself.

Even within the national context of the United States, Cofnas’s defence collapses. Extrapolating the 0.7 per cent figure, referring to graduates at one elite Ivy League institution, to claim there would be no high-profile, high-achieving black people in a nation of 330million people is statistically unsound.

I do not deny the heritability of individual human traits. While studying education and economic development at the London School of Economics, I examined Nordic adoption studies showing that some children’s educational outcomes align more closely with their biological parents than their adoptive ones. Individual heritability is a documented scientific reality.

However, it is absurd to extrapolate narrow, localised datasets into sweeping pronouncements about billions of people based on race, especially when two populations in sub-Saharan Africa can share as much genetic distance as an African and a European – a point argued by Angela Saini in Superior: The Return of Race Science. What’s more, working in finance has taught me a fundamental truth: statistics are easily massaged, whether to cover up a bad balance sheet or to promote abject nonsense. Asserting an intrinsic biological hierarchy across entire continents based on sparse data from developing regions or a single Ivy League admissions projection is lazy at best and farcical at worst.

Crucially, the assumption that IQ tests measure raw intelligence independent of environment is fundamentally flawed, as Joseph Henrich has demonstrated. If we accept Cofnas’s rigid hereditarian logic, how do we account for the birth-order effect, where older siblings consistently score higher on IQ tests than younger siblings born to the exact same parents? Furthermore, the 20th-century surge in global IQ scores – the Flynn effect – was largely driven by expanded schooling, public health and cognitive enrichment, not by rapid genetic selection. To isolate a true biological racial IQ gap, one would need to control for every conceivable cultural, socioeconomic and environmental variable, a task that remains virtually impossible.

Indeed, every metric Cofnas uses to infer black cognitive inferiority – including lower test scores and higher crime rates – is routinely documented among white working-class populations in post-industrial Britain and America. If group-level disparities proved biological unfitness, Cofnas would be forced to conclude that the white working class is genetically unsuited for modern society.

White British pupils rank among the lowest-performing demographics in the UK, trailing almost every ethnic minority group. In fact, low-income ethnic minority students on free school meals regularly outperform white British children who are not economically disadvantaged. Some of the top-performing state schools in England educate a disproportionate number of black students, such as Katherine Birbalsingh’s Michaela Community School, Brampton Manor Academy and St Olave’s, to name a few. Across the Atlantic, historical precedents tell a similar story. Under Jim Crow segregation, black schools like Dunbar High School, in Washington, DC, regularly outperformed white schools despite receiving significantly less funding and facing systemic discrimination.

Do conservatives who uncritically endorse Cofnas’s claims about black capability also accept the logical conclusion of his framework, that white working-class families are also ‘biologically hardwired’ for failure? I should hope not.

Let’s be frank, there is nothing ‘real’ about Cofnas’s so-called race realism. If I’d submitted an essay with methodology this porous, my tutors would have picked it apart line by line. He has relied on flawed methodologies to construct a rigid racial hierarchy, one that conveniently places people of his own Jewish ancestry near the top and people of my black ancestry near the bottom. I worry about the broader ramifications of such appalling scholarship gaining mainstream currency – for Jews, for black people and for everyone else.

If our media class cannot dismantle arguments this banal and structurally unsound, we are leaving the door wide open for more batty ideas to permeate through society unchallenged.