Will Belief in Race Science Lead to Genocide?

Probably not.

from here

The idea that knowledge of racial hereditarianism on a large scale will lead to genocide against low status racial groups is not unreasonable. There is a strong overlap between supporting genocide and racial hereditarianism in the West, and it would be silly to think that these beliefs are conceptually unrelated. What is important is whether on a population scale this effect is large enough to cause mass killings.

This is probably incorrect, as the historical record does not suggest that economically underperforming groups are subject to unusual amounts of violence.

Consider, for example, genocides:

• The Holocaust. Some non-negligible number of Jews (40,000-6,000,000 depending on who you ask, though I lean towards the higher number) died during World War II due to a combination of concentration camps and mass shootings.

• Bangladesh genocide. Death of 300,000 - 3,000,000 Bengalis in the 70s, with the perpetrators being the Pakistanis.

• Circassian genocide. Committed by Russians against the Circassians, a Caucasian minority, in the late 19th Century.

• Romani Holocaust. Killing of 100,000 - 1,000,000 Roma in Europe during WW2.

• Armenian Genocide. Killing of 600,000 - 1,500,000 Armenians by the Ottomans in the early 20th century.

• Rwandan Genocide. Killing of 500,000 - 800,000 Tutsi by the Hutus. Revision of this genocide is common and doesn’t appear to be politically motivated — there are right wing revisionists such as Ron Unz as well as left wingers like Edward Herman. I don’t have an opinion on the matter, but the fact that people on both sides of the political isle are willing to shed their reputation to argue for a radical revisionist narrative is odd.

• Greek genocide. 300,000 - 900,000 casualties of Ottoman violence in the early 20th century.

• The deportation of Germans from Eastern Europe after WW2, which led to 500,000 - 2,500,000 deaths according to Wikipedia. Not conventionally called a genocide as the purpose of the attacks were migration rather than elimination, but a horrible event nonetheless.

• Assyrian genocide. Expulsion and killing of several hundreds of thousands of Syrians by the Ottomans.

• Dzungar genocide. About 500,000 of the Dzungar were ordered to be killed by the Qianlong Emperor.

• Killing of several hundreds of thousands of Serbs, Romani, and Jews by the Croatians in WW2.

From this list, there doesn’t appear to be a correlation between whether a group is subject to genocide and their relative economic status.

Looking through Wikipedia’s list of ethnic riots, also suggests a lack of a correlation between group status and victimization. The top five most frequently victimized ethnicities appear to be the Chinese, Jews, Muslims, Romani, and Asian Indians — two traditionally low status groups and three higher status ones. All of these groups have been historically homeless or tend to migrate, from a common sense perspective, it makes sense that if an ethnicity is frequently a minority group within nations that it will be frequently be subject to violence. This is corroberated by Chua who notices that market dominant minorities tend to be subject to discrimination internationally.

Given that racialism has been historically common, and that this has not lead to an unusually large amount of genocides against low status racial groups, I must assume that it this will not be the case for the hereditarian brand of racialism as well.