Interracial marriage as panacea? In the second part of my response to Samizdata, I want to deal with Perry's comments on interracial marriage and genetic factors.

Intermarriage amongst races requires no 'campaign', it is a spontaneous social fact. The streets of London suggest that anyone who thinks a 'campaign' to encourage it is required is not just wrong but profoundly so. Miscegenation is a natural consequence of close proximity unless institutional racism prevents it.

First things first: I don’t care whether people engage in interracial marriage (IM) or not, as it’s their business. What I was objecting to was the tone of Dale’s original post, which made it seem like IM was a panacea for the problems of race relations. If IM is held up as the only solution, it’s inevitable that there will be a campaign to promulgate it. I agree that miscegenation is a natural consequence of close proximity in the absence of laws against it. But does that proximity exist in practice? It does in Silicon Valley, where high IQ, law-abiding East Asians, South Asians, and whites work together and have high rates of IM. But the fact that intelligence and criminality are associated with race means that we observe de facto segregation. This causes “white flight” and the formation of ethnic ghettos. Finally, as Razib points out, Perry neglects the fact that the non-white population is Britain is quite small in absolute terms. Thus they have a lower likelihoood of mating with members of their own ethnic group. As minority fractions increase, assimilation via intermarriage decreases.

Many years living in the USA (about 1/3rd of my life) proved to me that significant sections of US society tend to be profoundly racist in ways that have to be experienced by an outsider to be believed. The number of times a black male acquaintance of mine who was attending University in New Jersey was insulted and even assaulted because his girlfriend was white showed me an aspect to US society not many US bloggers like to contemplate.

Perry verges dangerously close to the Tranzi tendency to castigate US society as “racist”. Does irrational racism exist in the United States? Yes. But exhaustive studies have shown that racist attitudes have declined substantially since the bad old days. As for the assault on your black acquaintance, I am quite sorry that this happened and I hope the perpetrators were punished appropriately. But anecdotal evidence does not change the fact that white-on-black violent crime is statistically exceptional, [2] while black-on-white violent crime is not.

I do not doubt the factual veracity of the crime figures that Gene Expressions loves to bandy about: I have lived and worked in urban America enough to know the reality. But whilst crime figures prove there are serious problems in Black America, they tell us nothing whatsoever about the causes of those problem. Why look for genetic excuses for what is so obviously a man-made social problem?

First, I don't "love" to mention these figures. I mention them because no one else will, and because they're important. Second, why is this so “obviously” a totally non-genetic problem? I’m loath to rehash the arguments I’ve made time and again, but the evidence that some of the difference between black & white (and male & female) outcomes is due to genetic factors is overwhelming. Some – of course – is due to non-genetic environmental factors, and no reasonable person contests this. [1] You are correct that crime figures alone do not tell us about biology. But there is substantial biological evidence that indicates that criminality is partly influenced by genetic factors. Non-genetic environmental factors do not explain everything. This is true for differences between races AND between sexes. Do you really dispute that men are more prone to violence than women?

I am sure if genetic science existed in immediate aftermath of the Imperial Roman withdrawal from Briton, Roman scientists would have shook their heads and written off the ancient Britons as just genetically inferior to the Romans at sight of social chaos, decaying roads and aqueducts falling into disrepair.

As I said above, geneticists are not so foolish as to look at large-scale statistical evidence alone and conclude that genetic factors predominate. Biochemistry and genetics point to the same fact as the large-scale evidence: criminality is partially genetic. Chemicals don’t lie. Inject some testosterone or take some Zoloft and then tell me genetics does not matter.

Mexico and Brazil are held up as examples of the fallacy of expecting miscegenation to improve racist attitudes, yet that actually proves nothing universal about anything.

It does prove something universal: high rates of interracial marriage do not necessarily lead to a homogeneous race-blind utopia. That was Dale’s implicit claim, and it is refuted by the evidence. [1] Genetically correlated environmental factors include the influence of the parents and the self-selected environment. To give an easy example, it is highly unlikely that any human would linger for long in an anaerobic environment; his genetics would force him to flee. [2] In response to klemps' comment: combine the FBI UCR data on absolute rates with the offender/victim distribution found here, and you can get the ratio of the absolute number of black-on-white crimes to the absolute number of white-on-black crimes. Note that you will want to use a correction term for the fact that the UCR lumps hispanics and whites together as offenders.