Race is More than a Skin Tone

If you don't follow the Audacious Epigone (linked in the sidebar), he is something like the Statistician Emeritus of the alt right. He is quite adept at finding statistics lying in publicly available data that help substantiate various claims. Recently he took Ben Shapiro to task in Silly Shaprio, and followed up in Color matters, contra Shapiro, for Shapiro's public assertion that color does not matter, only ideology. The statistics paint a very different picture. Whites holding certain conservative beliefs tend to vote for the relevant party -- Republicans -- while blacks vote for the Democrats anyway, and Hispanics are in between.

This all echoes the advice of the great founder of Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew, who warned us:

In multiracial societies, you don't vote in accordance with your economic interests and social interests, you vote in accordance with race and religion.

The statement has become something of a mantra of the alt right. Shapiro attempts to separate ideology and color while totally ignoring culture and other racial elements. In an ideal world ideology is all that matters, but we don't live in some abstract universe. We live in a human society, which is messy, and however much people like Ben Shapiro might want to ignore it, color (i.e. race) is highly correlated with cultural and social phenomena that exert even greater influence over human behavior than ideology. No one is saying that in a multiracial society you should vote in accordance with race & religion rather than ideology, just that it is the truthful sociological observation, whether that conforms to one's moral sensibilities or not.

At this point, I think it's necessary to build some formal analytical tools around Lee's statement. Let's describe relevant nation types. An ideological nation is one in which ideas reign supreme, such as the vaunted proposition nation that the US is alleged to be. On the contrary, a racialist nation is one in which racial and cultural issues dominate. (Note, this is all a bit abstract. A racialist nation is something of an oxymoron, and a proposition nation may ultimately be a myth). The two nation types are separated by the Lee Inflection Point.

Lee Inflection Point
In an increasingly multiracial society, the Lee Inflection Point is the point where voting behaviors can be better predicted by demographics than ideology.

From Epigone's work, whites in America are still mostly an ideological sub-nation (if "sub-nation" is a valid social construct) and so are Hispanics, to a lesser degree. However, blacks are clearly a racialist sub-nation. The question is to what extent will the trend magnify. The Hispanics actually give some room for optimism, as they are a strong immigrant group that still tend to vote according to ideological concerns. But if Lee is correct, as America becomes increasingly multiracial, we should see the various sub-nations all moving towards racialist status. I intend to follow up soon with a method of providing ideological-racialist scores for the various races using Epigone's data and seeing if we can observe trends in that direction.