From my new column in Taki’s Magazine:

Ghosts of Africa

by Steve Sailer, April 11, 2018

Can 2018’s tsunami of DNA data on the origins of human biodiversity help explain the puzzle of why Americans tend to equate “diversity” with Africans, especially West Africans?

Anthropology has always been assumed to have political implications. For example, in Evelyn Waugh’s classic satire on press coverage of the 1930s Italian invasion of Ethiopia, Scoop, the rival Soviet-financed and German-financed Ishmaelite embassies offer competing conceptions of Africans.

The Communist consul espouses an Afrocentric out-of-Africa theory in which blacks are responsible for all of humanity’s accomplishments and thus deserve to take over the Earth.

“As the great negro Karl Marx has so nobly written…” He talked for about twenty minutes. The black-backed, pink-palmed, finlike hands beneath the violet cuffs flapped and slapped. “Who built the Pyramids?” he asked. “Who invented the circulation of the blood?... Africa for the African worker, Europe for the African worker, Asia, Oceania, America, Arctic and Antarctic for the African worker.”

In contrast, at the Fascist embassy:

The door of the suite was opened by a Negro clad in a white silk shirt, buckskin breeches and hunting boots, who clicked his spurs and gave William a Roman salute.

The pseudo-consul offers an in-to-Africa vindication of his supposed ancestors:

“For instance, the Jews of Geneva, subsidized by Russian gold, have spread the story that we are a black race…. As you will see for yourself, we are pure Aryans. In fact we were the first white colonizers of Central Africa. What Stanley and Livingstone did in the last century, our Ishmaelite ancestors did in the stone age. In the course of the years the tropical sun has given to some of us a healthy, in some cases almost a swarthy, tan. But all responsible anthropologists…”

Unlike in the time of Scoop, we are currently experiencing a revolution in our understanding of prehistory due to the sudden explosion in the ability to scan the genomes of ancient skeletons. Can our increasing ability to shed light upon these old disputes about Africans offer some insight into why Americans talk as if 100 percent black were the maximum—and optimum—in diversity?

[Comment at Unz.com]