Is AUTHOR wrong in the post ? POST : I think there are three things you have to understand about me to get this story:

1. I grew up in Indiana. In the place I used to live white nationalism was a normal thing. It's really embarrassing to admit, but if you'd met me eight years ago or so you might have heard me say things like - Africans have a genetic predisposition toward low iq. I'm really embarrassed that at one time I normalized and actively spread hate speech and was just so ignorant - even if I was really young. Currently twenty-eight.
2. I'm a professional scientist now. I take a lot of pride in my work. I really value truth. I'm a bit of a quiet activist too. I spend time volunteering, donating, do a lot of research in medicine.
3. I'm extremely quiet, awkward, and I don't really have a lot of friends outside of my SO and my family - but everyone in my family and my SO are extroverts.

So I'm at my older brother's party, and we're sitting in a circle playing Codenames. We really like boardgames and music. One of my older brother's friends had competed in a race earlier that weekend and done middlingly. He commented something like - "well if I had the extra bone in my foot like black people I'd have done better."

I realize I was being a little bit sensitive, but I tried to be immediately dismissive of the comment. I replied along the lines of - "come on man, that's just some crappy rumor. There's not much genetic differences between the races. Trust me, my PhD is in medicine lol."

Then my older brother cuts in and I'll paraphrase the conversation:

Brother: "there's no bone, but black people are genetically stronger and faster."

Me: "The primary genetic trait that's unique to black skinned people is extra melanin in the skin. I'm pretty sure that there's no evidence that there's significant difference in athletic ability between people with different skin tone."

Brother: "no, it's been proven." - pulls up some trash article

Me: "That's not how proof works, there has to be a real, mechanistic, intervention-based scientific investigation"

Brother: finds an article from very junky scientific journal "No see, I found this scientific study. If there's a study, there's at least evidence that it's true."

Me: "That's not how science works, you need a community consensus. Not one sample that's not even well peer-reviewed"

Brother: "Well, it's enough data for me that I'm not going to change my mind."

Me: "It's not just about changing your dumb-ass mind, we're in front of a group of people and when you emphasize poorly-supported divisive ideas, you make all these people in this room more comfortable with ideas that inch towards racism. You normalize it."

Brother: "Well, I don't care because I don't want to change my ideas."

Me: "that is the most ass-headed way to think about things. Why wouldn't you trust me? I'm a professional scientist in a closely related field. All I do is try to evaluate truth in things like this."

Brother's-Friend: "Jesus Knoxvillefox, you're making this party really awkward for everyone. You should just drop it so everyone can have fun."

Me: "I don't care, I'm not going to sit here and let my own blood normalize anything even approaching racism. And I'm not going to let him normalize bull-headedness and a consumer's approach to reading research. Because there's also plenty of data out there that falsely asserts that black people are iq-inferior to people with different skin colors and we should be guarding ourselves against believing anything that's written in a book or journal."

At that point I'm sort of raising my voice. Not yelling, but definitely stern and angry. We argued for a while until I had to leave. I feel bad in retrospect :c