The Legendary Dragon Alephwyr, named Alephwyr, BA

One of the places where hierarchical impulses most firmly dovetail with racism is in terms of the intersection between class, race, and IQ. IQ is something that lends itself to hierarchical thinking innately: it's a number that is universally descriptive that can change in size.

But while IQ is valid, to say that class is valid because of IQ differences between races requires first implicitly reifying class into a real thing. It also requires circularly saying that human values and preferences are less important when they belong to people with lower IQ.

Class isn't a function of labor being inherently less valuable, but of certain forms of labor being inherently more fungible. The LTV is unnecessary to establish a difference between "real" and "fictive" value. Labor unions suffice to prove that higher wages are possible

If higher wages are possible based on negotiating position, then "value" is not just a function of supply and demand but also of bargaining power qua leverage. What does this have to do with IQ? Well, people of lower IQ tend to be capable of only more fungible forms of labor.

But there's nothing innate or necessary about the lack of bargaining power due to labor fungibility. It's just a circumstantial fluke of history, or worse: sometimes it's a deliberate choice enforced by law. So IQ differences rationalize a state of affairs that isn't fundamental.

Supporting racism, or more specifically, enforced class disparity between races, on the basis of IQ, is thus invalid: it's as bad as saying that a specific path to wealth inherently makes its practitioners superior even when it doesn't lead to wealth.

tl;dr you can't say that an artificial social construct justifies the validity of using an unrelated metric to uphold that artificial social construct. Just because you found one number that goes up and down and correlates to an observed reality doesn't mean that it's "natural"

This would be bad enough, but we also live in a world where representation for humans as humans has been hollowed out in favor of representation for humans as consumers: where representation is proportional to wealth.