In this extremely competitive job market, Nathan Cofnas was recently hired to a postdoctoral position at Ghent University (UGhent) in Belgium. Confas is best known for his research on “race realism” – specifically, the claim that Black people are less intelligent than White people due to genetic inferiority, or, as he euphemistically puts it, there are “group differences in intelligence” caused by “genetically based racial differences.” Translated into plain English, this means that White people are essentially more intelligent than Black people, i.e., not due to structural racism but rather racial essences. (Although this aspect of his work has received less attention, Cofnas also seems to believe in innate gender differences, stating that “races and sexes” have different “distributions of psychological traits,” due to “innate” differences rather than social factors– that is, biology is destiny).

Elaborating on his racial realism, Cofnas writes that, “in a meritocracy… Black people would disappear from virtually all high-ranking positions, with the exception of sports and entertainment.” He also calls for a “hereditarian revolution” to defend racial realism against the “woke left,” a group of rabid ideologues. Presumably, these are some of the epistemically rigorous, high-quality arguments that won him the position at UGhent fair and square. 

Since Cofnas is peddling racist and sexist propaganda, which entrenches the status quo of pedophilic capitalist elitism, it is unsurprising that UGhent students are protesting his hiring. 

Meanwhile, Brian Leiter, in typical fashion, has defended Cofnas’ appointment, arguing that “he was appointed based on his scholarly work (I have no evidence to suggest otherwise),” so “to fire him” would violate principles of academic freedom. However, there is plenty of evidence that Cofnas was not hired on the merits of his work, since there is broad, non-partisan agreement on the poor epistemic quality of his “scholarship.” (Perhaps he was hired “on the basis of his work” in the narrow sense that his supervisor agrees with it, but the students’ objection is not about whether his work was reviewed, but whether it has sufficient epistemic merit – that is, whether he is qualified for the job. In short, Leiter’s argument is a strawperson, which refuses to engage with the substance of the objection). 

In reality, there is abundant evidence that Cofnas was not the best candidate – nor even a good candidate – for the research position at UGhent, based on the epistemic quality of his work. 

Hereditarianism is Pseudoscience

Back in 2019, moral psychologist Mark Alfano discredited Confas’ “racial essence” paper as, to put it mildly, epistemically irresponsible, and perhaps also in bad faith. Confas argues that there is no credible non-genetic explanation for racial differences in IQ scores, so the cause must be genetic. Alfano correctly notes that “Cofnas is not taking seriously the full range of proposals that already have been offered.” These include well-established structural inequalities such as environmental racism, the racial wealth gap, the racial income gap, school funding disparities, medical racism, such as the maternal mortality and birth-weight gaps, intergenerational trauma, and so on (see Washington 2007, Dula 2007, Metzl 2010). 

Cofnas’ paper also willfully ignores the extensive evidence that IQ tests are not objective measures of intelligence, but rather social constructs popularized by 20^th-Century eugenicists who sought to “scientifically” validate white supremacy – that is, the IQ test is racist. In the 1900s, white supremacists adopted “intelligence tests” to justify “eugenic campaign[s] against immigration, miscegenation, and other professed threats to Nordic ascendancy.” Using eugenic measures of intelligence to validate eugenics is a circular argument: IQ tests were designed to privilege Eurocentric knowledges and White knowers.    

Hereditarianism is Ahistorical Ideal Theory 

Earlier this month, Nathan Remcho further illuminated the epistemic irresponsibility of Cofnas’ race realism by situating it in the context of Ghent University, an institution with ties to slavery, child abuse, and organized rape. His argument is worth quoting at length: 

This issue [of Cofnas’ “hereditarianism”] is especially pertinent in Belgium, where pseudo-academic arguments were used to prop up King Leopold II’s personal pursuits in Africa. The Belgian colonial project in the Congo Free State, which resulted in the deaths millions and the suffering of millions more between 1885 and 1908, was not presented to the world as naked exploitation. It was justified through a carefully constructed apparatus of scientific and moral legitimacy: the language of civilisation, of racial hierarchy, of the white man’s burden. Anthropologists, missionaries, and administrators provided the intellectual scaffolding that Leopold II used to build an exploitative and violent regime. It was racial pseudoscience and the people who propagated it that gave the machinery of genocide its moral permission slip.

The following images will illustrate what is at stake better than “cool-headed” arguments. The first is a photograph of Congolese children whose hands were amputated by Colonial officials under the authority of King Leopold of Belgium; the second is a photograph of a father looking at the severed hands and feet of his 5-year-old daughter, dismembered because her village failed to meet their rubber quota. These are merely token instances of the unfathomable cruelty inflicted on enslaved Congolese people under King Leopold’s regime, which authorized the “rape, mutilation, and genocide of millions of Congolese” under the pretext of “civilizing the savages”: while raping and pillaging, the regime “promised a humanitarian and philanthropic mission that would improve the lives of Africans.” This history must be understood as part of a genealogical trajectory leading to modern eugenics and fascism. 

(The first image is a black-and-white photograph of two Congolese children sitting side-by-side, the older child sitting shirtless in a chair with a stoic expression, the young standing beside him wearing a skirt and t-shirt. Both are missing a hand. The second image is a black-and-white photograph of a Congolese man looking down, grief-stricken, at his child’s severed feet).  

The University of Ghent profited from the ruthless colonization of Congolese peoples, having been established before the state of Belgium itself, in 1817 – long before the tyrannical reign of King Leopold (1835-1909). UGhent was therefore part of the Belgian academic system during colonial expansion, positioning it to participate in and benefit from colonial systems of race “science,” nonconsensual experimentation on Black subjects, and the expropriation of land, resources, and cultural artefacts from the Congo. The UGhent faculty of political and social sciences acknowledges the effects of this colonial history in the form of longstanding “Eurocentrism in the curricula, as well intersectional inequalities in education and research.” An open lettersigned by faculty members and students cites Belgium’s persistent structural racism as an urgent reason to decolonize the university’s culture, curriculum, and methods.   

To this localized picture of academic colonialism, we can add a global dimension. The ramifications of slavery include the logic of Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking empire, which enabled Western capitalists to sexually exploit girls and women, extending slavery’s system of organized rape into the present. Historically, colonizers “bred” slaves through systemic rape, creating a culture of racialized sexual exploitation. The proceeds of sex trafficking were then used to fund academic pursuits, including scientific racism and the promotion of eugenic policies, such as legalized rape, forced sterilization, and sexually-abusive research. Following this tradition, Epstein himself invested millions of dollars in Harvard’s Program in Evolutionary Dynamics, hoping to “seed the human race with his DNA,” ostensibly through some combination of selective breeding and genetic engineering. Harvard itself has been described as “the brain trust of twentieth-century eugenics,” having birthed some of the world’s most influential eugenicists. The rising tide of fascism marks a nostalgic return to racial essentialism and hereditarianism – the very “philosophies” that Cofnas is peddling.  

It is in this sociohistorical context that we must read Cofnas’ defense of heritable racial differences. When Cofnas argues that White people (specifically, White cisgender men) are essentially more intelligent than Black people due to population-level genetic differences, he is contributing to a legacy of structural racism that UGhent contributed to and profited from. 

King Leopold’s brutal colonial regime is not a relic of the past – many of our household products come from modern-day slavery and child labour. Cofnas is reviving long-debunked pseudoscientific claims about “intelligence” and “racial essences” that validate white supremacy. (In fact, I am tempted to ask who might be funding this research, but Cofnas does not identify any private funding sources on his CV). Essentially, Cofnas’ work is epistemically irresponsible not only because it relies on pseudoscientific arguments, nor only because it willfully ignores valid objections, nor only because it lacks any novelty or originality (we’ve all heard the same argument from angry manosphere podcasters), but also, and perhaps especially, because it functions as political ideology, entrenching the eugenic status quo. As Rmecho puts it, “Cofnas is not doing science, he is spreading propaganda”: hereditarianism is not a radical new idea, but a stale old ideology, invented by eugenicists over 100 years ago. Promoting eugenic propaganda is especially irresponsible in the context of UGhent’s ongoing entanglements with colonial economies and ideologies.   

White Male Grievance Politics: White Men are the Real Victims? 

Aside from racial essences, Cofnas likes to write about his contempt for “the woke orthodoxy” in academia. He writes that “‘wokeism,’ or ‘social justice,’ is what has replaced Christianity [as the dominant religion] among the ruling class in the West.” “The woke narrative,” he elaborates, holds that “all differences favoring whites or men are a consequence of forces such as white privilege and the patriarchy,” not genetic differences. Basically, Cofnas is doing political activism against the so-called “woke mob,” who are unfairly discriminating against and oppressing privileged White men such as himself. 

The gist of the argument is: white men are the real victims of structural injustice – academia is a harsh and unfair place for White men due to systemic Black privilege and favouritism for women. In other words, Cofnas is peddling the same White-male grievance politics as misogynistic podcasters, who fancy themselves the victims of feminism, Black activism, and disability justice. White male grievance culture, explains Haily Tran, promotes the belief that 

[White] men, as a group, are being unfairly treated across society—from education and family law to media representation. This perceived victimhood becomes a moral narrative that reframes [White] male suffering as evidence of systemic bias. These beliefs do not arise in isolation; they are shaped by digital content ecosystems [e.g., the manosphere] that validate frustration and attribute blame.

The irony is that Cofnas purports to be against grievance culture – as well as identity politics and victim mentality – while actively participating in those very practices. His scholarship revolves around the idea that privileged White men like him are at a competitive disadvantage in academia, not because of “genetically-based differences,” but rather structural injustices against Cofnas’ own social group and political identity. In other words, what’s good for the goose is not good for the gander: grievance politics is only valid when privileged White men do it. Notably, Cofnas frames himself as a victim of “the woke orthodoxy” even though he managed to secure a prestigious position in a highly-competitive job market, despite the poor quality of his scholarship. Meanwhile, the people allegedly “mobbing” and persecuting him continue to make up a small fraction of the profession.  

Can you imagine if racialized, trans, and disabled scholars were this fragile? While the rest of us have no choice but to practice resilience and epistemic creativity for the sake of basic survival (let alone academic distinction), White male grievance philosophers can build a flourishing career on a foundation of hypocrisy, self-pity, and bad-faith identity politics. The irony!