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Um lots of people.
Sure, they might not use the exact words "racial essence" but is the existence of some such quality not the foundational axiom that underpins intersectionalists', HBDists', and old-school racists' entire worldview? "Racial essence" is the quality that allows wealthy academics and media talking-heads to claim that they are being "oppressed" by poor white coal miners. It is the quality that allows the 14-worders to exclude "mongrel children" from the future they seek to secure, and it is the quality that allows hi IQ autists who are extremely concerned about dysgenics to imagine that it's normies seeking mates and having kids without concern for eugenics who are the real threat to civilization rather than the secular utopians such as himself.
"HBDist" here, and it's not true. It's right in the name: "Biological", not spiritual.
I'm sure there's some overlap between people who believe in a racial essence and people who believe differing populations are distinguishable genetically. The latter position is a pre-requisite to the former, but not a necessary one.
...and Black Bloc call themselves "Anti-fascists" while marching around in black shirts, waving red and black flags, and threatening to beat up anyone who isn't on board with their radical socialist agenda.
The name is not the relevant distinction here.
Ok mate. Everyone but me in the world who thinks there is any validity to the science of (usually minor average) genetic differences between the very general human groups variously referred to as race, tribe, people, nation or population subscribe permanently and exclusively to a metaphysical and spiritual understanding of "race", and furthermore to a "correct" ordering of those races as a moral hierarchy. The alternative is unthinkable.
Not everyone, just the vast majority.
I don't think it's all that controversial to say that the blue/grey tribe in general places a great deal of weight on intelligence when determining moral worth. IE that it is always better to be "smart". Furthermore I would suggest that this tendency is especially pronounced amongst the sort of WEIRD secular type who makes the validity of "Science!" a central component of their identity/worldview.
Accordingly such an individual who believes in HBD can not truthfully deny ascribing a moral/metaphysical weight to race.
They might attempt to launder their desire to judge people by the color of their skin rather the content of their character through words like "polygenic traits" and the like but ultimately the impulse and it's end-point are the same.
Your telepathy is, as always, plausible but not final.
Never claimed that it was.
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No matter how many times you mischaracterize arguments, you won't thereby bring them into existence.
Is it really a "mischaracterization"? As @PutAHelmetOn observes up thread, there seems to be this assumption that race and racism are somehow special cases that ought to be set aside and that is what is being challenged.
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