Indians Are Hated Because They Are Dark and Can't Play Football

How subconscious prejudices warp conservatives' views

Spend any time on X, and you find a hatred of Indians that is virulent, widespread, and deeply rooted. You can throw almost anything out there that portrays Indians in a negative light and get tens of thousands of likes, regardless of whether it is true or not. It is now seeping into the real world, with DeSantis and Senate Republicans turning against skilled immigration and a Texas Senate candidate denouncing a Hindu statue in his state.

This isn’t a matter of everyone getting hate on social media. The anti-Indian fervor on the right is on a different level, which is quite puzzling when directed at a group that has a low crime rate, pays disproportionately into the tax system, mostly doesn’t arrive here illegally, and doesn’t bring terrorism or traits like antisemitism. In other words, none of the excuses conservatives usually give for disliking immigrants apply to Indians. All they have is “wage competition,” an argument that is rooted in a far-left understanding of economics that conservatives do not apply in any other context. Basically, if the wage competition argument is correct, all mainstream research on economics and the causes of human progress is wrong, and we need to rebuild our understanding from scratch. Conservatives have clearly not met that standard. As one report puts it on the issue of high-skill immigration, “it is hard to find another effect in the entire economics literature for which the evidence is more conclusive and overwhelming.”

I think I know what is going on here. I almost didn’t write this article, because I thought it was one of those things that are too uncomfortable to admit. But I know that if it makes me uncomfortable, then other people who are much less willing to face unpleasant facts are probably completely dominated by their subconscious instincts. We need to bring forth their motivations in order to have an accurate understanding of what is happening. Sunlight is the best disinfectant and all that.

When I talk to rightists about why they dislike Indians so much, the story I get is that they’re brown-nosers who are pushy, aggressive, and clannish. This isn’t an argument you hear conservatives often make publicly – though check out my conversations with Amy Wax to get the basic idea – in part because they can’t point to data confirming any of this.

As someone who talks to a lot of smart conservatives, then, you realize that for many of them economic arguments are just a pretext covering up a distaste for Indians as people. The ones who genuinely believe the wage threat arguments are economic populists, so can have non-racial reasons for their beliefs on this topic, but the problem with their thinking is a different issue. Here, it is enough to note that most conservatives apply zero-sum arguments about jobs inconsistently, and therefore must have other motivations, even if they are subconscious.

When I bring up conservative arguments about the personalities of Indians to liberals or libertarians, they are completely puzzled. In my experience, it seems that people’s ideological predispositions completely determine how they feel about Indians on a personal level, which is nearly perfectly correlated with their views on H-1B visas.

There are two possibilities regarding the political split. First of all, anti-Indian views might simply be based in racism. When a white person has a character flaw, rightists treat them as an individual, while an otherwise similar Indian is seen as a representative of his group. Alternatively, as one right-wing friend suggested, maybe so-called “racists” are the only ones who allow themselves to notice politically incorrect facts about the world. Liberals, she reminded me, are uncomfortable even recognizing the black propensity toward crime, one of the most indisputable facts we have about social life.

I don’t buy my friend’s argument that Indians have negative traits that only conservatives allow themselves to notice. I’m extremely skeptical of the view that we are any good at estimating differences between groups of people in ways that are not biased by preexisting prejudices. Show me data on a group difference, and I’ll believe it. If the group behavior is obvious enough, sure, we can draw conclusions from that. For example, Gypsies are a tiny percentage of the American population, but basically every time I see a group of people begging on the street as a family unit, they look like Gypsies.

So “Gypsies beg as family units more than other people” is a reasonable conclusion to draw, without looking at any studies. But I don’t think we’re any good at sensing less obvious differences. It kind of feels to me that Hispanics commit a lot more crime than whites, but it doesn’t appear that the differences are particularly large when you check the data and account for age. My intuition is likely based on my familiarity with the young Latino gangbanger cultural trope and living in a political environment where people are always talking about the dangers of our porous border.

When it comes to sex, my intuitive sense of male/female differences is that they are much more extreme than what the data would justify. Frankly, men I’ve known on average do seem a lot smarter than women. If you had once told me there was, say, close to a standard deviation IQ gap between the sexes, it would have seemed like a plausible hypothesis. Yet any gaps that exist are much smaller than that. What’s happening here is that my mind is probably exaggerating real differences, while also mistaking higher male aggression and confidence as reflecting greater intelligence. In other words, while leftists who deny any racial or sex differences are wrong, the idea that prejudices can sometimes mislead us is of course correct.

All of this is to say that I simply do not trust perceptions of Indian character flaws that are not based in data, especially since I have not noticed them myself and they are only apparent to people with a certain political outlook. Moreover, there is a much simpler theory of anti-Indian racism on the right. I would argue that two facts about the world explain the anger we see.

1. People have a preference for light skin.

2. The preference for lighter skin can be compensated for with a kind of masculine charisma, which blacks have and Indians don’t.

I will justify each of these arguments in turn. Putting them together, we can understand the subconscious impulses that make conservatives talk about wage competition and hallucinate negative traits among Indians as a group.

Proposition 1: Humans Prefer Light Skin

When people judge someone as physically attractive, they are also more likely to assume that they possess other positive traits such as intelligence, kindness, competence, and trustworthiness. This is part of a broader cognitive bias known as the halo effect, first named by psychologist Edward Thorndike in 1920. To take one study of many, a recent paper found that applying beauty filters to a person’s face led observers to rate the same individual more positively across a wide range of characteristics. I wasn’t able to find any research on whether conservatives or liberals are more subject to the halo effect. It is common to find that right-leaning politicians and even voters are more attractive. This can be taken as evidence that individuals on the right discriminate more based on looks, preferring attractive people as leaders, or the causation can go in the other direction, with looks determining people’s attitudes. One can imagine a feedback loop, with attractive people coming to value attractiveness more as a trait, and such individuals then forming communities that value attractiveness more, enhancing our natural biases. For similar reasons, women who are intelligent but unattractive often become feminists, and think men who judge women based on their physical features are disgusting.

Attractiveness is of course not equally distributed across races. Around the world, humans prefer light skin. It’s been often remarked that on Latin American soap operas, the actors overwhelmingly look European. In certain African countries, over half of women use skin-lightening creams, with the Ivory Coast and Ghana implementing bans on allegedly dangerous products. Similar numbers have been found in Northern India. Of course, you might say that in the West there are also bronzers and tanning. But this appears to be a white people thing. Perhaps the ideal skin tone for most humans is something like a Spaniard or Northern Italian. People who go out of their way to be much darker than the white norm are considered to be part of weird subcultures, like the cast of Jersey Shore. You certainly don’t see many women in Asia, Latin America, and Africa trying to get darker. This would mean it makes sense that Northern Europeans would sometimes tan, while pretty much everyone else in the world wants to be lighter.

Leftists will often claim that the preference for light skin is a legacy of colonialism or something like that. It is true that people will follow the practices of high-status cultures and see their traits more positively. But there is strong evidence that this particular prejudice is hard-wired. In Fair Women, Dark Men, anthropologist Peter Frost gathers data and historical research showing that the preference for light skin, especially for women, existed in many cases long before European domination, being found centuries or even millennia ago in Egypt, India, and Polynesia. His book also provides the following chart of cross-cultural preferences.

As you can see, the preference is more common for women. Frost presents an evolutionary reason for this, showing that women are always fairer-skinned than men, with lightness being a sign of fertility. Of course, the preference for light skin doesn’t appear to be completely universal, given the handful of negative examples, but it does seem to be the direction in which human nature tilts.

As you can see from the chart below, Indians are very dark. The only people in the world comparable to them are sub-Saharan Africans and natives from the region of Australia and Papua New Guinea. But we don’t see many Australian Aborigines or New Guineans in the West, so Indians are the darkest people Westerners have contact with who are not black. This creates prejudice against them, and leads people who don’t actively value anti-racism as an ideal to have a tendency to judge their traits uncharitably.

Proposition 2: Indians Lack the Masculine Charisma That Can Compensate for Anti-Dark Bias

This leads to the question of why blacks aren’t as hated as Indians on the right. Obviously, anti-black racism has been virulent throughout American history, but in many ways society now discriminates in favor of them. Conservatives can chalk this up to white guilt or political correctness alone, but I think that part of the story is that, as blacks were able to integrate more into American society, they were seen to have many characteristics that people value.

Black men are typically associated with masculine traits like physical strength, toughness, athleticism, and hypersexuality. They are good at sports that Americans like, particularly basketball and football, and also soccer, the one most favored by Europeans. Blacks make up about 70% of the NBA, just over half of the NFL, and 43% of the English Premier League. According to Jon Entine’s Taboo, this is in part due to West Africans having a higher proportion of fast-twitch muscle fibers, which makes them excel at running and jumping, in addition to other physiological traits. He also mentions a higher level of testosterone, which is associated with being more outgoing, and having better success with the opposite sex.

Given that testosterone is more attractive in men than women, it is therefore unsurprising that among black-white marriages in the US, the combination of black man-white woman is more than twice as common as white man-black women pairings. This fact is really hard to reconcile with any story that stresses the legacy of slavery or historical discrimination. Black man-white woman has been the ultimate racial taboo throughout American history! Moreover, whites are of a higher socioeconomic status than blacks, and women tend to prefer men who earn more money. So both history and normal mating market dynamics would suggest that white man-black woman pairings should be much more common than the reverse.

You can probably come up with some new theory to fit all of this with a story about the legacies of the past, but it’s much easier to just assume blacks have higher testosterone levels and other traits that make them attractive to women, popular as leaders and entertainers, and good at sports, despite socioeconomic disadvantages. They have “riz” as the kids say. This is consistent with everyday experience, and why I suggest men picture themselves as a black guy if they want to get better at attracting the opposite sex. It’s the same force behind the “Magical Negro” trope in movies and TV shows. Black women are less favored in the dating market because men care more purely about looks and put less emphasis on having an outgoing personality, though they are often nonetheless portrayed as having magical traits too.

Unfortunately, Indians don’t have such advantages. To take one indicator, they’re really bad at sports. In a list of Olympic medals won per capita across nations, India and Pakistan come in near the bottom. Partly this is due to historical poverty, since wealthier nations can devote more resources towards training elite athletes. Yet this can’t be the full explanation, because India and Pakistan are well behind nations like the Ivory Coast, Uganda, and Ghana. A series of studies from the UK show that adjusting for relevant factors, South Asian men have lower testosterone than white men, suggesting a genetic component to this disparity.

Higher levels of testosterone for blacks help counteract discrimination based on skin tone, particularly for males. There’s a funny genre of white nationalists complaining that blacks being good at sports has made white Americans less racist against them. This tendency for good ol’ boys from the South to fawn over black, often criminal, athletes that help their alma maters win football games was parodied in Tom Wolfe’s Man in Full. But Indians are dark, without the advantage of being cool. This is why I think that Vivek’s tweet about how Americans need fewer sleepovers and more studying led to such an explosion on the right. People already perceived Indians as nerds, and here was a major politician shoving their greater socioeconomic success in everyone’s face while reminding them of the precise traits they have that conservatives find unappealing.

I’m pretty sure if Indians were highly overrepresented in the NFL, they would be seen as more American. But this isn’t something that is in their power to change. Maybe they can practice to become place kickers? This is about selection in addition to group characteristics. Indians were brought into the US largely on account of technical skills, or a desire to move to a new culture in order to seek financial success. If we recruited from among 1.4 billion people based on athletic ability instead, the characteristics of Indians in the US would be different. But since we’re selecting on other traits, Indians who come to America are probably closer to their group average in terms of charisma and athletic ability.

How do East Asian men fit into this? First, you have the skin tone advantage, and the fact that their women are really attractive. But I think another thing is that East Asian men are so passive in personal relationships and introverted that they aren’t visible as political activists, CEOs, and political leaders, despite being highly educated and otherwise successful. As purely shape rotators, they simply offend people a lot less. This is why we talk about Indian CEOs of companies like Google, Microsoft, and IBM, while we discuss a “bamboo ceiling” for people of Chinese, Korean, and Japanese descent.

Indians have the worst of all worlds. They’re dark skinned, which is disfavored. In terms of personality, they’re more outgoing and have more masculine traits than East Asians, which lets them succeed at the highest levels of business and politics and get noticed as an alien elite. But they’re not as masculine as blacks, so they’re not good at charming people or playing basketball and football. This explains why they are hated – at least by conservatives, who are more likely to indulge in unquestioned forms of prejudice.

I Am Very Confident in This Theory

Sometimes I have a theory that I have a high degree of confidence in, but I expect my audience to be resistant to what I’m saying. This is one of those cases. I think every major empirical claim made here holds up, both in terms of academic literatures and people’s everyday experiences, and the logic connecting these claims into a larger narrative is also difficult to argue with.

But this theory has something for everyone to hate. Liberals will read this article and think it sounds too much like “race science,” which is to many of them the most evil thing imaginable. When people on the left are confronted with such arguments, you can see the gears turning, and a desperation to snatch at anything from history, sociology, or whatever tool they can find to explain away group differences – or, if forced to admit their existence, blame past and present racism – regardless of what the evidence says.

Conservatives are also likely to be repulsed by the implications of this argument, as it portrays them as petty, lacking in self-awareness, and prejudiced in the sense that everyone considers bad. My theory is, in effect, that “conservatives want to keep out of the country the people who may help cure cancer because their skin is dark and they don’t make good cornerbacks, becoming selective socialists in the process.” Can they really be like this? Sorry, have you been paying attention to discourse on the right over the last few years?

Conservatives are more likely to indulge in these kinds of base intuitions. I think your typical liberal probably feels all the things that conservatives do about different racial groups at a gut level, but makes an effort to overcome their instincts. This can be good or bad depending on the situation. It’s bad to be completely delusional on a subject like race and crime or affirmative action because you won’t face the truth about group differences. At the same time, liberals are also correct that people often let prejudice cloud their judgment. There is something similar going on with the trans issue, the importance of which I think conservatives clearly exaggerate, even if they’re mostly right about it, because people who are gender nonconforming gross them out.

Conservatives feel that blacks commit a lot of crime. They are right about that. They also feel the same about immigrants, so much so that it was the main issue on which the 2024 Trump campaign ran. Here they are wrong. So when they get a feeling that Indians have all kinds of traits that make them annoying or threats to American culture, they are less likely to question such attitudes, and consider the possibility that they just don’t like people who look different and are too dark without accompanying charisma to make up for it.

I’ve always sensed that this is what is going on here. I’ve been constantly pointing out how irrational opposition to Indian immigration is from any reasonable perspective one cares to articulate. The “wage competition” argument for keeping out skilled migrants is economic flat earthism. The cultural arguments are completely devoid of any data. As I recently said on X, there is no issue in public life like H-1B visas, where every logical argument and piece of data points in the direction of letting in more skilled migrants. The critics of immigration are not just wrong; they are arguably the group in politics that poses the greatest direct threat to societal progress.

That said, I do wish the right would be more honest about its racism. If you say “I don’t want to look at their faces,” we can do a cost-benefit analysis that takes into account the benefits of high-skill immigration, in terms of scientific growth and technological innovation, and then try to determine whether your opinion of who is ugly or uncool should outweigh the possibility of higher living standards for future generations. A more fundamental problem arises when people deny basic facts about the world, either thinking they’ve discovered a new theory of economics, or imagining cultural traits that they’re convinced must exist but are invisible to anyone who doesn’t share their politics.