Born to missionary parents in Japan, Taylor lived in that country until he was 16 years old. His parents were conventional liberals, and so was he until the age of 30. American Renaissance He graduated from Yale University in 1973 with a BA in Philosophy, and graduated from Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris (Sciences Po) in 1978 with a MA in International economics. Taylor speaks fluent English, Japanese and French. In the 1980s, Taylor was West Coast editor of PC Magazine and a consultant before founding the American Renaissance periodical in 1990. Taylor has taught Japanese to summer school students at Harvard University.

He is the author of Shadows of the Rising Sun: A Critical View of the Japanese Miracle (1983) ISBN 0-688-02455-6, in which he wrote that Japan was not an appropriate economic or social model for the United States, and criticized the Japanese for excessive preoccupation with their own uniqueness.

Taylor first turned to race in Paved With Good Intentions: The Failure of Race Relations in Contemporary America (1993) ISBN 0-9656383-4-0, Paved with Good Intentions, by Jared Taylor in which he argued that racism is no longer a convincing excuse for high black rates of crime, poverty, and school failure. He also edited The Real American Dilemma: Race, Immigration, and the Future of America, (1998) ISBN 0-9656383-0-8. The Real American Dilemma, edited by Jared Taylor (0965638308)

Taylor supervised preparation of the New Century Foundation monograph, The Color of Crime (1998, 2005), which cites government statistics showing that blacks and Hispanics commit violent crimes at considerably higher rates than whites, and Asians at lower rates than whites. He is the main contributor to a collection of articles from American Renaissance magazine called A Race Against Time: Racial Heresies for the 21st Century, (2003) ISBN 0-9656383-2-4 A Race Against Time (0965638324) and editor of a collection of essays by the late Samuel Francis entitled Essential Writings on Race, (2007) ISBN 978-0-9656383-7-1. Essential Writings on Race, by Sam Francis

Taylor has summarized the basis for his views in the following terms:

Race is an important aspect of individual and group identity. Of all the fault lines that divide society...language, religion, class, ideology...it is the most prominent and divisive. Race and racial conflict are at the heart of the most serious challenges the Western World faces in the 21st century... Attempts to gloss over the significance of race or even to deny its reality only make problems worse.

He has questioned the capacity of blacks to live successfully in a civilized society. In an article on the chaos in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, Taylor wrote "when blacks are left entirely to their own devices, Western Civilization...any kind of civilization...disappears. And in a crisis, civilization disappears overnight." American Renaissance News: Africa in our Midst: Lessons from Katrina Taylor believes in the theory of correlation between race and intelligence, where blacks are generally less intelligent than whites, and whites are generally less intelligent than East Asians, as expressed in The Bell Curve. Taylor has said in an interview:

I think Asians are objectively superior to Whites by just about any measure that you can come up with in terms of what are the ingredients for a successful society. This doesn't mean that I want America to become Asian. I think every people has a right to be itself, and this becomes clear whether we're talking about Irian Jaya or Tibet, for that matter.

Taylor espouses a doctrine of race realism. He has described himself as a "race realist."

Taylor has made remarks on the growing number of non-whites in Europe, America and Australia. On the greater number of non-whites in Holland compared with Denmark, Taylor has commented; "Europeans travel a lot within Europe, and they see dark-skinned bums sleeping on the streets [in] Rotterdam. In Denmark they don't see dark-skinned bums sleeping on the streets, and they are not so stupid as to be unable to understand that immigration has something to do with this." American Renaissance News

In January 2005, Taylor reviewed a book by Frank Salter, On Genetic Interests: Family, Ethnicity and Humanity in an Age of Mass Migration, and agreed with Salter that, from an exclusively genetic point of view, an Englishman would be better off resisting the immigration of two hypothetical Bantu immigrants, than he would be to rescue one of his own children from drowning. He also noted that this was an "extreme" conclusion. American Renaissance News: What We Owe Our People Taylor has also given support to Hans Hoppe's attempts to persuade libertarians to oppose immigration; he generally approves of Hoppe's work, although he sees the pursuit of a society with no government at all to be "the sort of experiment one might prefer to watch in a foreign country before attempting it oneself". VDARE.com: 12/28/01 - Democracy vs. Freedom (And The Nation-State)? by Jared Taylor

In a speech delivered on May 28, 2005, to the British self-determination group, Sovereignty, Taylor said of his personal feelings to interracial marriages, "I want my grandchildren to look like my grandparents. I don't want them to look like Anwar Sadat or Fu Manchu or Whoopi Goldberg." Demographic Change In White Western European World Uk Usa

Taylor is somewhat unique among American white nationalists for his opposition to anti-semitism. In his 1983 book Shadows of the Rising Sun , he denounced imperial Japanese links to Nazi Germany. At the American Renessiance group's very first conference, held in Atlanta in 1994, rabbi Mayer Schiller was the dinner speaker. In 1997, he removed Holocaust deniers and neo-Nazis off the groups' e-mail list.

Conservative writer and activist David Horowitz makes it clear that he disagrees with Taylor's philosophy, which he calls a "surrender to a multicultural miasma" but says that Taylor is "a very smart and gutsy individualist" and "a very intelligent and principled man." By Race and Design

Taylor's fellow VDARE.com writer Steve Sailer, while similarly objecting to Taylor's ideas, has said:

I first came to admire Jared Taylor's talents over 20 years ago, during the dawn of the personal computer age, when he ranked with Jerry Pournelle as the most brilliant PC journalist. That was the last time there was anything PC about Taylor. He’s now the editor of American Renaissance, a newsletter that applies Bell Curve-type concepts to current social problems in a way that the Mainstream Media should be doing but doesn’t, because it’s been frightened off... Taylor is a man of commanding voice and mien, Central Casting's dream of a U.S. Senator. But, needless to say, he will never become a Senator...because he long ago chose to sacrifice popularity for his principles.

Paul Gottfried, professor of humanities at Elizabethtown College, also disagrees with what he calls "the value of white nationalism," but writes: "In comparison to the generally shabby lot of journalists I have known, Jared is a true paragon of tolerance." He also notes what he calls Taylor's "classical liberal sense of fair play." Paul Gottfried Replies to His Critics

David Duke, former Grand Wizard of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan and former Louisiana State Representative, has described Taylor as a "a man of immense ability and the courage commensurate and necessary for telling the long-suppressed truths of race."

Mark Potok and Heidi Beirich, writers in the Intelligence Report (a publication of the Southern Poverty Law Center), has written that "Jared Taylor is the cultivated, cosmopolitan face of white supremacy. He is the guy who is providing the intellectual heft, in effect, to modern-day Klansmen." He has also stated that "American Renaissance has become increasingly important over the years, bringing a measure of intellectualism and seriousness to the typically thug-dominated world of white supremacy".