A biocultural mélange
Alan Goodman, a professor of biological anthropology, explains that race is real but not genetic.
Like a fish in water, we’ve all been engulfed by “the smog” of thinking that “race” is biologically real. Thus, it is easy to incorrectly conclude that “racial” differences in health, wealth, and all manner of other outcomes are the inescapable result of genetic differences.
The reality is that socially defined racial groups in the U.S. and most everywhere else do differ in outcomes. But that’s not due to genes. Rather, it is due to systemic differences in lived experience and institutional racism.
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As a professor of biological anthropology, I teach and advise college undergraduates. While my students are aware of inequalities in the life experiences of different socially delineated racial groups, most of them also think that biological “races” are real things. Indeed, more than half of Americans still believe that their racial identity is “determined by information contained in their DNA.”
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In the 1700s, Carl Linnaeus, the father of modern taxonomy and someone not without ego, liked to imagine himself as organizing what God created. Linnaeus famously classified our own species into races based on reports from explorers and conquerors.
The race categories he created included Americanus, Africanus, and even Monstrosus (for wild and feral individuals and those with birth defects), and their essential defining traits included a biocultural mélange of color, personality, and modes of governance. Linnaeus described Europeaus as white, sanguine, and governed by law, and Asiaticus as yellow, melancholic, and ruled by opinion. These descriptions highlight just how much ideas of race are formulated by social ideas of the time.
Funny how all this time there was never any difficulty with pairs from different races producing viable offspring.
There have been lots of efforts since Charles Darwin’s time to fashion the typological and static concept of race into an evolutionary concept. For example, Carleton Coon, a former president of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists, argued in The Origin of Races (1962) that five races evolved separately and became modern humans at different times.
How odd that they’re able to interbreed then.
One nontrivial problem with Coon’s theory, and all attempts to make race into an evolutionary unit, is that there is no evidence. Rather, all the archaeological and genetic data point to abundant flows of individuals, ideas, and genes across continents, with modern humans evolving at the same time, together.
A few pundits such as Charles Murray of the American Enterprise Institute and science writers such as Nicholas Wade, formerly of The New York Times, still argue that even though humans don’t come in fixed, color-coded races, dividing us into races still does a decent job of describing human genetic variation. Their position is shockingly wrong. We’ve known for almost 50 years that race does not describe human genetic variation.
Of course, that’s because so many Americans still associate “race” with skin color, which is determined by information contained in their DNA (though most Americans I know would not say it that way – he branded himself an educated elite. Most would just say it’s “in the DNA”). The idea of race as the set of characteristics that have been imposed by society is foreign to them. They equate skin color with a set of characteristics, and since the skin color is biological, then they are sure race is biological.
Sort of like the confusion between sex and gender that so bedevils us.
And yet, if it is “shockingly wrong” to say that “race” has some relation to genes, then how come commercial companies (such as 23andme) can discern people’s ancestry and race from their genes?
When the human species spread over the globe, there developed distinct shared-ancestry clusterings. This clustering pattern is biologically real and is the basis of the concept of “race”. Of course the clustering pattern is blurry rather than discrete, since we are all one species and the different groupings continued to mix. (Fuzzy, non-discrete patterns can still be real patterns!) And it may be that, with modern ease of travel, mixing will cause the clusterings to disappear over time.
But, in the world today, there is still a quite real pattern of shared-ancestry clusterings. And this is the basis of what we call “race”, though of course how people in a particular culture construe “race” will also have a layer of social construction on top of that. To assert that race has no underlying biological reality at all is science denialism in the service of an ideology.
Antebellum slavery advocates used to argue that each ‘race’ must have a separate creation. As if there were a dozen or more genesis myths being generated simultaneously.
Good thing nobody did say that.
Well, that’s certainly something well understood today, but it’s a little unfair to blame Linnaeus and Darwin for being unclear about it, as our modern idea of species is derived from Ernst Mayr in 1942, long after Linnaeus and Darwin had died. My own most recent grandchildren have grandparents from four countries spread and three continents, but whether Coon would have called these different races is another matter; probably not.
That’s what they claim, certainly, but it’s less clear that they can discern any such thing.
The problem with the idea of ‘race’ and the ready recourse to science as though it automatically stands above everything by such as Coel is that science has been used to bolster racism in both the 19th and 20th centuries, and still is now. One may say that that science has now been discredited and is therefore not real science, but it was widely accepted as genuine science in its time. And it served ideology. Science has a history, too, and it is not always pretty.
Or it’s not so much that science itself, science qua science, served ideology, as that people used it or hijacked it for ideology. I mean, duh, I’m pointing out the obvious: science is people doing scientific work, but I’m nudging us to be clear that it’s people who mix up science and ideology, not some kind of platonic essence of science that does it.
It’s not that people are saying that there are no clusters of genetic traits; it’s that those clusterings do not constitute a race. Race, like gender, is a concept imposed on people by ideologues. It is, like gender, the imputation of characteristics to people on account of their biological appearance. We could just as easily have decided that everyone with brown eyes is a different race to everyone with blue eyes. Those are real biological differences, caused by different genes, and tend to occur in clusters – but no-one uses them to assign people to different races.
As for genetic diversity: everyone outside Africa – all of us, put together – have less genetic diversity than that within Africa, even between neighbouring villages; and if we were going by genes, except for our inherited genes from different other sub-species of homo, all non-African tribes could be seen as one ‘race’, with individual African tribes each being a different race. That this isn’t how ‘race’ is applied, makes immediately obvious that race is used, like gender, to justify some people being considered superior to others.
@#9 “It’s not that people are saying that there are no clusters of genetic traits; it’s that those clusterings do not constitute a race.”
The concept underlying the term “race” (as used over multiple cultures over recent centuries) is indeed shared-ancestry groupings. And yes, such shared-ancestry groupings can indeed be discerned in genes. They are biologically real (though fuzzy edged).
One would not divide people into races according to eye colour, because the underlying concept is shared ancestry (not just any physiological difference). That pattern of shared-ancestry groupings is not the invention of ideologues, it’s a real feature of human history. For example, some of today’s Australians descend from people who migrated there 60,000 years ago; others are descended from very recent European immigrants. It’s the ideologues who would try to deny such history.
Now, yes, in the past, some people have attempted to use science to make claims about races that are wrong. (The fact that in the past some claims about race were wrong does not itself invalidate the concept of shared-ancestry races.) Equally, it was science (Darwinian evolution) that established the shared ancestry and common humanity of all humans.
And who decides that’s a matter of “race”? Who decides it’s race as opposed to history and geography?
My daughter, now a doctor, shared with me the lecture notes from an excellent medical school lecture on race. The main point of the lecture is that there are indeed clusters of characteristics, and those clusters are medically important, but those clusters correspond very badly (or not at all) to the popular superficial understanding of “race”.
I share the misgivings about these ancestry DNA tests. I don’t see them tied to race explicitly, except that ancestry from certain places is deemed a “race”. (Native American ancestry in particular is rife with legal issues in the US.)
“And who decides that’s a matter of “race”? Who decides it’s race as opposed to history and geography?”
It’s all of those things. History and geography have combined to produce a shared-ancestry grouping pattern in humans. And that shared-ancestry grouping pattern (which is the concept underlying “race”) is indeed in our genes (as it must be), and thus the claim in the above quote that such an idea is “shockingly wrong” is itself just wrong.
Having said that, what labels a particular culture might choose to apply to which groupings involves a very large layer of social construction on top of the underlying biological reality. Thus particular socially-constructed labels may not map at all well to biological reality.
That’s pretty much what I’m saying.
Then why, if we wish to be scientific, do we not simply jettison the loaded concept of ‘race’, which only encourages confusion and poor thinking, speak of ‘shared ancestry groupings’ if we are talking about biology and the differences that certainly do exist among such groupings, and about ‘race’ if we are talking about socially-constructed labels particularly since such labels have serious social and political consequences: namely, systemic racism? Would that not be helpful? Then we might be spared from taking seriously the lucubrations of such as Charles Murray, not to mention the asides of James Watson, and the kind of discussion that occurred recently at ‘Why Evolution is True’ in which some people were talking of the ‘culture’ of African-Americans as though it existed in some impermeable and isolated bubble and had no relation to the history, society and politics, including present politics (what is Republican gerrymandering about?), of the USA.
Incidentally, a reading of Isabel Wilkerson’s excellent ‘Caste’, suggests that the caste system in India, to which she compares the systemic racism of the USA , has little or nothing to do with ‘race’ since there seem to be no major ‘shared ancestry grouping’ differences between Dalit & Brahmin, much as certain members of the latter might like to believe the opposite. (The British, however, introduced the idea of basing caste on ‘race’, and this seems to have influenced the caste-system in some ways.) When racism began to be promulgated seriously and widely in the West (to justify colonial expansion and slavery), it was simply not the case, as Coel seems to suggest, that behind the scenes were well-meaning biologists assiduously and innocently working on establishing ‘shared ancestry grouping patterns’, upon which the concept of ‘race’ was subsequently mounted. There is in fact no genuine connexion between the idea of ‘shared ancestry grouping’ and ‘race’ which was in its origin as an influential concept intimately bound up with the establishment of racism.
Again, incidentally, Coel seriously misunderstands Alan Goodman’s point when he accuses him of that heinous sin ‘science denialism’ and suggests that the concept of race, contrary to what Goodman actually says, still does a decent job of describing human genetic variation.
Goodman’s words: ‘A few pundits such as Charles Murray of the American Enterprise Institute and science writers such as Nicholas Wade, formerly of The New York Times, still argue that even though humans don’t come in fixed, color-coded races, dividing us into races still does a decent job of describing human genetic variation. Their position is shockingly wrong. We’ve known for almost 50 years that race does not describe human genetic variation.’
Goodman is not denying genetic variation, he is denying that the concept of ‘race’ is a useful one for describing it.
Perhaps Coel could tell us why he wants to hang on to the concept of ‘race’.
@Tim Harris:
“Then why … not simply jettison the loaded concept of ‘race’, which only encourages confusion and poor thinking, speak of ‘shared ancestry groupings’”
Yes, we could do, and that may indeed be sense.
“Perhaps Coel could tell us why he wants to hang on to the concept of ‘race’.”
I’d readily use an alternative term but, “shared ancestry groupings” are biologically real (and thus, to the extent that the concept “race” retains its underlying meaning of “shared ancestry groupings”, it is also real).
“… and about ‘race’ if we are talking about socially-constructed labels particularly since such labels have serious social and political consequences: namely, systemic racism?”
I’m highly doubtful that mere socially constructed *labeling* is the primary *cause* of “systemic racism”.
“Then we might be spared from taking seriously the lucubrations of such as Charles Murray, …”
What’s your actual objection to Charles Murray? (It seems to me that he is usually damned based on the misrepresentations of his critics, not his actual writings.)
“and the kind of discussion that occurred recently at ‘Why Evolution is True’ in which some people were talking of the ‘culture’ of African-Americans as though it existed in some impermeable and isolated bubble and had no relation to the history, society and politics, including present politics (what is Republican gerrymandering about?), of the USA.”
I’m willing to bet that that didn’t happen. Can you supply a link?
@Tim Harris
“Again, incidentally, Coel seriously misunderstands Alan Goodman’s point when he accuses him of that heinous sin ‘science denialism’ and suggests that the concept of race, contrary to what Goodman actually says, still does a decent job of describing human genetic variation.”
I don’t accept that I misunderstand him.
“Goodman is not denying genetic variation, he is denying that the concept of ‘race’ is a useful one for describing it.”
And “shared-ancestry clustering” IS a real feature of humans, and is a real pattern of genetic variation, and thus DOES describe human variation. Goodman is just “shockingly wrong” on that (he quotes Lewontin in support, but Lewontin was wrong on this, Google “Lewontin’s fallacy” for an explanation of why).
And “shared-ancestry clustering” is still the underlying meaning of “race”.
Now, the current fad for blank-slateist “critical race theory” tries to make everything into a social construction, and if you go down that path far enough then the concept of “race” you end up with does indeed bear little relation to “shared-ancestry clustering”. (Such people also tend to argue that sex is a social construction and that penises can be female; personally I prefer to keep my concepts rooted in reality.)
1) I’m glad you agree that the concept of ‘race’ might be better not used in science.
2) There are historically various significances of the word ‘race’, and, yes, the basic meaning is in reference to plants or animals descended from some common ancestor. The word was taken over in the 18th, 19th & 20th centuries in order to divide humanity into superior races, (the Anglo-Saxon race, the Nordic race, the Aryan race) and inferior ones, and we are still living with this understanding of the word ‘race’ now, as social attitudes and politics in most of Anglo-Saxondom show (Trumpism, the Windrush scandal in Britain). Why not use an alternative term?
3) Perhaps I expressed myself badly. Let me put it another way: systemic racism depends on the defining, or labelling, if you prefer, of groups who are supposedly superior as opposed to groups who are supposedly inferior. And I must say that a peculiarity of the USA from the point of view of an outsider is how extraordinarily important the issue of what race you belong to seems to be.
4) Charles Murray – I’m afraid I find difficult to take seriously the opinions of someone who can write “Latino and black immigrants are, at least in the short run, putting some downward pressure on the distribution of intelligence.”
5) You scroll through and look it up yourself, if you wish to, before accusing me of lying. It was a few weeks ago, and it was the last time I commented on Professor Coyne’s website. The post was about some African-American intellectual, of whom Professior Coyne approved because his ideas accorded with Coyne’s political views and whose name I forget, who was basically saying that everything is really hunky-dory in the USA and it is the fault of African-Americans if they don’t pull up their bootstraps and be ‘successful’ in the approved American Dream way. Read the comments.
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To your second response: Yes, ‘shared-ancestry clustering’ is a real feature of humans, and Goodman is saying that ‘race’ used in reference to it is crude, and, given its history and the prejudices about race that are still far too salient in in the present, a less crude way of looking at things would be preferable. He is certainly no proponent of the Pinkeresque red herring you bring in: blank-slateism.
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@Tim Harris:
“The word was taken over in the 18th, 19th & 20th centuries in order to divide humanity into superior races, (the Anglo-Saxon race, the Nordic race, the Aryan race) and inferior ones, …”
I think that saying “in order to” (as though that were the whole point of the concept) is over-stating. The underlying concept is simply descriptive. But, as I’ve said, I’m happy to use other terms than “race”.
“Let me put it another way: systemic racism depends on the defining, or labelling, if you prefer, of groups who are supposedly superior as opposed to groups who are supposedly inferior.”
I’m not at all convinced. First, the claim of rampant “systemic racism” is dubious. Yes, there are differences it outcomes between groups, but that they are caused by current racism has not been established.
Second, the mechanisms producing any “systemic racism” are unclear. You seem to be asserting that the prime mechanism is: “society has labelled these people as inferior, therefore I will treat them worse”. I’m not convinced.
“You scroll through and look it up yourself, if you wish to, before accusing me of lying.”
I don’t believe — absent actual evidence — that commenters there were treating the culture of any group as an “impermeable and isolated bubble and had no relation to the history, society and politics”. That’s pretty much self contradictory. Of course it’s possible that they did, but if you’re going to accuse them then it’s up to you to support your claim.
That sentence can certainly be interpreted to mean: “Latinos and blacks inherently have low intelligence.”
On the other hand, the same sentence can be interpreted differently. Natural language is squirrelly like that. Suppose I told you, “She’s killing them out there!” How would you interpret my statement? Would you understand it as a description of atrocity, or of successful comedic performance?
Now, I’m aware that this isn’t new to you. I’m just making it explicit in order to set up the question: Why opt for an uncharitable interpretation when a charitable one is available?
Coel said, “I’m willing to bet that didn’t happen.”
Again, why opt for an uncharitable interpretation when a charitable one is available?
@Nullius, #22,
What charitable interpretation is available here?
Your example for squirelliness of natural language
is not relevant here. Whether it is literal or colloquial use of the word “kill” can be easily figured out from context.
For context, I am a genetic epidemiologist. That means I overlap considerably with population genetics, although that is a separate field.
Coel – you’re embarrassing yourself. There is shared ancestry and we can detect that through DNA studies such as GWAS and WES/WGS. Their correlation with race is poorer than you seem to believe. And, most importantly, ancestry is not a single axis.
This is hard to explain to non-geneticists, but everyone who looks black is not necessarily primarily of African ancestry anymore than someone who looks Chinese is necessarily Asian. Skin color does not correlate to ancestry much at all.
But here’s the rub. It doesn’t matter what your ancestry is, if you look black you’re treated as black. A police officer isn’t going to ask for your 23andMe results before shooting you in the back or kneeling on your neck until you suffocate.
Race is not ancestry. Race is a ghastly social construct that needs to be destroyed. Ancestry is a fluid continuous trait in all directions. The populations we draw are not real, they’re a convenience for understanding the natural history of a trait. Why do African-derived populations get sickle cell, but it is not significantly present in any other population? Why do European populations get cystic fibrosis? Again, it seems to be mostly restricted to that population, on average. But the lines between them are not distinct, they’re arbitrary.
And, BTW, the term we use is usually either “populations/people of X ancestry”, or “X-derived populations” where X is African, European etc. The tools we have are too crude but we do what we can with the tools we have.
@Claire #24:
“Their correlation with race is poorer than you seem to believe”
I think you’re making erroneous assumptions about what I believe.
“And, most importantly, ancestry is not a single axis.”
Sure, of course not.
“This is hard to explain to non-geneticists, but everyone who looks black is not necessarily primarily of African ancestry anymore than someone who looks Chinese is necessarily Asian. Skin color does not correlate to ancestry much at all.”
Why sure, that’s well known. For example Aboriginal Australians are not related to the Bantu peoples, but are closer to some East Asian populations. (And I don’t see why this is hard to explain to non-geneticists.)
“Ancestry is a fluid continuous trait in all directions. The populations we draw are not real, …”
Shared-ancestry groupings are indeed real, they’re just not discrete, sharply defined and one-dimensional.
I have no intention of spending hours scrolling through someone’s blog – one that I no longer read – to find the particular exchanges I was referring to. As I have said, Coel can do it if he wants to.
I should like, however, to take issue with his assertion that ‘the claim of rampant “systemic racism” is dubious. Yes, there are differences in outcomes between groups, but that they are caused by current racism has not been established.’
I should like to refer Coel to the definition of ‘institutional racism’ that was presented in the Macpherson report on the failure of the British police to deal with the stabbing and murder of a young black youth, Stephen Lawrence, in 1993: “the collective failure of an organisation to provide an appropriate and professional service to people because of their colour, culture or ethnic origin”. It is seen in “processes, attitudes and behaviour which amount to discrimination through unwitting prejudice, ignorance, thoughtlessness and racist stereotyping which disadvantages minority ethnic people”.
It seems to me to a good and serviceable definition, if somewhat too tame, particularly in the case of the USA where slavery played so important a role, where civil rights for African-Americans were only obtained in 1964, where gerrymandering and efforts to suppress the African-American vote persist very obviously now, where the incarceration of American-Africans is out of all proportion to their presence in the overall population, etc, etc. (And lest it be thought that I am being anti-American, I shall say that my German ancestors on my mother’s side, who immigrated to Britain in the 19th century, were involved in the cotton trade – a branch of the same family settled in New Orleans – and undoubtedly profited, as many British people did, from slavery and the aftermath of slavery in the USA.)
I find it puzzling – since I have come across the same attitudes as Coel’s among commentators on a certain website – that these facts seem simply to be ignored. It seems very odd that people who seem to pride themselves on their empiricism should seem to brush away these facts, historical and present. I remarked in a comment, on that famous website, that I found it curious that other commenters did not seem to want to address race and racism, preferring instead to reduce the matter to a question of class, something that they – all of them white, I suspect – appeared to feel more comfortable with. I suggest that Coel should read some serious American history (not the flag-waving, splendidly optimistic kind) and also Isabel Wilkerson’s very good recent book, ‘Caste’. He might also read ‘The Windrush Betrayal’ by Amelia Gentleman (who is, incidentally, the wife of Boris Johnson’s younger brother) for a harrowing description of how racism that was not ‘unwitting’ worked (and, alas, still works, since the present government in Britain is predictably dragging its feet) to destroy people’s lives. I do not know how people, including some members of my own family, could continue to vote Conservative after what had happened – but of course many people simply do not care about what happens to ‘minorities’, particularly after being gingered up by the Murdoch press.
@Tim Harris:
“I should like to refer Coel to the definition of ‘institutional racism’ that was presented in the Macpherson report …”
Yes, let’s go with that definition, where “institutional racism” meant that the institution provided a very different standard of service depending on race.
“USA where slavery played so important a role, where civil rights for African-Americans were only obtained in 1964, …”
I think everyone would agree that “systemic racism” was rampant in the US in the past. The question is whether it is so today. A lot of thoughtful commentators (Wilfred Reilly, Glenn Loury, Coleman Hughes, John McWhorther etc) suggest that it has declined to low levels, such that it is now less relevant than other factors.
“where the incarceration of American-Africans is out of all proportion to their presence in the overall population, …”
But now you suggest — presenting no evidence at all — that the disparity in incarceration rates is caused by current “systemic racism”. And yet there are a range of other factors (including wealth, class, culture, etc) that affect crime rates. This is why automatically crying “systemic racism” is dubious.
“I find it puzzling – since I have come across the same attitudes as Coel’s among commentators on a certain website – that these facts seem simply to be ignored.”
What facts am I ignoring? It seems to me that you’re the one ignoring lots of relevant stuff. You seem to imbibed Critical Race Theory wholesale, such that the only things that matter are race and systemic racism. Everything is explained solely by those two factors. Yet, the truth is that societies are way more complicated and there’s a lot of other stuff going on also.
1) An institution can be a government, a police force, a company and many other things. The Macpherson Report’s ‘institutional racism’ is generally called ‘systemic racism’ today.
2) ‘Low levels’? – you seem to have a very rosy view of the world.
3) I am very well aware that there are a number of contributing factors to crime rates, as well as to how criminals, or supposed criminals, are dealt with. Racism is one of them, and an important one, both in the US, the UK and Australia. I feel like telling you to teach your grandmother to suck eggs, but that would be rude.
4) I have never read any Critical Race Theory; and neither have I suggested anywhere that race and racism are the only two factors that explain everything, nor that societies are not complicated. You seem to dislike it when others suggest that you believe things that you say you don’t believe in. Why do you so readily behave in the same way you accuse others of doing?
I am going to stop responding to you, just as I have done on a previous occasion when you went on and on. I do not want to presume on Ophelia’s patience.
Well, if you accept that society is complicated, and that a range of factors including wealth, class, culture, etc (not just racism), can explain disparities in outcomes, then claims of rampant “systemic racism” in society today need to be established on the evidence, not just asserted or adopted as ideology.
Alan Goodman’s article is very good, and he clearly knows what he’s talking about. However, there is one point he might have made (or if he did I missed it) that goes some way explaining why so many people think that skin colour defines race. The characters that supposedly distinguish Africans from Europeans — skin colour, frizzy or straight hair, eye colour, nose and lip shape — are among the few we can easily see. The overwhelming majority of genes, however, affect things we can’t see without test, but are the relevant ones for metabolic diseases and things like osteoporosis. These are the ones that don’t cluster significantly with “race”.
Coel @ 29 – Institutional racism is not a synonym for “disparities in outcomes.” There is more to institutional racism than that; quite a lot more. Nobody here is saying “institutional racism explains everything” or anything resembling that.
Good point, Athel.
Thank you, Ophelia. It’s a sort of Gish Gallop, isn’t it?
Argh, isn’t it!
Also Coel @ 29 – why are you treating the claim that there is no institutional racism in the US as the default, the obvious truth that requires no evidence? You do at least know that we have a history of institutional racism, yes? Given the whole slavery thing? And its aftermath? The crushing of Reconstruction? Redlining and how that shaped the allocation of wealth for generations? Unions that were all-white for generations? Stuff like that?
Why would institutional racism have disappeared entirely by now? What makes you so confident that it has? Could it be ideology?
@Ophelia:
“Institutional racism is not a synonym for “disparities in outcomes.” ”
That’s pretty much what I was saying, that, contrary to assumptions of Critical Race Theory, disparities in outcomes cannot be straightforwardly attributed to “systemic racism” without examining actual evidence.
“why are you treating the claim that there is no institutional racism in the US as the default, the obvious truth that requires no evidence?”
I’m not. I’m suggesting an evidence-based discussion of the issue.
“You do at least know that we have a history of institutional racism, yes?”
Why sure!
“Why would institutional racism have disappeared entirely by now? What makes you so confident that it has?”
I’m not. But, as I say, I’ve listened to scholars such as those I listed above who “suggest that it has declined to low levels, such that it is now less relevant than other factors”.
@Athel:
“… some way explaining why so many people think that skin colour defines race.”
Of course the idea of “race” such that “skin colour defines race” is indeed a social construction with no support in biology or genes.
But it smells pretty much like a strawman. Nobody actually takes a line as simplistic as “skin colour defines race”. The strawman is then ritually burnt so that people can proclaim “I’m so anti-racist that I’ll deny that race even exists”.
Ok can we get one thing straight here? Nothing I’m saying in this discussion is for the sake of showing off how anti-racist I am. Can we just leave that banal crap out? It’s boring, it’s beside the point, it’s Fox News-level tedious. I would never claim to be particularly brilliant in the anti-racism department, for the compelling reason that I’m not.
Also – OF COURSE plenty of people “take a line as simplistic as “skin colour defines race”.” Most people do! They wouldn’t necessarily say it, but they don’t need to; it’s taken for granted.
You seem to think you have me pegged as some vapid Wokey McWokerson who needs to be corrected by no-nonsense you. I think my errors and crimes don’t quite fit that schema.
What assumptions, where?
Ophelia & Athel, I really shouldn’t bother with a man (for it must be a man) who is no way serious, who in no way argues in good faith and now returns to his favoured ‘concept’ of race, who calls out for evidence from others but provides none of his own, ignores such evidence as given him (the Windrush scandal, for example) and who (with apologies to Milton)
Picks out his way, not with indented wave,
Prone on the ground, as since, but on his reare,
Circular base of rising coels, that tower
Coel above coel a surging Maze.
@Ophelia: “Ok can we get one thing straight here? Nothing I’m saying in this discussion is for the sake of showing off how anti-racist I am.”
I was more thinking of the Alan Goodman article, not yourself, when suggesting that.
It’s entirely fair to write an article saying that a simplistic account of “race” in terms solely of “skin colour” has no biological or genetic basis (that’s entirely true). But any fair article would also say that a concept of race in terms of shared-ancestry groupings *does* have a biological basis and does map to genetic variation. That is my basic point here, in criticising the Goodman article.
No any fair article would not do that. It’s a footling point and it ignores the fact that that’s not the ordinary understanding of what race means. You’re saying that race can be defined in such a narrow way that it does “have a biological basis,” but you could say that of any word. Just redefine it and hey presto it means what I say it means.
[…] I find that interesting in light of the discussion (especially Coel’s part of it) on A biocultural mélange. […]
@Ophelia: “… that’s not the ordinary understanding of what race means.”
I guess this is the root of our disagreement — we don’t agree on what the ordinary understanding of “race” is.
I’m willing to bet that, were we to poll people: is race primarily about: (1) people with shared ancestry, or (2) people with the same skin colour, then the majority would go for the former.
But I’ve never seen such a poll, so I could be wrong (and I guess the answer could be different in different countries). I confess I’m a bit surprised that people are asserting that the latter is the *primary* concept of “race” (as opposed to being a marker for the former), but there we are. At the very least, my way of construing the concept is widespread.
Hm. Well, you’re in the UK, and the ordinary understanding of the word “race” may be different there. Certainly the history with it is different. Here in the US race is about skin color first of all, and that’s very rooted in our history. I’ve just been reading a book about T. Roosevelt’s imperialist ventures in the Philippines, which quotes extensively from emissaries he sent there – the conclusions they base on the physical appearance of the people are staggering to read. Not staggering just because they’re evil, though they are, but because they’re so stupid. One non sequitur after another. Basically “they look different from us in ways a, b, and c, therefore they lack abilities a through z.”
About your poll though – yes, maybe most people would answer it the way you say, if they paused to think about it. But that’s not what I meant, and I don’t think it’s what we’re talking about. More Gish Gallop? What I’m talking about is how people use it and think of it without being polled, without stopping to think about it. It’s a marker, a quick visual perception. “Common ancestry” is a different level.
Ophelia you beat me to the point that yes if worded like that most might answer (2). I think a better way to take that “poll” is to give people a stack of photographs and sort them by race, any way they want to. My only prediction is that more people will return 2 or more stacks, rather than just the unsorted stack.
@Mike #46:
“My only prediction is that more people will return 2 or more stacks, rather than just the unsorted stack.”
You’re right, they would. But the question is, would they be using visible characteristics as markers for gauging shared-ancestry groupings, or would they be treating skin shade as all that matters?
My prediction is that they’d put photos of those with, say, East Asian ancestry and those of Mexican ancestry in different stacks, even where the skin shade was rather similar.
I thought for a moment that that was a reference to me, but I guess not. Given my rather androgynous name it may still be helpful to mention that both biologically and in my “lived experience” I am a man who has never pretended to be a woman. I don’t think my wife or daughters would be happy if I did (though that’s not the only reason that I accept the sex that nature gave me).
It sounds like a very Anglo-Saxon name, like Aetheldred and similar, paired nicely with a Celtic one.
@Kalyani, #23:
I’m not fond of providing alternative interpretations for people. The philosophical exercise has little value if not done oneself, as it is the process per se that needs practice. When we go through the effort of generating alternative readings, we necessarily think about the other person’s perspective and potential intent, entering a different frame of analysis wherein we look for reasons to view the statement positively. When someone gives an alternative reading, that is not the case. We remain in our original mental frame, wherein we look for reasons to view the statement negatively.
Reading things charitably requires practice, but it’s not difficult. Generating charitable alternatives should be step zero. The question shouldn’t be, “What charitable alternative is available here?” It should be, “Is this charitable interpretation a likely fit for the author’s intent?”
You would be well served to search for a charitable interpretation yourself. If you find it impossible to produce one, here’s a possible interpretation. I’ve not read any Murray, so I can’t speak to whether it jibes with his intent, but it is certainly less offensive than, “Latinos and blacks inherently have low intelligence.”
That it’s easy to spot the vast difference in context but difficult-to-impossible out of context is the entire point of the example. Context could suggest a particular interpretation to the Murray quotation, but we don’t have the context.