Race Denial: The Power of a Delusion

[galvez]

An excellent essay by MX Rienzi on the methods used by "experts" to confuse laymen on the issue of race.


web.archive.org/web/20030615200853/http://www.legioneuropa.org/Racediv/race.htm

Excerpt:

"On April 24, PBS aired the first of a three-part television series called 'Race-The Power of an Illusion,' produced by a lefty outfit called California Newsreel, whose website says it specializes in 'educational videos on African American life and history, race relations and diversity training, African cinema, Media and Society, labor studies, campus life, and much more.' The first episode, called 'The Difference Between Us' purported to demonstrate that race is an 'illusion' concocted to justify repression of 'people of color' by nasty white-skinned people."

[Sandwich]

Nearly all television programmes are total crap, so I’m not about to defend this one. The mtDNA stuff was just shameful.

However, I do have a few questions about the article’s take. Run of the mill scientists are often very poor philosophers, and should stick to churning out data, preferably in their own narrow field. Great scientists, like Cavalli-Sforza, appreciate the need to establish logically clear category types.

The author says :

“they harp on the fact that there is no single gene or (small) set of genes unique to any racial group. They suggest that two members of the same race may differ from each other more at a specific gene locus than they do from someone of a different race. In other words, at some small part of their genomes, a person can appear more similar to some people of other races than to some people of his own race. This is true, but meaningless.”

If it was just ““at some small part of their genome” ” that “two members of the same race may differ from each other more at a specific gene locus than they do from someone of a different race” then the statement that “there is more genetic variation within population groups than between groups” would be actually incorrect (mathematically) rather than misleading, wouldn’t it? Wouldn’t a more accurate presentation of the case be to say : “the genomes as a whole of two members of the same race may differ more from each other than from that of someone from a different race”.

Let’s take this as a first hint that the author is prepared to stoop to the polemical methods he is criticizing rather than maintaining reasoned argument. I doubt he is innumerate.

He then comes up with the brothers Joe and Ted. If they are full brothers and there is more genetic variation between them than between one of them and a stranger chosen at random, it does not invalidate the concept of the family, but it might just lead one to wonder what old Ma JoeandTed has been up to. However if one took say a thousand such brothers, and a thousand random strangers, and came up with the same result, one might conclude that the Muslims have a point about the usefulness of Purdah. Of course such a result would be extremely unlikely, and the simple analogy between race and family that the author is trying to present is equally removed from reality. For the term race to have some meaning it has to relate to a sample size larger than a village of in-bred hillbillies sharing a common ancestry. Inbred groups of this size would in fact definitely have genetic similarity greater than two random individuals, but such a definition, as Cavalli-Sforza points out would lead to a classification scheme involving about a million races.

The maximum number of testable genes is so high that we could in principle detect, and prove to be statistically significant, a difference between any two populations, however close geographically and genetically. The discontinuities a useful definition of race requires are much more problematic than those involved in that of a family, and it is disingenuous of the author to suggest otherwise.

The argument about monkeys is similarly misguided. It is precisely because race is not the same as species that there is a problem. One does not need genetic studies to differentiate monkeys from humans: lack of fertile offspring does that.

The racial “more within than between” syllogism goes something like this. My collection of stamps expressing political events has more variation within it, in terms of colours used, number of perforations, shape, etc, than there is variation between the average* for these features and the average* for my pal Fred’s collection of stamps highlighting key events in postal history (the history of stamp-making). They’re both stamp collections after all. ”<br>
(Nonetheless, we may, for a variety of reasons, want to focus on certain things all the stamps in each specific collection have as a common theme than on what differentiates them. This is problematic but people who deny the existence of race, or argue that it is a purely social-subjective differentiation, miss out that just because the world can be organized in all sorts of different ways does not mean that some of those ways are not more meaningful and useful than others – in the case of race, for anthropological studies and the treatment of hereditary disorders.)

On the other hand the author is suggesting that there is no such problem, on the grounds that if we introduce some other assembly of shaped and coloured papers, say labels, the same fact: “more variation within than between” would hold. Yes, it would, but so what? The difference between a collection of labels and a stamp collection is unproblematic. The difference between political history stamps and postal history stamps, on the contrary, is a difference based on the purpose for which the collections were made.

Somebody could jumble up the two stamp collections and it would not necessarily be obvious how to reassemble them into two distinct collections. The same is not true if one jumbled up a stamp collection and a collection of labels – unless one didn’t know the difference between a stamp and a label of course. Race is not such a simple distinction, which is what makes me think that Cavalli-Sforza and others might be less than enthusiastic about the appropriateness of our author’s arguments in its defence.

Finally, and less relevantly, a lot of the author’s argument hinges on the idea that certain genes control the expression of others. But do we know how these particular certain genes vary statistically, across populations and across individuals? I think not. Do we have any reason to believe that their distribution is other than that of other genes? Not as far as I know.

Ideological fervour, it seems, runs high on both sides of the debate, and like all febrile states, produces confusion.

* substitute appropriately complex statistical formulation here

[darksphere]

Regarding this issue then I think the whole discussion over whether race exists or not derives(at least to a large extend) from different conceptions of what a race really is.

Obiously whether race exists depends on ones conceptions of what race means. And there are very different definitions to the way the term is used in the public and how it's used by physical anthropologists.

Due to the way the term was used by a certain guy with mustache back in the thirties it became the impression of laymen that race meant groups of very diverging groups separated by enormous, unbridgable gaps of all sorts.

Unfortunately while all the mustache-mans other ideas has been denounced later his way of using the term race has stuck.

You constantly see race used to imply genetic groups with enormous divergence and often the word race also seems to mostly be applied to people as a form of slander supposed to degrade ones humanity... To be a race is to be devoid of individuality AND to be weird in the same way.

You see this way of using the term everywhere in the mass-media(movies, computergames, popular litterature etc.). Just one example:

In the computergame Starcraft is featured three different "races". These three groups all come from each their corner of the galaxy.
The three groups are constantly described as different races through-out the manual and game allthough it's obvious to anyone that they can't be races in any scientific sense seeing as race is a subdivision of a species and it's very unlikely that creatures from different planets should be of the same species.

It's no wonder when people hear the term used that way that they get the impression that it denotes enormous genetic gaps.

So if I say that I think negrids and Europeans are different racial groups then any uninitiated listeners will undoubtfully hear it as: "Negrids and Europeans has nothing in common and can never function in a society together, one or the other is basically none-human plus there is no such thing as individuality amongst either of them".

And of course people will take issue with that...
Hence this whole race-denial wave.