Race v. Racialization

The Objectivist
IS RACE REAL?
Dunkirk-Fredonia Observer
4/26/06

Racial differences are real. This claim conflicts with the widely held view that racial groupings are social constructions. Groups and attributes that are socially constructed are ones that depend on persons thinking in certain ways. For example, attributes like being married, pretty, or middle class and things like money and languages are socially constructed. Other groups and attributes are not socially constructed. Rather they track fundamental divisions in the world. For example, consider categories such as mammal and gold.

Racial groupings are real properties. Persons have different genetic patterns and these patterns cluster around four or five groups (theorists differ here). The groups include blacks, whites, East Asians, and South Asians. So widely accepted are these genetic patterns that commercial firms will tell you where your ancestors came from. All you do is swab your mouth and send it to the company along with a check. The test can even tell persons of mixed ancestry the percentage of their ancestry that comes from different regions. The explanation for these differences is that populations separated over time and space accumulated genetic differences in response to natural selection and random genetic changes. In particular, it is thought that blacks split apart from non-blacks and later whites and Asians split apart.

There are a couple of arguments against the reality of race that are unconvincing. It is sometimes argued that race can’t be real because human beings of different races are much more similar genetically than they are dissimilar. This is unconvincing. Human beings share over 98% of their genes with chimpanzees; this doesn’t show that they are the same. It is also argued that since there are racially-mixed individuals, there can’t be races. However, the possibility of interbreeding doesn’t prevent there from being different groups. For example, the fact that some dogs can be part Great Dane and part German Shepard doesn’t show that there aren’t different breeds and that the differences between breeds aren’t in part due to genetics.

The reason it’s worth noting the reality of race is that it matters. Blacks, whites, and East-Asians have different distributions of intelligence. For example, on some estimates, the average white person has a higher IQ score than 84% of the black population, whereas the average black person tests higher than 16% of the white population. East-Asians score even higher than whites. Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, authors of the widely hated The Bell Curve, argue that a substantial part of these differences is due to genetics. As evidence they note that black and Asian children adopted by white families have IQs similar to that of blacks and Asians generally. Evidence can also be seen in that in the 1981-1995 period, white students whose parents did not have more than a high school diploma had higher SATs than black students at least one of whose parents had a graduate or professional degree (e.g., Ph.D. or M.D.). A similar pattern can be seen in that the SAT scores of whites from poor families exceeded that of blacks from rich ones. Rick Reilly of Sports Illustrated notes that only 48 men have run the 100-meter dash in under 10 seconds and they’re all black. He also notes that of the last 50 All-Pro cornerbacks, only one was white.

Our society has tried to ignore these genetic differences, thereby producing painful results. For example, preferential treatment has in the past led to 66% of black medical students failing part of the medical boards and 43% of black law students being unable to graduate and pass the bar within three years. We find similar results in other areas, e.g., teacher competency exams. A lot of resources have been wasted and persons harmed because of dishonesty about race. This is shameful.

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The Constructivist
RACIALIZATION MATTERS
Dunkirk-Fredonia Observer
4/26/06

“Africans are naturally fitted for slavery.” “American Indians are destined for extinction.” “Democracy works only for Anglo-Saxons.” “Immigration by inferior European races to the United States must be stopped.” “Aryans are a master race who deserve to rule the world.” If these claims strike you as ridiculous or troubling, you may be surprised to discover that they were not the ravings of crackpots but were endorsed by the leading racial scientists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

If so, you’ll probably be shocked to find that the global history of race thinking is both long (spanning the past three to eight centuries, depending on how you define it), and, for much of that time, illustrious (it lost its stranglehold on public opinion in the West only relatively recently). Scholars such as Lee Baker, Elazar Barkan, Thomas Gossett, Ivan Hannaford, Audrey Smedley, and Nancy Stepan have produced intellectual histories that reveal a shift from theological and civilizational justifications of race thinking to scientific ones in the eighteenth century and after. In fact, key scientific disciplines—anthropology, biology, medicine, psychology, sociology—began as racial sciences. While their faults have been ably dissected by Ruth Benedict, Julian Huxley, and Ashley Montagu in the World War II era and Stephen Jay Gould, Daniel Kevles, and R.C. Lewontin over the past few decades, these racial sciences shaped Western conventional wisdom for much of the preceding two centuries.

Since the 1980s, scholarship on the social fabrication of race (Ian Haney López), the politics of racial formation (Michael Omi and Howard Winant), and the racialization of human differences (Mahmood Mamdani) has evolved from these histories and critiques of race thinking. Today, explorations abound of scientific, legal, literary, media, aesthetic, and popular constructions of race; of interrelationships between gender, class, national, ethnic, and racial formations; and, for their engagements with ideologies and narratives of race, of just about everything from naturalist novels to world’s fairs, from museums to minstrel shows, from the frontier to the suburbs, from immigration and naturalization law to media representations of Los Angeles and New Orleans. These explorations have amassed an overwhelming amount of evidence that races are social fictions, not biological facts. Consider that pre-WWII racial scientists could never quite agree on the number of races they were supposedly “finding” in nature—arguments ranged from a handful to dozens to hundreds, depending on which rules of classification were selected. Consider that in any of these schemas, there is more genetic variability within any “race” than between any two “races.” Consider that laws defining “white,” “black,” and “Indian” varied from state to state in the U.S., diverge even more widely from nation to nation, and have changed radically over time.

In the wake of the Human Genome Project and other revolutions in our understanding of human genetics over the past decade, some see another opportunity to establish the reality of races. But cutting-edge genetics does little to support the reliability, validity, and referentiality of race. Population geneticists can trace certain markers to produce what one book in this growing field has called The History and Geography of Human Genes. But all such studies do is track the various migrations out of Africa and around the world by various human populations. You can “find” as many “races” as you want, depending on what kind of computer analysis you perform. Similarly, people who pay for genetic analyses will most likely get a much more vivid picture of the movements and mixtures in their family trees than they ever expected. In the realm of individual development, geneticists are finding that one’s DNA is not a fixed blueprint but that environmental influences play a huge factor in determining which genes get switched on and off when. And at the level of social policy, profiling by phenotype and publicizing individuals’ genotypes raise troubling privacy, equal protection, and due process issues.

The idea that “race determines” intelligence, character, values, and potential is as flawed and dangerous now as it’s ever been. Attempts to map pre-WWII social fictions onto the latest findings in genetics are doomed to fail. There is no good reason to characterize human genetic differences as “racial” or to posit “race” as a cause or explanation of social phenomena.

If you’re still not convinced, try the following experiment: alternate reading a chapter from The Bell Curve and a chapter from Whitewashing Race: The Myth of a Color-Blind Society until you have finished both books. Then report back here which you find more persuasive and why.

UPDATE: The debate continues.