Dispatches concerning human variation
Nicholas Wade wrote a book on race, published in 2014 to scathing reviews. One of the reviews was in American Scientist. (I didn’t notice at first that it’s written by someone I know slightly: Greg Laden.)
In his new book, A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race, and Human History, science writer Nicholas Wade claims that race is real—that Darwinian natural selection has resulted in a number of biologically separate human populations characterized by distinct, genetically determined social behaviors. He asserts that many of these differences have emerged over the last 10,000 years and that they explain much of human history. He writes that recent science has “established that human evolution has been recent, copious, and regional” and uses this framework to account for regional variations in economic power and cultural pursuits.
As soon as it appeared, Wade’s book touched off a firestorm of controversy—as he surely knew it would. It’s the latest in a series of dispatches concerning human variation, whose authors in recent decades have starkly divided into two camps, one centered in anthropology and the other in psychology, political science, and economics. Wade is in the latter camp. The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life, a widely read text by psychologist Richard Herrnstein and political scientist Charles Murray in 1994, proclaimed intractable human differences in ability between races; the authors based their views on disputed work published by Canadian psychologist J. Philippe Rushton in the 1980s and early 1990s. Meanwhile, anthropologists had developed a divergent concept of human variation, reaching the collective conclusion that the human species is not compartmentalized in races or subspecies (interchangeable terms in zoology). In 1998 the American Anthropological Association adopted its Statement on Race asserting that the best available research shows race to be a social construct that is biologically invalid.
Early reviews of Wade’s book show a familiar division: Anthropologists mostly take a critical view, whereas psychologists and economists generally like the book. Agustín Fuentes, a zoologist and anthropologist, and Jonathan Marks, a geneticist trained in anthropology, are among the more negative; Bell Curve coauthor Murray and famed geneticist James Watson, a supporter of the biological race concept, land on the positive side. The favorable reviews almost invariably echo one of Wade’s key themes: Disbelief in the existence of race results from biased science driven by a left-leaning political agenda. Wade suggests that “any researcher who even discusses issues politically offensive to the left runs the risk of antagonizing the professional colleagues who must approve his requests for government funds and review his articles. . . The result is that researchers at present routinely ignore the biology of race.”
So is Wade right? Are there human races? Is the variation seen between different cultures and locations best explained by genetic differences between human populations? And have anthropologists been turning a blind eye to the evidence in front of them?
There is no shortage of scientific information, and it gives a clear answer: no.
He then gives a quick sketch of the scientific information, and sums up:
Without boundaries or predictive value, race isn’t a valid biological concept. Human races may have existed in the past—just as there are subspecies of a number of different mammals, including chimpanzees—and they could exist in the future. Nonetheless, to this point the history of Homo sapiens has not led to a known emergence of distinct races. We evolved recently, spread quickly, and in many regions interacted readily. Race is a powerful and important social construct, and in that way it is very real, but it is not a biological useful concept for understanding human diversity.
And guess who else weighed in.
Our letter to the New York Times criticizing Nicholas Wade’s book on race
That’s Jerry Coyne criticizing Wade’s book on race.
Sunday’s New York Times Book Review (already up) features a letter signed by 139 population geneticists, including myself. It is, in essence, a group of scientists objecting en masse to Nicholas Wade’s shoddy treatment of race and evolution in his new book A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race, and Human History.
The book was about the genetics of ethnic and cultural differences, and while it made a valid point that ethnic groups do show small but significant genetic differences across the globe, there was no evidence for Wade’s main thesis: that differences in behavior among groups, and in the disparate societies they construct, are based on genetic differences. While that might in principle be true, we simply have no evidence for that conclusion, and it was irresponsible of Wade to suggest that such evidence existed.
I was asked to review Wade’s book for a major magazine, but after reading it became so dispirited that I simply didn’t have the stomach to eviscerate it (pardon the pun). But Allen Orr did a good job in the New York Review of Books; and it was telling that even the Times’s own review, by David Dobbs, was pretty critical. (The Times Book Review is infamous for going easy on books by the paper’s own writers, and Wade has written for the paper for donkey’s years.)
I find that interesting in light of the discussion (especially Coel’s part of it) on A biocultural mélange.
Since you’ve mentioned me, let me say that I agree with the Coyne etal comments:
“it made a valid point that ethnic groups do show small but significant genetic differences across the globe, …”
Exactly. Ethnic (shared-ancestry) groupings do indeed map to significant genetic differences. You can indeed discern people’s ethnicity from patterns in genes.
“… there was no evidence for Wade’s main thesis: that differences in behavior among groups, and in the disparate societies they construct, are based on genetic differences.”
Agreed again. I know of no evidence that differences in *behaviour* between groups are genetic (as opposed to cultural and environmental).
Greg Laden: “Nonetheless, to this point the history of Homo sapiens has not led to a known emergence of distinct races.”
That’s right, they’re not “distinct” they are fuzzy branching patterns (that also then merge through inter-mixing).
Since you’ve mentioned Jerry Coyne, note that he thinks that “races” are biologically real: “I do think that human races exist in the sense that biologists apply the term to animals …”. https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2012/02/28/are-there-human-races/
I don’t get it. Doesn’t “race” mean color and associated morphological characteristics? Aren’t these features genetically heritable, like eye color? Since when does “race” mean “culture”? Of course cultures are not genetically determined.
The disagreement appears to boil down to which meaning of the word race is being used, and there is also seeming disagreement about whether race even ought to mean one or the other.
Race[1]: shared, geographically grouped, heritable genetic differences, including differences in mental aptitude / behaviour.
Race[2]: shared, geographically grouped, heritable genetic differences, not assumed to imply any particular thing unless established with good quality data.
“Race is real / not real” therefore takes on different meanings depending on which version of race is being used. As far as I have been able to discern from a skim of that preceding conversation (I didn’t even know the conversation continued past day 1, as I did not revisit it), most people here are using race to mean race[1], and with that version in mind, race is definitely not real. An argument for using race[1] and therefore trumpeting “race is not real” is that the people we are rebutting – racists – use race[1], and so we are directly rebutting their claim as it is usually phrased, and with the meaning of race they use.
I don’t think we should go with that however, as it necessarily takes race[1] to be the meaning of the word race; i.e. that race necessarily implies mental/behavioural differences. I think it is tactically better to express the point by rejecting race[1] and stressing race[2].
Buying into race[1] means having a much more annoying conversation. It starts by asserting that race[1] has been disproven / has never been proven, at which point the other person will say something like “omg you’re telling me there are no differences between regional peoples at all??” requiring you to say through gritted teeth “no, of course there are some differences, like skin colour” which will be taken by the opposition as a major concession “aha! So there are regional differences in people! But why did you begin by denying this?” and then you will probably be bogged down in an argument about the seeming contradiction of denying race while granting that there are regional and heritable differences.
On the other hand, a conversation using race[2] gets into quality of data in studies very quickly: “Sure, there are differences of genetics that are geographically distributed, and sure, they give rise to a number of physical traits both visible (e.g. skin colour) and invisible (e.g. predilections toward sickle-cell anemia), so to that extent, race[2] is real. But it has never been established with good data that there is any difference in e.g. intellect” – and from there, the conversation is likely to become a discussion of why studies that use proxies such as salaries for intellect are flawed… which is where we win.
Sounds to me about like the TA project: change the definitions of words so that they become meaningless, and then steamroll anything that used to be knowledge in favor of fantasies not tethered to the real world at all, while claiming to be more intellectual and authoritative than the people who actually know what they are talking about.
Yes, there is a word to refer to folks who argue like this. Sophisticates.
Holms at #3, but race(1) will always arise from race(2). Especially in a context where there are already disparities in incomes, access to education, justice, social services and opportunities. People as a group will try to justify rather than check their privileges. Those people will not care about the ‘quality of data’, they just want their prejudices confirmed. So language matters and the whole concept of race should be ditched altogether as too polluted to be of any use.
In this domain even good intentions can lead to awful outcomes.
Claiming that race (or gender) is a social construct is the ultimate post-modern garbage belief. Saying that Norwegians, Koreans and Senegalese are demonstrably DIFFERENT from each other, both physiologically and genetically, doesn’t make any of them superior or inferior to one another.
@Arnaud #6:
“… but race(1) will always arise from race(2).”
That argument is why people end up arguing that race (= shared-ancestry clustering) does not exist.
They start off, correctly, by noting that all the evidence is that average differences *between* groups are much smaller than dispersion *within* groups, and thus that racist attitudes are simply wrong — and they’re entirely right on that.
But then they reason: well let’s go for belt and braces: if we assert that racial groupings have no biological reality *at* *all*, then logically there *cannot* be real and significant differences between the groups, and so, for good measure, let’s assert that.
The problem is that they’ve then gone down the path of science denialism, and they are doing that owing to what they see as the moral implications — racism then logically *cannot* make sense (not just that it *does* not make sense, as evaluated on the actual evidence). And going down the path of science denialism, even for a laudable motive, is ultimately a bad strategy.
The clear, empirical fact: “average differences *between* groups are much smaller than dispersion *within* groups” is a much better high ground on which to plant ones standard and defend. It’s also an entirely sufficient defence; and it has the advantage of being aligned with reality.
That isn’t necessarily why. That’s what I keep trying to say. You’re assuming I’m coming at this from the “race must be unreal or all is lost” view and I’m not. I’m coming at it from the “what do we even mean by race” view. I don’t have a very settled opinion on whether we need to get rid of the word or not, but I’m permanently interested in what we mean by words and concepts. I talk about that all the time. That question is why I started this subject. It’s intellectual curiosity, basically.
I do, certainly, think that racism sucks and that we in the US have a LOT of work to do on that front, but that doesn’t mean you get to assume that’s why I’m saying what I’m saying, or to overlook what I am in fact saying.
So much heat, very little light.
“Race” is real, but race is a flyspeck.
We’re all the same ape, one big family.
@Coel #8:
What exactly are they denying?
What clear evidence are they refusing to see?
@Kalyani:
“What exactly are they denying?”
That there are shared-ancestry clusterings in the spread of people across the world, and that such clustering is discernible in genes.
No they’re not.
@Coel #12:
Any one who denied this would be denying not just Genetics as the mechanism underlying heredity, but also the basic principle of heredity which is “Like begets like”. This principle results in your “shared ancestry clusters”.
It is discernible in genes because they constitute the mechanism that underlies heredity.
Do you seriously believe such people exist among us?
Well, I think this is a complex issue that needs unpacking, and I’m too lazy to do it, but here’s something to think about >> https://gcbias.org/2017/11/20/our-vast-shared-family-tree/
Genetic inheritance is complex and scattered, and I’m not sure anyone can tease out a coherent thread about it as it pertains to race. Race being a social construct is not too far fetched given the fact of cultural inheritance of semi-nomadic groups over time. Not in the last hundred or so years anyway.
This is OT but for anyone who is interested in how race categorization evolved in North America during the latest 19th & early-mid 20th century, I enjoyed “The Birth of Whiteness” (Bernardi, 1996) when I read it in undergrad. It tracks the evolution of how race was portrayed in early cinema, with special attention to the ever shifting boundaries of what defined being white, black, etc. and how it related to assimilation into the dominant culture of the USA (Protestant western european) during the era of Jim Crow, multiple waves of immigration from Europe/Asia, and America’s first foray’s into global imperialism.
Kalyani #14
“Any one who denied this would be denying not just Genetics as the mechanism underlying heredity, but also the basic principle of heredity which is “Like begets like”. This principle results in your “shared ancestry clusters”.
It is discernible in genes because they constitute the mechanism that underlies heredity.
Do you seriously believe such people exist among us?”
I’m starting to think that, yes, they do, because that is the resulting effect of redefining “race” out of all recognition (of genetics and heredity) and claiming “it’s a social construct,” just as TA’s claim that not only gender but also sex “is a social construct.” How else can people say “there’s no such thing as race,” when manifestly people of similar genetic/racial background inherit similar racial characteristics through genetics?
It’s one thing to deny that race has any necessary connection to culture or other social structures, but entirely different to say that race doesn’t exist. It’s expecting people to deny what they can manifestly see, just as transgender theory requires everyone to deny their own knowledge of the sex of people they see.
Like Nicholas A. Jones, #7, I think it’s turned into a lot of postmodern mumbo jumbo.
I was glad to see Greg Laden & Jerry Coyne giving their sensible views. Yes, ‘race’ does have at its base the idea of a ‘shared ancestry’ (though this was by no means absolute where human beings are concerned – it was perfectly possible to accept outsiders into tribes) – it was commonly and loosely used, particularly in archaizing19th-translations, to refer to ‘tribes’ and ‘nations’ – ‘the Achaean or Danaan race’ in translations of Homer (in Homer the term ‘Achaean’ referred to all Greeks, whereas in Hesiod the Achaeans were only those Greeks from Achaea), or the ‘race of Geats’. The English ‘race’ could simply be a loose way of saying the English nation (which includes a great number of people who were not originally English). And then, of course, there were the Celtic ‘races’, generally looked down on by the English in the 19th century, particularly if they were Irish (the denigration of the Celtic nations persists among certain English people). And then there was raised on top of this sort of loose usage the whole disgusting edifice of supposedly scientific racism with whose effects we still live, whereby all black African people, from a vast continent, were lumped together in one amorphous mass despite there being huge differences between peoples living in different areas of the continent, the Japanese were described as ‘yellow monkeys’, the Tasmanians were wiped out, etc, etc. Racism clearly persists, in, for example, Republican attempts to suppress the African-American vote among other things in the USA, in the UK – the Windrush scandal, among other things, and in Australia in the treatment of the aboriginal population. So, as Claire remarked in an earlier thread, scientists speak of ‘populations’ as a useful heuristic device. Jerry Coyne carefully defines the concept of ‘race’ in purely biological terms, as it is used with respect to plants and non-human animals, but I rather doubt whether he would want to use the word in a scientific paper about human genetics, given the word’s history, and its abuse by such as Francis Galton, (who made some useful contributions to science in addition to being one of the founders of eugenics), Carleton Coon & Charles Murray. I note that all three of these men had an obsession with intelligence.
Coel needs to stop assuming, in the teeth of people like Claire, who know a great deal more about genetics than he or I do, that raising questions about the usefulness of the term ‘race’ with respect to human populations is necessarily ‘science denialism’. He is being infantile in his refusal to recognise what people are actually saying.
In an essay, readily found on the internet, entitled ‘Reconciling Race and Human Adaptability: Carleton Coon and The Persistence of Race in Scientific Discourse’ by Alan H. Goodman and Evelynn Hammonds, the authors write,
‘In a frequently used textbook, “Biological Variation in Health and Disease” TheresaOverfield says: “The terms biological variation and racial variation are used interchangeably here. Although the word race is somewhat unfashionable today, it is a good short word” (Overfield1985:4). We think most everyone would agree that word length is a poor criterion for continued scientific usage. George Armelagos has suggested that using race in epidemiological studies should be considered scientific malpractice. We call it a form of ideological iatrogenesis.’
I think the simplest thing to say is that ‘race’ is in origin a folk taxonomic term that came into the English language from Spanish or Portuguese, probably in the early 16th century. It came to be used in various ways, including scientific ways, and of course in racist theories, some of which purported to be scientific, were taken to be so in their time and still are by by many people. That is the problem, and given the sweeping generalisations about race that may commonly be found nowadays and which derive in part from this supposed science, there are very good reasons why the term should be dropped in scientific papers about human genetics. as, according to Claire, they rightly have been..
I should add, perhaps, in the light of some comments above, that the problem with the word ‘race’ is that, because of its history, it is often and readily taken not merely to refer to certain physical characteristics of given populations, and to genetic inheritance, but to things like the kind of personal character members of certain ‘races’ are supposed to possess; and also despite the fact that human ‘races’ are very fuzzy at the edges and there is a certain fluidity between ‘races’, ‘race’ is commonly taken to be an immutable and ineluctable fact, determining the nature of people in every way. I am not surprised to find from the review of Wade’s book printed above that Charles Murray and James Watson liked it: two supposedly intelligent, and (in the case of one at least) scientific people who share the values of Donald Trump.
@Kalyani #14:
“Any one who denied this would be denying not just Genetics as the mechanism underlying heredity, but also the basic principle of heredity which is “Like begets like”. This principle results in your “shared ancestry clusters”.”
For a “clustering” pattern you also need some degree of geographical separation resulting in a reduced gene flow between clusters (compared to flow within clusters). Human ancestry does show this pattern (for example, Aboriginal Australian populations were relatively isolated for tens of thousands of years, until the very-recent arrival of Europeans).
It may be that with modern ease of travel the clustering pattern will blur out over the next few hundred years. But, shared-ancestry clustering is quite clearly a feature of humans today.
“Do you seriously believe such people exist among us?”
Among the readers of this blog? Not sure. Among people more widely? Why, yes! Blank-slateist wokeism is so rampant that lots of people will deny the most obvious things (for example that, on average, men have a big advantage in sporting ability over women).
In the case of shared-ancestry clusterings, the motive is a fear that there might be some (small and unimportant) on-average differences between the clusters, and thus it is safer to deny that they even exist.
I think it would be helpful, Coel, if you were also to draw attention to the fact that the opposite of ‘blank-slateist wokeism’ is also rampant, and in fact probably more so among the general populace. Both need to be attacked.
@Tim Harris:
“Coel needs to stop assuming, in the teeth of people like Claire, who know a great deal more about genetics than he or I do, that raising questions about the usefulness of the term ‘race’ with respect to human populations is necessarily ‘science denialism’.”
Of course I’ve not done that. Why don’t you try responding to what I’ve actually said?
“He is being infantile in his refusal to recognise what people are actually saying.”
You have a bad habit of trying to win an argument by making substance-free attacks on people.
Well, I must say that I am glad to see in your penultimate post less of the behaviour you exhibited in your comments on the last thread on this subject. It was actually cogent and intelligent, and not floundering around pretending that anyone who disagreed with you was guilty of ‘wokeism’. Perhaps you have learned something.
See what I mean?
Yes, I do!
This strikes me as one of those arguments where the difference between points of view has a lot to do with people using words differently.
It brings me back to a discussion I had with a professor of mine one time. We were watching Olympic sprints together over beers. I asked him if Black people were better at sprinting because they had bigger butts. We had such a phenotype on display. He said to me “But P, rice is a miff.” (Mind you, my professor was West Indian by way of Birmingham). Need these two perspectives be at odds? Need we argue interminably? No.
It can be simultaneously true that a heritable tendency towards greater musculature in the gluteal region accounts for the fact that Olympic sprints are almost exclusively Black, and that the idea that Black is a race is a complete myth.
This comes by way of the elementary observation that the genetic diversity within humanity native to Africa is not only greater than the genetic diversity of each of the other “races,” but than that of the rest of the world combined. Even within different African ethnic groups there is more genetic diversity than within different non-African ethnic groups. Part of this has to do with the migration out of Africa to the rest of the world only coming from a subset of Africans.
If we were to make orthogonal groupings of “races” by amount of genetic difference, then there would be more “races” within Africa than outside Africa. We are just lazy people who place skin color above all other factors when constructing “race.” Going back to Olympic sprinter butts, the reconciliation of apparently opposing viewpoints comes from the idea that, whereas virtually all Olympic-quality sprinter butts belong to Black people, other Black people’s butts are farther from ideal for sprinting than are white people’s butts.
Let’s look at the other end of the running spectrum: the fastest marathoners. They are also all Black, but they are differently Black. The top marathoners are all from Ethiopia and Kenya. The top sprinters are also all Black, but none of them are from Ethiopia and Kenya. The sprinters are mostly representatives of the African diaspora, such as Jamaicans, thus ancestrally West African.
We know what the key difference is between sprinters and marathoners: the predominance of fast-twitch muscle fibers versus slow-twitch muscle fibers. The difference in this single hereditable trait among Black people is so great – greater than that found in the rest of the world as a whole – that not only do some Black people display the greatest predominance of fast-twitch muscle fibers, but other Black people display the greatest predominance of slow-twitch muscle fibers. In this one trait, Black people have the rest of humanity neatly bookended.
The idea that all Black people are alike in some way (beyond having more melanin) is the socially constructed part of race. Genetically speaking, Black people are more unlike each other than are the rest of the people in the world. At least as regards Black people, rice is a miff.
Though I should add that that puerile and arrogant little dig in that penultimate comment about your not being sure whether or not readers on this blog admit that ‘shared ancestry clustering’ exists spoils the cogency, etc that I praised you for. You were repeatedly told on the previous thread by more than one person that this was not was at issue here, but it seemed, and seems, never to get through. Why do you not bother to pay attention to what others say? I suggest that before complaining about others’ behaviour, you should examine your own.
“Though I should add that that puerile and arrogant little dig in that penultimate comment about you’re not being sure whether or not readers on this blog admit that ‘shared ancestry clustering’ exists spoils the cogency,”
So I’m now supposed to know all the readers of this blog (by being psychic?) such that I know whether there are any among them who would deny that? Really?
Perhaps you could provide some of that evidence you keep on calling others to provide by examining the responses of readers of this blog to your lucubrations and seeing how many have come out in favour of the idea that ‘shared ancestry clustering’ does not exist or how many are in a state of serious ‘science denialism’.
No, but it’s not unreasonable to give us the benefit of the doubt unless we show signs of denying that point.
I found it useful to compare the way the word ‘race’ is used with the newest version of arbitrary classification of people: the word ‘generation’. Nobody here is denying that people are born on certain dates, any more than we are denying that people are born in particular places with particular ancestry. What we are asking is how that is remotely useful for telling us anything about the people who are born on those dates or in those places, apart from their ages and perhaps something about their likely appearance. Calling someone Asian or a Millennial says pretty much nothing useful about them to anyone who doesn’t wish to use the classification for grounds on which to base their own prejudice.
Also from differing views regarding how most people (globally or regionally) understand the term, and to what degree these matter.
Race could mean skin color, full stop. It could mean shared ancestry groupings. It could mean one of those plus normative or descriptive claims. It could mean something else entirely. People could understand race one way prima facie, and understand it differently reflectively—or not. And all these differences could independently matter significantly or not at all.
On issues as fraught as race, there’s little hope of constructive dialogue until accord can be reached on the basics. And yet … And yet we continue, because SIWOTI.
Arnaud #6
Not quite. Race[1] will arise again and again, not because we retain the idea ‘race exists but there is no data showing behavioural / cognitive differences’, but because there will always be ingroup / outgroup thinking, and the visible differences between the races are a handy marker for such thinking. In other words, race[1] will not go away in the foreseeable future.
So, this conversation is going to repeat; may as well do it right. Saying: race isn’t real only to have to concede that there are physical differences but they don’t count as racial differences for some reason… is the needlessly difficult way.
People, like all animals, tend to look most like their parents and siblings, and less like people who aren’t as closely related. The more distant the relationship, generally the greater the difference. This is down to the different distribution of genes and their mutations. So far, so good; and so far, so scientific.
But what does the word ‘race’ even mean, if applied to those differences? How does it help to identify a Black Brit, some of whose ancestors came over with the Romans, as a different race to a White Brit, some of whose ancestors came over from Scandinavia, when some of their ancestors are likely to be the same Celts? I have a typically Celtic appearance, as does my youngest sibling; my other siblings look Scandinavian. But when it gets sunny, whilst I remain as pale as a ghost, the others all turn a deep brown – legacy of some Mediterranean/North African genes which missed me (or were turned off). We don’t classify people as different races according to eye or hair colour, so why skin colour? Especially when variations within a ‘race’ – or even one family – are greater than that between races?
This is why I believe ‘race’ to be a ‘social construct’. There are genetic differences between groups of people, but why think that means we can group people into ‘races’ in any scientific way? The divisions are so arbitrary, and largely used to deny privileges to people based on ancestry.
Does the US still assign a percentage to people with Black or Indigenous ancestry, as they did in the 20th Century?
“Tribal blood quantum” is one of the required points of data for registering as a member of a federally recognized Indian tribe in the US. It’s a fraught process, because there are legal implications to being a member of such a tribe; it’s not as consequence-free as becoming a member of the Mayflower Society or whatever it might be called.
As far as I know, there is no current formal use of the “One Drop Rule” (aka hypodescent), but some people do stand by it, saying that light-skinned people with Black ancestry are Black, perhaps “passing” as white.
tigger_the_wing,
To the extent that there is any official racial categorization in the US, it’s based on self-identification. The Census Bureau recognizes five racial groups–Black or African American, American Indian or Alaskan Native, Asian, Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander, and White. They specifically do not claim that these have any biological reality, and allow responders to choose multiple categories. (And then they complicate things with an “Ethnicity” category with just two options: Hispanic or Other.)
I wanted to reply to Coel @ 12 yesterday but I had to go out, and by the time I got back the power was out (so, so was the internet).
But the point is that that’s not mostly what people mean by “race,” and that there’s a lot more to what people do mean by “race” than that, and that race is a drastically imprecise label for that, and so on. It’s not written in stone that shared-ancestry clusterings must be called “races,” or that that’s the only possible word for them, or anything else of that kind. It’s not anti-science or science-denialism to seek precision in wording.
I recently read “Who we are and how we got here-ancient dna and the new science of the human past” by david reich, One of the interesting findings in there is that several thousand years ago there there several different races[2] but they don’t map onto current races[2] Eg: there was a North Eurasian ‘race’ that no longer exists but which contributed genes to both present Europeans & the pre-Columbus Americans.
@tigger:
“We don’t classify people as different races according to eye or hair colour, so why skin colour?”
Well we don’t. I know people here have claimed that we do, but I’m highly dubious. We classify by ancestry — though yes, there is a large element of cultural choice in which groupings get labelled — and we might use visible characteristics such as skin as *markers* for ancestry.
Two pieces of evidence: First, Jessica Krug. Krug was not lying about her skin colour or visible appearance. How could she be? Her skin and appearance were fully visible in photos and to all who met her. She was lying about her ancestry. Surely that shows that what matters in whether she actually is “black” (as opposed to pretending to be) is ancestry, not skin colour.
Second, echoing the test on the other thread of giving people a pile of photos and asking people to classify them. In terms of mere skin tone it is possible to find close matches between those of Chinese ancestry and those of Mexican ancestry. And yet, I’m willing to bet that Americans would not classify good-quality photos of Mexicans and Chinese as the same race. Are people really asserting that they would?
I don’t think this is quite it, though. We label “kinds of people”, and the “kinds of people” are assumed to have shared ancestry, morphological characteristics, language, religion, and culture, all in some kind of mishmash that is usually inaccurate. I don’t think that isolating “shared ancestry” captures the concept very well at all.
I was thinking about this while listening to a news report that talked about, among other things, racism directed against Muslims. Obviously Muslims do not constitute a consistent “shared ancestry” group, and much of the difficulty in trying to discuss the problem stems from terminology, and the arguments about it. Discrimination against the “kind of people” called Muslims is based on assumptions, any of which may be entirely false for a given individual or group, but all of whom practice a particular religion, hence the arguments about whether this should be called racism, rather than discussions about how to address the discrimination.
I was thinking, too, about some of what I’ve read about Jewish people by the eccentric Israeli historian Shlomo Sand. He asserts that Judaism, like any other major religion of the time, grew by conquest and assimilation, with the assimilated people simply absorbed into the population and assumed thereafter to have the same ancestry as the conquerors, or sometimes the other way around. There are still many claims of the existence of a “Jewish race”, but it wasn’t true in antiquity and it’s even less true now.
Racism against Muslims complicates everything a lot. People can convert to Islam, obviously, so Clive Smoothington Dapper IV can convert to Islam, so can he be a victim of racism against Muslims? On the other hand a lot of the hostility to Muslims almost certainly is rooted in racism and/or xenophobia…but Islam is still a religion and not a race.
Bosnia. Bosnian Muslims are ‘Caucasian’. And Europe stood idly by as they were massacred and raped by the Serbs. And this, it appears, was a factor in the radicalisation of young Muslims in Britain, and doubtless elsewhere..
In addition, of course, to the denial that ‘race’ exists, there is also the comforting denial by people who one might think should know better that systemic racism exists.
@40: ‘In terms of mere skin tone it is possible to find close matches between those of Chinese ancestry and those of Mexican ancestry. And yet, I’m willing to bet that Americans would not classify good-quality photos of Mexicans and Chinese as the same race. Are people really asserting that they would?’
Wearily: no, Coel, nobody is asserting, really or otherwise, that they would.
Please stop coming out with these pathetic irrelevancies.
Though it might be worth recalling that British soldiers in India during the time of the Raj referred to Indians as ‘blacks’ and probably as ‘n-word’, just as they did when referring to Africans. In Australia the n-word, according to the OED, is an offensive term used to refer to people of aboriginal descent, in New Zealand to people of Maori descent. In the USA, according to the OED, it was used in the past to refer also to people of Native American descent.
And the way Roosevelt’s imperialist advance team talked about the people of the Philippines would make your hair stand on end.
Yes, and in both the Korean War and the Vietnam War, the Koreans and Vietnamese were referred to as ‘gooks’ and a lot of other things, I expect. John Dower’s ‘War without Mercy: Race & Power in the Pacific War’ brings out the importance of ‘racism’ (on both sides) in the conduct of that war. Then there is Mark Twain on the subjugation of the Philippines. Which reminds me of his brilliant and harrowing satire, ‘Pudd’nhead Wilson’, which few people seem to read but should, in which a young man (Tom Driscoll), who looks white but whose mother was one-sixteenth-black (these finical details were important at the time), and a slave is raised as the heir to a white, slave-owning family after his mother exchanges him in the cradle for the true heir. The story ends with the true heir inheriting everything in his twenties, and feeling thoroughly uncomfortable about it since he has been raised as a slave, and Tom being sold downriver – the spot of ‘black’ blood rendering him ‘black’.
Re Bosnia, back in my undergraduate days, when Tito was still around, one of my classmates in my Turkish class was a Bosnian imam named Mustafa. He was a bit of a Nasreddin figure–very friendly, but he liked to play the fool, playing jokes mostly on himself (and it wasn’t always clear that he understood the jokes, though in retrospect it seems clear that he did). He was a big fan of Atatürk; he seemed to admire the idea of a secular, democratic Islamic society.
When the war was raging in Bosnia, I heard an interview on NPR with a leading cleric from Bosnia, distraught that Europe wasn’t coming to their aid after all those years when they considered themselves European first. It was heartbreaking to realize that that was Mustafa speaking.
Anyway, I just checked, and he’s still around, and hasn’t seemed to have given up his ideals.
@45, not defending NZ at all as far as racism goes because, sadly, we have a racist past and resulting systemic racism built into our society. Much the same as everywhere it seems sadly.
From a historical point, it seems that the use of nigger was known, but relatively rare in NZ historically. I suspect it actually became more common in the 50’s-70’s because I certainly heard it being used by people of an age to be born in that time range. Again, rare, and considered impolite even in the 70’s and 80’s. These days it would be considered offensive.
Recently three areas in North Canterbury that included the word nigger (~stream, ~head and ~hill) have been officially given Maori names. LINZ, the relevant Government department notes that the origin of the name possibly relates to the native grass Carex Secta which is endemic to the area and was colloquially called ~head. I’ve also heard a story that a local in the dim distant past had a much loved dog called nigger.
Here is a link that people interested in language and colonialism might find interesting.
https://www.wgtn.ac.nz/lals/resources/publications/nzej-backissues/2002-donn-bayard-and-carolyn-young.pdf
The importance of using the Otago Witness/Otago Daily Times as the newspapers for analysis is that due to the Gold rush and rich farming the greater Otago region was a centre for european settlement and one of the richest areas of NZ in the mid to late 1800’s.
What a splendid man Mustafa appears to be!
@Sackbut #41:
“We label “kinds of people”, and the “kinds of people” are assumed to have shared ancestry, morphological characteristics, language, religion, and culture, all in some kind of mishmash that is usually inaccurate. I don’t think that isolating “shared ancestry” captures the concept very well at all.”
Shared ancestry is primary in that it is the essential attribute. All the others are then things that correlate with ancestry. As the cases of Jessica Krug, Rachel Dolezal, Elisabeth Warren and being Native American, etc show, people do take ancestry as determining the issue.
“… racism directed against Muslims.”
I think it’s unhelpful to talk about “racism” against Muslims, since Muslims are not a race. Having said that, people could be racist against an ethnic group that is predominantly Muslim, and could see Islam as a marker for that group.
It’s also common to be prejudiced against those with different ideas, for example “commies” or those with a different religion. There’s a history of wars and strife between Catholics and Protestants. But it would not be sensible to say that Catholic vs Protestant strife was “racism”, and I don’t think it’s helpful to talk of racism against Muslims (though there can be “racism against ethnic groups who are predominantly Muslim”).
Holms @34 : “Saying: race isn’t real only to have to concede that there are physical differences but they don’t count as racial differences for sme reason… is the needlessly difficult way.”
I think that’s were you are wrong: because when we think about races we don’t think of all the disparity of the African continent, where most of mankind genetic diversity still is. When it comes to genes, “white people” are incredibly homogeneous and you can find more disparity between two places in the Congo that are a couple of dozen miles apart than between white people in Toronto and the Italian Alps. Yet we will call all those people ‘black’ and try to find other ways by which to amalgamate them together. A good example is sickle cell disease which has been referred to already multiple times here but certainly does not occur in every ‘black’ populations (It also appears in other malarial regions, outside of what we would call ‘black’ populations).
Another thing is the very definition of ‘black’ changes over time. North Africans were counted so until very recently. Italian immigrants to the United States and so on. ‘Caste’, the book by Isabel Wilkerson has also been referenced in this discussion. She shows that the very definition of ‘black’ in the US has changed and carry on to change over time mostly following changes to socioeconomic conditions.
If the physical differences you speak of are not described by the words we use when we speak of races how then can such words retain any descriptive value at all?
Let’s be clear, they HAVE value when it comes to culture, sociology and so on, because they are imprinted in our psyches and because ‘black’ people in the States and elsewhere have created and still create their own culture, often as the result of being shut out of mainstream ‘white’ culture, but when it comes to biology? Nah!
@Arnaud #52:
“She shows that the very definition of ‘black’ in the US has changed …”
There are two distinct questions being considered here:
(1) Is the category “black”, as defined by current and common usage in the US, a biologically meaningful category?
The answer to that is pretty much “no”.
(2) Do human genomes across the world show patterns of shared-ancestry clustering?
The answer to that is “yes”.
E.g. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a1/Rosenberg_1048people_993markers.jpg
@Tim Harris,
Yes, he was certainly a delightful person when I knew him, and he still seems to be. Of course when I knew him I had no idea how important a person he was in his country (which technically didn’t exist as such at the time).
Also, I believe he was the first Muslim who I interacted with on a regular basis, so he shaped my early ideas of what Islam was.
And now I realize that through him I have two degrees of JP2 and Tony Blair. OK, maybe that’s not so great.
(3) Is there any good reason to call patterns of shared-ancestry clustering “race”? The answer to that is “no.”
“(3) Is there any good reason to call patterns of shared-ancestry clustering “race”? The answer to that is “no.””
The only reason is that that’s how the term has been used over centuries in many different countries (with similar in other languages).
But if people consider it an unhelpful and tainted word moving forward then it can be dropped. Though it’s not that easy to dictate changes in language.
No it isn’t. That may be one way the term has been used but it’s been used for far less neutral-seeming appearances.
I’m late to the party but whatever.
@Coel you come right up to the edge of it and then swerve at the last moment. Shared ancestry does not equal race, nor should it. As you’ve pointed out, Aboriginal Australians would not cluster with African populations significantly in a genomewide analysis. So here’s a thought experiment. If we showed a set of pictures of European-derived, African-derived and Asian-derived people to US citizens and toss in a few Aboriginal Australians, ask how people identify them, do you think anyone would notice the Australians as a separate group?
And finally, to mess with everyone’s heads, ancestry clustering is not static. Admixture (the mixing of 2 or more previously separated populations), genetic drift, mutation, selective pressures, mating preference and more affect all of this. Evolution is slow but genetic variation within a species and subsequent phenotypic differences can change fast if the pressure is great enough, i.e. it kills you before you can reproduce or lowers your chance of reproduction.
In areas of Africa where malaria is endemic, the sickle mutation is retained because the pressure from malaria is stronger. But in the US, we are seeing the allele frequency drop as the sickle trait is now being selected against by the fact that sickle disease (2 copies of the mutation, disease) kills, the sickle trait (1 copy of the mutation, no disease) increases risk of pregnancy loss, and malaria is unknown in the US except for travelers entering from malaria-infested regions. The allele frequency is ~5% in African Americans and 10-20% in West Africans. For a history of only ~400 hundred years since the first slaves were brought into the US, that is lightening fast. Set the beginning timepoint further forward, say to where it became the preferred way of getting workers for plantations etc, then it’s even faster.
The same is true for other genetic variation in African Americans. both functional and non-functional polymorphisms (the majority are non-functional). Over time, admixture from European-derived and other populations in the US will separate African Americans from West Africans to the point that they do not look significantly related.
@Claire:
“If we showed a set of pictures of European-derived, African-derived and Asian-derived people to US citizens and toss in a few Aboriginal Australians, ask how people identify them, do you think anyone would notice the Australians as a separate group?”
Hi Claire, First, to restate my position in two sentences:
(1) Shared-ancestry is the underlying concept of “race”, in that that is what people think they are talking about when they talk about race.
(2) On top of that underlying concept, there is a substantial layer of social construction in how a given society construes racial labels.
To answer your question: No, I think most Americans would not notice. (To be honest, my estimation of most Americans’ knowledge of the “rest of the world” is not high.) Many Americans would likely assume they were African. Many Americans might also assume that “sub-Saharan Africans” form a “clade”, and such assumptions would affect how they use labels. But I don’t think that them making that sort of faulty assumption changes my point (1).
No it isn’t.
Hi Coel,
I would argue that your formulation is the wrong way around. When people talk about “race”, they mean a collection of visible characteristics associated with an arbitrarily defined group that they assume that “Black”, “White”, “Aryan”, “Jew”, “Arab” all mean something. They readily believe that all black people come from Africa. They wouldn’t believe or care that a black man from Australia is no more African than I am.
I don’t know if you are painfully familiar, as I am, with the history of genetics as a field. If you haven’t read Sir Francis Galton’s work in eugenics (he coined the term in fact), I recommend it, vile as his preconceptions and biases are. It is clear that he believed that race underlay shared ancestry. At the time, it was considered that the different races were almost akin to different species. Why else would they use terms like “subhuman” or “inferior” to describe black people? They talked about contamination or dilution of pure blood. Sir Francis arguably danced the thin line of advocating genocide.
I think you have a more charitable view of humanity than I do. Working in health disparities research tears a lot of scales from one’s eyes about people’s views on race, at least in the US, and it is not pretty.
I do not think, I am afraid, that Coel has a particularly charitable view of humanity. He naively and wrongly assumes that a fairly recent and innocuous-sounding scientific definition is the bedrock from which all other usages derive, and clings to it as though it were a spar from a sinking ship. It is not the bedrock. Just as ‘races’ are. in his words, ‘fuzzy’, so are words. He ignores history, and the history and present usages of the word, as well as the evidence that contradicts his views even though it is all around him. He also appears to be what one might call a systemic-racism denier, as many on the ‘white’ right are — mostly cynically, I suspect, since it allows them to pretend that grave injustices do not exist.
For a historical example of this way of thinking about different “races,” from that book about Teddy Roosevelt’s invasion of the Philippines I’ve mentioned a couple of times:
The [St Louis World’s] fair’s chief of the Department of Anthropology was William McGee, who was also president of both the National Geographic Society and the American Anthropological Association. The esteemed anthropologist proclaimed that “white and strong are synonymous terms…It is the duty of the strong man to subjugate lower nature, to extirpate the bad and cultivate the good among living things…and in all ways to enslave the world for the support of humanity and the increase of human intelligence.”
Ellipses in the source [i.e. they’re not mine]. James Bradley, The Imperial Cruise, pp 131-2.
I also very much doubt that ‘many Americans’ (or many other people anywhere) ‘might also assume that “sub-Saharan Africans” form a “clade”’, erroneously or otherwise, since unless you are a trained biologist or, as a layman, take a more than usual interest in biology, you wouldn’t even know the word.
And to go back to Coel’s point about strife between Catholics and Protestants not involving racism, there were plenty of people in Northern Ireland, particularly on the Protestant side, who were ready to assert that members of the other sect looked different, and that you could tell a ‘teague’ merely by looking at them.
‘Brewer, on the other hand, emphasized that the link between sectarianism and racism in Northern Ireland is mainly explained by a history of colonialism and deeply entrenched historical economic and political struggles on both sides of the (Protestant British vs. Catholic Irish) divide, which historically has led to a conflation of categories of sect, ethnicity and race (Brewer 1992).’ From ‘Is racism the new sectarianism? Negativity towards immigrants and ethnic minorities in Northern Ireland from 2004 to 2015’,Doebler, McAreavey & Shortfall.
Just to add a little more context about race (from: CERS Working Paper Racism in Rwanda
Henry Millar, 2014):
‘Rwanda was originally colonised by Germany at the end of the nineteenth century. These first missionaries and colonisers brought with them their obsession with the classification of human kind according to their race and origin. This Western Pseudo-Science was influenced by the work of Charles Darwin and his theory of evolution. Western settlers saw themselves as culturally superior to the savages they had discovered and were eager to document these three new found races. The Twa made up 1% of the population, the Tutsis approximately 15% and the Hutus over 80% of the population. We can see the simplicity of the observations made by the early missionaries who noted that the Twa is ‘quite similar to the apes he chases in the forest’ (Prunier, 1995). In contrast we see how the Germans obsessed over the superior Tutsi race with their ‘Beautiful shinning teeth’ and tall thin physique making them very different to the majority of the Rwandese population. The colonial obsession with the Tutsi meant that they were favoured and allowed to govern the colony. Throughout the colonial period the Hutu majority was dominated by the Tutsi population and held jobs working the land while those Tutsi not part of the governing elite worked mainly with cattle which was seen as a superior occupation. This division of labour was enforced by those in power and was a ‘political creation’, according to Mahmood Mamdani (2001), rather than being the natural development of society.
‘The early influence of the colonisers cannot be dismissed when looking at present day issues of racism in Rwanda as this western ideology reshaped traditional Rwandan society and firmly implanting the seeds of racial thinking. Myths about the origins of the newly labelled superior Tutsi suggested they had migrated from as far away as Tibet and perhaps even made it to Iceland. It is telling that even today some Tutsis still believe that their origins are those stated by these colonisers. These racial ideas sewn in the west were exported to Rwanda and presented the Tutsi with a biological justification to dominate the ‘native’ Hutu population.
‘By 1959 the Tutsis, aided by the Germans and Belgians, dominated leadership as they occupied all but two out forty-five chief positions. Gerard Prunier (1995) states: ‘harmless intellectuals created this myth of traditional Rwanda’ and they had no idea that this new social structure would ultimately lead to so much bloodshed. The hierarchy placed the Tutsi at the top but all the while the white colonisers were in Rwanda they, as ‘superior race’, had ultimate control over what they saw as a civilising mission. This is important as we cannot see the social structure put in place in Rwanda outside the context of the West. As powerful as the Tutsis were, or thought they were, and after independence the Hutus, the West has always been at the top of the hierarchy….
We can see the long lasting effect of the colonial era on the way in which the Tutsis and Hutus elite have governed. Racial ideology was used as a lens through which socio-political issues where to be addressed, the BAHUTU Manifesto claimed Hutus were victims of a ‘racial monopoly’ as Hutu intellectuals appealed to the UN Mission arriving in Rwanda for help in the fight against their oppressors (Prunier, 1995). Where this should have been seen as an issue of an authoritarian single party minority oppressing the Hutu masses who required some form of representation as part of a multi party system, instead the situation is seen purely along the lines of the racial split enforced by the Colonial institutions. This situation continued after Rwanda gained independence as, although the emergent Hutu elites gained power from the Tutsis, this only inverted the old social structure and the issues they sought to tackle were once again addressed as purely racial rather than based upon issues of class. This approach unified all market identifies as the poor and the rich were seen to be fighting as part of the same struggle against the enemy. The Hutu middle class and elites used the plight of the poor Hutus, victimised by the Tutsi, as one of their main platforms to consolidate their control of the masses. This meant that the poor segments of Hutu society were forced to support the Hutu elite as failure to do so would be to betray your own people.
‘In the years leading up to 1994 we can see that racial ideology was still very much embodied in Rwandan society as political leaders continued to utilise the racial split to strengthen their position of power. President Habyarimana used the threat of a Tutsi invasion from Uganda to unite the Hutus against groups including the ‘Clan De Madame’ and various moderate factions seeking to remove him from power. This demonstrates that even in the 1990’s the political elite was still using the colonial Western concept of traditional Rwandese society. This established the fault lines along which Rwandan society would polarise and adopt a culture of fear. President Habyarimana was able to broadcast anti-Tutsi propaganda to the Rwandan population which bred extremism despite the promise of peaceful coexistence following the signing of the Arusha Accords. The post-colonial framework of the myths of racial identity provided the platform upon which events from 1990 until 1994 would nurture the environment in which genocide would occur.’
Arnaud #52 and OB #55
I barely mentioned it as an aside in the #3 comment, and I see now I should have placed much more emphasis on this point: I am talking about this as an argumentative tactic against the ‘race realists’, should you be inclined to stick around and argue with them. I have encountered a handful online, and this is the line of attack I recommend taking against them.
When they talk about race[1], rather than tell them point blank “race is not real”, I try to introduce race[2] by going over some traits that we can agree on, and then getting to intellect / behaviour after having already introduced the concept of quality of data. As an argumentative method, I find it more productive.
“I also very much doubt that ‘many Americans’ (or many other people anywhere) ‘might also assume that “sub-Saharan Africans” form a “clade”’, erroneously or otherwise, since unless you are a trained biologist or, as a layman, take a more than usual interest in biology, you wouldn’t even know the word.”
You don’t have to know the word to make the assumption.
@Claire: #61:
Hi Claire, first, let me reiterate that I’m surprised. Until this conversation, I’d considered it obvious that shared ancestry underlay notions of “race”. But then, it’s good to learn about the different perspectives people have!
Yes, I’m familiar (somewhat) with Galton et al.:
“It is clear that he believed that race underlay shared ancestry. At the time, it was considered that the different races were almost akin to different species.”
Yes, agreed, there was a long debate about whether humans were all one species. But the whole concept of “species” very definitely is about an inter-breeding group, and thus about shared ancestry. How could they have conceived of race as “underlying” shared ancestry? Surely, the “shared ancestry” concept has to be wrapped up with it from the start? Indeed, the concepts of shared-ancestry “races” goes back way before Galton. Nearly all cultures have had such concepts.
“When people talk about “race”, they mean a collection of visible characteristics associated with an arbitrarily defined group that they assume that “Black”, “White”, “Aryan”, “Jew”, “Arab” all mean something.”
But again I point to the examples of Meghan Markle and Jessica Krug. One is widely accepted to be “black”, while the other is widely accepted to have been lying about being “black”. The difference is not about skin colour and not about visible appearance! (Google some photos if in doubt.) The difference is in ancestry.
“They readily believe that all black people come from Africa. They wouldn’t believe or care that a black man from Australia is no more African than I am. ”
Yes, but that is ignorance, leading to faulty assumptions, that then affect how they use labels. As it happens, the Atlantic slave trade took slaves from a limited region of West Africa, and so nearly all of the slaves taken to the Americas were from the Niger-Kordofanian language family. Thus, the population they came from was indeed close to a “clade”. Americans can then make the assumption that that’s all there is to it because that’s all they know.
Meghan Markle is regarded as ‘black’ for very American reasons that really have have very little to do with science and a lot to do with American history. She is also proud of being, as she said in South Africa, ‘a woman of colour’, as why should she not (good for her!) – particularly after, it seems, being once instructed by a teacher to tick the ‘white’ box in a census form, and hearing on another occasion her mother being called a ‘nigger’. She herself wants for very good personal, and political, reasons to be regarded as ‘black’, as in view of American history, she had every right to do, even though, it may be, she could have passed as ‘white’ (until the white racists caught up with her, of course). The sorry tale of Jessica Krug is irrelevant.
And Jessica Krug’s story is also very American.
@Tim Harris:
“Coel … naively and wrongly assumes that a fairly recent and innocuous-sounding scientific definition is the bedrock from which all other usages derive, … He ignores history, …”
Ironically, it’s roughly the reverse. The conception of “races” as shared-ancestry clusterings was clear and central to the work of influential early scientists such as Johann Blumenbach, back in the 1770s ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Friedrich_Blumenbach ).
In contrast, the attempt to divorce “race” from ancestry clusterings is part of the modern blank-slateist fad.
[And just because I *know* that Tim will try hard to misunderstand this, referencing Blumenbach is *not* claiming that he was right in his classifications, nor that he was free of the prejudices of this times — of course he wasn’t, no-one ever is — it is simply to say that it is clear that scientists in those days thought of races in terms of shared-ancestry groupings; it is not a modern idea.]
Nobody here is trying to “divorce “race” from ancestry clusterings.” We keep telling you. You’ve got a bee in your bonnet that we’re all zany lefties DenYing ScIence, but that’s not what we’re saying.
Cool, I’ve explained this to you more than once and it’s getting tiresome to keep refuting you. Not to put too fine a point on it, you don’t know what you are talking about. Those of us who do have tried several ways to explain it to you but aren’t making any headway. This is not a matter of opinion. We can’t agree to disagree.
“Black” is a race, according to historical accounts throughout to the present day. The meaning has changed over time. You cannot claim that “black” implies shared ancestry if peoples from different continents are all called black. Hell, you can’t even say all Africans have shared ancestry. They do not. Have you any idea how big Africa is?
I spend time in West Africa, primarily but not exclusively Ghana. In that one country, as you travel around, different tribes predominate. Out of the big cities, the interbreeding of different tribes is uncommon because the traveling distances were just too large until very recently. Even within Accra, Kumasi or Koforidua, that mixing is (genetically speaking) very recent. Ashanti =/= Yoruban =/= Hausa =/= Mursi =/= Bantu etc. You hopefully take my point. Race does not differentiate this. Shared ancestry does.
Claire: “I’ve explained this to you more than once and it’s getting tiresome to keep refuting you.”
That’s because Coel is a troll.
This quote from the previous thread should have been enough to establish the fact:
“…the claim of rampant “systemic racism” is dubious.”
But that thread is actually all the proof you need: time and time again, confronted with evidences and the inner contradictions of his claims, Coel retreats a little and seems to give a bit of ground (“But, as I’ve said, I’m happy to use other terms than “race”) only to seize it back at the first opportunity, forcing everybody here to explain the same things time and time again. When this is done so clearly and forcefully that he cannot even pretend to have misunderstood it (with the authority shown by Claire, for instance) he changes the subject slightly before returning later to his hobby horse. This is classic troll behaviour.
Fuck him.
Hi Claire,
Nothing that you’ve said refutes what I’ve said. I’m well aware of all the facts that you point to. Further, I’m well aware of the layer of “social construction” in racial concept and labels, on top of the underlying “shared ancestry” concept.
““Black” is a race, according to historical accounts throughout to the present day. The meaning has changed over time.”
“Black” does not have one meaning, even at a given time. So “black” is not “a race”, if we collate all usages of “black” across the world.
Rather, “black” is a racial label whose meaning depends on the LOCAL CULTURE. If you referred to “blacks” in conversation in, say, a bar in Mandurah, Western Australia, you would be taken to be referring narrowly to Aboriginal Australians (and not including Africans). So “black” is not “a race”, rather “black” is a label used about races, the meaning of which depends on context.
“You cannot claim that “black” implies shared ancestry if peoples from different continents are all called black.”
Where did I ever claim that “black” implies shared ancestry? Where did I claim that the current US usage of “black” maps neatly to a shared-ancestry clustering? (Indeed I’ve explicitly said: “Is the category “black”, as defined by current and common usage in the US, a biologically meaningful category? The answer to that is pretty much “no”.)
I’ll repeat again my central claims: (1) shared ancestry is an ineluctable component of concepts of “race”, and (2) the racial labels that a particular culture uses show a large component of social construction.
Nothing in your last comment conflicts with either of those two.
“Hell, you can’t even say all Africans have shared ancestry.”
Indeed, they are not a clade. We know that.
Shorter Coel: There’s no point in disputing me, I already know everything.
@Arnaud #75:
” This quote from the previous thread should have been enough to establish [that Coel is a troll]: “…the claim of rampant “systemic racism” is dubious.” ”
I apologise for trying to judge issues on the facts. We’re being told that North American college campuses are infused with rampant “systemic racism”, and yet all the actual evidence is that they’re among the least racist institutions (and the most supportive of minorities) that have ever existed anywhere.
In such cases, the concept of “systemic racism” seems to mean: “racism which we can’t supply actual evidence for, but which we want to claim exists purely because of inequalities in group outcomes”.
@Ophelia:
“Shorter Coel: There’s no point in disputing me, I already know everything.”
I’d prefer to phrase it: “if you want to refute me, you have to refute what I’ve actually said”. :-)
I’ve consistently been clear that my position is that the racial labels that people use derive from a MIXTURE of underlying biology AND social construction. Most of the supposed “refutations” and claims of “inconsistencies” would only hold if I’d claimed that there was a 1-to-1 mapping between racial labels and clades. And since I haven’t, the replies are rather frustrating.
Ah, now we get to it.
Who’s we? And why are you bringing that up here? And what does it have to do with anything I’ve said? If you’re pissed off about people who say North American college campuses are infused with rampant “systemic racism” then GO TALK TO THEM.
I’m sure you would but the reality is that you’re the one who keeps 1. ignoring what everyone else says and 2. shifting your ground constantly.
This is beyond boring so do feel free to do as I suggest and go talk to the people who talk about racism on campus instead of to me, but if you insist on continuing, please follow the convention about quoting by using blockquotes instead of quotation marks; it makes reading easier.
P.S. the reason for my snide remark about your knowing everything was your “I’m well aware of all the facts that you point to” addressed to Claire. It’s not your field, but you know all about it just as she does, when it is her field. Really? Then you must know everything.
@Opheila :
Apologies for not using blockquote.
All I meant was that I was aware of the particular facts that she pointed to that supposedly refute me.
It wasn’t a reply to you or to anything you in particular have said. It was a comment more generally about the concept of “systemic racism”, in reply to Arnaud (and to previous comments by Tim Harris).
And, sorry, but I don’t agree that I’ve shifted ground at all.
Ok but then can we treat the issue of people who think there is systemic racism (which I certainly do) and the issue of whether or not “race” is a scientific term as separate issues, and leave the first one aside? You seem convinced that I wrote these two posts because I think there is systemic racism, but that’s not why I wrote them. They don’t depend on each other. We all get that you think it’s absurd that people think there is systemic racism, but that’s not the subject of this post.
All right then. What exactly do you think people in the US or Europe mean when they use racial terms like “black”?
Oh look, here we are:
I’ve just shown you that you cannot say shared ancestry is the underlying concept of race.
And for the love of dog, stop talking about clades! You clearly haven’t the slightest idea what it actually means. The way you are using it to describe people from West Africa is racist.
You said:
Skin color does not correlate very well with ancestry. So the idea that the cultural choices made to label people have any connection to their actual ancestry is complete bollocks.
I just quoted you saying exactly that.
This is not true. Cultural separation whilst sharing a geographical space can produce clustering in humans. So does assortative mating. Reduced “gene flow”, as you call it, is a minor factor in clustering in a small population but the actual driver is genetic drift. In large populations, genetic drift has a minor effect so the the introduction of a migrant population might make a small effect in increasing variation but the main cause of clustering here is assortative mating.
I hope this snippet provides enough context. This statement is a simplistic understanding of how population genetics actually works. There are a number of reasons why this is not true. Allele frequency clustering can be estimated by observing differences in allele frequencies and correlating them to different geographical locations. But it is a guess, not truth. 23andMe can claim all they like that they can pinpoint which tribe in Africa you share ancestry with. It’s not nearly as accurate as that. It can’t be, it’s literally impossible, but also technically impossible – they do not have enough data to capture the segregation of alleles in different populations in African. (And don’t even bother doing 23andMe if you’re of Asian heritage, you will be sadly disappointed to hear that you are in fact… Asian).
I teach a whole course on this stuff. I can’t summarize my 25 years of training and expertise in a few short paragraphs. I can say this:
1. Race is not shared ancestry nor does shared ancestry underlie race.
2. Race and any derived “racial grouping” will always be driven by observable features and is therefore biologically irrelevant.
@Claire:
That would depend on who was speaking and on the context. And one can use a “racial term” like “black” (i.e. a term about race) without committing to “all black people worldwide are one race”. I do not think that all “black” people worldwide are one race, but I might use the term “black” in a discussion about race when, in context, it was clear what I was referring to.
I think that, across the USA and Europe, different people will use the word differently, and have a mash of different concepts when using it. Ancestry will be part (but only one part) of it.
Why is it racist? (And I do know what the term means.)
And yet Ophelia tells me that: “Nobody here is trying to “divorce “race” from ancestry clusterings.” We keep telling you.”
Even if their methods can’t give as much accuracy as they claim, that does not refute my actual statement which, as you quoted, was: “that there are shared-ancestry clusterings in the spread of people across the world, and that such clustering is discernible in genes.”
A lot of what you say is not wrong, but nor does it refute what I’ve said. E.g.:
But are there any actual examples of shared-ancestry clusterings in human genomes having been produced by those effects (without any role from geographical separation)?
Coel @78, Describing North American colleges as being amongst the least systemically racist institutions is really damning with very faint praise.
I gave up using the word race years ago. Not because I had a clear idea of why it was problematic and how it really should be used, but rather because I knew I didn’t have a good grasp on how to use it carefully enough. My preference these days is to avoid mentioning anything about a persons ‘race’ or apparent ethnicity unless necessary. I mean, when discussing a whether the neighbour is a nice person or not, what relevance is it to throw in that they are Korean? If I’m trying to physically describe one person to another unless I know specifically how they prefer to be described I’ll use the most generic description of their appearance possible.
My own shared ancestry includes central England, the Channel Islands (there’s a French surname from there) and the Shetlands. On the Shetlands I can trace ancestors back into the early 1700’s and the names are Nordic (not surprising). So, on an ancestry basis we could maybe assume a melange of northern european genes with a smattering of asiatic genes from the Shetlands (I understand these are common there). I’m not at all sure that anyone looking at that data would be able to guess much specific about me. A clumsy but more information dense way to describe me would be a native New Zealander of European descent. That would enable a broad physical and cultural set of assumptions to be made about me. Some of which would be accurate. Being a New Zealander, or Australian, or American isn’t just nationality. I know Australians of many different ethnicities who are more culturally similar to each other than a european Australian to a european New Zealander.
Anyway, I’m rambling. I think people need to be much more careful in how they discuss these issues and most of us don’t know enough to do so.
Claire, can you point me at any good texts that are accessible for lay people?
What Rob said.
That’s my sense of it too. I’m not clear on what it means, I’m not clear on what everyone else thinks it means, I’m not clear on what it’s supposed to mean – it’s baggy. It’s loose and vague and imprecise and it’s loaded. Although on the other hand I don’t mind using it politically, as it were – citing race as an issue, comparing race with sex or class, that kind of thing. But that’s what I’ve been saying all along: it’s a political word, a sociological word, maybe a literary word, but it’s not a science word.
The simple point seems to be that ‘race’ as a word includes a sense of shared ancestry, of belonging to a family, a tribe or a nation, but that it is too vague a word to be of much use scientifically, given what we know now, and much more so because of its history and because of its popular use. Scientific racism was certainly not some innocuous endeavour undertaken in some innocent and neutral manner, but involved imposing a hierarchy on the species Homo Sapiens with the ‘white race’ at the top (although this often did not include those ‘white races’ such as the Irish or the Slavs whom the people who supposed themselves at the top of the tree regarded as inferior). Scientific racism grew out of popular prejudices and fed into popular prejudices and continues, after its heyday, to influence strongly popular popular prejudices, as well as the prejudices of, say, James Watson, in the present, and certainly beyond the present.
Coel now introduces the word ‘clade’, not in any good faith, but to find a way of saying ‘race’ without actually doing so.
I think Coel owes us all an honest explanation of why the word ‘race’ is of such importance to him. I suspect that he will not give one. He talks of the ‘prejudices of his time’ when referring to Blumenbach. I note that when Galton was mentioned, Coel promptly replied that, yes, of course he had read him, but carefully refrained from saying anything about Galton’s ideas. Perhaps Coel might care to examine his own prejudices.
Coel@78:
“In such cases, the concept of “systemic racism” seems to mean: “racism which we can’t supply actual evidence for, but which we want to claim exists purely because of inequalities in group outcomes”.
And what about other cases outside the academy? The world is rather broader than the academy, you know.
In any event, since it seems that in genetics, at least human genetics, responsible scientists eschew using the word ‘race’ because of its imprecision, its scientific history and its role in popular and bigoted usage, Coel’s crusade in favour of the term appears to be entirely irrelevant.
@Tim Harris:
It’s not. I’ve said twice that it may be better to ditch the word. Indeed, I’ve mostly used the term “shared ancestry clusterings” myself, rather that “race”.
Go on, quote something from me that can fairly be summarised as: “the word ‘race’ is of such importance to him”. Bet you can’t.
My basic point here is that “shared ancestry clusterings”, the thing that aligns with *biological* concepts of race, are real and seen in genes — contrary to the article by Goodman which seemed to deny that. (And I’ve repeatedly stated that *cultural* notions of race don’t neatly align with *biological* concepts of race.)
No I didn’t. I’ve never read Galton. Why do you misrepresent? It’s not an honest way of discussing. I said “I’m familiar (somewhat) with Galton et al” (“familiar” from occasional reading about them).
Some scientists in those days did indeed impose a hierarchy (as I said, no scientist is free of the prejudices of their times, which can affect their work; it’s also worth noting that the scientists didn’t invent such prejudices, they were prevalent in the culture). But, also, some of those scientists did not impose a hierarchy. At root, they were just trying to understand the world, in the same way that they tried to categorise and understand the rest of the natural world.
And we should also evaluate the wider claims on the evidence, not treat such claims as liturgy from which departure is heresy.
I shall merely say two things: it is true that certain scientists ‘didn’t invent such prejudices’ (as, incidentally, I remarked above), but it is also true that some scientists made them a bloody sight worse by providing them with what appeared to be scientific backing and this has had serious and continuing political and social effects. I grow rather fed up with the myth of the innocent scientist, working humbly away in isolation detached from the world. Some scientists, indeed, are like that, and I have every respect for them; others, like Galton (for whom in my case familiarity of whatever kind breeds contempt where his racial views are concerned), are not.
Yes, of course we should evaluate the wider claims about systemic racism on evidence, but those who have bothered to read the Macpherson report, who take the trouble to take notice of such things as the Windrush betrayal, the efforts of Republicans to suppress the black vote and many other things are not reciting a liturgy from which departure is heresy. No doubt there are people on the left who do recite such a liturgy (there are fools everywhere), but there are certainly people on the right who recite their own liturgies and who are not interested in any evidence that does not fit their ideological preoccupations.
That’s it, farewell.