If I wanted to raise this possibility for discussion, I would likely leave “race” out of the discussion.
I’d probably start out by raising the possibility of measurable differences in intelligence among individuals; if that were successful I’d move on to the notion that there might be other shared differential characteristics among high-intelligence and low-intelligence communities; if that were successful I’d move on to the question of what those other characteristics might be… for example, age, or childhood nutritional regimens, or geographic region of birth, or various other things.
If, instead of doing that, somebody starts out by privileging a hypothesis that “race” correlates with intelligence for some particular definition of “race” and framing the conversation in those terms, I’d want to know what leads them to privilege that hypothesis before I was willing to invest much in that discussion, in much the same way that if someone starts out by privileging a hypothesis that the Old Testament God created the world in seven days I’d be inclined to reject their conversational framing.
Part of the problem is that “race” isn’t really a biological classification, although people pretend it is. It is a folk taxonomy that appears to be based partly on phenotype (e.g. skin color) but also partly on socially constructed facts such as language, socioeconomic status, and religion. So if you want to talk about phenotype or ancestral origin, talk about these; race is at best a biased label for a disguised query.
In say the American context race does basically match ancestral origin in the first approximation. Say
African Americans are a hybrid population of West Africans and North-Western Europeans. Or for example European Americans are mostly North Western Europeans mixed in with a bit of Southern and Eastern European. The Hispanic category (which isn’t even a race) is basically an euphemism for Mexican American (who the majority of US Hispanics are) which is because of economic differences between Mexico and the US and the pattern of migration basically a euphemism for Mestizo (which as a European-Native American hybrid population with a relatively uniform amount of admixture does make sense as a biological entity).
Not only that, those who have older roots on the continent may have gone through common selective pressures. To quote Gregory Cochran
Amish in Lancaster County, Ashkenazi Jews as a merchant/scribe caste, Tibetans & altitude, pastoralists and lactase tolerance, hunter-gatherers → peasants : every significant, lasting ecological change creates an altered human population, different in both body and mind.
If I wanted to raise this possibility for discussion, I would likely leave “race” out of the discussion.
I’d probably start out by raising the possibility of measurable differences in intelligence among individuals; if that were successful I’d move on to the notion that there might be other shared differential characteristics among high-intelligence and low-intelligence communities; if that were successful I’d move on to the question of what those other characteristics might be… for example, age, or childhood nutritional regimens, or geographic region of birth, or various other things.
If, instead of doing that, somebody starts out by privileging a hypothesis that “race” correlates with intelligence for some particular definition of “race” and framing the conversation in those terms, I’d want to know what leads them to privilege that hypothesis before I was willing to invest much in that discussion, in much the same way that if someone starts out by privileging a hypothesis that the Old Testament God created the world in seven days I’d be inclined to reject their conversational framing.
Part of the problem is that “race” isn’t really a biological classification, although people pretend it is. It is a folk taxonomy that appears to be based partly on phenotype (e.g. skin color) but also partly on socially constructed facts such as language, socioeconomic status, and religion. So if you want to talk about phenotype or ancestral origin, talk about these; race is at best a biased label for a disguised query.
In say the American context race does basically match ancestral origin in the first approximation. Say African Americans are a hybrid population of West Africans and North-Western Europeans. Or for example European Americans are mostly North Western Europeans mixed in with a bit of Southern and Eastern European. The Hispanic category (which isn’t even a race) is basically an euphemism for Mexican American (who the majority of US Hispanics are) which is because of economic differences between Mexico and the US and the pattern of migration basically a euphemism for Mestizo (which as a European-Native American hybrid population with a relatively uniform amount of admixture does make sense as a biological entity).
Not only that, those who have older roots on the continent may have gone through common selective pressures. To quote Gregory Cochran
Absolutely agreed, which is why I put the word in scare quotes in the first place.