Eh? What is this thing you call “race,” Earth Monkey?
Genetically differentiated human populations defined by phenotype.
“Race is a cultural convention.”
A quote from wikipedia:
“Forensic physical anthropologist and professor George W. Gill has said that the idea that race is only skin deep “is simply not true, as any experienced forensic anthropologist will affirm” and “Many morphological features tend to follow geographic boundaries coinciding often with climatic zones. This is not surprising since the selective forces of climate are probably the primary forces of nature that have shaped human races with regard not only to skin color and hair form but also the underlying bony structures of the nose, cheekbones, etc. (For example, more prominent noses humidify air better.)” While he can see good arguments for both sides, the complete denial of the opposing evidence “seems to stem largely from socio-political motivation and not science at all”. He also states that many biological anthropologists see races as real yet “not one introductory textbook of physical anthropology even presents that perspective as a possibility. In a case as flagrant as this, we are not dealing with science but rather with blatant, politically motivated censorship”.
The input is the claim ‘Race is a cultural convention.’ You output the interpretation: ‘None of the phenotypic variations associated with any racial schema are physically real; they are hallucinations or figments.’ Given how transparently ridiculous the assertion is, one must at least take a moment to pause and reconsider whether the anthropologists’ claim is really what you take it to be.
Perhaps what is being denied is not the existence of morphological variation between human populations, but rather the conceptualization of these differences under the traditional concept of Race, with its assumptions of discreteness and of other markers of cultural and bio-diversity strictly mapping on to a small set of physiognomic markers. Perhaps what is also being asserted is that the precise boundaries between races, and how large or small a ‘race’ gets to be, is culturally constructed and varies across different groups possessing ‘race’-like categories. Is it more likely that anthropologists are speaking somewhat loosely and infelicitously, or that they think the existence of darker and lighter skins in different parts of the world is a Grand Alien Conspiracy?
Given how I might have said/believed something similar myself just a couple years back, I think I know what is meant. You get a photo of Colin Powell and he was about light-skinned as Bush—so since different people of the same skin-hue are one called ‘white’ and the other ‘black’, one thinks it might the division may be entirely a cultural artifact.
Also there’s no single characteristic which doesn’t fluctuate gradually across populations—so any grouping seems again entirely arbitrary.
But a visual that got me to understand the above view was too-simplistic was this graph here at Lewontin’s argument and criticism. Though any one characteristic wouldn’t suffice to divide humanity meaningfully into races, several characterics taken together in can form clusters...
If you used to believe this yourself, then maybe you can explain to me what you mean(t) by ‘entirely a cultural artifact.’ Did you think that the people in question didn’t have different skin tones? That skin tone isn’t a genetic trait? That there was no correlation between a racial grouping and any phenotypic or genetic marker, like skin color? That genetic relatedness is confabulated in a grand game of make-believe?
“there’s no single characteristic which doesn’t fluctuate gradually across populations”—No, some traits have reached fixation in a population, or are totally absent. But I take your point. It’s still understandable that categories predating our modern, sophisticated notions of genetic variation would be controversial in their attempted modern reimaginings.
Did you think that the people in question didn’t have different skin tones?
Colin Powell did not have a different skin tone than George W. Bush; yes—no categorization based on skin-color would actually put Colin Powell in a different category than Bush, while putting him in the same category with Condoleeza Rice: Relevant photo.
And whole groups that Americans called non-white (like Middle-easterners) looked likewise pretty white to me.
That there was no correlation between a racial grouping and any phenotypic or genetic marker, like skin color?
There was correlation with physical characterics obviously—much like you could say that Swedes are more often blonde, but that the actual lines drawn around the category didn’t really have anything to do with physical characteristics—same way that Swedish citizenship correlates with blondness but isn’t defined by blondness.
Colin Powell did not have a different skin tone than George W. Bush; yes—no categorization based on skin-color would actually put Colin Powell in a different category than Bush, while putting him in the same category with Condoleeza Rice
I’ve seen the photo. So your claim is that anthropologists, like yesteryou, once believed that 100% of ‘black’ people had darker skin than 100% of ‘white’ people, with zero overlap? This seems very implausible.
And whole groups that Americans called non-white (like Middle-easterners) looked likewise pretty white to me.
That’s no coincidence. American authorities typically group most Middle Easterners with Europeans as ‘Caucasians.’
the actual lines drawn around the category didn’t really have anything to do with physical characteristics—same way that Swedish citizenship correlates with blondness but isn’t defined by blondness.
But being of Swedish descent does have biological meaning and significance, albeit to a lesser degree than being of African descent. So what can be meant by the claim that race is ‘merely’ like being Swedish? Is it merely a fuzzy quantitative shift, not a categorical disagreement about what ‘race’ is or how it fits into the natural world?
Allow me to attempt to rationally reconstruct what the younger you and the straw-anthropologist believed. Based on the evidence that changed your mind, I gather that your old view was not that racial distinctions were nonexistent, but that they were biologically superficial. The obvious phenotypic variations very nearly exhausted the distinctness of each racial group. So when you advocate racialism, what you’re really trying to draw attention to is that race is more than skin deep, that there are many many genetic traits, some very significant, that break down along racial lines of various sorts. And this is indeed an important point, though framing it as a dispute over whether ‘races’ are ‘real’ is, to put it mildly, misleading.
So your claim is that anthropologists, like yesteryou, once believed that 100% of ‘black’ people had darker skin than 100% of ‘white’ people, with zero overlap?
I don’t know about anthropologists. I thought I explained that my yesterme saw the opposite of what you just said: saw that some people labelled ‘black’ had skins as light (or almost as light) as ‘white’ people. So I saw the dividing line between ‘black’ and ‘white’ to be utterly arbitrary, a line arbitrarily drawn in some continuum, and which best seemed to identify cultural not biological differences.
Keep in mind that my yesterme was a Greek boy, and had no occasion to have known about e.g. Afro-textured hair or different nose structures, etc. or any other collection of physical characteristics that together could form a cluster.
gather that your old view was not that racial distinctions were nonexistent, but that they were biologically superficial.
No, I’m not talking about mere superficiality, nor about how insignificant or significant the traits were. I’m talking about an utterly arbitrary line drawn between populations of people. As if someone had arbitrarily said that the numbers >72 are the “orange” numbers and the numbers <72 are the “purple” numbers.
With only one trait in question to divide the races, this judgement of mine would have remained valid—no matter if it’s something as insignificant as skin-color or as significant as IQ.
It’s the combination of more than one trait (e.g. skin-color AND hair-texture AND nose-shape) that makes racial visual identification a classification of actual observed clusters in the human species—again REGARDLESS of whether the traits are “significant” or “superficial” or “important” or whatever.
So you were guilty of two bits of ignorance. Instead of my ‘racial traits are all superficial’ (which sounds like a much more plausible error for multiculturalists, anthropologists, etc. to make), your view was that (a) ‘there is only a single phenotypic trait distinguishing each race from the others,’ and (b) ‘these traits exist on a continuum smoothly linking all the races.’
Since these two old views of yours are how you understand the claim ‘race is a cultural construct,’ you are then asserting that people who reduce race to a cultural construct are ignorant of, or in denial regarding, the fact that different racial groups have different common ancestors over long stretches over time, owing to reproductive isolation. So you are effectively asserting that the anti-racialists are guilty of doubting the existence of continents, mountain ranges, and other sources of reproductive isolation that could interrupt various continua. This seems like an extremely implausible claim to impute to others, whether or not you naively believed it yourself; so you’ll need to cite sources demonstrating that the people in question really did hold this view.
You are also asserting that the ‘race is a cultural construct’ crowd think that race is not merely superficial, but reducible to a single trait and nothing else. For instance, anti-racialists can allow that east Asians have an epicanthic fold, or can acknowledge that they have darker eyes and hair than Europeans, but cannot acknowledge both of these facts, since this would then be asserting that races are distinguished by clusters and not by single phenotypic effects. Again, this is an extraordinary claim, much more radical and ridiculous than my moderate suggestion that anti-racialists tend to think of this clustering as ‘only skin-deep.’ So again, you are obliged to provide some references demonstrating that this is the stance of anti-racialists, on pain of straw-manning.
People can see what I’m “asserting” by reading my own sentences. Any assertion that I actually make, you can quote word-for-word. All your assertions about my supposed assertions, I disavow.
Downvoted, because putting words in another man’s mouth is one of the tactics I least appreciate and least want to see in this forum. I consider it a form of slander.
Aris Katsaris, you’re the one accusing the field of physical anthropology (and other people sharing anti-racialist views of this sort) of promoting the unargued assumption “Race is a cultural convention.” and of dismissing the possibility of any alternative view. As yet, in this entire conversation you have provided no evidence of this; so I’ve instead had to focus on clarifying what you mean by this accusation. (I was not under the impression that trying to unpack and understand libel was itself libelous; but if so, I will tread with caution...) Your evidence that this is a plausible accusation, and your explanation of what this accusation means in concrete terms, both reduce to your own past experience of believing:
the dividing line between ‘black’ and ‘white’ to be utterly arbitrary, a line arbitrarily drawn in some continuum
… which seems to be denying the occurrence of the mechanism (reproductive isolation) that blocks continuous variation. If this is not a fair characterization of your characterization of the anti-racialist position, then explain what you really mean and why my exposition is off-base. And again, quoting you:
I’m not talking about mere superficiality, nor about how insignificant or significant the traits were. I’m talking about an utterly arbitrary line drawn between populations of people. As if someone had arbitrarily said that the numbers >72 are the “orange” numbers and the numbers <72 are the “purple” numbers. With only one trait in question to divide the races, this judgement of mine would have remained valid—no matter if it’s something as insignificant as skin-color or as significant as IQ. It’s the combination of more than one trait (e.g. skin-color AND hair-texture AND nose-shape) that makes racial visual identification a classification of actual observed clusters
… which seems to be denying that racial groups have more than a single trait in common. If this is not a fair characterization of your characterization of the anti-racialist position, then, again, explain how.
Good-faith use of the technique of paraphrasing in order to make sure you’ve understood what the other person has said is extremely important, indeed an indispensable one for successful discussion. Part of why it’s important is precisely because it’s so easy to misunderstand someone; so it’s my goal to be corrected by you, if I have misrepresented you, and paraphrasing serves both this goal (by making transparent my understanding of you) and the goal of clarifying what’s actually under dispute. If the sky is not blue, I desire to believe that the sky is not blue. But I cannot revise my model of your argument and beliefs if you do not articulate specifically what I got wrong, and what the right explication is.
You mistook my interpretation for a straw-man. (Note: Accusing people of ‘slander’ is rather less conducive to productive discussion than noting a straw-man fallacy and moving on; and simply pointing out the error and how it occurred is more conducive still.) But my ‘superficiality’ interpretation was an attempt to steel-man your position, and when you completely dismiss my steel men and assert they are not what you meant, it severely limits my interpretive options. Hence my more recent interpretations do make your position appear weaker. Perhaps that means you should reconsider whether your view is justified. Or perhaps that means I misrepresented you; in that case, it should be supremely easy to explain how I did so, and to clarify precisely how your intended meaning differs from what I said.
Given the downvoting I received, I updated upwards on the possibility that I was wrong on my interpretation of the thread, and reread it from the start. As such I’m retracting my accusation of you as a troll—though I still don’t appreciate some of your communication tactics (next time please just ask whether I’m asserting something), and I still can’t tell if you’re arguing in good faith, I can see how you may indeed be doing that, given some unclear/badly communicated bits on my part, including how I didn’t clarify that I wasn’t necessarily agreeing with all the parts of the quote I provided.
I’m at work right now, but later today, I will try to briefly “unpack” my position again, from scratch, hopefully bridging the inferential gap between us.
Given how much karma you have on this site, and how reasonable most of your comments are, I’m updating upwards myself on the chance that I’ve been using some discussion tactics that needlessly put people on the defensive. I apologize for not clearly distinguishing my paraphrases and counter-arguments.
Also, I don’t think that quotation you cited is totally crazy. It does need some defending and unpacking, and if you want to jettison some parts of it, feel free. I’m familiar with some of the excesses people on both sides of the racialism debate can fall into, and part of my motivation for pushing you on this issue was an honest curiosity to see if you have examples of the kinds of excesses that give you such a dim view of the anti-racialist side of the issue. Since this seems to be essentially a terminological dispute, I don’t particularly care about whether we retain use of the word ‘race’ or not; but I do care about the deeper-level misconceptions fueling the controversy.
I’ll try here to clarify some points better than I did last time, and then I’ll bow out of this thread.
First of all, in regards to the George W. Gill quote—my primary desire in providing that quote was to indicate forensic anthropologists consider ‘race’ to be more than a cultural construct. The last part of the quote, which refers to the opposing views, I should have left out as I’m not actually informed enough about the academia to discuss the extent that the ‘cultural construct’ view is politically motivated or not.
Now trying to unpack my own views on the ‘race’ and ‘cultural construct’ issue. Some plain facts both yesterme believe and I still believe: “Race” as the word is typically meant, is a grouping of people, visually identified as such by other people—in this they differ from things like e.g. ‘nationalities’ which can’t be visually identified.
So effectively “racial categories” is a map. But a map may be drawn either
A) in non-arbitrary lines, according to some natural shape (e.g. a map of continents) -- in which it identifies some reality that an objective disinterested observer would map in roughly the same manner. In which case we can call said model a natural model. or B) it may be drawn almost entirely according to political/cultural and arbitrary criteria which no two observers would draw in the same way unless they both rested on the same cultural tradition. In which case we call it a “cultural construct”.
E.g. if someone is asked to divide human beings in two great categories according to biology that relates to reproductive functions, it’s easy enough to figure that the human species would “naturally” be divided into males and females—because there’s a biological reality under that. Such dividing lines, between people with XX and people with XY chromosomes is an obvious Schelling point.
But consider the calendar. The solar year is a natural enough division. A month so-and-so, roughly following the moon, but not quite. And a week or a century aren’t natural divisions at all—they’re dependent on cultural constructs.
If you try to divide human history into eras, the cultural construct becomes even more visible. Even if you go with “Hellenistic” “Classical” “Middle Ages” “Rennaisance” “Modern era” in one corner of the world, you’ll have to go with “Heian” and “Edo” eras in another corner. And even limited in one area of the world, it’d all be about what we as history-readers are supposed to consider significant.
Now going back to the issue of race—both the current me and the yesterme believe that what human beings call “race” is between (A) and (B) -- to significant part a cultural construct, but not completely. The difference between me and yesterme is that some years back I considered race to be almost entirely a cultural construct, -- because I saw no clear clusters (and therefore no “natural” categories) for any one characteristic and I hadn’t yet visualized how a combination of multiple characteristics could form “natural” clusters when any single characteristic by itself did not.
Having now visualized this, I realize that such clustering can actually form “natural” racial categories, some of which will match up really with what people identify as such.
That having been said, race in America at least is obviously still to some extent a cultural construct—which is why e.g. partly-African partly-European descent people are much more often grouped with completely-African people than with completely-European descent people.
Now any former belief of mine doesn’t need to have also been held by other people in order to treat ‘race’ as a cultural construct. They need have ONLY considered the particular clusters that our society calls “clusters” as cultural constructs, rather than as naturally occurring categories.
This certainly doesn’t mean that they need have disbelieved in “mountain ranges” or “continents” or even that there exist populations of largely differing genetic characteristics—they needn’t even disbelieve that a natural map can indeed be drawn. They need only disbelieve that society’s current map is natural.
Now I’m bowing out of this thread. I don’t think there’s anything to be gained by further elaboration of beliefs of my yesterme or even my current me on the subject.
Aris Katsaris, you’re the one accusing the field of physical anthropology
No, I don’t remember accusing that field of anything. Since your comment begins with a blatant falsehood, I will not bother reading the rest of it. Downvoting it unread, and classifying you as a troll.
No, I don’t remember accusing that field of anything.
You seem to have forgotten how this conversation got started. Someone said “Race is a cultural convention.” You argued that this claim, although common in physical anthropology (you cited George W. Gill’s view to support this assertion), is false. I suggested a more charitable, steel-mannish reading of the “Race is a cultural convention.” thesis, and asked you what your own reading of this common multiculturalist thesis is. You responded “Given how I might have said/believed something similar myself just a couple years back, I think I know what is meant.”, and then proceeded to unpack your own earlier views. We’re still trying to do that unpacking, and unless you’ve silently changed your mind about the structure of this discussion, you’re still trying to give an exposition of what the anthropology textbooks in question, and most other people who support this view, have in mind.
My suggestion is that you have yet to give an interpretation of “Race is a cultural convention.”, and of the general anti-racial-categorizations thesis, that would plausibly have been held by academics, since the denial of more than one racial trait statistically clustering together, and the denial of non-continuous human variation, both reflect truly fundamental misunderstandings of human phenotypic and geographical variation. At the very least, a great deal of textual evidence would be needed to justify attributing such a strong, absurd thesis to so many anti-racialist people. Now: Where, precisely, do you disagree with my representation of this discussion? And where, precisely, do you disagree with my specific counter-arguments?
Since your comment begins with a blatant falsehood, I will not bother reading the rest of it. Downvoting it unread, and classifying you as a troll.
It’s understandable that you’re angry; dissonance (both internal and social) inevitably makes us angry. Intellectual virtue isn’t about being stoically immune to such responses from our very primate brain; it’s about how you handle them when they arise, how you minimize the damage. Just a word to the wise.
And whole groups that Americans called non-white (like Middle-easterners) looked likewise pretty white to me.
Middle Easterners’ skins do look noticeably darker than those of typical native English speakers of European ancestry, to me. But then again, so do those of certain (but not all)¹ Italians, whom I don’t think any sizeable number of Americans would call non-white.
ISTM that there’s much larger variation in skin colours among Italians than among northern Europeans or among Middle Easterners. (All the people in this picture are Italian with no sizeable foreign admixture that I know of except in one case, and none is albino or anything like that.)
...and seven hours after I post this, I see a friend of mine whose skin is almost as pale as that of a typical Irishwoman and I remember that her parents are from the Middle East. God, I am full of crap certain times.
The input is the claim ‘Race is a cultural convention.’ You output the interpretation: ‘None of the phenotypic variations associated with any racial schema are physically real; they are hallucinations or figments.’ Given how transparently ridiculous the assertion is, one must at least take a moment to pause and reconsider whether the anthropologists’ claim is really what you take it to be.
The problem is that when asked to justify that statement ‘Race is a cultural convention’ anthropologists in interpret it in the way you describe in your second paragraph, but they than proceed to use it in arguments as if it means ‘None of the phenotypic variations (except possibly skin color) associated with any racial schema are physically real; they are hallucinations or figments’.
Genetically differentiated human populations defined by phenotype.
A quote from wikipedia:
“Forensic physical anthropologist and professor George W. Gill has said that the idea that race is only skin deep “is simply not true, as any experienced forensic anthropologist will affirm” and “Many morphological features tend to follow geographic boundaries coinciding often with climatic zones. This is not surprising since the selective forces of climate are probably the primary forces of nature that have shaped human races with regard not only to skin color and hair form but also the underlying bony structures of the nose, cheekbones, etc. (For example, more prominent noses humidify air better.)” While he can see good arguments for both sides, the complete denial of the opposing evidence “seems to stem largely from socio-political motivation and not science at all”. He also states that many biological anthropologists see races as real yet “not one introductory textbook of physical anthropology even presents that perspective as a possibility. In a case as flagrant as this, we are not dealing with science but rather with blatant, politically motivated censorship”.
The input is the claim ‘Race is a cultural convention.’ You output the interpretation: ‘None of the phenotypic variations associated with any racial schema are physically real; they are hallucinations or figments.’ Given how transparently ridiculous the assertion is, one must at least take a moment to pause and reconsider whether the anthropologists’ claim is really what you take it to be.
Perhaps what is being denied is not the existence of morphological variation between human populations, but rather the conceptualization of these differences under the traditional concept of Race, with its assumptions of discreteness and of other markers of cultural and bio-diversity strictly mapping on to a small set of physiognomic markers. Perhaps what is also being asserted is that the precise boundaries between races, and how large or small a ‘race’ gets to be, is culturally constructed and varies across different groups possessing ‘race’-like categories. Is it more likely that anthropologists are speaking somewhat loosely and infelicitously, or that they think the existence of darker and lighter skins in different parts of the world is a Grand Alien Conspiracy?
Given how I might have said/believed something similar myself just a couple years back, I think I know what is meant. You get a photo of Colin Powell and he was about light-skinned as Bush—so since different people of the same skin-hue are one called ‘white’ and the other ‘black’, one thinks it might the division may be entirely a cultural artifact.
Also there’s no single characteristic which doesn’t fluctuate gradually across populations—so any grouping seems again entirely arbitrary.
But a visual that got me to understand the above view was too-simplistic was this graph here at Lewontin’s argument and criticism. Though any one characteristic wouldn’t suffice to divide humanity meaningfully into races, several characterics taken together in can form clusters...
So such groupings are in fact meaningful.
If you used to believe this yourself, then maybe you can explain to me what you mean(t) by ‘entirely a cultural artifact.’ Did you think that the people in question didn’t have different skin tones? That skin tone isn’t a genetic trait? That there was no correlation between a racial grouping and any phenotypic or genetic marker, like skin color? That genetic relatedness is confabulated in a grand game of make-believe?
“there’s no single characteristic which doesn’t fluctuate gradually across populations”—No, some traits have reached fixation in a population, or are totally absent. But I take your point. It’s still understandable that categories predating our modern, sophisticated notions of genetic variation would be controversial in their attempted modern reimaginings.
Colin Powell did not have a different skin tone than George W. Bush; yes—no categorization based on skin-color would actually put Colin Powell in a different category than Bush, while putting him in the same category with Condoleeza Rice: Relevant photo.
And whole groups that Americans called non-white (like Middle-easterners) looked likewise pretty white to me.
There was correlation with physical characterics obviously—much like you could say that Swedes are more often blonde, but that the actual lines drawn around the category didn’t really have anything to do with physical characteristics—same way that Swedish citizenship correlates with blondness but isn’t defined by blondness.
I’ve seen the photo. So your claim is that anthropologists, like yesteryou, once believed that 100% of ‘black’ people had darker skin than 100% of ‘white’ people, with zero overlap? This seems very implausible.
That’s no coincidence. American authorities typically group most Middle Easterners with Europeans as ‘Caucasians.’
But being of Swedish descent does have biological meaning and significance, albeit to a lesser degree than being of African descent. So what can be meant by the claim that race is ‘merely’ like being Swedish? Is it merely a fuzzy quantitative shift, not a categorical disagreement about what ‘race’ is or how it fits into the natural world?
Allow me to attempt to rationally reconstruct what the younger you and the straw-anthropologist believed. Based on the evidence that changed your mind, I gather that your old view was not that racial distinctions were nonexistent, but that they were biologically superficial. The obvious phenotypic variations very nearly exhausted the distinctness of each racial group. So when you advocate racialism, what you’re really trying to draw attention to is that race is more than skin deep, that there are many many genetic traits, some very significant, that break down along racial lines of various sorts. And this is indeed an important point, though framing it as a dispute over whether ‘races’ are ‘real’ is, to put it mildly, misleading.
I don’t know about anthropologists. I thought I explained that my yesterme saw the opposite of what you just said: saw that some people labelled ‘black’ had skins as light (or almost as light) as ‘white’ people. So I saw the dividing line between ‘black’ and ‘white’ to be utterly arbitrary, a line arbitrarily drawn in some continuum, and which best seemed to identify cultural not biological differences.
Keep in mind that my yesterme was a Greek boy, and had no occasion to have known about e.g. Afro-textured hair or different nose structures, etc. or any other collection of physical characteristics that together could form a cluster.
No, I’m not talking about mere superficiality, nor about how insignificant or significant the traits were. I’m talking about an utterly arbitrary line drawn between populations of people. As if someone had arbitrarily said that the numbers >72 are the “orange” numbers and the numbers <72 are the “purple” numbers.
With only one trait in question to divide the races, this judgement of mine would have remained valid—no matter if it’s something as insignificant as skin-color or as significant as IQ.
It’s the combination of more than one trait (e.g. skin-color AND hair-texture AND nose-shape) that makes racial visual identification a classification of actual observed clusters in the human species—again REGARDLESS of whether the traits are “significant” or “superficial” or “important” or whatever.
So you were guilty of two bits of ignorance. Instead of my ‘racial traits are all superficial’ (which sounds like a much more plausible error for multiculturalists, anthropologists, etc. to make), your view was that (a) ‘there is only a single phenotypic trait distinguishing each race from the others,’ and (b) ‘these traits exist on a continuum smoothly linking all the races.’
Since these two old views of yours are how you understand the claim ‘race is a cultural construct,’ you are then asserting that people who reduce race to a cultural construct are ignorant of, or in denial regarding, the fact that different racial groups have different common ancestors over long stretches over time, owing to reproductive isolation. So you are effectively asserting that the anti-racialists are guilty of doubting the existence of continents, mountain ranges, and other sources of reproductive isolation that could interrupt various continua. This seems like an extremely implausible claim to impute to others, whether or not you naively believed it yourself; so you’ll need to cite sources demonstrating that the people in question really did hold this view.
You are also asserting that the ‘race is a cultural construct’ crowd think that race is not merely superficial, but reducible to a single trait and nothing else. For instance, anti-racialists can allow that east Asians have an epicanthic fold, or can acknowledge that they have darker eyes and hair than Europeans, but cannot acknowledge both of these facts, since this would then be asserting that races are distinguished by clusters and not by single phenotypic effects. Again, this is an extraordinary claim, much more radical and ridiculous than my moderate suggestion that anti-racialists tend to think of this clustering as ‘only skin-deep.’ So again, you are obliged to provide some references demonstrating that this is the stance of anti-racialists, on pain of straw-manning.
People can see what I’m “asserting” by reading my own sentences. Any assertion that I actually make, you can quote word-for-word. All your assertions about my supposed assertions, I disavow.
Downvoted, because putting words in another man’s mouth is one of the tactics I least appreciate and least want to see in this forum. I consider it a form of slander.
Aris Katsaris, you’re the one accusing the field of physical anthropology (and other people sharing anti-racialist views of this sort) of promoting the unargued assumption “Race is a cultural convention.” and of dismissing the possibility of any alternative view. As yet, in this entire conversation you have provided no evidence of this; so I’ve instead had to focus on clarifying what you mean by this accusation. (I was not under the impression that trying to unpack and understand libel was itself libelous; but if so, I will tread with caution...) Your evidence that this is a plausible accusation, and your explanation of what this accusation means in concrete terms, both reduce to your own past experience of believing:
… which seems to be denying the occurrence of the mechanism (reproductive isolation) that blocks continuous variation. If this is not a fair characterization of your characterization of the anti-racialist position, then explain what you really mean and why my exposition is off-base. And again, quoting you:
… which seems to be denying that racial groups have more than a single trait in common. If this is not a fair characterization of your characterization of the anti-racialist position, then, again, explain how.
Good-faith use of the technique of paraphrasing in order to make sure you’ve understood what the other person has said is extremely important, indeed an indispensable one for successful discussion. Part of why it’s important is precisely because it’s so easy to misunderstand someone; so it’s my goal to be corrected by you, if I have misrepresented you, and paraphrasing serves both this goal (by making transparent my understanding of you) and the goal of clarifying what’s actually under dispute. If the sky is not blue, I desire to believe that the sky is not blue. But I cannot revise my model of your argument and beliefs if you do not articulate specifically what I got wrong, and what the right explication is.
You mistook my interpretation for a straw-man. (Note: Accusing people of ‘slander’ is rather less conducive to productive discussion than noting a straw-man fallacy and moving on; and simply pointing out the error and how it occurred is more conducive still.) But my ‘superficiality’ interpretation was an attempt to steel-man your position, and when you completely dismiss my steel men and assert they are not what you meant, it severely limits my interpretive options. Hence my more recent interpretations do make your position appear weaker. Perhaps that means you should reconsider whether your view is justified. Or perhaps that means I misrepresented you; in that case, it should be supremely easy to explain how I did so, and to clarify precisely how your intended meaning differs from what I said.
Given the downvoting I received, I updated upwards on the possibility that I was wrong on my interpretation of the thread, and reread it from the start. As such I’m retracting my accusation of you as a troll—though I still don’t appreciate some of your communication tactics (next time please just ask whether I’m asserting something), and I still can’t tell if you’re arguing in good faith, I can see how you may indeed be doing that, given some unclear/badly communicated bits on my part, including how I didn’t clarify that I wasn’t necessarily agreeing with all the parts of the quote I provided.
I’m at work right now, but later today, I will try to briefly “unpack” my position again, from scratch, hopefully bridging the inferential gap between us.
Given how much karma you have on this site, and how reasonable most of your comments are, I’m updating upwards myself on the chance that I’ve been using some discussion tactics that needlessly put people on the defensive. I apologize for not clearly distinguishing my paraphrases and counter-arguments.
Also, I don’t think that quotation you cited is totally crazy. It does need some defending and unpacking, and if you want to jettison some parts of it, feel free. I’m familiar with some of the excesses people on both sides of the racialism debate can fall into, and part of my motivation for pushing you on this issue was an honest curiosity to see if you have examples of the kinds of excesses that give you such a dim view of the anti-racialist side of the issue. Since this seems to be essentially a terminological dispute, I don’t particularly care about whether we retain use of the word ‘race’ or not; but I do care about the deeper-level misconceptions fueling the controversy.
I’ll try here to clarify some points better than I did last time, and then I’ll bow out of this thread.
First of all, in regards to the George W. Gill quote—my primary desire in providing that quote was to indicate forensic anthropologists consider ‘race’ to be more than a cultural construct. The last part of the quote, which refers to the opposing views, I should have left out as I’m not actually informed enough about the academia to discuss the extent that the ‘cultural construct’ view is politically motivated or not.
Now trying to unpack my own views on the ‘race’ and ‘cultural construct’ issue. Some plain facts both yesterme believe and I still believe: “Race” as the word is typically meant, is a grouping of people, visually identified as such by other people—in this they differ from things like e.g. ‘nationalities’ which can’t be visually identified.
So effectively “racial categories” is a map. But a map may be drawn either
A) in non-arbitrary lines, according to some natural shape (e.g. a map of continents) -- in which it identifies some reality that an objective disinterested observer would map in roughly the same manner. In which case we can call said model a natural model.
or B) it may be drawn almost entirely according to political/cultural and arbitrary criteria which no two observers would draw in the same way unless they both rested on the same cultural tradition. In which case we call it a “cultural construct”.
E.g. if someone is asked to divide human beings in two great categories according to biology that relates to reproductive functions, it’s easy enough to figure that the human species would “naturally” be divided into males and females—because there’s a biological reality under that. Such dividing lines, between people with XX and people with XY chromosomes is an obvious Schelling point.
But consider the calendar. The solar year is a natural enough division. A month so-and-so, roughly following the moon, but not quite. And a week or a century aren’t natural divisions at all—they’re dependent on cultural constructs. If you try to divide human history into eras, the cultural construct becomes even more visible. Even if you go with “Hellenistic” “Classical” “Middle Ages” “Rennaisance” “Modern era” in one corner of the world, you’ll have to go with “Heian” and “Edo” eras in another corner. And even limited in one area of the world, it’d all be about what we as history-readers are supposed to consider significant.
Now going back to the issue of race—both the current me and the yesterme believe that what human beings call “race” is between (A) and (B) -- to significant part a cultural construct, but not completely. The difference between me and yesterme is that some years back I considered race to be almost entirely a cultural construct, -- because I saw no clear clusters (and therefore no “natural” categories) for any one characteristic and I hadn’t yet visualized how a combination of multiple characteristics could form “natural” clusters when any single characteristic by itself did not.
Having now visualized this, I realize that such clustering can actually form “natural” racial categories, some of which will match up really with what people identify as such.
That having been said, race in America at least is obviously still to some extent a cultural construct—which is why e.g. partly-African partly-European descent people are much more often grouped with completely-African people than with completely-European descent people.
Now any former belief of mine doesn’t need to have also been held by other people in order to treat ‘race’ as a cultural construct. They need have ONLY considered the particular clusters that our society calls “clusters” as cultural constructs, rather than as naturally occurring categories.
This certainly doesn’t mean that they need have disbelieved in “mountain ranges” or “continents” or even that there exist populations of largely differing genetic characteristics—they needn’t even disbelieve that a natural map can indeed be drawn. They need only disbelieve that society’s current map is natural.
Now I’m bowing out of this thread. I don’t think there’s anything to be gained by further elaboration of beliefs of my yesterme or even my current me on the subject.
No, I don’t remember accusing that field of anything. Since your comment begins with a blatant falsehood, I will not bother reading the rest of it. Downvoting it unread, and classifying you as a troll.
You seem to have forgotten how this conversation got started. Someone said “Race is a cultural convention.” You argued that this claim, although common in physical anthropology (you cited George W. Gill’s view to support this assertion), is false. I suggested a more charitable, steel-mannish reading of the “Race is a cultural convention.” thesis, and asked you what your own reading of this common multiculturalist thesis is. You responded “Given how I might have said/believed something similar myself just a couple years back, I think I know what is meant.”, and then proceeded to unpack your own earlier views. We’re still trying to do that unpacking, and unless you’ve silently changed your mind about the structure of this discussion, you’re still trying to give an exposition of what the anthropology textbooks in question, and most other people who support this view, have in mind.
My suggestion is that you have yet to give an interpretation of “Race is a cultural convention.”, and of the general anti-racial-categorizations thesis, that would plausibly have been held by academics, since the denial of more than one racial trait statistically clustering together, and the denial of non-continuous human variation, both reflect truly fundamental misunderstandings of human phenotypic and geographical variation. At the very least, a great deal of textual evidence would be needed to justify attributing such a strong, absurd thesis to so many anti-racialist people. Now: Where, precisely, do you disagree with my representation of this discussion? And where, precisely, do you disagree with my specific counter-arguments?
If by ‘troll’ you mean ‘someone acting in bad faith,’ might I suggest that your human psychological model is a bit implausible? (Or, possibly, you have become too personally invested and are not applying your own model carefully. I couldn’t say.) A corollary of Hanlon’s Razor: ‘Never attribute to trolling that which is adequately explained by good-faith misunderstanding or disagreement.’
It’s understandable that you’re angry; dissonance (both internal and social) inevitably makes us angry. Intellectual virtue isn’t about being stoically immune to such responses from our very primate brain; it’s about how you handle them when they arise, how you minimize the damage. Just a word to the wise.
Technically, libel.
Middle Easterners’ skins do look noticeably darker than those of typical native English speakers of European ancestry, to me. But then again, so do those of certain (but not all)¹ Italians, whom I don’t think any sizeable number of Americans would call non-white.
ISTM that there’s much larger variation in skin colours among Italians than among northern Europeans or among Middle Easterners. (All the people in this picture are Italian with no sizeable foreign admixture that I know of except in one case, and none is albino or anything like that.)
...and seven hours after I post this, I see a friend of mine whose skin is almost as pale as that of a typical Irishwoman and I remember that her parents are from the Middle East. God, I am full of crap certain times.
The problem is that when asked to justify that statement ‘Race is a cultural convention’ anthropologists in interpret it in the way you describe in your second paragraph, but they than proceed to use it in arguments as if it means ‘None of the phenotypic variations (except possibly skin color) associated with any racial schema are physically real; they are hallucinations or figments’.
That’s extremely strange and surprising, if true. Can you provide an example of this?