Is there any such thing as being a "race traitor"?

Great Debates
41

[QUOTE=Der Trihs]
Which rather underlines why race IS arbitrary. Why not call blond haired, or red haired, or green eyed people “races” ? Or people with Rh positive blood ? Why are ‘blacks’ a race, but not any of the subgroups that compose them races ? We group some shared characteristics and/or ancestry together and call them a race; others we don’t. We could easily pick others, and ignore the present “races” the same way we do, say, RH positive blood for non-medical purposes.
[/QUOTE]

Indeed. Nobody’s saying “skin color is illusory” or “presence or lack of epicanthal folds is illusory” or whatever, because that would be ridiculous. But it is perfectly legitimate to to call racial categories out as arbitrary and lacking genuine foundation, the “reality of race” being something above and beyond the reality of various such attributes.

42

Of course. As I said in the OP, white supremacists seem to have almost invented the term (at least in the public eye).

Also, I’d like to note that many of the “exceptions” mentioned in the replies so far involve direct action (e.g. ex-slave giving up Underground Railroaders) of a kind (IMHO) likely motivated by greed. Is that kind of situation really analogous to, say, Condelezza Rice working against affirmative action laws? Michelle Malkin being a right-winger? At what point to actions motivated by genuine personal beliefs (or even just HAVING personal beliefs) go “over the line”?

43

The connotations we associate with race are arbitrary. Race itself is not. Race is a condition that exists regardless of how we feel about it.

What if Hillary Clinton had decided to combat Barack Obama’s lead by running as a black candidate herself? If race is arbitrary why can’t she have decided to be black instead of white?

44

[QUOTE=Little Nemo]
What if Hillary Clinton had decided to combat Barack Obama’s lead by running as a black candidate herself? If race is arbitrary why can’t she have decided to be black instead of white?
[/QUOTE]
Because as far as I know, she doesn’t fit that arbitrary definition. Although if she has even one black ancestor decades ago, she could have called herself “black”, and would have been called that ( or less polite words ) if he ancestry had been discovered. The “one drop” view of race was popular back then. The difference between now and then is that the arbitrary definition of race has changed, and she no longer fits it. Since it has no underlying scientific basis, it could easily change again.

45

[QUOTE=you with the face]
O negatives in the house!
[/QUOTE]

O negative please.

46

Maybe you need to check out what the word arbitrary means.

Random House Unabridged Dictionary says “subject to individual will or judgment without restriction; contingent solely upon one’s discretion”. American Heritage Dictionary says “Based on or subject to individual judgment or preference”. WordNet says “based on or subject to individual discretion or preference or sometimes impulse or caprice”. Kernerman English Multilingual Dictionary says “not decided by rules or laws but by a person’s own opinion”.

If race was arbitrary as you’ve claimed, then anyone could decide what race they wanted to be. The fact that they can’t indicates that race isn’t arbitrary; it’s decided by external factors over which the individual has no control - generally skin color. People can’t decide what race they are because they can’t decide what color their skin is.

And it’s not an individual decision. If you asked a hundred people what race this person was, they’d all say he’s black. And they’d all say this person is white. So obviously there is some common set of standards involved.

To use an example you gave, saying that race is arbitrary is like saying that blood type is arbitrary.

47

It’s certainly ridiculous but don’t say nobody’s saying it. Bryan Ekers said it in post #2: “Race is an illusion”.

When it comes to race, some people have just fallen into a habit of denial, rather than applying any thought.

“Black people tend to be dumber than white people.” “No, no, no, that’s not true.”

“Black people tend to be lazier than white people.” “No, no, no, that’s not true.”

“Black people tend to be more athletic than white people.” “No, no, no, that’s not true.”

“Black people tend to have darker brown skin than white people.” “No, no, no, that’s not true.”

Huh?

No, really, black people do tend to have darker brown skin than white people. It’s not a good thing or a bad thing. It’s just a fact. But you’d be surprised how many people would argue the point. It’s like they believe that conceding that black people are different from white people in any way is a betrayal of racial equality.

Racial equality is great. I’m all for racial equality. But racial equality should be knowing that people are equal despite having different races. Not denying that they have different races.

48

[QUOTE=Zsofia]
I don’t know, I would tend to think that if you were a slave in the antebellum South, and you ratted out your fellow slaves when they ran away and told the slave hunters where they were hiding even though there was no risk to you just to curry favor with the masters - I think it might be legitimate to call you a race traitor. However, “race” in that situation is just a convenient word for “group” - it’s not bad because you’re both black, it’s bad because you’re both slaves.
[/QUOTE]

I’m more about your disclaimer than about the main body of your post. If you are black, and you support policies that are harmful to black people, that doesn’t make you any worse of a person than if you were white and you supported policies that are harmful to black people.

Now, if you support policies that are harmful to people you know personally, then I could say maybe you’re worse than someone who supports policies that are harmful to folks they DON’T know personally. And a black person may be likelier to know folks harmed by anti-black policies than a white person would be. But it’s the intimacy with those harmed by your actions, not your membership card in a granfalloon, that makes you a bad person.

The word “traitor” is pretty problematic in this context. (I don’t much like it in other contexts, either: I think it assigns a negative moral weight without justification in many cases. But that’s another thread).

Daniel

49

[QUOTE=Little Nemo]
No, really, black people do tend to have darker brown skin than white people. It’s not a good thing or a bad thing. It’s just a fact. But you’d be surprised how many people would argue the point. It’s like they believe that conceding that black people are different from white people in any way is a betrayal of racial equality.

Racial equality is great. I’m all for racial equality. But racial equality should be knowing that people are equal despite having different races. Not denying that they have different races.
[/QUOTE]

I think the people objecting to the reality of race would point out that the only statement in your list that’s true is the one true by definition. “Black people tend to have darker skin than white people” is akin to saying, “Left-handed people tend to write better with their left hands than right-handed people.”

If your definition of race starts and ends at skin color, then of course the concept has scientific merit. You’ll also find that it’s a difficult concept to work with, though, since there are folks recognized as white with darker skin than other folks recognized as black.

If your definition is more of a fuzzy-logic one that takes into account a collection of physical characteristics, then I think it has more real-world relevance, but is much less clear-cut and nearly useless from a scientific perspective (at least until we get better at working with fuzzy logic).

If your definition allows for white people who “act black” or similar nonsense, then it moves into the scientifically useless category, I think.

Daniel

50

[QUOTE=John Mace]
Wrong.

If you insist on putting all of humankind into 4 groups, there are going to be millions of people who just don’t fit. All the traditional races blend as a continuum into each other. For instance, if you travel from Beijing to Berlin, there is no one place where people suddenly stop looking Asian and suddenly look European. Unless, of course, you know where that place is and can cite it for us…

You can, of course, draw arbitrary lines anywhere in the world and call people on one side of line race A and people on the other side race B. But that is necessarily arbitrary.
[/QUOTE]

Rarely do I get irritated here. But you succeeded in ticking me off. Would it kill you to READ what I wrote?!

Races exist. I pointed out in my post that they were not some mythical “pure” group or bloodline. These races have to do with various population migrations from the African cradle of humanity. Had you actually read my post, you would also note that nowhere did I say people fit neatly into those groups.

I am sick and tired of people in GD who do not read the posts they respond to, instead choosing to dump their own prejudices and preconceptions into it.

51

[QUOTE=smiling bandit]
Rarely do I get irritated here. But you succeeded in ticking me off. Would it kill you to READ what I wrote?!

Races exist. I pointed out in my post that they were not some mythical “pure” group or bloodline. These races have to do with various population migrations from the African cradle of humanity. Had you actually read my post, you would also note that nowhere did I say people fit neatly into those groups.

I am sick and tired of people in GD who do not read the posts they respond to, instead choosing to dump their own prejudices and preconceptions into it.
[/QUOTE]

You can get as irritated as you want, but you’re still wrong. I read your post, and it is simply incorrect. When you put something like this in a post:

you’re telling us there is a conspiracy of scientist to hide the real truth that you somehow know. Well, I’m not buying it. If you want to make a real argument with real cites, go ahead. But just posting some nonsense in GD and getting irritated when someone calls you on it isn’t a debate.

52

[QUOTE=John Mace]
you’re telling us there is a conspiracy of scientist to hide the real truth that you somehow know. Well, I’m not buying it. If you want to make a real argument with real cites, go ahead. But just posting some nonsense in GD and getting irritated when someone calls you on it isn’t a debate.
[/QUOTE]

No, you are wrong. And again, you seem unable to even comprehend what I posted, instead blindly dumping your own opinions of what you wanted me to say so you could blindly accuse me of racism.

Shipman, Pat. The Evolution of Racism: Human Differences and the Use and Abuse of Science. Cambridge: Harvard University. 2002.

Chapter 10 in particular describes how anthropologists pulled back in the post-WW2 era, ashamed over the (unfortunately close) association of their science with Eugenics and Nazi race theories. Unlike your suggestion, I did not say there had been a conspiracy; rather, there was a change of opinions not founded in science, but rather in politics and social order, such that anthropologists took their interests elsewhere out of fear of supporting another racist killer.

Early anthropology tended to be more interested in the lines of descent: which groups went where when, with whom they merged, or when and how they seperated, but without the use of modern techniques like carbon dating or whatnot (which meant a lot of guesswork). At the same time, classical anthropology was interested in cataloguing and seeing the vast array of human differences and variability; this was dropped in favor of emphasizing human unity.

53

[QUOTE=Little Nemo]
It’s certainly ridiculous but don’t say nobody’s saying it. Bryan Ekers said it in post #2: “Race is an illusion”.
[/QUOTE]

I believe you’ve misinterpreted my post. “Race is an illusion” is a different statement from “Skin color is an illusion”. To the extent that race exists in our culture (as a fairly arbitrary social construct), it’s certainly something other than mere skin color.

54

[QUOTE=smiling bandit]
No, you are wrong. And again, you seem unable to even comprehend what I posted, instead blindly dumping your own opinions of what you wanted me to say so you could blindly accuse me of racism.
[/QUOTE]

Now you’re simply going off the deep end. There is nothing in my post that even remotely accuses you of racism. N-O-T-H-I-N-G.

Again, simply wrong. There is a thriving effort to understand lines of descent and human migration, all founded on the study of DNA-- something completely unavailable to science in the 1950s. Whether politics played a roll in anthropology right after WWII is irrelevant given the hard data we have available to us now. Look up The Genographic Project. But “lines of descent” is not equivalent to race. Perhaps you are thinking that haplogroups are some sort analog to race, but that isn’t correct either.

55

[QUOTE=Little Nemo]
Maybe you need to check out what the word arbitrary means.

[/QUOTE]

Maybe you need to read more than just the definition that supports your argument? “Arbitrary” can also just mean unreasonable or unsupported. In that sense, yes, race is arbitrary, in the same way that definitions of art and pornography are arbitrary (the “I know it when I see it” definition).

56

[QUOTE=smiling bandit]
No, you are wrong. And again, you seem unable to even comprehend what I posted, instead blindly dumping your own opinions of what you wanted me to say so you could blindly accuse me of racism.
[/QUOTE]
Why don’t you wait until a charge of racism has been laid before you go after another poster for making an accusation that I cannot find anywhere in his posts?

[ /Modding ]

57

As to the point of the discussion:
[QUOTE=smiling bandit]
I’ve mentioned it before and I will probably do so again, but there IS such a thing as race. It has nothing to do with intelligence or capability or moral worth, but the scientific concept does exist. Anthropologists are very uncomfortable with it, and tend to hide it these days, but it does exist and denotes certain extremely large human populations, all of which have interacted and interbred. There are only about four of them.

There is also such as thing as ethnicity, which is a much more complicated beast.

Now, I can’t imagine such as thing as a race traitor. or really even an ethnic traitor.
[/QUOTE]

No. The Four (or Thre or Five–folks cannot even agree on that number much less who gets to be in which group), do not exist as a biological reality.

There are, indeed, populations of people who are more closely related, genetically, but there are far more than three to five of such groups. The lumping of large numbers of determinable populations into “races,” however, is meaningless. For example, most lumpers would put all the various African populations into the "black’ or “Negro” race, yet the Khoi-San are genetically more distant from the peoples of central Africa than the peoples of central Africa are from some Asians.

I do not like the phrase “races do not exist” because it makes a series of declarations with different meanings and different understandings among any group of speakers and listeners.

It is, perhaps, more accurate to note that the word race carries so much baggage that its (potentially) legitimate use as the term for “population” has been irredeemably compromised.

In the Decmber 20, 2002 issue of Science, (Vol 298), Noah A. Rosenberg, Jonathan K. Pritchard, James L. Weber, Howard M. Cann, Kenneth K. Kidd, Lev A. Zhivotovsky, and Marcus W. Feldman published a study, “Genetic Structure of Human Populations.” In that study, they determined that there were a number of neutral markers in human DNA that, when analyzed as groups of loci, could identify with relative certainty the geographical region in which a person’s ancestors lived. (There were six such regions, BTW, not four.) However, the clustering of such loci was required, because no specific marker could be found limirted to any of the four geographical regions. Two individuals from Asia or South America might be able to be identiied as such without sharing any of the loci in common. Each autosomal microsatellite locus could be found in every population. It was only by seeing which ones clustered (often differently) among different people that they could work back to the six geographic regions.

The point about anthropologists backing away from the use of “race” as a descriptor probably has some validity, but the anthropological community continued to discuss “race” well into the 1970s until Cavalli-Sforza began producing biological evidence that the identifications of “races” (i.e. lumping all people into three to five groups), had no biological basis.

58

I explicitly have said that many people do not have a clearly defined race. But many people, probably the majority, do.

I guess I should have provided some cites for what I wrote. Oh wait, I did.

Maybe like race, the dictionary meaning of the word arbitrary is just an illusion and people are actually feel to use whatever meaning they wish.

59

[QUOTE=Little Nemo]
I explicitly have said that many people do not have a clearly defined race. But many people, probably the majority, do.
[/quote]
Would you mind clearly defining race, then, since many people have one?

The post you’re responding to had several fuzzily-defined starting points; the gist is that there are poorly-defined categories of race that have no scientific merit, or very little. If you say there are clearly-defined categories, it would really help move the argument forward if you’d provide those clear definitions, so we can know what one another are talking about.

Trust me, you do NOT want to go there (says LHOD, the board’s radical descriptivist). :slight_smile:

At any rate, you provided cites showing why you interpreted the word in a way that made your opponents look like idiots. That’s not cricket: instead of interpreting a word in an argument in a way that makes your opponent look stupid, the honorable thing to do is to interpret the word in a way that matches common usage AND that makes the argument defensible.

For example, from dictionary.com comes definition 4:

This is almost precisely how Mr. Dibble defined it, and is pretty clearly what he meant. Your cite for a different definition, one that would make his point stupid, is totally irrelevant.

Daniel

60

[QUOTE=Little Nemo]
I explicitly have said that many people do not have a clearly defined race. But many people, probably the majority, do.
[/QUOTE]

Okay, define it. And define how one can be a traitor to it.
Please.