STANDARD DISCLAIMER: I have no quibble with Collounsbury, Edwino, TomnDeb, re: race. Your arguments seem compelling and, frankly, these relentless race threads really irk me.
That said, please explain: Why do so many Ph.D. demographers and social scientists tenaciously cling to the concept of well-differentiated races in their studies? Is this a case of politics overriding science? Do these seemingly respectable researchers really believe in distinct races as such, or is it a “shorthand?” The federal government employs or contracts with countless expert demographers who speak of “race” as though it’s a coherent construct. Ultimately, is it that the federal government, as primary distributor of research monies, dictates the terms that will be used, and you either play ball or sit out the game?
I don’t think social scientists (that is, any reputable ones) actually believe that “race” is a viable, scientific construct from a biological perspective (although I could be wrong - I certaintly don’t, but I can’t speak for other social scientists). That being said, I don’t think it prohibits social scientists from using the concept of race as a social/cultural construct. I can’t speak for Collunsbury, et al., but I think they would (in principle) agree that many social scientists use term as a “shorthand” concept - understanding that it is a social/cultural construct - in trying to understand various social/cultural phenomena.
I don’t personally have any problems with social scientists, demographers, policy makers, etc. conducting research and making policy using the term. Check out “The Black-White Test Score Gap” - 1998, C. Jencks and M. Phillips (eds.), Brookings Institute, to get an idea how social scientists can use the term to understand/explain social/cultural phenomena).
That being said (myself a social scientist), I am trying to move away from using the term, opting for other terms such as cultural group, ethnicity, or population. So for me, my tenacity in using the term really isn’t an issue.
IMO, I think those social scientists whose tenacity is strongest tend to be those from groups who have been marginalized by society solely on the basis of their “race”. To entirely drop the term (and again from a sociological/cultural perspective) would mean giving up an element of one’s “identity” (an issue that has some commonality with other groups who have been “marginalized” by society in some fashion - women, gays/lesbians, etc.).
However, the use of race in the context of “identity politics” is best left for others to comment on. I’m sure tomndebb or others can provide a much more coherent and elegant response.
(Yeah, and I’d have gotten here first id AOHell hadn’t decided to purge my session and my nearly-completed post.)
A few points:
I don’t believe that anyone has argued that we cannot perceive differences or that culturally identifiable groups cannot exist.
Because there are groups that can be visually identified, there are going to be social dynamics that will be brought to bear on members of those perceived groups.
Since visibly identifiable groups are (usually) liable to have come to the U.S. from the same general geographic region, there may be some associations that we can make about them (with mixed results).
The demographers are working in a continuum of historical research, just as any other researchers. The figures they are collecting and using may date back decades. The findings of Cavalli-Sforza and his fellow researchers are only about 12 years old. The demographers, attempting to make accurate predictions based on past data, are pretty much compelled to stay inside the groups that they first identified so as to maintain like-to-like comparisons for their studies.
In the United States, the odds that a person perceived as black had (a majority of) ancestors who came from Africa are much much higher than that the person’s ancestors came from Fiji, Andaman Islands, or Australia. Similarly, the overwhelming number of people perceived as white in the U.S. have European forebears rather than ancestors who came from Afghanistan, India, or Saudi Arabia. The European-descended people are going to have one (loose) group of traditions (including that of freely coming to this country looking for gold-paved streets and working hard to “make it”). African-descended people are going to have a number of group associations, including slave ancestors, Jim Crow laws, red-lining, etc. Asian-descended people are going to have a “middle” experience in which they came looking for the freedom to get ahead, and found it–subject to restricted rights to become citizens, frequent harrassment because of fears of the “yellow peril”, a ghettoized existence, etc.
The common experience will affect those groups in personal, social, and economic ways. I have never been denied a place to live or a job because of my appearance. I can drive through the nearby wealthier suburbs and never be followed for blocks by a policeman (or stopped for a “safety check” or because the lightbulb over my license plate is burned out). I have never had to pay a higher mortgage rate on an equivalent house because some bank had a red line drawn on their city map on the street two blocks over. The attitudes that I bring to a view of government, commerce, my neighbors, and all the other aspects of living in North America at the cusp of the 20th-21st centuries will, in many ways, be more like the attitudes of other European-descended people than it will of African- or Asian-descended people.
This point is a tricky double-edged sword. Far, far more people in this country who suffer from sickle cell anemia are the descendants of people who were imported from certain sections of Africa than anywhere else in the world. If a patient comes to a doctor complaining of sickle-cell-like symptoms, the doctor will have a greater chance of discovering the problem by testing a black person for sickle-cell while testing a white person for a different disease. (Especially in these days of cost-conscious HMOs and PPOs, there is a great incentive to make the fewest diagnostic tests.) Of course, while that works nicely for playing the odds, it means that a black person whose ancestors were taken from a malaria-free region of Africa may have to undergo several unproductive tests for sickle-cell before the doctor finally moves on to find the real problem. Simialrly, most whites will not have to undergo sickle-cell tests, which means that a Lebanese person from the Detroit region may have to undergo an entire battery of unproductive tests unless the doctor has paid attention to the literature indicating that Lebanese are also susceptible and has bothered to ask the patient his ethnic background.
This was the issue recently discussed in the New England Journal of Medicine. A study that tested heart drugs came up with a white/black color line (based on relative percentages, not on actual “all blacks do A” and “all whites do B”) for efficacy. A criticism of the study was that had “race” been omitted from the study, the results would have been identical to a grouping based on diet, economic station, and age.
Recalling that a great many people never look outside their own discipline, it would not be surprising to find that a certain number of demographers are totally unaware of the findings of Cavalli-Sforza or Sykes or others. They are simply continuing the studies that they have always performed, looking to refine the data, (usually based on social definitions), regardless what biology may now be saying.
I will note that when the census does its demographics, the selection of an individual is based on the person’s self-identification. Thus, a person with one black and three white grandparents who was raised in an inner-city neighborhood and considers themselves black would show up on any studies as black, regardless where some outside person would put them.
Now, is the use of cultural racial identification valid? One group argues No. They argue that persistent focus on race simply continues to divide us as a society. They may have a point.
On the other hand, I have personal experience in which I discovered long after the fact that I got at least one apartment and one or two jobs that were denied to earlier applicants because they were black. The government could declare that we are all gray and those previous applicants would still never have gotten the apartment or the job. For the government to identify what its citizens are doing to each other and why, it needs to identify what classes of people are being injured because of their appearance.
Possible reasons:[]Habit or style. It’s currently in vogue. []It may be a reaction to a time when minorities might be ignored in studies, as if they didn’t exist. (In 1973-75, I got involved with studies of the cost of changes in workers compensation benefits. Strangely, the standard method used a mortality table of Caucasians or excluding Blacks (I forget which) Nobody could explain why they didn’tuse tables of all Americans, which were also available.[]It’s easy. One has some data to analyze, and race is a convenient way to bulk up the journal article []As tsunmi points out, it’s also a convenient way for government bureaucrats to justify their postitions by promulgating more paper.[]It fits the current push toward Balkanization. (E.g., various ethic groups have organized separate graduation ceremonies for themselves at some colleges []It supports the politics of victimization It matches a current political position. E.g., the NY Times and others consider it very important the educational testing be required to show results by race.
I’ll have you know I post the same sort of lengthy dissertations on religion, politics, evolution, history, geography, child-rearing, social mores, or any other topic.
