This post is jaw-droppingly stupid.
You think that only “11%” of all Dominicans are “black”.
I’ll agree that only 11% of all Dominicans consider themselves “black” but the overwhelming majority of Dominicans are as “black” as most African-Americans.
Please explain how you can be so ignorant and hypocritical as to refer to African-Americans as “blacks” or “negroes” but claim that only 11% of all Dominicans are black.
Thanks
Your first paragraph is a rather silly analogy from two perspectives.
First, the whole point of there being a social construct is that everyone does recognize that humans are capable of lumping disparate entities into different groupings. That people can look at other people and sort them into groups is the very essence of social constructs. On the one hand, many people can look at the members of a group that they have agreed to construct and choose to treat them unfairly or more favorably depending on how they have chosen to label that socially constructed group. On the other hand, other people can look at those constructs and seek ways to minimize unfair treatment.
Second, your analogy fails because it means nothing. We may speak of Kansas as flat or (Western) Colorado as mountainous, but we would never look at a mountain in the Andes or the Alps and say “I am looking at Colorado.” We would not look at the Pampas or Ukraine and say “I am looking at Kansas.” The analogy simply fails.
On the other hand, there is a reason to recognize that race is a social construct. Noting that fact distinguishes the concept of race from a biological reality. As a social construct, we can see that society has taken certain actions based on what it has constructed and we can choose to support or oppose those actions. Pretending that there is a biological reality behind that construct means that we draw improper conclusions about the members of any constructed group based on nothing but our having placed them into that group. It is a circular argument that neither provides information nor illuminates reality.
You point out some claims about specific ethnic groups. I will not even get into whether or not your claims are accurate. Presuming that they are accurate for the purpose of discussion, what you are discussing are biological populations. These have been recognized for years. Certain groups are more susceptible to disease; some groups reach different median heights or weights; some groups even demonstrate, (either in aggregate or among indvivdual outliers), abilities that are different than or better than the majority of humanity.
The problem is that there is a bait-and-switch effect in these discussions. One person will point out that one population or another demonstrates distinguishing traits and says that we can identify those separate populations as races. If they get agreement on that point, the discussion suddenly reverts back to the Big Three, (or four or five), races with all sorts of outlandish generalizations made about multiple groups based on the characteristics of smaller groups that have been lumped, via social construct, with the larger “race.”
The classic examples are discussions of sprinters and maraton runners applied to the socially defined “black” race. Western Africa (or descendants of that region) from Senegal to Congo has produced disproportionate number of very fast sprinters in recent years. There is no indication that all people from that region are good sprinters, only that those groups produce a high number of outliers in that trait. In Eastern Africa, one specific ethnic group from Kenya, (not even all Kenyans–only members of the Kalenjin group), have produced a disproportionately high number of fast marathon runners. Any number of people who want to pretend that the “Three Races” are biologically real talk about how “blacks” have the fastest sprinters and the fastest marathon runners, ignoring the fact that they are actually talking about two completely different groups of people.
You can see it in this thread. Once in a while we can get a proponent of race theory to acknowledge that sub-Saharan Africans are actually divided, biologically, into more disparate genetic groups than any other cluster of human groups on Earth. However, the moment that the pro-race folks need to make a claim, they bundle everyone in sub-Saharan Africa into one homogeneous group, then throw in the various separate groups that were exported to the Americas and who have large amounts of other ancestry. This despite claddistic information demonstrating that sub-Saharan Africa includes groups that are more closely related to Europeans and Asians than they are to other Africans while those exported to the Americas include a large admixture of European and indigenous American genes. Regardless of the value of using the word “race” in one capacity or another, (or as used in other cultures), claims of “biological race,” when presented in our culture, are best met with the rebuttal that the proponent is simply projecting cultural beliefs onto disparate groups that do not reflectt biological reality.
What you’re doing here is changing the definition of the term “race” to get past the objections raised in this thread and others. (I should say, what Steve Sailer is doing, since he’s the pseudoscientific racialist you stole it from.)
You’re also wrong strictly on the facts, since black Americans and white Americans, two separate races by the standard US definition, are often blood relatives of each other. And it has been pointed out repeatedly that many “black” populations in Africa are more closely related to populations in Eurasia than they are to other populations in Africa.
The reason you’re willing to argue so ignorantly is because your primary motivation here is political. You either don’t know or don’t care about the actual facts of the issue.
NDD’s main goal is the vigorous, completely fallacious defense of US racialism. He’s almost entirely ignorant about Africa and the African diaspora. From either an academic or scientific point of view, this is a fatal flaw. You can’t discuss subjects you’re completely ignorant about.
Doesn’t stop him, though. As long as everyone else he’s speaking to is as ignorant/crazy as he is, it doesn’t matter. As soon as he does encounter people with real data and the ability to analyze it, his arguments are exposed as irrational tirades with little relation to reality.
I don’t understand this criticism. If the boundary around Colorado represents, say, where we draw the line to define Han Chinese and the boundary of Kansas represents how we define Turkic peoples, then mountains and plains would represent traits typical to Han and Turkic, respectively, and distinguishing them from each other. My point was that the exact place where draw the line separating is arbitrary and doesn’t matter much. What is the Andes here supposed to be analogous to? That some other group shares the trait which is present in the Han but lacking in the Turkic? ok, so what?
You know how “non sequitur” means “it does not follow from”? I wish I knew the the latin for “nothing follows from this”. The social construct business would be one of those.
Whatever you call it, you don’t have to call it race, there is genetic variation among humans across the globe. Just like every other widely distributed species. Yes, where we draw the line between populations is arbitrary. But oftentimes when we do draw such lines we find significant differences. Not always. There probably isn’t much difference between Irish and Scots. I would bet there are significant differences between Irish and Choctaws. And it should not be surprising if it turned out that there are aggregate cognitive or behavioral differences between them. The brain is a product of evolution after all. Evolution didn’t stop when humans migrated from Africa.
The point of making categories is to identify characteristics of the entities within those categories. If there is no difference between the entities inside different boundaries, then we cannot talk about the non-existent differences. In which case, why bring it up?
What trait do you believe is characteristic of Han that is not characteristic of Turkic peoples?
You appeared to be arguing that noting that race is merely a social construct is lacking in some manner, but all your arguments support the notion that race is merely a social construct. Those arguing for some “real” basis of race are arguing that there is a biological reality that the word race identifies. If you are not arguing that they are correct, then the actual non sequitur was your post to which I responded.
We have a word, “race,” that people employ in various statements. The point of noting that it is a social construct is to point out that it is merely an invention that has no serious meaning except as people act on (pretend that), there is some reality behind it.
You did not actually read my post, did you.
Yes, there are differences between various human groups. Scientists call those groups populations. Earlier, there was a belief among some scientists that there were only a handful of populations and they called them races. They believed that there were characteristics that were true of each “race” that were not true of the other “races.” We now know that whatever can be said of a smaller group–a population–cannot be generalized to the larger group, the one that was called race. When someone claims that there are five races, they mean nothing more than that there are five areas of the world where we arbitrarily assign the inhabitants to some “race.” (Some people even pretend that there are three races.)
There is nothing inherently wrong with using the word race to identify the hundreds of genetic populations around the world, EXCEPT that every time someone uses the word “race” to identify a population, someone else will come along and pretend that what is true of that smaller population is true of everyone in the socially constructed race.
In your odd example, labeling the Han as Coloradans would be to associate the Han with people adapted to living in mountains–even though 40% of Colorado is flatter than Kansas. And that is pretty much what people do when they use the word race. They find a group of people who have a trait, such as living in Boulder, and then say that Coloradans are mountainous people, ignoring all the Han who live in Julesburg, Sterling, Lamar, and even Greeley where there are no mountains. The people in Julesburg, Sterling, Lamar, and Greeley vote for the same governor as the people in Boulder, Estes Park, Aspen, and Grand Junction, but they do not see the same landscape out their windows on the way to work or shopping. It is only by recognizing that “race” is a social construct that has no bearing on the nature of people that we can avoid pretending that labeling a person as belonging to a race tells us something about him or her other than the general region in which his or her ancestors lived, just as we cannot tell by learning that a person is from Colorado whether they are used to driving on curving mountain roads or battling high plains’ crosswinds when they are driving. Nor can we presume that a person from Colorado is likely to have less experience driving in plains’ crosswinds than a person from Kansas.
Of course it matters, if you want to call what you’re doing science. If you want to call it armchair blathering, which is what it is, then sure, it doesn’t matter much.
You defended the use of the term race in an earlier post. Now you say you don’t want to use it. Make up your mind.
Incidentally, the term for extended family is not race, it’s ethnic group, ethny, tribe, or clan. Perfectly well established terms we already have settled definitions for.
No. Humans have less genetic diversity than many other species. Less than chimpanzees, for example.
Who’s we? Your royal we most certainly does not include mainstream professionals in the biological sciences. So who exactly is doing this line drawing?
NDD and the others are claiming this is a settled issue, that these things have been proven. In reality, the claims have either been proven false, or remain uncertain due to lack of evidence.
It isn’t enough to talk in a general way about evolution creating differences in cognitive ability. You have to identify the specific mechanisms which led to cognitive differences. I’ll save you some time: there are none.
Africa isn’t a tropical paradise where food grows without effort. In fact the social structure of many African societies gave a reproductive advantage to men with more resources, and higher intelligence certainly helped them to gain more resources.
Mediterranean Europe and the Middle East, where Western Civilization developed, are notable not for their harsh, cold climates, but for their temperateness. Northern Europe, relatively cold, but not nearly as harsh as Central Asia, was backwards until relatively recently. No place in Western Europe has an environment as harsh as those endured by Native Americans in the subarctic, northern plains and northern mountain regions they traversed to settle the continents.
i agree with everything here.
No. The analogy was to highlight a principle. Han=Colorado or Han=Kansas, it doesn’t matter to my point.
Blacks have higher self esteem than whites apparently.
I know I’m a little late to the party but this is a really telling post.
It concedes not only that IQ testing is affected by education levels (when an ideal IQ test shouldn’t be) but that it makes a huge difference.
Yes, huge. I see you’ve tried to limit the damage with your last sentence saying “Biology…is the most important”, but look at the effect that poverty is having according to you:
China, under your scheme should be one of the brightest countries in the world. Instead it comes out dead average because of the poverty of rural parts of china.
If that’s the case then one might expect parts of SS Africa to have supposedly low IQs under these tests as some countries there have much deeper poverty and also have a greater proportion of the population below the poverty line.
And at the very least you’d have to say that if poverty can pull the top country down to average it can pull an average country down to the bottom. IOW just from following your logic through we’d have to say that if SS Africa was as wealthy as the West the average IQs would probably be comparable (100).
Now is usually the time he pulls out the discredited IQ “estimates” (or made-up numbers) by Lynn for the IQ of sub-Saharan African countries.
True but I’m actually using NDD’s own numbers here, and just following his logic through.
But yeah, several times I and others have shown that his arguments are often refuted by his own cites. So I doubt this one is going to change his mind. Not sure why I posted it in fact.
Are you saying self esteem is genetically determined?
How did that happen? That is, that only a minority of African-Dominicans self-ID as “black”? Where do they draw the line?
Dom Rep, Puerto Rico, and Brazil all reckon this in a similar way. Only people who can pass for black Africans will consider calling themselves black, and even there, many don’t ID as black if they have money or education. Money whitens. Skin shade and socio economic class matter more than what we call race in the US, and a certain amount of mixing is taken for granted.
WaPo columnist Eugene Robinson was surprised by this when he visited Brazil. Most of the people in his social circle didn’t call themselves black even though they were darker than he was.
I am Dominican. I will explain to you how this works: There is no question in the census for each person to identify how they define themselves. The census-taker takes a good look at you and write whatever he wants. Black means very, very dark. The vast majority are considered mixed to various degrees and a minority slightly bigger than “blacks” look “white”. Since we have been mixing like rabbits for more than 500 years this “looks black” or “looks white” is highly unscientific. So yeah, bullcrap.
While I agree with the general proposition that there may very well be differences in the races when it comes to mental prowess, andy that there may even be some evidence supporting that (weak as it may be), what you’re pointing to here is much more easily explained by culture. In fact, when I was working on an educational product years ago and plowed through report after report after report, one of the things that jumped out was that, in regards to Asians in the U.S., yes they greatly outperform the norm at first, but for those who had been here for 3 generations or more, there was no difference in their academic performance.
Traits are dependent on the interaction between a persons inborn nature and the environment/culture they are raised in. Behavioural genetics studies seem to suggest that people aren’t blank slates:
Genes linked with optimism and self esteem.
Another thing to look at is testosterone and androgen receptors.
The answer is all over this thread. It happened because the concept of race is an arbitrary social construct and people will draw lines wherever it’s convenient considering the local existing “mix” and social stratifications. As I mentioned in my first and unique post in this mess, Obama is considered black in the USA, even though the only thing you can say about him is that he has 50% African ancestry and 50% European ancestry. He could be considered mulatto, white, whatever if he had been living and elected in another country.
Again, as as been said on pages after pages in this thread, racial divisions are cultural, arbitrary, and make no sense neither from a scientific nor from a common sense point of view.
So, “how did that happen?”. In the same way Americans decided that “African-Americans” were essentially all “blacks” despite them coming in all sort of skin shades and with all sorts of mixed ancestry. Somewhat dark-skinned Americans self Self-IDing as “black” isn’t any less weird than somewhat dark-skinned Dominicans not Self-IDing as such.
Every time I read these discussions I feel intellectually raped. Look, the hierarchical structure of intelligence in general is discussed here. At the apex is general intelligence, which refers to the ability in common. There are difference theories of g, but the existence of a g-factor is no longer seriously debated. Debate was settled by a series of studies which showedthat there is just one g. As for Gardner’s “multiple intelligences” or Sternberg’s “practical intelligences,” when factor analyzed they end up either loading on the g-factor or loading on factors (e.g., a general athletic ability factor). that aren’t even remotely close to what most people think of when they speak of intelligence.
As for global population differences in other traits, there are, apparently, super-K differences and related personality differences. These, of course, are on the macro level. And do not necessarily generalize to the inter-individual between region level. That said, thereis plausibly a genetic basis to some regional differences in personality and other behavioral traits.