They are unacceptable and racist positions. In addition, I see no reason to believe they are true.
I’m also confused. Are you saying that if they were true, it’d be immoral to refer to them as being true, that some sort of polite fiction would have be to maintained?
I’m not answering any hypotheticals here. There’s no reason to believe racist claims are true right now, any more than there is a reason to believe one race is chosen by God to rule over the rest. Such claims are racist, and right now, it doesn’t matter why one believes or makes the claim- it’s a racist claim/belief, regardless of the motivation.
I had some follow-up remarks, but they are similarly hypothetical, so I’ll politely bow out, per your clarification above.
I’m not sure this clears up my confusion, but if we can’t consider scenarios in which the positions are true, I’m not sure that’ll change.
When we are talking about racism, what we’re really talking about is ethnocentrism. And while I agree that regardless of what we call it, this chauvenistic tendency exposes a pretty ugly side of human nature and has led to countless suffering through the ages.
Still, I wonder if ethno-centricity has an evolutionary, perhaps not so obvious advantage for the long term survival of the human species.
Hard to tell. There are few examples in nature – and all I know of are limited to primates – of competition between family-bands of the same species.
Do you advocate for or against genetic research in ethnic differences and the comparative advantages/disadvantages these studies may (or may not) reveal?
I don’t have any problem with research of any kind, as long as it’s good and ethical science.
Okay, but you’d have to agree that doing “good and ethical science” in the field of comparative intelligence* between various ethnic groups is a mine field for any researcher(s).
*Not that there isn’t plenty of other research that needs doing, is arguably more worthwhile and almost certainly less controversial.
Whether this is true or not, so what? Why shouldn’t it be a mine field? Good science isn’t supposed to be easy.
I don’t believe I said anything with regards to it having to be easy. 
I’ll fall firmly in the former camp, and this is a distinction that many racists fail to get. Racist beliefs, if there were an iota of good evidence for them, ought to be part of the mainstream conversation.
But it so happens that there’s not a shred of strong evidence to support racist beliefs about intelligence, morality, etc., and not for lack of looking. Our culture has literally spent centuries looking for that evidence, and only a few decades seriously examining it. And in those few decades of serious examination, virtually everyone has seen that the evidence to support these racist claims is ridiculously weak. There’s no good discussion to be had here.
These beliefs have been disproven, falsified, curb-stomped, pulverized, torn apart by packs of rational dogs, and blown to smithereens. There is no rational reason to hold these beliefs any longer.
Anyone who holds these beliefs despite the mountain ranges of evidence against them holds racist beliefs.
I would agree. But the position being taken here by the OP appeared (and appears?) to be that these would be unacceptable positions even if they were true.
Out of curiosity, as someone largely unschooled in the area, is there an accessible scholarly discussion of this “blowing to smithereens”? I had been under the impression that there was some discrepancy in performance on a number of metrics (from the LSAT to IQ tests) between races, even after controlling for other factors. I know that there are theories about test bias, the tests generally, definitions of race, socioeconomic factors, etc. But you certainly make it sound like all of this has been more conclusively resolved than I had assumed.
Disparate outcomes exist (in statistics for education, crime, economics, etc.). And in the past, there were disparate outcomes too- with different groups at the top and bottom. The “genetic hypothesis” (e.g. that inherent genetic tendency differences between various groups for high/low intelligence/aggression/etc. are the best explanation for these disparities) is one hypothesis, but there is no actual genetic evidence to support it- for example, no genes found for high or low intelligence, much less evidence that different groups have different likelihoods for these genes.
It’s reasonable to assume that whatever factors put various groups at the top and bottom in the past are still present to varying degrees- we’re not even close to a perfectly equal world yet. So without such genetic evidence, there’s no reason at all to support the genetic explanation over other explanations.
This makes sense to me. But it’s not particularly consistent with vivid imagery of debunking provided in the other post.
Every mechanism put forward to explain racial disparities along genetic or inherited lines over the past 200 years has been debunked. Every mechanism to define races along genetic or inherited lines over the last 200 years has been debunked. For 200 years, these quasiscientific theories have been used to justify denying rights to nonwhite people within American and European culture.
So when someone comes along with a “scientific” theory that attempts to define races using genetic or inherited lines, and especially that attempts to account for racial disparities using such lines, they’re working within a centuries-long tradition.
That’s nonsense. Science evolves. Old theories are disproven and replaced by new theories.
The notion that since all the old theories have been debunked therefore all potential new theories must also be false has no logical basis.
I read extensively on the subject about two decades ago; my source material is somewhat out of date. If you’d like to explore the question more fully, you might start here.
What a ridiculously inept summary of what I said, and what a ridiculously inept understanding of science it betrays.
No, new theories aren’t false because past theories were debunked. But when there are 200+ years of attempts to explain using biology what’s more elegantly explained by society, and when the folks making those attempts are trying to deny rights to a group, then future attempts to do the same thing face increasingly high hurdles.
Last night I got a call from some dude who wanted to talk with me about my Windows machine. He was calling from Windows Tech Support. Now, the fact that I’d read about this scam in the past didn’t mean that he was a scammer. The fact that he didn’t know whether I had a Windows computer didn’t mean that he was a scammer. The fact that this is a well-known scam didn’t mean that it’s a scammer.
But I was almost as sure that he was a scammer as I am sure that a new racist theory is false, because I can evaluate past evidence and use it to predict the solidity of new evidence.
Science is cumulative. There’s a nonzero chance that some biological explanation of race will come along, just like there’s a nonzero chance that a biological explanation of the Sun’s energy will come along. But every bit of science we pile on the heap of our knowledge reduces that chance closer to zero.