Excellent thread. If you feel my take is a tangent, I'll drop it after this post.

I disagree here, I feel the question is not at all coherent. The reason why is that fundamentally crime != behavior. The dog study that toothsayer the fool posted is from Duffy, D.L., et al., Breed differences in canine aggression, Appl. Anim. Behav. Sci. (2008), doi:10.1016/j.applanim.2008.04.006. Their methodology was studying how 'dogs have responded, ‘‘in the recent past’’ to a variety of common events and stimuli'. Sure, I believe that certain responses to certain stimuli can be scientifically demonstrated to be different by breed.

Law and crime aren't like that at all. All laws are fundamentally status offensives. The law doesn't say nobody can take anybody into custody, it says only certain people can take others into custody under certain circumstances. The same exact "stimula" can lead to the same exact "response"... while in some cases that "response" is legal, and in other cases that "response" is illegal.

I believe there is a vast difference between immigrants and their children. If you lump them together the average is going to get pulled up quite a bit. Also, if you count the vast influx of Indians who have been coming over lately, they are starting out highly educated.

I think he's referring to poor, uneducated, unskilled Asians who come here and then have children here, who in turn seem to find a level of success that seems to buck many trends.

One thing you all missed badly in the last 100 posts is geography. geographic mobility and human geography(in relation to wealth) are probably the most important aspects of racism and race relations.

My response and previous explanation to you (i.e my question as to when Asians or Jews lived under similar circumstances) still applies. Again, like toothsayer you are asserting without evidence that some group has faced similar circumstances but with different outcomes (i.e that these hypothetical immigrants "buck many trends"). Neither of you has made any attempt to substantiate any part of that claim.

Yeah, I don't think we really disagree. I'm just not sure it's the best way of clarifying the idea of "race as a social construct" to Chris. I tried to make clear my agreement on the point that human social behavior is enormously complex (especially compared to dogs!), and that the nature of this complexity (the role of culture and society) is a reason why biological explanations have not proven very useful. Chris, I think, conceded that point in his first post.

He was arguing instead about whether calling race a social construct implied a complete lack of biological basis for human diversity. Since that is a misconception to begin with, I think clarifying the meaning of the phrase "social construct" is more useful than an argument about the social construction of the legal system, even though the latter is certainly related to the topic of the thread. Also you don't need my permission to post about it obviously :P

Asian here. The upward mobility of the "poor asian immigrant" is largely a myth. Most Asian immigrants are rich and well-educated in their home countries. If you don't have money, you can't come over.

I agree that cultural critique is warranted, but you can't deemphasize the role of capital and tribe in shaping success. Do you think people start businesses or send their kids to top colleges without capital? Is being born into that privilege hard work or luck? And is life unnecessarily bad for the unlucky?

http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2012/...ian-americans/

A century ago, most Asian Americans were low-skilled, low-wage laborers crowded into ethnic enclaves and targets of official discrimination. Today they are the most likely of any major racial or ethnic group in America to live in mixed neighborhoods and to marry across racial lines.

Asian immigrants first came to the U.S. in significant numbers more than a century and a half ago—mainly as low-skilled male laborers who mined, farmed and built the railroads. They endured generations of officially sanctioned racial prejudice—including regulations that prohibited the immigration of Asian women; the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which barred all new immigration from China; the Immigration Act of 1917 and the National Origins Act of 1924, which extended the immigration ban to include virtually all of Asia; and the forced relocation and internment of about 120,000 Japanese Americans after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941.


I can't get numbers on their poverty levels, only the ones recently. Meaning, I can't find anything that shows the level of change between poor immigrants and their children, within one generation.

Nonsense. Recent immigrants are better educated and start off successful. Almost every Asian I know here were in the polar opposite - in my area we had poor, uneducated immigrant parents (early to mid 70s). Almost all have vastly surpassed their parents status.

It's not a magic trick that you get immigrants who are uneducated and can't speak the language churn out children who become highly educated and break right into the top tiers of income. We are talking about people who come from financial disadvantage, cultural and language disadvantages, and absolutely no help with education (homework). They literally have the entire deck stacked against them, and somehow they manage to thrive.

Tooth is right. Culture plays a significant role in the results.

Asians come from almost exclusively from 2 parent homes and prioritize education, not rocket science

My opinion is that there are three fails here. One is related to "race is a social construct", which we are 100% in agreement with, and which you explained excellently, with a great Coates linkee, etc. I'll get out of your way here.

My second point is that this comparison to dogs, etc isn't just useless, it's fundamentally absurd. No amount of behavioral testing is going to tease out the difference between illegally taking someone into custody (kidnapping), and legally taking someone into custody (a cop making a valid arrest). Right now there are prisons full of convicted retail drug dealers. What "stimula" could we use to behaviorally test the "reaction" of taking up a career as a retail drug dealer?

This whole dog-thingee is asserting hard science. There is no hard science here, just absurdity.

Third, of course, just because genobe group A is significantly different than genobe group B in something... doesn't make correlation == causation. This is, of course, the mistake ToothSayer the fool is making.

In a shocking turn of events, Wil's citation is his friends.

Hey, great thread WN (at least when you're not on vacation). May I ask, are you currently working on your masters/doctorate, and if so, in what field?

Edit: This is re well named's post #100.

That's fine as far as it goes, it's absolutely right to observe that race is a social construction and that it doesn't always correspond well with underlying biological reality. Where we start to stray into the continuum fallacy is when the claim is made that this invalidates race as a useful concept, or that there is no correspondence at all with a biological reality.

Color is a concept that is socially and culturally constructed. For example, many languages do not distinguish between blue and green. This influences the way we perceive things; research has found that speakers of Russian, which considers "light blue" and "dark blue" two different colors, are more adept at distinguishing shades of blue. But it would be the continuum fallacy to conclude that therefore "color" is a useless concept, or that it does not correspond at all to any underlying physical or biological reality. The analogy is a pretty good one because we could define color in biological terms by classifying wavelengths of light in terms of how well they activate retinal cones. Color as culturally defined would be an inexact approximation of this biological reality; for instance, the Russian distinction between light and dark blue probably wouldn't make sense under a biological classification system.

So to return to the part of your post I thought was fallacious:

Blue light is more effective at promoting plant leaf growth than red light. An analogous post would look something like this:

The fallacy here should be glaringly obvious, but your post contains precisely the same fallacy.

To clarify a bit further, Wright is presumably trying to explain a social issue (statistics about races) in terms of biology (population genetics). You're saying this is invalid because race doesn't match up well with population genetics in many instances (Hispanics, Mexicans and so forth), but the work that is not $hown here is that "black" and "white" specifically are racial concepts which do not map well onto population genetics.

Similarly in the color example, the explanation of the real world observation involving the culturally loaded concepts "blue" and "red" is explained ultimately in terms of wavelengths of light. It's not enough to say that color doesn't always match up well with wavelengths of light, to invalidate an explanation based on wavelengths you'd have to show that "blue" and "red" specifically don't differ enough in those terms.

Sure, culture and family formation play their roles in manufacturing success. I even agreed with him by saying he's right to critique culture. That said, what you're saying is nonsense. Your circle is impossibly small. There are plenty of older Asian hoods across America that prove Asians with disadvantages largely fail unless they are assisted, exceptional and/or pretty lucky.

And you're not completely wrong that there are poor Asian immigrants who are successful. But, for the most part, the presence of capital (intellectual, social, wealth) separates your typical "good Asian" (Japanese, Chinese, Indians) from "bad Asian" (Vietnamese, Laos, etc).

Look beyond your experience and gain some perspective. I don't blame you, but you are definitely biased and underestimating your friends parents. Make a better assumption and credit the parents who are responsible for producing friends you see yourself in.

Put simply, successful Asians are most similar to successful Whites. I have nothing to gain by pointing out to you my advantages, but here I am doing it because you and Tooth are misusing Asian immigrant experience (ability to manipulate their old system to immigrate or wealthy, 2 parent households, strong communities) to draw parallels with a typical Black experience (poor, born into poor school districts, crime by and crime against past generations).

I don't have time to find a better link but here's the first example that came up:
http://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/ne...-groups-in-l-a

from the article:

"White households in Los Angeles have an estimated median net worth of $355,000. By comparison, Mexicans and U.S.-born blacks are estimated to have a median net worth of $3,500 and $4,000, respectively.

Additionally, among nonwhite groups, Japanese ($592,000), Asian Indian ($460,000), Chinese ($408,200) and Filipino ($243,000) households had estimated median net worth values far in excess of blacks who recently moved to the Los Angeles area from Africa ($72,000), other Latinos ($42,500), Koreans ($23,400) and Vietnamese ($61,500).

“The socioeconomic status of immigrants prior to entering the U.S. plays an important role in influencing the wealth position of particular groups,” said Melany De La Cruz-Viesca of the Asian American Studies Center at UCLA and lead author of the report. “This report not only reveals a nuanced story of racial wealth differences in L.A., perhaps more importantly, it also explores the local nature of asset markets and what factors influence the wealth status of communities of color.”

The majority of immigrants who came to the United States after the passage of the 1965 Immigration Act are highly educated, possess higher levels of wealth than the average American, and are highly skilled professionals who are more likely to hold jobs that pay more. One exception is Vietnamese immigrants, many of whom came to the United States as refugees generally with limited financial resources. The National Asset Scorecard and Communities of Color survey findings are consistent with this general pattern.

The NASCC survey findings reveal staggering disparities that should serve to urge lawmakers to identify and pursue policies that can help narrow racial wealth differences, the authors said. In particular, there’s a need to develop policies that address structural discrimination in asset and credit markets and the inherited inequalities associated with vast differences in parental wealth"

This is all wrong.

We can make machines that can create color. I'm using one to type this on, and you're surely reading this on one also. If I type <color=123456>Hello</color>, except with square brackets, I get Hello. Now, the question: "do you see the same color #123456 as I do?" isn't a question for science. That's a question for epistemology, a branch of philosophy. What science can answer, is that typical humans will experience a consistent color #123456, they will consistently find it complementary to color #563412, etc. In other words we can scientifically establish the color wheel. But, what science can't answer is the question "is color #123456 'blue'"?

The name of color #123456 is a social construction. So is the name for color #255 and for color #65535. Now, if I understand what you wrote about Russian, color #123456 and color #65535 would be called whatever the word for 'cyan' is, while color #255 would be called whatever the word for 'blue' is. In English they'd all be called simply 'blue'.

Race works the same way. Using Emerson's eyes, so to speak, Germans and French folk are different races. Using our modern eyes, they are both 'white'. A gringo might go to Mexico and see a buncha people of the 'Mexican race'. A Mexican traditionally sees the same buncha people is being 'indio', 'mestizo', or 'criollo'... three distinct races. Etc.

I hope this helps.

This is true, but doesn't directly support an objection to my argument about the relationship between Black crime and concentrated poverty. If you want to use racial crime rates in the present, you need to demonstrate that Asians and Blacks live in equivalent social conditions now. If you want to make an argument about a century ago, you need to cite crime rates from a century ago, or demonstrate the way in which events of a century ago influence the present.

Remember that my objection to comparing Asians to Blacks is precisely that Blacks have endured conditions of disadvantage and poverty much worse than the general population for literally centuries and that this is not true of Asians. I have made some effort to demonstrate how past injustices are perpetuated in the present. If you want to make an argument that there is a racial difference unrelated to the factors I've cited that explains the progress Asians have made in the US relative to Blacks over the last century, you need to do more than note the relative difference and change over time. You have to try to explain how those changes occurred.

Fortunately, your Pew Research link, and other supporting material, provides such an explanation:

So, when we evaluate the modern success of Asian-Americans, we are not looking primarily at the descendants of oppressed Asian immigrants from a century ago, we are looking at a group of mostly recent immigrants, the majority of which were relatively wealthy and advantaged before immigrating. The Migration Policy Institute provides additional support:

Given that data, it should be clear why why the oppression of Asian immigrants a century ago is misleading, and why the argument about relative crime rates between Blacks and Asians in the present fails. The Asian racial group is composed mostly of recent immigrants who came to the country with relatively higher socio-economic status and at a time well after the worst of anti-Asian racism in American society has passed. This is not true for the overwhelming majority of Black Americans.

I don't have any college degrees. I skipped school when I was younger. Professionally I'm a computer programmer. I'm in my mid-30s now and just began pursuing a BS in anthropology. On the other hand, my wife is a sociologist with a BS in anthropology, a masters in comparative culture, and a doctorate in sociology. She's my source for free textbooks and help finding relevant research :P

"As far as it goes" was all I ever intended in the sentences you are objecting to. When I said I was surprised, it's because in anthropology and sociology those sorts of explanations fell out of fashion a few decades ago. Not because they are logically incoherent or theoretically invalid, but because it is clear that biological explanations of social inequalities are far less persuasive than socio-cultural explanations.

That is both a matter of empirical evidence and of the conceptual difficulties with translating social concepts of race into meaningful biological ones, as I think the anthropological blog I linked yesterday helps clarify. I think your analogy to color fails to recognize the full impact of this conceptual difficulty. In any case, saying that race was "more" a social construction than a biological one was intended as a very brief statement of the above conclusions, as I keep explaining. It was not an attempt to say that biological factors are a priori irrelevant and invalid.

Basically, if you want to argue that those couple sentences were unclear then I'm happy to agree that they could have been clearer, and I'm happy to have taken the time to try to clarify them. My attempt to be brief on that point (in order to spend more time presenting research) was perhaps a failure. Where I wrote that Wright infers "real" racial differences, I should have said biological racial differences meaningful to explanations of social inequality. Socially constructed differences are still "real". By mentioning only the conceptual problems with race, I gave the impression that those were more important than the empirical problems with the theory, which also seems like a mistake.

The broad argument of my first 3 posts doesn't hinge on the idea that biological explanations are theoretically and a priori invalid, but that they aren't the best explanations of the available data. That is not merely a question of the conceptual difficulties, but again those conceptual difficulties do exist, and I have shown work on that, especially in my previous post to you. I would refer you again to the arguments here. See especially the section which begins here: "Computer software that finds genetic clusters did not prove anything about traditional race categories, and in fact proves that race is a social construction."

I think I can make this argument simpler and clearer.
The quoted data and statements above would look identical even if some nefarious alien bred Africans over 20+ generations to have an average 130 IQ and Europeans to have an average 70 IQ, because nearly all genes would be unaffected by this selection pressure.

The quoted data and statements above would look identical if the peak of cultural success for 50 generations - success which led to far more breeding - was defined by the depth of one's understanding and erudition around the Torah (one theory put forward to why Ashkenzai Jews are so intelligent and massively over represented in success in highly intellectual fields).

Or if intelligence, forward planning and agreeableness selection pressures were quite different for 1000+ generations in the colder part of Ice Age Asia as compared to the mild plentiful climates of the more tropical southern regions of Asia.

The in-group and out-group similarity results would look identical to what the quote claims discredits racial/ethnic differences, as a tiny portion of genes are being selected for in making people have different temperaments and cognitive abilities.

Hopefully even someone who doesn't understand the first thing about genetics can appreciate why the above quote is irrelevant for discussing whether there is phenotype-affecting clustering of genetic traits within groups, and if these inform the cultures and habits of these groups.

Does this difference exist? We simply don't know, and won't have a definitive answer until we properly map genes to brain development (10 years?). There's plenty of anecdotal evidence that it might. But regardless, many of the arguments being put forth, including many by well named above, are wholy dishonest/ridiculous, and at odds with observations in other species and the heritability of personality traits and intelligence generally.

The dishonesty in the studies that compare in-group and between-group variation, and use the results to declare race as a concept invalid for any purpose, are a black mark on sociology's honesty.

Ah, the sweeping and unsupported dismissal of social science. My favorite argument.

I deleted the final paragraph. Let's see you argue the substance rather than trying to scurry away.

Taking one tangential comment and using it avoid the fact that you need to respond to very inconvenient arguments. My favorite tactic!

edit: By the way, on Asian or Jewish success, I think the data is very strongly on my side. I just haven't had time to put a post together. I will. I want to get you to focus on "racialized poverty" - your term for why African Americans do so much worse even when controlled for income and parental education - as I think it's a word salad rather than a meaningful concept, and it falls apart when you start to be specific. But that's going to take some thought and time.

Hi wn,

I agree, except that the two are not mutually exclusive. Socio-cultural explanations certainly seem more convincing, but that doesn't preclude a partial biological explanation.

We agree that there are empirical problems with the theory.

I have to admit here to the crime of not reading your links until you posted them a second time (because I thought what you posted ITT provided ample basis for criticism). Now that I have read it, I also don't understand any of the articles he links. If you understand them I'd appreciate some dumbing down. My problems with them are below:

This seems like the continuum fallacy again (i.e. that classification systems that are imperfect are automatically worthless). Belonging to two groups is a problem for biological taxonomy, but not for investigating social groupings that by their nature do not have an exact biological counterpart.

The second abstract I flat out don't understand at all, so I'll skip that. The article he quotes:

That's just a bizarre claim to me, that any deviation from "groups roughly corresponding to the continents" is a disprover of racial genetic clustering. Of course I expect freak genetic clusters that don't correspond to anything in particular (for instance the Kalenjin marathon runners). I don't see how that is relevant to racial genetic clustering writ large.

I don't want to turn this into the typical shouting match, but I'm not sure how you can accuse me of avoiding arguments on substance, given my existing contributions to this thread. In the mean-time, you've avoided responding to any of the points I've made to you, including questions I've asked you about the Ross police shootings study, and also with regard to your comparison between Asians and Blacks. I'm happy to hear that you do intend to address the latter topic, but perhaps you should delay making self-congratulatory remarks about the failures of social science until you actually do so. I hope you will respond to my last post to Wil on that subject.

As far as the rest of your last post, I'm not sure what inconvenient arguments it contains. You quoted me referring to a section header in a blog post about the social construction of race by an anthropologist, but you didn't actually respond to any of the arguments made by the anthropologist, or even refer to any of them. The section header is not the argument! You have to click on the link.

Through your first 5 paragraphs I honestly don't see any actual point or argument being made, aside from responding to the section header instead of the actual argument. It's entirely rhetorical. In your sixth paragraph you acknowledge that we don't know that there's any meaningful link between biological differences and social inequality, which seems to me like a concession that my claim that the evidence doesn't support a biological explanation of racial inequality is correct. I am open to the possibility that future research in genetics, neurology, or other fields will add depth to our understanding. I think I have made that clear when I told Chris that I wasn't arguing that biological theorizing was a prior invalid.

Finally, you claim that some unspecified studies are dishonest but you give no explanation so again I am not sure how to respond since I have no idea what you really mean.

Chris: when I was working on an ad-tech startup over the last few years, I ended up building several models which used clustering algorithms to try to detect click fraud, and through that research became more familiar with the behavior of those algorithms on complex data sets (although I won't claim my data was as complex as human genetics). The bizarre claim you reference is speaking about the way in which the configuration of the algorithm (which is given by the user prior to the data) conditions the output of the algorithm.

Basically, the criticism is that there is a "garbage-in, garbage-out" style problem with the analysis, in that the results you obtain are very much a function of the configuration of the model. This is similar to problems that occur with Bayesian models where the outputs may be highly dependent on subjectively made choices about prior probabilities, if you have ever encountered that sort of thing. The data is complex enough that you can run the model with differing configurations and get it to tell you that there is really 1 human race, or 2, or 5, or 20, or whichever number you desire. There are many ways of dividing humans into groups by genetic affinity.

Because genetic variation is highly correlated to geographic distribution, if you run the model to generate the number of racial groups which corresponds to popular conceptions, you will get an output that roughly matches the popular conception. But, that output is not epistemically privileged, or more ontologically "real", then the results of the algorithm when it is set to look for 1 racial group, or two. The users of the algorithm are privileging that one configuration, and their choice of configuration is conditioned by the preexisting social concept of race, but it's a mistake to think that the algorithm uniquely confirms the validity of our racial categories over against other possible sets of racial categories.

Again, this is not a criticism that says that therefore biological differences don't exist. It's a criticism against taking the output of a clustering algorithm as though it were highlighting a uniquely real biological set of races. The limitations of the method are important because they limit the conclusions which may be justified. We may expect genetic variations to have implications for human behavior, but we may also more reasonably expect the causality and meaningfulness of those genetic variations to be higher when we distinguish groups with more granularity, i.e when we treat Kalenjins as an ethnic/racial group distinct from other Africans, let alone from African-Americans.

If taking this criticism to entail that biological differences are meaningless is a continuum fallacy, taking it to entail that biology is likely an important factor in social inequality is something akin to a composition fallacy, if that analogy isn't too tortured.