Quote:
Originally Posted by coordi
Claiming "Race is a social construct" in the face of a nuanced subject as racism is an infallible stance, and one of sincere intellectual dishonesty
"Perhaps the most celebrated confusion of geographic difference for race followed the publication of Genestic Structure of Human Populations (Rosenberg et al., 2002). The authors studied genetic variation in 1052 people from 52 populations and then asked a computer program called Structure to group the samples. When they asked it to produce two groups, Structure gave them EurAfrica and East Asia-Oceiania-America. When asked for three groups, Structure gave Europe, Africa, and East Asia-Oceania-America. When asked for four, it gave Europe, Africa, East Asia-Oceania, and America. When asked for five, it gave roughly the continents. And when asked for six, it gave the continents and the Kalash people of Pakistan. When asked for more (up to twenty groups), it gave more (Bolnick, 2008)"
This is an excerpt from Well Named linked. I think it shows illustrates pretty clearly that the idea of race as we use it is a social construct.
For one, the act of deciding how many "races" there are is arbitrary. If you took 10 scientists who do gene clustering research and didn't allow them to collaborate at all, and asked them how many human races there were and what they are, you would probably get a lot of different answers. This is especially true if the scientists were all chosen from different parts of the world, as they would be bringing different socially constructed baggage to the table that would probably influence how they decided to make genetic distinctions. If you took 10 mathematicians from around the world and didn't allow them to collaborate, and asked them what 2+2 was, they would presumably all come to the same answer.
Second, if you went into the real world and walked up to people on the street in the US and told them there was actually only 2 races, and they had to guess what they were, (a) they would not all come up with "EurAfrica and East Asia-Oceiania-America" and (b) no one would agree to reorganize society to reflect this (ie racial quotas getting into college), because the concept of race in the real world is arbitrary (socially constructed) and does not map onto the science of genetic difference with particularly high fidelity.
Also, I concede that the fact that if scientists did come to a consensus tomorrow that it was correct to demarcate humans into 2 races based on genetic similarity, and all the white people were told they were actually the same race as black people, a lot of white people who don't consider themselves racist would probably have a lot more problems with this then if the designations had fallen in a different way, which I guess illustrates how the problem of racism is deeper than just overt white supremacy.
Ironically, I don't think Sam Harris would have any problem at all with this designation (if he agreed the scientific rationale behind deciding to arbitrarily choose 2 races was sound), because he isn't racist and is intellectually honest (at least insofar as the limits of his cognitive biases)
Last edited by Kelhus999; 05-23-2019 at 04:56 AM.