Stop Me Before I Vote Again

I'd never heard of Dr. Agassiz before though I had heard generally of those who used pseudo-science to justify (dare I say it) "racial" hatreds.

A very educational post.

Thanks,

I tend to agree with the point that special studies departments is silly, a combination of ghettoization and standards-lowering.

But, you know, of course, that race is as real sociologically as it is bogus as a biological claim about appearance groups.

The contradiction therein, including the political obfuscation involved, is something we could better understand, with the help of people who get paid to work full time on the issue. Like Adolph Reed, for instance. And George M. Fredrickson.

I imagine most people would find the idea that "race" doesn't exist to be counterintuitive. Though most sane people recognize the idea that a person's character or motivations can be determined by his or her race is nuts, there is surely some reason why white people have white skin, colored hair, etc, and black people are black. Why do diseases like Tay Sachs or Sickle Cell tend to occur in specific "racial" groups and not in others?

I am not trying to be contentious here. This is a subject I know nothing about and I am unfamiliar with the scientific refutations, if any, of the concept of "race." I am seeking to be better informed. It's just that I find the oft-repeated idea that "race is a social construct" to be unconvincing.

I do agree the way we generally view race and the arbitrary qualities many assign to this or that perceived racial group is a social construct. That doesn't mean there is no biological basis to "race." I would like to know what the science is on the question of race. Any help would be appreciated.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_(classification_of_human_beings)

Sean -- What opened my own eyes, back in the day, was Ashley Montagu's old Man's Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy Of Race. No doubt there is more recent stuff too; perhaps some other readers here can suggest titles. I'm not home at the moment and can't go scan my shelves. I seem to remember there's something by Richard Lewontin (who's well worth reading in any case).

Sickle cell anemia is NOT a racial disease. It's a measure of how long your population lived near malarial areas. Sickle cell trait is a defense against malaria.

MJS is right. Read Lewontin.

If our society were 1/4 as civilized as its masters claim, everybody would know this.

Professors have taken a worthy theme and used it to churn out new genres of intellectual fraud.

At least, with the adjunctification of universities, dealing with the practical realities of scraping by will make it harder and harder for those who teach this rubbish to keep believing it themselves.

Sean, generally speaking traits such as white skin become persistent when they yield an advantage. In that particular circumstance, the lower melanin makes it easier to synthesize Vitamin D. That's beneficial to people who live in northern climes. In very harsh circumstances, a slight advantage can make a big difference.

Dangerous recessives crop up due to isolation and population die-offs. If they're not immediately lethal, and exogamy becomes difficult or impossible, they get concentrated.

to abolish the biological basis of population
"characteristics"
by appeal to one or other finesse move
is quite jeffersonian ...or is it franklinite

populations once sufficiently seperate
will begin to diverge
they have diverged

equalization as well unequalization
under the law
are both obviously social constructions
but biological claims of race become greatly more difficult to wipe out by jeffersonian means ...needless to say

since on one level
all our constructs are social after all
their status must contain other seperating features
race may not be like the electron as much
as the aether or the atom
but its not like the unicorn or the angelic host

take mendelian genes to fire close to the target
now we've studied em
up close in the flesh so to speak
they develop such self confliction complexity in inter action among themselves let alone with their partly "self created" contexts stuff gets hegelian pretty quick

ahh
the platonic purity is lost ...
well to say there are races
is unfortunately a finesse of a complex of briary problems much like the contrivence of the population sharing a so called common gene pool

let the philosphers contend

to retreat into nominalism
when a unity is exploded into a plurality
say at some bio -molecular substrate or other
like mendels poor gene
or the dear old hellenic atoms
we get to the raggedy edge
and once again start showing there is no dusk no dawn only continuous transitions
enter stage right the fossilization
the kantian antinomy
discrete and continuous
both and neither at once
here applied to the origins of human anatomy
which is it
individuals only or are their "real"
racial groupings

enter the hegelian dialectic stage left ....

ahh the dry air tasks me ....

-----------
ps
along mjs's essentially 18th century lines
there is a final nuclear option
a final slicing of the gordian knot

that must enter the battle somewhere
at each reformulation of the struggle of opposites here
even after dear old aggassiz and his seperate and apparently unequal racial "creation" theory is demolished
by the evidence
and we've moved on thru mendel and darwin
to ooops two seperated " populations "

each the products of quite seperate paths from a common origin
and now containing gene pools
with different frequencies of certain genes\ alleles hey even unique alleles
that only emerge as they are compared and ironically begin to re=merge
these frequencies of alleles become
jansenism
the trageic fate of isolation

yup this nasty bit of imposed patterning
by way of waterboarded data bases
"allows" history to enter as enemy of the oppressed and alibi of the oppresssor

so we return to metaphysics
once again
"we hold these truths to be self evident "

race does not exist

it has no coherent unequivical biological basis
it is a social construction
that is also a social fiction
so lets forget this nasty contrivence
of early colonial imperialism
and
get down to individual cases

the foundation of the meritocracy eh ??
very enlightened

there are many more social evils
then taught in our present ivy philosophy philosphy horatio

my hope is obvious enough
once we know our genes can can change our genes what form of bondage are they

nothing worse then a flat chest on a teen aged girl

ie
subject to "repair"

the divergent development of peoples
in mother India
as we euro imps call her
offers much field for meme plunder

castes vs races ??

was new orleans headed that way and haiti too ??

lenin saw local jews
as a caste of the empire not "a nation"

among much else
race as a social construct requires
laws to artificially partition populations

legal enforcements become acts
that guide the mass metabolism of the generations
right at conception

the splendor of a proliferation of castes
like tribes
like dogs and gold fish
the result of "artificial " genetic isolation
applied to some original unitary species
to draw out and fix for generations
certain desired distinguishing features

quite a social impluse to lay up agin

races don't exist so we are forced to create them

from the "natural" inequality of individuals
to the "natural" inequality of historically seperated groups
ends as soon as the groups cross fertilize
the course of reproduction of society
by the inter conjugation of the groups

when this generation process
becomes utterly artificial utterly determined a priori
onlt restricted by ...the price tag involved

what then ???

now come goodman lewontin

with another finesse

genetic determinism is a mechanists' fraud

evidence is supplied of enviro mediations
so utterly transforming gene expression

then throw in genes altering each others expression and ...
well yes complexity as in three layers
not the moronic two of the socvio biologists

not input genes output behaviours

but input genes into a layer(s)
of wicked mediations
that in turn at long last
outputs behaviours

la lucha continues

Human speech as a concept is purely a social construct; there's no entity in the outside world that corresponds to it. It's a fairly recent invention and has pretty clear roots as both reflex of, and justification for, certain human institutions, like communication over the phone where gesture is ineffective.

I see MJS holding the ladder for Melissa as she chisels Agassiz's name off a schoolhouse. Very whiggish, but fun!

Speech is a practice, Lunch; race is a theory.

la lucha may continua, but given his/her/its last intervention, I'm left pondering whether La Luncha will Discontinua.

Human speech as a concept is purely a social construct; there's no entity in the outside world that corresponds to it.

Human language arises from real, physical structures in the human brain. Naturally, there is a great deal of slippage between social notions of language and the underlying biological machinery. But human language reflects an objective, underlying neurological reality.

There is also, of course, a great deal of slippage between race as a social and political construct and the underlying realities of biological difference across human descent groups. The two notions are not coterminous, not nearly. But race is not pure unsupported fiction, either.

Race is a set of arbitrary boundaries imposed on a continuum. Moreover, the boundaries always shift. Few people nowadays would say that Jews constitute a different "race", but this was once considered self-evident. And it's not as though new DNA evidence came in to erase that particular boundary: politics and culture erased it.

For that matter, it was once thought self-evident that the Irish are a different race from the English -- as self-evident as the "racial" difference, now so crystal-clear to us all, between black folks and white folks.

And what a wonderful miscellaneous grab-bag granfalloon that latter concept is -- white people! Who are they, exactly? Answer: anybody who's not black.

And what a wonderful miscellaneous grab-bag granfalloon that latter concept is -- white people! Who are they, exactly? Answer: anybody who's not black.

So, in a panicked attempt to disassociate themselves from regressive tea-bagging "whites," what recodification/new social construction of race will enlightened pwog-lib "whites" propose?

With a little fine-tuning what eugyppius says @11:27 and what MJS says @12:02 are not incompatible. The "continuum" has a basis in a certain spectrum (or better yet, patchwork) of biophysical traits, whereby Group A's traits share family resemblances, as do Group B's, and C's, and so on. But of course, the dividing lines b/w Group A and Group B are somewhat nominal -- and as op sagely points out, have something to do with state attempts to organize an ethno-cultural division of labor, not just power-laden discursive constructs.

And actually MJS, there are a few scattered academics in the godforsaken elite universities who do interesting work on this stuff, even though I share your disdain for bourgeois academia in general.

Owen, it's going to be pretty hard to go from a theory of genetics to a theory of consciousness and wind up at a theory of conduct. But if we cull the moronic sociobiologists, we'll be making a good start. Ironically, the one good thing they've done is provide a set of justifications. It's clear that some thoroughly wretched genes are expressing themselves.

For what it's worth (probably not very much), I think this paper does a good job at suggesting the underlying reality of descent group variation:

http://tinyurl.com/yczqp3w

Obviously whole chasms stand between the modern notion of race and statistically observable human difference. But circumstances and geographical accidents have clearly kept many human populations isolated from one another for long periods of time. The result is that variation is not quite a seamless continuum.

Past cohorts of head boys have exploited this fact to develop social constructions of "race" that can be used for political and economic ends. These social constructions are still with us, for the most part, and they're obviously ridiculous. As MJS points out, the notion of whiteness is particularly absurd.

I'm not sure how this contributes to the current discussion, but anyway. I'm procrastinating.

I'm procrastinating.

Tain't we all... and bully for us.

Are you people serious? This is clearly a post written by and being commented on by primarily white men. I can think of no better example of white privilege than a bunch of white men deciding that race doesn't exist and isn't a valid field - and the same goes for woman's studies and I'm guessing gender studies too. Some of you must understand how ignorant that sounds. While race may not be a scientific construct, it is a social one, and the history of the world has made it a very important one. How typical to find a bunch of white men who feel entitled to comment on topics they have no personal knowledge of, little to educational background in, and seem to know nothing about.

I could be wrong about gMAB's provenance, but I would just like to use this opportunity to say I'm very glad MHL shot a twitter link to SMBIVA.

It has increased the hilarity of the comments here significantly.

I guess I'm saying, it would be supercool to be mistaken for a teabagger yet again. Maybe that's hoping too much.

Ah... I love it.

Are you people serious? This is clearly a post written by and being commented on by primarily white men.

That's right. The ONLY form of oppression and prejudice in the world is that which flows from Whites onto Nonwhites. That's the ONLY form.

Therefore if you are a White you cannot understand ANY type of oppression. You simply cannot.

Right?

errrr....wait....I mean,

Left?

Looks like "StudiesPhD" is now "giveMeABreak"

giveMeABreak, I can't speak in defense of everyone (mostly "white" guys, I would surmise) who has remarked on this topic, but I think if you read through the contributions a little more carefully, you will discover that not a single commenter has denied that AS SOCIAL CONSTRUCTS racial classification systems are used to justify, facilitate, rationalize social domination/labor exploitation/imperialism, etc. Maybe a couple of folks have overzealously dismissed the legitimacy of "critical race studies" (or what have you), but mainly the critique has been about how "critical race studies" (or what have you) gets deployed, and for what purposes, in the bourgeois university. Even if some of the comments seem a bit over-the-top or wrongheaded, you gotta understand that they are framed in the larger context of an attack on the pretensions and the crimes of bourgeois universities, and an attack on the illusions/perfidies of those self-styled "meritocrats" who defend them.

PS I would hazard to say that the discussion here has been a lot more robust and LEFTIST than many a "critical race studies" seminar at many a "top 25" university, despite the pigmentation and "privilege" (?!?) of the interlocutors. How many "critical race studies" exponents (grad students and professors alike) continue to provide cover for an Obama Admin that is murdering non-"whites" by the thousands in Central Asia?

Barry O's not from the barrio.

http://img397.imageshack.us/img397/4669/obamasnobxm8.gif

That one, for "GiveMeABreak".

And so it ends with two world-historical options, overweight "white" reactionaries decked out in camo gear, versus multiculti DLC neo-liberals decked out in fashionista pant suits.

A pox on all their houses. This has been joylessly entertaining, as well as mordantly instructive: this country is SO over.

gluelicker, I appreciate the explanation, and perhaps I'll have to back and read a bit deeper. I may have jumped to conclusions having heard where the "race isn't a valid scientific grouping" argument typically goes, but that's not fair. I haven't read this site before, so am not familiar with the typical tone, but I still find this discussion problematic. I'll have to read some more and come back.

CF Oxtrot - what is "Looks like StudiesPhD is now giveMeABreak"? Don't get it?

No, you wouldn't. It's not a type of analysis sanctioned at Hivey Leeg Memorize-and-Regurgitate "learning" factories.

And so it ends with two world-historical options, overweight "white" reactionaries decked out in camo gear, versus multiculti DLC neo-liberals decked out in fashionista pant suits.

What better illustration of highly manipulated, prefab American political debate could you ask for? Open expressions of far-left sentiment repeatedly mistaken for xenophobic right-wing ranting.

It's a clever knot the overlords have tied.

Ay yi yi yi. I can't believe you all actually opened this can of monkey farts.

International conventions and domestic legal prohibitions against discrimination based on perceived racial difference are arguably useful tools in promoting equality, even if academia and the moral theatrics industry sometimes mischaracterize social conflict within a racial framework. The danger comes when this mischaracterization leads policy makers and activists to believe that oppressive relationships like those between Indigenous nations and corporate states can be resolved by equal opportunity within a capitalist system. While not all states employ race as a criteria in exercising oppression, many utilize the colonial model developed by racially-biased European powers, and have adapted to the assimilationist structures for denying human rights to Indigenous peoples, regardless of skin color. In the end, it is this authentic distinction between ways of life that is most crucial to the survival of humankind, rather than superficial constructs like race.

They had their limitations fer shurr, and I'm far from prone to revolutionary chic hagiographies, but when the Black Panthers were undone from without/within, it was a great loss to the US/international left.

uh-oh, Jay.

That's the sort of realism that our Meritocratic Supermen and Wonderwomen won't be able to tolerate seeing in print.

Better start a university with a "racial studies" program to distract everyone from that stuff... eh?

MH, I wish the people you had in mind could simply be written off as "monkey farts" -- but they cannot. Not because the tenure-seeking and tenured crowd on the post-colonial studies circuit (not all of which is retrograde, mind you) is a politically pivotal constituency -- far from it. But because the false dichotomies/parlor games peddled by the more harebrained "identity politics" stewards inform and screw with the public discourse at large, via the so-called "culture wars." And of course the capitalist oligarchs, party pimps, racist retreads, and Fox Snooze shock jocks -- and not a few race and gender and LGBT brokers, like Michael Eric Dyson -- love every "controversial" minute of it, while the Empire slouches toward a worse tomorrow.

Adolph Reed's "What Are the Drums Saying, Booker?" still does good work...

Eugyppius wrote:

circumstances and geographical accidents have clearly kept many human populations isolated from one another for long periods of time. The result is that variation is not quite a seamless continuum.

This variation between ancestral groups is just not important enough on the biological level to loom so large in our way of thinking about human society. The magnification of these tiny differences into a conception of different "races" is plainly inadequately motivated by the biological facts, such as they are, and therefor must be driven entirely, I would argue, by social considerations.

Memorize-and-Regurgitate "learning" factories.

That's not the modality in the po-mo humanities & social science grad programs. To the extent there is memorization, it is the memorization of cutesified concepts that may or may not have at one time had critical (Marxist, even) roots and purposes (such as Gramsci's "hegemony"). To the extent there is regurgitation, it is the mimicry of discursive style practiced by your mentors and peers... a style that is (barely) just credible enough to demonstrate that you can pass as a member of the initiate, but deliberately oblique enough so that no one in the room has to make a substantive claim with concrete referents, and possibly expose and embarrass themselves.

gluelicker... as I said, memorize and regurgitate!

The other noise, that's all just part of the Secret Handshake that forms the real essence for selling Hivey Leeg Genuine Factory Product certificates as highly valued commodities.

Our hydra-headed Pseudonymus (or Pseudonyma) gibbered:

This is clearly a post written by and being commented on by primarily white men. I can think of no better example of white privilege than a bunch of white men deciding that race doesn't exist and isn't a valid field - and the same goes for woman's studies and I'm guessing gender studies too.

1) How does one go about being "primarily white?" Who, if anybody, is secondarily white?

2) How does Pseudonymus/a come to be so sure about the "race" and gender of individuals writing and commenting here?

3) What difference does it make? Who has yet cited personal experience in support of his or her arguments? The points being made here stand or fall on their own merits, quite apart from who is making them.

Pseud. has perfectly exemplified one of the primary tenets of identity politics: namely, that certain topics constitute the exclusive turf of certain groups. I think this strategem reinforces a point I tried to make in the original post: namely, that "identity" as a way of thinking about chauvinism or racism tends to institutionalize the very boundaries it purports to criticize. Members of Group X can make a living in the X Studies Department by being professional X's -- by which I mean not X's who are professional, but people who are professionally X's. And you know how people come to cherish the privileges of their professions, which would not exist if Xitude ceased to be socially salient.

Private Intellectual Property, reads the sign over the Studies Department door. Members Only. No Trespassing!

gluelicker... as I said, memorize and regurgitate!

Now I'm way nitpicking -- procrastination, anyone? -- but it is a very esoteric form of "memorize and regurgitate." No one inculcated in a No Child Left Behind classroom, without other influences or resources, could practice it well enough to get by. Nor could a Chinese, Korean, or Japanese tyro trained in their own secondary school systems. It's all about acquiring the "symbolic capital" and "symbolic capital"-dropping skills necessary for "success" in certain professions that require more flexible and spontaneous forms of kissing ass, self-promotion, upward advancement, herding cats, legitimating power, etc. -- ESPECIALLY in "globalized" (sic) institutions.

Yes, it is esoteric. It's perfect for the slightly-more-intelligent-than-a-cretin minds harvested by the Hivey Leegs. When one is self-impressed courtesy of getting accepted by a Hivey Leeg Factory, one begins to imagine one's self as possessing a subtle, yet powerful intellect. (cliche, cliche, cliche) A bit of Socratic spin on rote memorization -- teasing out Paradigmatic Truths of Empire -- works wonders for indoctrination into the Right Way of Seeing the World.

As to procrastination, I welcome into my own Secret Handshake society all practitioners who make the request. The name of my group -- the WIGATI society.

Second Draft:
The differences in human speech patterns are a purely social construct (Hungarians do not communicate well over the phone with Japanese, for example); there's no entity in the outside world that corresponds to them. These differences are a fairly recent phenomenon, etc.....

Race is a phenomenon that parallels speech differences. Just as cross race fertilization doesn't produce sterile human hybrids, so Hungarians and Japanese communicate effectively without a common grammar and vocabulary if they are thrown together in the flesh.

To deny "race" is similar to denying that Hungarians and Japanese speak different languages.

Concerning Dr. Agassiz:
To place his portrait at the head of this post is whiggish.

From a Wiki article about Herbert Butterfield:
"The Whig Interpretation of History
He had in mind especially the historians of his own country, but his criticism of the retroactive creation of a line of progression toward the glorious present can be, and has subsequently been, applied more generally. A given "whig interpretation of history" is now a general label applied to various historical interpretations.
He found Whiggish history objectionable because it warps the past to see it in terms of the issues of the present, to squeeze the contending forces of, say, the mid-seventeenth century into those which remind us of ourselves most and least, or to imagine them as struggling to produce our wonderful selves."

I can still see MJS delightedly steadying the ladder for Melissa as she chisels Agassiz's name off a schoolhouse.

This thread is a good example of the glee club someone mentioned recently.

Sorry, my socket puppet slipped off. Anonymous is Lunch.

But, not yet Toast, I think.

my socket puppet slipped off

Ah, so it's resolved. Your (socially constructed) gender is "girl." Toast with a XX-Chromosone is defined as "girl," so I've heard.

To deny "race" is similar to denying that Hungarians and Japanese speak different languages.

And I feel certain that an impartial jury would certainly acquit me -- if all the facts were known -- of any tiniest taint of Whiggery.

MJS, an excellent observation... and one which explains how Barry O'Barmy the un-Irish Mulatto Mandingo got the nod instead of Plaintiffs' Whore Johnny Eddie, or Swillary "I'm Better than ANY Man" Clinton-Rodham-Jefferson-Washington:

Members of Group X can make a living in the X Studies Department by being professional X's -- by which I mean not X's who are professional, but people who are professionally X's.

Barry O who's not from the barrio, he's a professional light-skinned articulate Black. Image-wise, in Polite Society, he's the opposite of Fake-Cowboy Gee Dubbs Arbusto.

Ratchet in place!

NOT YET Toast.

But I don't get it, gluelicker. Over my head. Happy to hear more about, though. Is it a sexist joke, perhaps? They're always fun! I was expecting to get something from you. Lunch continues.

MJS is the one who implies that gender is socially constructed and to some extent I agree with that. Gender is partly socially constructed but there is something in the 'outside world that corresponds to it' that is not socially constructed.

Can't think of a way to make race difference - language group analogy clearer. Maybe after a good night's rest, I'll come up with something. Or just change my socks ... or stockings .

You guys are real nice! Well, except for Dawson. He made me cry the other day saying something about 'mindfuck' that made me clamp my knees together really hard.

I think everyone can agree there is genetic variation within human sub-groups and that these variations arise largely as an evolutionary response to the local environmental conditions that existed where these sub-groups originated from. The same goes for the genetic diseases these groups sometimes suffer from.

I don't think this fact either proves or disproves the idea of "race." Some white Europeans are lactose intolerant, some are not. This does not mean they are a separate race. But a person's "race" can be a powerful indicator of whether or not a that individual may be susceptible to a particular genetic disease or not. You can't look at a black guy and tell anything about his character from the color of his skin, but you can say a lot about his odds of his developing sickle cell disease. The Irish may not be a different race than the English, but they do suffer from a genetic disease, haemochromotosis, that is far more common among the Irish than the English or other Europeans. Because of this, I find it a little difficult to swallow the idea that "race" (or at least, one's ancestral genetic sub-group) is biologically meaningless, as it may have some predictive value in medicine.

There's an interesting pro and con debate on race here:

Pro: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/first/gill.html
Con: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/first/brace.html

Perhaps the genetic differences between supposed races are not profound enough to warrant classification as separate races. Some scientists prefer terms like "population" to describe genetic subgroups. But is that a meaningful scientific distinction, or simply a "distinction without a difference?" I haven't seen enough evidence to accept or refute the genetic basis of race, and there does seem to be quite a bit of controversy about it among scientists.

I am concerned that in the interest of political correctness, we may fail to fully examine the implications of thousands of years of localized evolution and how it impacts human health today, perhaps in profound ways yet to be understood.

Happy to oblige, Lunch. I get all sweaty when Lunch eats me, rather than the reverse.

Anyway, my "jibe" had to w/the slippage from "sock" to "socket"... so Lacanian.

Off to seminar!

Out to Lunch: To deny "race" is similar to denying that Hungarians and Japanese speak different languages.

Quite so. Like the fact that the Sun goes round the Earth, this is just common sense. And who can argue with that?

One problem for attempts to use language as evidence for the existence of race is the fact linguistic diversity in Africa, within the "black race", is greater than the linguistic diversity outside the African continent.

In the end, one can no more define a concept of race, using linguistic or any other criteria, which is valid for humanity as a whole, than one can sensibly define race within Africa.

'Lunch continues' zum Stammtisch auf Englisch (die 'lingua franca' von Indien).

Oh, you Romance linguists!

Thank you, Lajany Otum. This is helpful.

As a socially constructed, common sense understanding for (almost) ever the Sun did (does?) go around the Earth. Were it not for (a prejudice in favor of) Occam's razor (a social construction among a tiny subgroup of human beings, well the prejudice in favor of, anyhow) the Sun would still go round the Earth. This is just a POV issue.

A discussion of the concept of race begins with the origins of the concept of race. I don't dispute your 'within - between African language' point, but I don't think it is applicable here. Where did the concept of race begin? In one place or in many? Perhaps at the boundaries of language group regions?

Is it possible to identify the language spoken during life by a corpse via autopsy or histology or in any way yet developed? Examine the same corpse only visually and guess what racial classification the living person would have assigned to himself.

Glue,
"I get all sweaty when Lunch eats me, rather than the reverse."

Didn't you mean to write: "I get all sweaty when Lunch eats my lunch, rather than the reverse." Otherwise you would risk adding gay bashing to your sexism. Well, a sort of implied gay bashing.

Lunch, you didn't get my (perhaps piss-poor, or ill-executed) "joke" at all. Although my assurance prolly means zilch, it wasn't "sexist."
Questions had been raised about the putative gender and race of anonymous posters of here, and why or why not these ascriptive identities mattered. When you miswrote "sock" as "socket," I lamely wrote (in effect), "that settles it, Lunch is 'female'." (Very) crappy humor, perhaps, but not misogynist, unless you're really patrolling for thought crimes, and I trust you're not the sort.

I'm still puzzling over the language/race thing. It still defeats me. People who believe in "race" would say you could learn a new language but you can't change your race. Race is considered something essential, innate, ineluctable; language isn't. You inherit your "race" from your parents; you learn to speak from whoever you learn to speak from. An infant from Shanghai can grow up speaking flawless Brooklyn English and knowing nothing about China but he's still "racially" Chinese, if "race" is part of your conceptual toolkit. But I daresay I'm still missing the point.

On another point raised above, there's a good reason (other than PC) to prefer the term "population" to "race": the former can be fairly precisely defined, unlike the latter. As noted earlier, not all distinct populations are considered different "races" by people who attach some meaning to that term. Why not?

I also haven't gotten any of the "lunch" jokes. I'm soooo confused.

As for "gay-bashing," ha ha ha ha, I was positioning myself as reprimanded, as well as androgynous (!)... you said you were not yet "Toast" (i.e. an item to be eaten), and also (rather arrogantly) implied that you had "won" the last round of repartee... I graciously conceded, implying that you ("Lunch") had "eaten" me and not the other way round, at the same time humbly admitting that I did not mind being devoured, no matter your biophysical sex/socially constructed gender, since I'm an equal opportunity munchee. Capiche? So sorry I had to spell it out gracelessly...

Glue,
Only now have I managed to perceive my typo: socket for sock.
Your joke is good.

Your joke is good.

That's a relief. Now, let's get back to principled beehive-bashing and shape-shifting.

I may be just a bit or a lot incompetent with this internet communication stuff. (Hey, that sure was a short seminar. Or maybe I missed another joke!? I don't know Lacan. Does he/she/it do seminars?)

A problem arises for me when I attempt a quick turnaround (quick by my standards) on a comment. I post and it later turns out that my snippy response doesn't get published until after someone has been gracious.

I'm guessing that a lot misunderstanding is generated thusly in fora like SMBIVA.

As I typed it out, I told myself that glue would be offended slightly by my "good joke" comment.

I should have written: "Your joke is good, not that you require my validation. We all post for our own amusement. If a joke of mine makes me laugh I am satisfied. My (the) imagined responses of the rest of you as I press "Post" are like the behaviors of the characters in my dreams. I invent them but seem not to control them.

I don't know Lacan either, but I can talk/write about him allusively, like MLH's acolytes. Something about penis=male sex organ, phallus=signifier of patriarchy, and language as an ongoing contest in which the (male) speechifier attempts to symbolically do away with his mama, but never quite reach the holy grail of identity resolution, b/c of something called "deferral." Get it, kind of? Me neither! That's the spirit! Seminar over. Time to hustle off to the ice cream fountain, for a big banana split.

Awwwww... cuuuuute. Actually, not: gross, as in GROTESQUE. And I'm not talking about baldy's pate. Bad Al.

I'm going to keep posting grotesque rabbit pictures!

"To deny 'race' is similar to denying that Hungarians and Japanese speak different languages."

Balderdash. Race started out as a claim about deep (mental) differences between appearance group. As biology, race does not mean what it claims to mean. So, to deny it is most certainly not the same thing as denying the fact that different languages exist.

But, despite its falsity as a biological claim, race is all to real, because people, conditioned by 450 years of extreme acts and insistences, believe it's real and act accordingly.

To deny the latter, sociological dimension is logically as dumb as denying that different languages exist.

But Lunch's analogy is obfuscatory, because it collapses the crucial distinction between race as biology and race as history/sociology. Maintaining this distinction is requirement #1 of coherent race education and politics. On this, Lunch is apparently only a Snack.

It seems that a comment of mine has gone missing. No great loss. I hope this one goes through....

I am needing a Dawsoning over of my 9:24PM post.

I hope to live long enough to experience 450 years of conditioning ... of any kind ... piece of cake compared to an eternity in ... well!

I am wondering if the social construction of race might not have a slightly more extensive lineage ... emerging from the mists of prehistory a few centuries (or millennia) before .... say .... Herodotus.

I have forgotten my Herodotus and will trust MJS to set me straight if I need to be so set.

I am concerned that in the interest of political correctness, we may fail to fully examine the implications of thousands of years of localized evolution and how it impacts human health today, perhaps in profound ways yet to be understood.

Well, don't be. Scientists have been onto this subject for decades, and it has been shown that humans vary clinally. That is to say, all this localized evolution has produced populations that are more distinct within in a given geographic location than between them. Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza is an expert on this subject, as is the aforementioned Richard Lewontin. Furthermore, the genetic difference between peoples in different geographic locales have been diminishing steadily for thousands of years. There has always been gene flow between human populations, through conquest and migration (including forced migration, such as Trail of Tears, slavery, and "transportation" to the Colonies). That has only increased with the industrial age.

You'd need to interrupt this gene flow for biological differences to accrue to the point where we could start talking sensibly about biological races. You'd also need time, and far more time than evolution has had to play with. Humans may have evolved over the course of millions of years from a last common ancestor that we share with chimps, but 80,000 years ago our own species nearly died out entirely. Thus, the differences between humans haven't accrued over several millions years, but only over tens of thousands since that bottleneck (not to mention, Homo sapiens didn't even leave Africa until relatively late, c. 100,000 years b.p.).

As far as the notion that "race" impacts human health, I don't need to know that a person is culturally classified as "black" to treat them for malaria any more than I need to know that they're culturally classified as "Arab" to receive treatment for the same condition. Sickle-cell anemia is not exclusively associated with people of African descent. It also cropped up in what is today Greece, southern Italy, Turkey, Oman, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Afghanistan and India, which overlaps with the historical distribution of malaria. Thus, sickle cell anemia appears to be a "black disease" only because we have more black people in the U.S. than descendants of the other groups who also suffer from sickle cell.

I forgot to mention that those extremely, almost absurdly specific lists of ethnicities that make distinction between Melanesian, Polynesian, Hungaro-German, etc. etc. are due not to overwhelming political correctness, but to an attempt several decades ago to quantify race within "acceptable" standards of error. Researchers found that you need 40-50 categories of human beings just to maintain an "acceptable" margin of error of 10%. In other words, you can create 50 different "races" and you will still screw up the classification of 1 individual out of 10.

That's why biologists like myself start to wonder whether "race" has any useful biological meaning at all (notwithstanding its historical, cultural, and sociological meanings).

I'd also like to add, in addition to MJS' mention of Ashley Montagu, that another man who took an early stand blasting the myth of biological races was the geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky. His book Genetic Diversity and Human Equality, though published late in his life, neatly sums up his views on an issue that concerned him for several decades.

ethnology
science or pseudo science ???

if ethnic groups exist
then
what if a state centered society
finds itself multi ethnic
and for whatever reason
adds caste laws
including cross breeding laws
do breeds in time emerge ???

no
the attempt to expunge race
by burning straw men is not enough

yes straw men will serve where necessary

race differences lack a sine qua non marker
so what ?
disnctions will be draw on what markers are there

as in assigned "natural" parentage
and from the smallest even inconsistent distinctions
great social differences can be built eh ??

the reason studies departments exist
has to do with the struggle within existing departments
to eject certain specialists and soecialties
eh
not to mention hybreds

the greater mother called the university
thru it's executive board or whatever
must find a place for these rejects and misfits
hence new programs and departments emerge

lacey could now be a member of the poli sci department no ??
if they were prepared to recognize her speciality as worthy of the department and science
even if granting degrees thru that department were not allowed

sure they might require profs
to have poli sci department granted degrees to get hired by the department
but this is just more byzantine elaborating

i see father S in some vaguely parallel cosmos
swinging his hatchet
gowned round head style
at the necks of these louche supplicants

ironic really
him in that cosmos taking a bishop bullet
for the cause of department standards
given his noble contempt
for such self perpetuating
star chamber outfits

Prejudice is as old as humanity, Lunch. Racism is obviously one form of prejudice. Beyond that trite and misleading point, the idea of race started in Europe as an application of early Enlightenment attempts at classification and science to the peoples the Europeans were "discovering" after c. 1450.

The most intense phase of racial science was an attempted excuse for racial slavery in the Americas.

I'm sorry, though not surprised, that you can't understand what 450 years of conditioning means.

And I meant to say above:

"...I don't need to know that a person is culturally classified as "black" to treat them for sickle-cell anemia...."

I must remember to click the preview button first.

mh:

"monkey farts ??"

ie farts of monkeys

why not sniff em to our hearts content ??

tracing my august lineage back
i find such farters down there below me in
in the paine family tree

my grant to the nth power grand father
paw paw a tailess chap
believed to have
lived in present day eritrea

stunk up quite a storm in his day
so the family oral tradition sez anyway
based on what who can say since ole paw paw's off spring
-including my great to the nth minus one grand father
spoke in cries

ps i note we paines were strictly
patrilinear from way way back
long before we aquired chomsky brains

"I must remember to click the preview button first"
hell no
go for it

trust in the kindness of strangers Null

http://northcountrypublicradio.org/blogs/brainclouds/uploaded_images/blanche-dubois-716086.jpg

i have and i hype the typo errors
as well as hetrodox spellings

if they reader won't make an effort fuck em
such as glomp on that 'll prolly try refutin' ya anyway

distant cousin
cha cha blah blah
posing for a british sailor

http://www.sxc.hu/pic/m/m/ma/maddiazz/270841_gibraltar_apes.jpg

the slut !!!!

*
Dawson, blinkered creature, next you will be telling us that racial/ethnic stereotypes are invalid, though everyone relies on them constantly, unconsciously, however conscientiously unprejudiced he is. Sociological boilerplate intended for the edification of youth emerging from their cruelty prone adolescent years. Without doubt beneficial boilerplate.

In an attempt to dispute Smith's dismissal of race as a topic worthy of academic study I (no doubt without effect) suggested that race riots were a common feature of the national experience. Beyond that I don't recall saying a word about racial prejudice. It is the notion that an awareness of racial (appearance group?) differences is pervasive, inescapable that I (no doubt tritely in your rehearsal) am asserting. And that few are buying.

I will begin my comments with an asterisk so that you can skip them if it suits you to. And I won't address or mention you again in comment or joke (attempt).

I will withdraw from your course rather than wait for the F.

Best wishes and goodbye, Lunch

Split the lunch and find the musty,
Boil on boil in gastrics roiled.

No, that's not right. If Only I Had Google!

*
oops! old habits.

Split the lunch and find the musty,
Boil on boil in gastrics roiled.

No, that's not right. If Only I Had Google!

lunch
if you get too quick and clever
it comes off as hostile
not just facetious manic play

and md might use a more neutral term
then prejudice
but his point stands
the socially constructed freight loaded
on a perceived "alien" identification
is by intention antagonizing
and ripping
these social constructions
to ribbons
is well worth the effort
exposing malignant intentions
in the process
is a bonus
the insight
contained in
' our minds can only opertate thru steroetypes ' fails to fully engage
the full measure of the phenomenalogical dialectic

vide hegel's science of logic
"essence as reflection within itself"
sampling:

"illusory being is essence own positing "

so yes

but " the essentiality that has advanced to immediacy is in the firts instance existence ..it is true that the thing contains reflection but its negativity is ..extinguished
in its immediacy since its ground is essentially reflection
its immediacy sublates itself ..."

sublates itself
sublates itself
sublates itself
in a flash one fine day
to conciousness
race becomes "...illusory "

Null, I get it that sickle cell isn't an exclusively "black" disease. I also agree you don't need to know a person is black to diagnose sickle cell...but it does help. Most states now screen the majority of newborns for sickle cell, regardless of race, which makes sense.

But what about prenatal screening for sickle cell disease? That is a lot more costly, invasive and may pose at least some risk to the fetus.

Should this screening be standard in Japanese hospitals to Japanese mothers? How about Eskimos and Finns, should they get it? It goes without saying that this kind of testing may be more desirable for blacks than others. Ideally, you would identify candidates for prenatal screening by first screening all parents themselves, regardless of race, but that might be too costly in many instances or not of much use in others. So you have to marrow it down somehow.

If I were a Japanese doctor, I probably wouldn't advise prescreening all Japanese parents to determine if they might be candidates for prenatal screening of sickle cell. I would advise such screening for every black parent I encountered, though.

I also haven't gotten any of the "lunch" jokes. I'm soooo confused.

I have many moments while reading Lunch posts where I wonder whether the issue is "up periscope, Oxtrot! Lunch just shot over your head!," or "you're not a spelunker, Oxtrot, no need to dive so deep into the earth to get Lunch's subterranean digs."

As a homer sapienza myself, I appreciate those whose persona and view isn't so quickly read or understood. Lunch keeps me on my toes, as op does. "What? Huh?"

Like this:

You guys are real nice! Well, except for Dawson. He made me cry the other day saying something about 'mindfuck' that made me clamp my knees together really hard.

Sorta makes a guy wonder where she who clamped so snugly keeps her brains, that sort of statement does.

****************

On the main subject, most supra-imbecilic know that race is a man-made construct that nature doesn't care about... meaning nature will continue independently of man's naming of things found in nature.

As evidence of which I present the following as relevant and probative:

Our Noblest Democrat President, Barack Hussein Obama.

His parents, eh?

Or if the magistrate prefers, I offer:

95% of domestic dogs now in existence.

Null, I get it that sickle cell isn't an exclusively "black" disease. I also agree you don't need to know a person is black to diagnose sickle cell...but it does help.

Okay, how does it help? A person either has sickle-cell anemia or s/he doesn't. A person either carries the trait or s/he doesn't. I don't see where the need for appealing to the concept of "race" is diagnostically useful.

And since the best you could come up with in support was the possibility of testing communities which have no history of sickle-cell, as if there were no way to distinguish between those that have that history and those that don't but by the biologically spurious concept of "race", then I can only conclude that you can't think of a reason either.

Considering that I pointed out that most newborns of all races are now screened for sickle cell in most states, and agreed that was a good idea, I don't see where you get the notion I think "race" is the only way to distinguish between those who do and don't have the sickle cell trait. Obviously, comprehensive testing of the entire population, not just a a particular race, would be the best and most reliable way to screen for sickle cell disease.

The problem arises in that most countries don't have comprehensive screening, including ours, since it is only recently that newborns are being screened for sickle cell. In the absence of comprehensive screening, either here or in a country like Japan, how would you go about determining who should or shouldn't get screening for sickle cell?

If you can't test everyone, either due to cost or impracticality, are you seriously arguing race shouldn't be a basis of who you do test? Would it be useless to say if you're of African descent, you should be tested for sickle cell? In this case whether the concept of race is biologically dubious or not is irrelevant. It is still a useful guideline.

*
Ouch! Oxy 1 Lunch -1 (z-sum game ref.))

We need more such rare bits in these threads (glancing Schumann, inebriated Friday night larks ref.)

I promise to try harder (and to abandon those stupid asterisks and maybe something else)

Taking a break for tax season but before I go want to say:
Smith is behind my attempt to trace 'race' awareness to language group difference (if 'trace' can be used in such a data-free context). Wasn't it the noble Smith himself who recently confessed to a predisposition to animus when embedded in a quarter-note inflected speech ambience. If such predisposition could force itself to the conscious awareness one so highly developed what could one hope for in the case those (us) formed from the common clay, or from our nth great ancestors?

Going to change my socks in March.

In the absence of comprehensive screening, either here or in a country like Japan, how would you go about determining who should or shouldn't get screening for sickle cell?

I would screen the members of the population that had shown a greater than average predisposition to carrying the sickle cell trait.

If you can't test everyone, either due to cost or impracticality, are you seriously arguing race shouldn't be a basis of who you do test?

I'm not arguing anything. I'm just questioning how race is supposed to be a useful consideration.

Would it be useless to say if you're of African descent, you should be tested for sickle cell?

No, but that wouldn't be a racial issue either. "Of African descent" is not a race, it is a statement of ancestry. Obviously, those whose ancestors lived in areas where the sickle cell trait was common, or who are descended from populations among whom the sickle cell trait is common, should be tested for the trait. But "population" and "race" are two different things, and conflating them is a hell of a way to make a certain Mr. Darwin spin in his grave.

In this case whether the concept of race is biologically dubious or not is irrelevant. It is still a useful guideline.

How can it be a useful guideline in making medical decisions when there is no biological basis for the concept of race? I prefer my medicine to be based on biological reality, personally.

If you can't test everyone, either due to cost or impracticality, are you seriously arguing race shouldn't be a basis of who you do test?

Sean, with all respect, the fact that you're using the two terms interchangeably tells us precisely why we need to get rid of the latter term (and concept).

Tay-Sachs is much more common among Ashkenazi Jews than other European populations. Would you say that they constitute a separate "race"? Probably not, I should think.

My dear friend, clear your mind of cant. You may talk as other people do: you may say to a man, 'Sir, I am your most humble servant.' You are not his most humble servant. You may say, 'These are bad times; it is a melancholy thing to be reserved to such times.' You don't mind the times. You tell a man, 'I am sorry you had such bad weather the last day of your journey, and were so much wet.' You don't care sixpence whether he is wet or dry. You may talk in this manner; it is a mode of talking in society: but don't think foolishly.

--Dr Johnson

Dr Johnson's advice quoted above addresses a slightly different situation: but the core of it applies: you can clear your mind of cant, even if you can't (as I can't) help being an easily-annoyed old curmudgeon.

Please keep the asterisk.

Just want to say thanks for the respectful debate, guys. It's a touchy subject, and you've made a lot of helpful points I'll bear in mind. I can agree race is a nebulous and problematic concept, I just don't know enough to really get my head around it just yet.