ZN: a request for info on the subject of "race" as social construct.

I respect and am pleased by the request, but that’s a time-heavy search so I’m afraid it will come in bits and pieces.

I can begin with a simple Newsweek article I happen to have around that is OLD but it covers the bases.

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Three is Not Enough: Surprising New Lessons from the Controversial Science of Race

By: Sharon Begley
Newsweek, 2/13/95, Vol. 125, Issue 7

To most Americans race is as plain as the color of the nose on your face. Sure, some light-skinned blacks, in some neighborhoods, are taken for Italians, and some Turks are confused with Argentines. But even in the children of biracial couples, racial ancestry is writ large — in the hue of the skin and the shape of the lips, the size of the brow and the bridge of the nose. It is no harder to trace than it is to judge which basic colors in a box of Crayolas were combined to make tangerine or burnt umber. Even with racial mixing, the existence of primary races is as obvious as the existence of primary colors.

Or is it? C. Loring Brace has his own ideas about where race resides, and it isn’t in skin color. If our eyes could perceive more than the superficial, we might find race in chromosome 11: there lies the gene for hemoglobin. If you divide humankind by which of two forms of the gene each person has, then equatorial Africans, Italians and Greeks fall into the “sickle-cell race”; Swedes and South Africa’s Xhosas (Nelson Mandela’s ethnic group) are in the healthy-hemoglobin race. Or do you prefer to group people by whether they have epicanthic eye folds, which produce the “Asian” eye? Then the !Kung San (Bushmen) belong with the Japanese and Chinese. Depending on which trait you choose to demarcate races, “you won’t get anything that remotely tracks conventional [race] categories,” says anthropologist Alan Goodman, dean of natural science at Hampshire College.

The notion of race is under withering attack for political and cultural reasons — not to mention practical ones like what to label the child of a Ghanaian and a Norwegian. But scientists got there first. Their doubts about the conventional racial categories — black, white, Asian — have nothing to do with a sappy “we are all the same” ideology. Just the reverse. “Human variation is very, very real,” says Goodman. “But race, as a way of organizing [what we know about that variation], is incredibly simplified and bastardized.” Worse, it does not come close to explaining the astounding diversity of humankind — not its origins, not its extent, not its meaning. “There is no organizing principle by which you could put 5 billion people into so few categories in a way that would tell you anything important about humankind’s diversity,” says Michigan’s Brace, who will lay out the case against race at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. About 70 percent of cultural anthropologists, and half of physical anthropologists, reject race as a biological category, according to a 1989 survey by Central Michigan University anthropologist Leonard Lieberman and colleagues. The truths of science are not decided by majority vote, of course. Empirical evidence, woven into a theoretical whole, is what matters. The threads of the argument against the standard racial categories:

* Genes: In 1972, population biologist Richard Lewontin of Harvard University laid out the genetic case against race. Analyzing 17 genetic markers in 168 populations such as Austrians, Thais and Apaches, he found that there is more genetic difference within one race than there is between that race and another. Only 6.3 percent of the genetic differences could be explained by the individuals’ belonging to different races. That is, if you pick at random any two “blacks” walking along the street, and analyze their 23 pairs of chromosomes, you will probably find that their genes have less in common than do the genes of one of them with that of a random “white” person. Last year the Human Genome Diversity Project used 1990s genetics to extend Lewontin’s analysis. Its conclusion: genetic variation from one individual to another of the same “race” swamps the average differences between racial groupings. The more we learn about humankind’s genetic differences, says geneticist Luca Cavalli-Sforza of Stanford University, who chairs the committee that directs the biodiversity project, the more we see that they have almost nothing to do with what we call race.

* Traits: As sickle-cell “races” and epicanthic-fold “races” show, there are as many ways to group people as there are traits. That is because “racial” traits are what statisticians call non-concordant. Lack of concordance means that sorting people according to these traits produces different groupings than you get in sorting them by those (equally valid) traits. When biologist Jared Diamond of UCLA surveyed half a dozen traits for a recent issue of Discover magazine, he found that, depending on which traits you pick, you can form very surprising “races.” Take the scooped-out shape of the back of the front teeth, a standard “Asian” trait. Native Americans and Swedes have these shovel-shaped incisors, too, and so would fall in the same race. Is biochemistry better? Norwegians, Arabians, north Indians and the Fulani of northern Nigeria, notes Diamond, fall into the “lactase race” (the lactase enzyme digests milk sugar). Everyone else — other Africans, Japanese, Native Americans — forms the “lactase-deprived race” (their ancestors did not drink milk from cows or goats and hence never evolved the lactase gene). How about blood types, the familiar A, B and O groups? Then Germans and New Guineans, populations that have the same percentages of each type, are in one race; Estonians and Japanese comprise a separate one for the same reason, notes anthropologist Jonathan Marks of Yale University. Depending on which traits are chosen, “we could place Swedes in the same race as either Xhosas, Fulani, the Ainu of Japan or Italians,” writes Diamond.

* Subjectivity: If race is a valid biological concept, anyone in any culture should be able to look at any individual and say, Aha, you are a . . . It should not be the case, as French tennis star Yannick Noah said a few years ago, that “in Africa I am white, and in France I am black” (his mother is French and his father is from Cameroon). “While biological traits give the impression that race is a biological unit of nature,” says anthropologist George Armelagos of Emory University, “it remains a cultural construct. The boundaries between races depends on the classifier’s own cultural norms.”

* Evolution: Scholars who believe in the biological validity of race argue that the groupings reflect human pre-history. That is, populations that evolved together, and separately from others, constitute a race. This school of thought holds that blacks should all be in one race because they are descended from people who stayed on the continent where humanity began. Asians, epitomized by the Chinese, should be another race because they are the children of groups who walked north and east until they reached the Pacific. Whites of the pale, blond variety should be another because their ancestors filled Europe. Because of their appearance, these populations represent the extremes, the archetypes, of human diversity — the reds, blues and yellows from which you can make every other hue. “But if you use these archetypes as your groups you have classified only a very tiny proportion of the world’s people, which is not very useful,” says Marks, whose incisive new book “Human Biodiversity” (321 pages. Walter de Gruyter. $23.95) deconstructs race. “Also, as people walked out of Africa, they were differentiating along the way. Equating ‘extreme’ with ‘primordial’ is not supported by history.”

Often, shared traits are a sign of shared heritage — racial heritage. “Shared traits are not random,” says Alice Brues, an anthropologist at the University of Colorado. “Within a continent, you of course have a number of variants [on basic traits], but some are characteristic of the larger area, too. So it’s natural to look for these major divisions. It simplifies your thinking.” A wide distribution of traits, however, makes them suspect as evidence of a shared heritage. The dark skin of Somalis and Ghanaians, for instance, indicates that they evolved under the same selective force (a sunny climate). But that’s all it shows. It does not show that they are any more closely related, in the sense of sharing more genes, than either is to Greeks. Calling Somalis and Ghanaians “black” therefore sheds no further light on their evolutionary history and implies — wrongly — that they are more closely related to each other than either is to someone of a different “race.” Similarly, the long noses of North Africans and northern Europeans reveal that they evolved in dry or cold climates (the nose moistens air before the air reaches the lungs, and longer noses moisten more air). The tall, thin bodies of Kenya’s Masai evolved to dissipate heat; Eskimos evolved short, squat bodies to retain it. Calling these peoples “different races” adds nothing to that understanding.

Where did the three standard racial divisions come from? They entered the social, and scientific, consciousness during the Age of Exploration. Loring Brace doesn’t think it’s a coincidence that the standard races represent peoples who, as he puts it, “lived at the end of the Europeans’ trade routes” — in Africa and China — in the days after Prince Henry the Navigator set sail. Before Europeans took to the seas, there was little perception of races. If villagers began to look different to an Englishman riding a horse from France to Italy and on to Greece, the change was too subtle to inspire notions of races. But if the English sailor left Lisbon Harbor and dropped anchor off the Kingdom of Niger, people looked so different he felt compelled to invent a scheme to explain the world — and, perhaps, distance himself from the Africans.

This habit of sorting the world’s peoples into a small number of groups got its first scientific gloss from Swedish taxonomist Carolus Linnaeus. (Linnaeus is best known for his system of classifying living things by genus and species — Escherichia coli, Homo sapiens and the rest.) In 1758 he declared that humanity falls into four races: white (Europeans), red (Native Americans), dark (Asians) and black (Africans). Linnaeus said that Native Americans (who in the 1940s got grouped with Asians) were ruled by custom, Africans were indolent and negligent, and Europeans were inventive and gentle, said Linnaeus. Leave aside the racist undertones (not to mention the oddity of ascribing gentleness to the group that perpetrated the Crusades and Inquisition): that alone should not undermine its validity. More worrisome is that the notion and the specifies of race predate genetics, evolutionary biology and the science of human origins. With the revolutions in those fields, how is it that the 18th-century scheme of race retains its powerful hold?

Consider these arguments:

* If I parachute into Nairobi, I know I’m not in Oslo: Colorado’s Alice Brues uses this image to argue that denying the reality of race flies in the face of common sense. But the parachutists, if they were familiar with the great range of human diversity, could also tell that they were in Nairobi rather than Abidjan — east Africans don’t look much like west Africans. They could also tell they were in Istanbul rather than Oslo, even though Turks and Norwegians are both called Caucasian.

* DOA, male, 5’11” . . . black: When U.S. police call in a forensic anthropologist to identify the race of a skeleton, the scientist comes through 80 to 85 percent of the time. If race has no biological validity, how can the sleuths get it right so often? The forensic anthropologist could, with enough information about bone structure and genetic markers, identify the region from which the corpse came — south and west Africa, Southeast Asia and China, Northern and Western Europe. It just so happens that the police would call corpses from the first two countries black, from the middle two Asian, and the last pair white. But lumping these six distinct populations into three groups of two serves no biological purpose, only a social convention. The larger grouping may reflect how society views humankind’s diversity, but does not explain it.

* African-Americans have more hypertension: If race is not real, how can researchers say that blacks have higher rates of infant mortality, lower rates of osteoporosis and a higher incidence of hypertension? Because a social construct can have biological effects, says epidemiologist Robert Hahn of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Consider hypertension among African-Americans. Roughly 34 percent have high blood pressure, compared with about 16 percent of whites. But William Dressler finds the greatest incidence of hypertension among blacks who are upwardly mobile achievers. “That’s probably because in mundane interactions, from the hank to the grocery store, they are treated in ways that do not coincide with their self-image as respectable achievers,” says Dressier, an anthropologist at the University of Alabama. “And the upwardly mobile are more likely to encounter discriminatory white culture.” Lab studies show that stressful situations — like being followed in grocery stores as if you were a shoplifter — elevate blood pressure and lead to vascular changes that cause hypertension. “In this case, race captures social factors such as the experience of discrimination,” says sociologist David Williams of the University of Michigan. Further evidence that hypertension has more to do with society than with biology: black Africans have among the lowest rates of hypertension in the world.

If race is not a biological explanation of hypertension, can it offer a biological explanation of something as complex as intelligence? Psychologists are among the strongest proponents of retaining the three conventional racial categories. It organizes and explains their data in the most parsimonious way, as Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein argue in “The Bell Curve.” But anthropologists say that such conclusions are built on a foundation of sand. If nothing else, argues Brace, every ethnic group evolved under conditions where intelligence was a requirement for survival. If there are intelligence “genes,” they must be in all ethnic groups equally: differences in intelligence must be a cultural and social artifact.

Scientists who doubt the biological meaningfulness of race are not nihilists. They just prefer another way of capturing, and explaining, the great diversity of humankind. Even today most of the world’s peoples marry within their own group. Intra-marriage preserves features — fleshy lips, small ears, wide-set eyes — that arose by a chance genetic mutation long ago. Grouping people by geographic origins — better known as ethnicity — “is more correct both in a statistical sense and in understanding the history of human variation,” says Hampshire’s Goodman. Ethnicity also serves as a proxy for differences — from diet to a history of discrimination — that can have real biological and behavioral effects.

In a 1942 book, anthropologist Ashley Montagu called race “Man’s Most Dangerous Myth.” If it is, then our most ingenuous myth must be that we sort humankind into groups in order to understand the meaning and origin of humankind’s diversity. That isn’t the reason at all; a greater number of smaller groupings, like ethnicities, does a better job. The obsession with broad categories is so powerful as to seem a neurological imperative. Changing our thinking about race will require a revolution in thought as profound, and profoundly unsettling, as anything science has ever demanded. What these researchers are talking about is changing the way in which we see the world — and each other. But before that can happen, we must do more than understand the biologist’s suspicions about race. We must ask science, also, why it is that we are so intent on sorting humanity into so few groups — us and Other — in the first place.

The field you want is called Critical Race Theory.

Scholars important to the theory include Derrick Bell, Patricia Williams, Richard Delgado, Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, Camara Phyllis Jones, and Mari Matsuda.

Derrick Bell, Race, Racism and American Law, first published in 73, is now in its 6th edition. I’ve never read it. Bell is considered one of the originators of CRT.

I started reading a book called “How to be Less Stupid About Race” (or something similar to that), but I’ve been interrupted by multiple activities, and set it aside a couple of weeks ago. Based on the first half of it, I can only say I have learned nothing I didn’t already know. I’m gonna finish it, though, as I am looking for new material for the unit I teach on race.

We had a GIGANTIC thread on race a few years ago, but I think the board has been reset since then.

My central spine for the race unit is a documentary called Race: The Power of an Illusion. It’s 3 episodes long, about an hour each. It is well worth watching if you can find it. It’s probably on youtube. The first episode is on science…i.e. there is no such thing as race. The second episode focuses on how we got where we are today when race wasn’t a big deal even a few hundred years ago. The third episode is the one that shows how racial constructs have systemically fucked over people of color through public policies. That one is indispensable for understanding the present, including – really – the MAGA people.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jenniferraff/2019/04/25/what-does-dna-tell-us-about-race/#3f8d7ca157b3

https://bigthink.com/politics-current-affairs/racial-purity-is-scientifically-meaningless-say-8-000-geneticists?rebelltitem=1#rebelltitem1

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/23294515.2018.1544177?journalCode=uabr21

https://www.genome.gov/genetics-glossary/Race

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/disturbing-resilience-scientific-racism-180972243/

https://www.irishtimes.com/life-and-style/people/genetics-pioneer-who-insisted-the-idea-of-race-was-unfounded-1.3644636

https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk/2019/06/race-delusion

link: http://blog.petrieflom.law.harvard.edu/2019/07/11/why-race-based-health-disparities-have-little-to-do-with-genetics/

Zooey wrote:

He asked about race as a social construct. He’s says at the top he already agrees that race doesn’t exist genetically or biologically.

I think we just interpreted that differently. I was responding to this:

Billy_T wrote:

“race” is a social construct, and doesn’t actually exist as a valid category, biologically or genetically.

The genetics on that is actually very interesting.

Then there’s people who do the history of the concept of race:

https://timeline.com/europeans-invented-the-concept-of-race-as-we-know-it-58f896fae625

http://www.understandingrace.org/resources/pdf/disease/smedley.pdf

http://www.councilforresponsiblegenetics.org/pageDocuments/K4IQ3T8YCD.pdf

Billy_T wrote:

In the midst of a discussion of Trump’s recent racist attacks, I said that “race” did not exist, but racISM was obviously an actual thing, with deadly results.

Some scientists do claim that race is a biological reality because certain RNA patterns can be marked strongly by ethnic ancestry.

Of course that’s not DNA. And DNA is the issue.

I would just tell the scientist off. This is decades old science and she is in the minority.

In terms of is race real, I would say no biologically and yes culturally–though being “real” culturally is a tricky business. That is, it’s not just racism that is real, it’s also race as a cultural category, both positively (a minority identifying with a tradition can be a source of strength), and negatively (white people don’t notice that they are racially marked among one another to have no race just personhood).

This is never an easy discussion. More power to you.

….