“Race is a social construct”. You may hear that a lot from uneducated people. They may say that since the definition of race is ‘ever-changing’, that race doesn’t exist and that it only exists in our minds. They obviously have no understanding of genetics and how we came to be today. If you want to get technical, everything is a social construct. The Universe is a social construct. We’re only giving definitions to what we perceive something to be, so with the logic of ‘race being a social construct’, then everything is a social construct. With that logic, the Universe doesn’t exist because it’s a social construct.
I will look at 3 articles in the first of many articles on this subject. One from Angela Onwuachi-Willig, Bill Nye and Ta-Nehisi Coates. All 3 have extremely wrong views on the biological reality of race, and I will prove that here. I will quote from each article and show how they are wrong with scientific studies as well as point out their bad logic.
I will begin with Angela Onwuachi-Willig. In her article for The New York Times, ‘Race and Racial Identities Are Social Constructs‘, she says that because of the ever-changing definition of the term race, that it is a social construct and not a biological one.
Race is not biological. It is a social construct. There is no gene or cluster of genes common to all blacks or all whites. Were race “real” in the genetic sense, racial classifications for individuals would remain constant across boundaries. Yet, a person who could be categorized as black in the United States might be considered white in Brazil or colored in South Africa.
Race is not biological, it is a construct. There are no clusters of genes or one gene that is common in blacks or whites. That is correct, but her statement about race being social and not a biological construct is clearly ignorant as I will show below.
You can see in the picture above that races clearly do cluster in different clusters from other races. She is right about the changing definitions, especially Brazil, but Brazil is a special case. So much mixing has gone on in Brazil that there is evidence of skin color becoming independent of ancestry. One outlier example doesn’t make race a ‘social construct’. South Africa is also another one. They classify race in South Africa with four categories: black, colored, Indian/Asian or white. Obama would have been called ‘colored’ in South Africa today. But, again, just because there are changing definitions of race throughout the globe, doesn’t mean that race doesn’t exist.
Like race, racial identity can be fluid. How one perceives her racial identity can shift with experience and time, and not simply for those who are multiracial. These shifts in racial identity can end in categories that our society, which insists on the rigidity of race, has not even yet defined.
Is she making an argument for being ‘trans-racial’? I bet Rachel Dolezal would be happy.
In a society where being white (regardless of one’s socioeconomic class background or other disadvantages) means living a life with white skin privileges — such as being presumed safe, competent and noncriminal — whites who begin to experience discrimination because of their intimate connection with someone of another race, or who regularly see their loved ones fall prey to racial discrimination, may begin to no longer feel white. After all, their lived reality does not align with the social meaning of their whiteness.
I always hear about ‘white privilege’ but never get an actual definition of what it means. People complain about ‘white privilege’ because they, of course, don’t understand the biological reality of race. Anything that may prove innate differences between individuals or races they just can’t imagine exists because of what they’ve been taught their whole lives. She is talking about those whites who are in the BLM movement. The false ideals of egalitarianism are the cause of this.
More than 50 years ago, Congress enacted the most comprehensive antidiscrimination legislation in history, the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Half a century later in 2015, the same gaps in racial inequality remain or have grown deeper. Today, the unemployment rate for African-Americans remains more than double that for whites, public schools are more segregated now than they were in the 1950s and young black males are 21 times more likely to be shot and killed by the police than their white male peers. Even a white fourth-grade teacher in Texas, Karen Fitzgibbons, openly advocated for the racial segregation of the 1950s and 1960s on her Facebook page.
Right. IQ is the cause of the unemployment rate of African Americans. Not any imaginary forces such as ‘white privilege’. Public schools are more segregated today due to people wanting to be with others genetically similar to themselves. Blacks cause themselves to get shot and killed by police due to their actions during altercations with police officers. Oh no, someone has not politically correct opinions!! She should lose her job and never work a good job again!
That’s what the Left does. They attempt to shout you down with buzzwords so you can’t calmly and intellectually prove your case.
She is clearly wrong. Good thing this is called an ‘opinion piece’, there were few actual facts in it.
Now to touch on Bill Nye’s views on race. It’s funny. I loved his show when I was a kid. Now, knowing the truth about racial differences, hearing him say that made me lose all respect for him. He’s a mechanical engineer with a Bs from Cornell University. People only take what he says because he is ‘The Science Guy’ when he has no training in what he is talking about.
“We obsess about whether our dog is a pug-Jack Russell terrier mix with corgi overtones and an oaky finish. ‘An approachable little dog,’ whatever. They’re all dogs, okay? And so the idea of a purebred is just a human construct. There’s no such thing – in a sense there’s no such thing as a purebred dog.”
That right there is a fallacy. As with the woman’s article above, they both use the ‘continuum fallacy‘. The continuum fallacy is when someone rejects a vague claim because it’s not as precise as they want it to be. ‘There are no pure races’ or ‘there are no pure breeds of dog’, that doesn’t mean that genes don’t cluster differently, showing genetic differentiation.
“If a Papua New Guinean hooks up with a Swedish person all you get is a human. There’s no new thing you’re going to get. You just get a human. Japanese woman jumping the African guy, all you get is a human. They’re all humans. So this is a lesson to be learned. There really is, for humankind there’s really no such thing as race. There’s different tribes but not different races. We’re all one species.”
Right. That doesn’t mean there is no such thing as race. Grizzly bears and polar bears can mate to create a prizzly bear. Does that mean species doesn’t exist? (I will touch on speciation at the end of this article.) Once again, that statement doesn’t deny the biological reality of race, as you can see from the picture above.
Researchers have proven, scientifically, that humans are all one people. The color of our ancestors’ skin is a consequence of ultra-violet light, of latitude and climate.
We all belong to the same genus, Homo, but again, that doesn’t disprove race. He’s correct in saying that our ancestors’ skin is a consequence of UV light of latitude and climate, and right there he proves us correct in stating that sunlight differences depending on where your ancestors evolved in the world are the cause of racial differences.
Despite our recent sad conflicts here in the U.S., there really is no such thing, scientifically, as race. We are all one species. Each one of us more alike than different.
In this statement, he is saying the first sentence because of recent racial relations in the U.S. A clear politically-motivated statement.
“Each one of us more alike than different.’ That is correct, but, yet again, doesn’t disprove the reality of race. Geneticists estimate that humans will differ, on average, at 3 million base pairs in their DNA. That’s more than enough for distinct racial classification, as well as enough to differentiate us.
Is that supposed to mean anything? Cats have 90 percent homologous genes with humans, 82% with dogs, 80% with cows, 79% with chimpanzees, 69% with rats and 67% with mice.
As you can see from the links above, we are all extremely genetically related to animals that are clearly extremely physically different from us humans. This shows, that the differences in humans are down to not how genetically distant we are from other animals in the animal kingdom, but how the differing genes we have are expressed.
We all came from Africa. We’re all made from the same star dust. We’re all going to live and die on the same planet – a pale blue dot in the vastness of space. We have to work together!
And finally, you can see his way of saying that racial differences mean nothing because ‘we all come from Africa’ and ‘ we’re all made from star dust’. That may be true, but that doesn’t do anything to acknowledge, or even show that racial differences are meaningless.
Bill Nye has absolutely no authority to speak on this matter. Liberals then eat this up and cite Bill Nye as proof that race doesn’t exist, which is clearly untrue as I have shown.
Ancestry — where my great-great-great-great grandparents are from — is a fact. What you call people with that particular ancestry is not. It changes depending on where you are in the world, when you are there, and who has power.
Right with the first sentence, and with the second. It seems he’s attempting to use what the first article I cited says: that due to ever-changing racial definitions that race doesn’t exist as we believe it to be. He says that ancestry is a fact, well wouldn’t that same ancestry be your racial classification? I am not following his logic. Just because there are differing views on the definition of race throughout the globe, doesn’t mean that there is no biological reality of race.
He cites someone else who states:
“Race” as a term is very nebulous. But human subgroups with similar ancestries can have group differences in DNA — and intelligence is highly unlikely to have no genetic basis at all (although most now believe its impact is greatly qualified by cultural and developmental differences).
Cultural and developmental differences. The cultural differences are thrown out. According to the editorial ‘Mainstream Science on Intelligence’, which came out shortly after The Bell Curve was published, one of their points is that IQ tests are not culturally biased if the individual speaks English. If they are not English speakers, they will either get a test in their native language or get Raven’s Progressive Matrices, which is a ‘culture free’ IQ test as it’s based on pattern recognition and has no writing involved. Developmental differences, yes. White mothers have a better prenatal environment then do black mothers, which is biological. Developmental differences are innate within the two populations.
I do not know. Andrew is more inclined to believe that there is some group-wide genetic explanation for the IQ difference. I am more inclined to believe that the difference lies in how those groups have been treated. One thing that I am not convinced by is controlling for income and education.
Oh, the old ‘Stereotype Threat‘ canard. The paper, which was cited more than 5000 times, states that African-Americans do worse on tests in which they are told that they are being judged on their race. Well, a meta-analysis of 55 published and unpublished studies came out and what was found that the it shows clear publication bias. Either due to people not knowing how to read scientific papers or more insidious tactics. The effect varies across studies and is small. Though elite university undergrads may underperform on tests of cognitive tests due to Stereotype Threat, this effect doesn’t generalize to non-adapted standardized tests, high-stakes settings and less academically gifted test takers. Stereotype Threat cannot explain the difference in mean cognitive test performance between African Americans and European Americans. (pg 68)
In the mid-20th century, as we have been documenting, it was the policy of this country to deny African-Americans access to the same methods of wealth-building, that it was making available to whites.
This is not merely a problem for your local diversity and sensitivity workshop. It is a problem of wealth and power. When you create a situation in which a community has a disproportionate number of poor people, and then you hyper-segregate that community, you multiply the problems of poverty for the entire community–poor or not. That is to say that black individuals are not simply poorer and less wealthier than white individuals. Because of segregation, black individuals and white individuals of the same income and same wealth, do not live in communities of equal wealth.
What bearing does segregation have on IQ differential? I don’t know. My skepticism of genetics is rooted in the fact that arguments for genetic inferiority among people of African ancestry are old, and generally have not fared well. My skepticism is also rooted in the belief that power generally seeks to justify itself. The prospect of actual equality among the races is frightening. If black and white people truly are equal on a bone-deep level, then the game might really be rigged, and we might actually have to do something about it. I think there’s much more evidence of that rigging, then there is evidence of cognitive deficiency .
I must add that I can not pretend to be a dispassionate, nor impartial observer. I come from a particular place. I’ve now been out in the world, and seen how other people in other places live. They don’t strike me as more intelligent. They strike me as better armed. There’s nothing scientific about that. But I think we all have core faiths. These are mine. You’ve been warned.
Regardless of the method used in the analyses, all researchers reached estimated very close to that obtained by Lewontin: The differences observed by the subdivisions (populations, groups of populations, races) represented 10 to 15 percent of the total genetic variation found within the human species. Formally, these findings demonstrate, first, that the species is indeed subdivided into genetically definable groups of individuals and, second, that atleast some of these groups correspond to those defined by anthropologists as races on the basis of physical characters. They do not however, settle the arguments regarding the methods of racial classification. Unfortunately, Lewontin did not specify before initiating his analysis how large the difference has to be in order to call the groups “races”.
Consequently, the results of the studies have led population geneticists to two diametrically opposite conclusions. Lewontin called the observed differences trivial, and proclaimed that “racial classification is now seen to be of no genetic or taxonomic significance” so that “no justification can be offered for its continuance.” This view is echoed by authors of similar studies, who seem to be surprised that genetic variation within populations is greater than that between them. By contrast, Sewell Wright who can hardly be taken for a dilettante in questions of population genetics, has stated emphatically that if differences of this magnitude were observed in any other species, the groups they distinguish would be called subspecies.
One can extend Wright’s argument even further. The more than 200 species of haplochromine fishes in Lake Victoria differ from each other much less than the human races in their neural genes, although they are presumably distinguished by genes that control differences in their external appearances. The same can be said about atleast some of the currently recognized species of Darwin’s finches and other examples of recent adaptive radiations. In all these cases, reproductively isolated groups are impossible to tell apart by the methods used to measure differences in human races. Obviously, human races are not reproductively isolated (interracial marriages are common and the progenies of such marriages are fully fertile) but the external differences between them are comparable to cichlid fishes and Darwin’s finches. Under these circumstances, to claim that the genetic differences between the human races are trivial is a more political statement than a scientific argument. Trivial by what criterion? How much difference would Lewontin and those who side with him consider non-trivial?
By mixing science with politics, geneticists and anthropologists are committing the same infraction of which they are accusing other scientists, who they themselves label as racist. Even worse, by labelling the genetic differences as insignificant, they play into the hand of genuine racists who can demolish this claim and so further their own agenda. It is intellectually more honest to acknowledge and then point out that by no means imply supremacy of one race over others. This can be done by demonstrating that the differences are in genes that cannot be linked to any features that would be required for the preeminence of a particular race.
It’s clear that racial classification does exist. The creator of Fst, Sewall Wright, says that a Fst distance of .15 is more than enough for speciation (differing racial classifications). It directly refutes Lewontin, who put his political ideology of Marxism over science. Those cichlids in Lake Victoria are a perfect example that though the definition of ‘species’ does change depending on which researcher you speak to, it doesn’t discount that there are real and physical genetic differences between races and ethnicities.
In conclusion, the term “race is a social construct” is a deliberately intellectually dishonest statement, or a statement used to hide the truth for more insidious things to happen due to the non-acknowledgement of race.