The liberal response to race realism: "but ... but ... but ... but"

• "But race is a social construct" [Race is as valid a concept as breeds or sub-species, as it involves a massive amount of correlation between various physical traits. Also, it is extremely hypocritical to say that race isn't real while promoting discrimination based on race.]
• "But intelligence cannot be adequately measured." [IQ is a good indicator of success, and there was no serious challenge to the idea of measuring innate intelligence until scientists started investigating how innate intelligence correlates with race]
• "But IQ tests are culturally biased in favor of European-Americans." [That's strange, because northeastern Asians in the United States have a slightly higher average IQ score than the demographic whom IQ tests are allegedly biased in favor of.]
• "But studies like those cited in The Bell Curve do not take differences in childhood environment into account, such as nutrition, parental involvement in cognitive development, and so on." [There have been transracial adoption studies involving black children adopted by middle class white couples, wherein a sizable racial IQ gap remained.]
• "But, the scientists who have promoted race realism, like Murray, Rushton, Jensen, Watson, Shockley, etc. have generally been white men, who are automatically evil scum and this makes their claims suspect." [Aside from being an example of typical gross leftist racist hypocrisy, this is an ad hominem argument. Furthermore, there have been Asian and Ashkenazi scientists who have professed race realism.]
• "But, but, but ... Guns, Germs, and Steel!!11one" [Jared Diamond, like his fellow Marxists Gould and Lewontin, freely admitted that his radical political views influenced his scientific work. Furthermore, Diamond's book is extremely disingenuous, as it explains the massive civilization gaps between continents as being merely the result of environmental differences, and neglects to tell the reader that environmental differences are precisely what lead to genetic differences over a long span of time. One is left with the impression that the book is a pathetic politically-motivated polemic intentionally designed to mislead the reader.]

 

Most liberals scream "but..." because they simply haven't experienced. They just don't know what majority black or heavily multi-cultural enviroments are like. Ignorance makes them continuously look for excuses because they can't handle the cold hard facts that some races are inherently bad.

I used to be like this when I was a kid. It may shock some people to know I was deeply liberal right up to I was in my late teens. I grew up in majority black neighborhoods and all there was to hang out with were black kids. I used to notice their shocking, violent, depraved and uncivilized behavior, but I wanted to believe there was some kind of excuse as to why they behave in such an unacceptable way because I'm a nice person and I don't want to think of any group being inherently evil. But as I grew up I began to realize there's something not quite right about black "people." They're just not like other races.

Liberalism is cured by experience. Send them all to the ghetto or Africa to live for a few months and the ones that survive will be cured. It's that simple.

 

I think you summed up, and refuted, the left's approach to the race issue perfectly. Well done.

 

Some great points here, as well. It's no coincidence that the most liberal area of country, New England, is also the area where most of these "diversity at any cost" ideas come from. It's also not a coincidence that this particular area is arguably the whitest area in the country, with most states having over a 90% white population. It's easy to be so accepting of everyone when everybody around you looks and thinks just like you do. These people don't have a black or Hispanic person within 50 miles in any direction, and they want to keep it that way with their prohibitively high real estate values, but they will be the first to demonize you for not having the same rosy picture of multiracial societies and diversity as they do. What a bunch of hypocrites.

 

I agree with everything that you say here, but I'd like to emphasize that liberals are right about some things, like abortion rights, which I elaborate on here.

<<< Mod Edit: Racist Flamebaiting >>>

 

Thank you. Racial egalitarianism is nothing more than the Left's counterpart to young earth creationism.

 

Science has proven there is only one human sub-species(race) that exist today.

Go to 4:30 to get straight to the point.

http://m.youtube.com/index?desktop_uri=%2F&gl=US#/watch?v=A8RefZ1Hcvo

 

The bottleneck from ~70,000 years ago certainly does not preclude huge genetic differences accumulating in various lineages over that span of time. Moreover, the various lineages diverged well before that date, it's just that the world population decreased to a rather small number and humans were limited to a few widely dispersed pockets.

 

I edited my post. Try replying to it now.

 

Btw, breeds are achieved through selective breeding. Can't apply to humans.

 

I beg to differ. How would you explain the term half breed as applied to the messiah obama?

 

Um, no. It is called "sexual selection" and it happens in humans and has been listed as a very important contribution to the development of racial differences.

 

Apparently he thinks that humans can make breeding decisions for their domesticated animals and plants but not for themselves.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breed

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewontin's_Fallacy

 

I don't see how this refutes what I posted about Breeds. I'll read the whole page later.

 

The "race is a social construct" largely is rooted in Lewontin's "work", which many scientists, including Dawkins, have criticized (as Dawkins does believe that race is a valid taxonomic concept).

 

And this still doesn't change the fact that you were wrong about breeds.

You clearly didn't watch the video I posted.

 

Your ramblings on breeds is irrelevant to the fact that the "race is isn't real" meme (which is your argument in this thread) has had its foundation kicked out from underneath it (which the linked article outlines). Do try to see the larger picture.

 

You were the one that said Breeds was as valid as a concept as sub-species and a result of sexual selection (which of course was false).

The link also said this.

You still haven't commented on the video I posted.

 

so is this the thread for the uneducated, are I in duh wight spot?

 

Breeds, sub-species, and races are all taxonmic labels below the species level that have value.

Yes, it says that Lewontin's critic is correct.

The link does not work.

 

Now you're just ignoring what I posted earlier about Breeds. Here it is again

It says both Edwards and Lewontin are correct...

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8RefZ1Hcvo&nomobile=1]4:30 and onward[/ame]

 

Hello Everyone.

This is my first post.

I have been involved in debates on the subject of Scientific Racism for sometime. I used to have a Youtube channel with the same name as I have here, where many of my videos were about Scientific Racism but it was recently deleted due to copyright violations (I uploaded a documentary and TV special which led to my account's termination). I will upload some of my videos that don't violate copyrights to a new channel soon.

The topic starter has brought up a number of points that they feel are the common arguments of opponents of race-realism. I find it curious that Truthist labels the opposition to race-realism as having a single political stance. Do all conservatives believe in race-realism? It's my understanding that "race-realism" is a fringe view that is not accepted as mainstream science. Several scholars have challenged the claims of racialists who advocate this kind of research.

Racialism is the belief that race determines the mental traits and capacities of
a person and that there is a racial hierarchy in these traits, particularly intelligence, that determines cultural differences between races. The most popular research among academics who advocate racialism is the psychometric data derived from IQ tests which have shown that there are averages differences in the score of populations regarded as races most notably demographic groups in the United States such as White Americans and Black Americans. A great deal of research has been conducted to investigate the cause of the Black-White IQ gap in the USA and whether or not it can be eliminated. The belief that the gap is partially caused by genetics and therefore represents an innate difference in intelligence between races is often referred to as the hereditarian position.

This view has received a lot of criticism and rebuttals from Geneticists as well as Psychologists and other scholars some who undoubtedly differ in their
opinions on politics. It is misleading to label the opposition to "race-realism" as liberals as if the opponents were all political ideologues with no scientific basis to object to these claims.

With that being said I will now address Truthist's statements...

Human genetic variation is real. No one denies that. People vary in physical traits such as skin color, hair texture, craniofacial features, allele frequency etc.

Race has traditionally been used to describe and classify this variation. The reason that racial classification has become a controversy among biologists and geneticists is because race has been defined differently over the years and some assumptions about human variation that old racial classification schemes are based on have been proven to be false.


This chart for example shows the different ways in which race has been defined in the last couple of decades:





When scholars talk about race being a social construct they are usually referring to the fact that the racial categories used by countries such as the United States are socially defined. The USA has a history of defining racial categories by rules of descent such as the "One Drop Rule" which decreed that all people with known or detectable Black Ancestry must be defined as Black. Because these racial categories were given social importance they become a major part of the identity for American citizens. The biological definitions of race often differ from social definitions and there is some argument about the validity of classifications and the use of race in biology at all. Sub-species is widely regarded as a concept consistent with race
which has also been debated among zoologists. The issues with these labels are not nearly as resolved or as simple as Truthist describes.

These articles give some good details on the subject:

Conceptualizing human variation Nature Genetics 36, S17 - S20 (2004)

What We Know and What We Don’t Know: Human Genetic Variation and the Social Construction of Race


I don't know what you mean by promoting discrimination based on race.

Are you talking about Affirmative Action?

Social policies for demographic groups called races has nothing to do with the scientific arguments over race as a biological concept.

These summary points taken from the first article above provide a good rundown of the positions of evolutionary biologists and geneticists on the topic:



Some of the points about the biological concept of race and its relation to the question of race and intelligence were addressed in the documentary I uploaded to Youtube. The relevant portion of that video can be viewed here:

[ame="http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xb9iip_race-and-intelligence-5-7_school"]Race and Intelligence 5/7 - Video Dailymotion[/ame]

Actually Alfred Binet, the inventor of the IQ test, was against his test being used in the exact same way that eugenicists began to use them and hereditarians are using them now. Binet's goal with the IQ test was to use them to identify children with learning disabilities so that they could be provided with special help programs to increase their chances of receiving a proper education.

He did not believe that his tests could or should be used as a measurement of a person's innate mental ability. Mental testing could be used to identify learning patterns and how good you are at performing certain tasks but ultimately they do not measure your capacity to learn and do not take into account the quality of your environmental setting in which intelligence is nurtured. A score on an IQ test alone does not determine your innate ability.

They are good predictors of success in life only because they are designed to
test your knowledge of information relevant to success in the society in which the administrators of the test reside.

So do African immigrants to the United States. The reason that some populations like Asian-Americans have higher IQs is likely because their cultural environment prepares them well for IQ tests. Cultures where good study habits are most highly valued tend to lead to groups of people who do better academically and on IQ tests. African-Americans have been deprived of social and economic equality for decades which has not only hurt them financially but negatively effected the culture of their community and the quality of education that they receive.

The study you are referring to had several methodological flaws which were acknowledged by its own authors.

Richard Nisbett, a Psychology Professor at the University of Michigan listed some of the problems:

The study to which Rushton and Jensen (2005) allocate so much space is the single adoption study that provides any support whatever to the hereditarian position. This is a study by Scarr and Weinberg (1976; Weinberg, Scarr, & Waldman, 1992), which examined adoptees into White families who had two White biological parents, two Black biological parents, or one Black and one White parent.

The study is more difficult to interpret than the other two, one of which assigns Black children, who were probably equivalent in expected IQ, to either Black or White middle-class families and the other of which assigns both Black and White children to the same environment. The Scarr and Weinberg study held neither race nor expected IQ nor adoptive setting constant. An additional problem with the Scarr and Weinberg study is that the Black children were adopted at a later age than the others, which would prompt an assumption of lower initial IQ for them.

In addition, the Black children’s mothers had lower educational levels than did those of the other two groups, which also would prompt an assumption of lower initial IQ. Finally, the “quality of placement” was higher for White children than for other children. All of these facts combined mean that it is not possible to know what to predict under either a hereditarian model or a pure environmental model.

Source: HEREDITY, ENVIRONMENT, AND RACE DIFFERENCES IN IQ A Commentary on Rushton and Jensen (2005) Psychology, Public Policy, and Law 2005, Vol. 11, No. 2, 302–310

If you look at the article above you will find that alot of IQ research supports the position that genes play no role in the cause of the Black-White IQ gap.

 

Who have you ever heard make such an argument?

The scholars you mentioned are not widely criticized because they are White but because most of them are associated with an organization called the Pioneer Fund which has a history of financing racialist research including Nazi Scientists and American Eugenicists.


Racism Resurgent: How Media Let The Bell Curve's Pseudo-Science Define the Agenda on Race

But besides their obvious ideological agenda qualified scholars have criticized them which makes this an academic debate.

You're obviously exaggerating your description of Diamond's admitted political views influencing his research. If a scholar states that his work is motivated by Egalitarian sentiment I think that should be applauded and that does not reflect poorly on his ability to be objective. Diamond's position is that geography and not genetics is the cause of differences in cultural development between populations. Some groups are isolated by geographic barriers and others do not have the same resources while in some places the spread of culture and technology is much easier than in others.

Diamond rejects genetic arguments and poses an alternative because it is obvious to him that people in even the most technologically primitive cultures are composed of very intelligent individuals who have mastered a way of life that suits their environment refuting the idea that they simply do not have the intelligent to learn like someone who has grown up in a Western society. Diamond makes the point that while living among tribes like those in New Guinea he with all of his Western education would be helpless without them as he lacks the knowledge of their survival strategies which obviously require a significant level of intelligence to pick up.

If you want to read a pathetic politically-motivated polemic I recommend the work of J Phillippe Rushton who claims to use evolutionary science to explain the psychometric and social science data he has collected on human races.

You should see his debates with evolutionary biologists and geneticists such as Joseph L Graves and David Suzuki.


[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_eRtjgKlt8s"]Race and Intelligence Debate: Phillipe Rushton v. Joseph Graves - YouTube[/ame]

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9FGHtfnYWY"]JP Rushton and David Suzuki debate at the University of Western Ontario, February 8th, 1989 - YouTube[/ame]