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4 Nerd-Its
RE: The line between -ism and science
Here's a (possibly dumb) question: what would the racial makeup of America look like if we stopped all immigration, closed up the borders, and began to breed using only the various peoples living here now? What "race" would emerge in several generations? Would we all and up looking like Native Americans in a thousand years? If you took a breeding population from Norway and swapped them out with a breeding population from Sub-Sahara Africa for several generations, would their racial characteristics swap as well? (assuming no inter-breeding occurs.) I suppose ultimately, my question (statement) is this: isn't what we define as "racial characteristics" merely a genetic response to environment?
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RE: The line between -ism and science
What if race X, or more specifically, carriers of Gene X were determined to be genetically inferior in some non-trivial manner to others in a societally impacting way, e.g., intelligence?
These are known to occur. Probably the most well known is Down Syndrome.
I think the real problem is that we keep talking about "race" as if we know what it is we're talking about. Race isn't an intrinsic property of a person. It's a socially constructed category. It makes no sense, scientifically, to ask what race a person is - you can ask what race they identify themselves with, what race they'd be most likely identified with by some group, and so on, but not what they are.
Different cultures have different ideas about what constitutes race, and even different ideas about the race category itself. For example, in Brazil, race is more about appearance than actual heritage. A person's race can even change over their lives - something that's out of the question in the American version of the concept. In the US, most feel they might mistake someone's race, but their race is fixed.
Before the civil rights movement, many states had statues following the atrocious "one drop rule". Today, our notions of race are more complicated, but many still seem to have an idea similar to the "one drop rule" at the center of it.
There's a secondary problem in that there's some truth in what Watson said. He couldn't have put it much worse, and it's easy to jump to wrong conclusions, but there is a correlation between skin color and intelligence. But correlation does not mean causality. There's a similar correlation between skin color and malnutrition, and an even stronger correlation between malnutrition and intelligence.
It's very difficult to make accurate judgements based on race - we're culturally biased, and they're not as effective indicators as we tend to assume - but it's very useful to do so.
A former car dealer I know told me he used to hate when black people would come into the showroom. They were much less likely to be legitimate sales opportunities. He based this on anecdotal evidence, and there's really no question that he could have been wrong - I'm fairly certain that he exaggerated the difference, at a minimum. He also judged that his opinion on the subject was generally shared by the rest of the sales staff, including the non-whites.
If there is a difference in the likelihood of a sale or the relative size of a sale (something that would be relatively easy to measure concretely), then it's hard to argue that it's racist when a salesman sees two couples enter the showroom, one black, one white, and always goes to the white couple first. He's optimizing his commissions.
But the tricky part comes in when he tries to consider cause and effect. Skin color isn't the cause, but it is an indicator - it correlates with the real cause, which is economic. It's easy to subconsciously conflate the two and lose sight of the real picture. If you've learned to be annoyed when a black man comes into your place of work, it's not a big leap to disliking black people in general. It's not right - it's flat out immoral to do so - but it's easy.
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