A Politically Correct Lexicon

And another. ”Latin@” is often used in writing to encompass the female- and male-gendered variants Latina and Latino. The @ is both “a” and “o.” This is done mostly by politically active leftish Latin Americans and Latin@s.

It’s a racket here in California, people as white as I am are claiming the Latina category to get affirmative action protection.

Well , given where this country has been in terms of ethnicity and class, this ain’t that bad a deal....No doubt there are those who are, shall we say...uncomfortable....with having to stop and think about which terminology to use, for any particular ethnic group....But at the end of the day..it’s all about respect...and appling a dignified response to all individuals you my be addressing in conversation...at the work site..or on the street.....

If it’s about respect for individuals as individuals we don’t need special privileges like affirmative discrimination or Stalinist PC garbage. If it’s
about perpetuating racism forever then it makes sense.

Jeeez....Hardesty , ...this is a simple article about using respectful language towards individuals of diverse ethnic backgrounds...Nobody is discriminating against you or any other anglo-saxon male using affirmative action so-called qoutas...Please can you focus and stay on the subject at hand......

Are you KIDDING ? How many examples do you require before you see a pattern ?

Hardesty...at this point , do you really believe , any examples from the likes of a blindemike , will be found in any way , shape or form… .....salient.....by this Redhorse ? Are you really that daft.....? You will only be stoking your own ego....BM.... Your juvenile , ad hominem , ad infinitum , rhetorical defecations are of no use to anyone....

adieux....sir , ‘ toon......

Several years ago I was chastised for identifying someone as an “Oriental” instead of an “Asian.” I must have been asleep the day that “Oriental” was officially thrown on the ash heap of politically incorrect terminology. After my faux pas was pointed out, I began noticing that whenever I heard the word “Oriental” used to denote “Asian,” it was by people past the age of fifty. So when, exactly, did this word become taboo? And why?

I grew up in and near Chicago and using “guys” to denote a mixed gender group goes back to the 1960s. I’ve lived on the west coast for several decades now and it seems to be in general usage here as well.

Redhorse, I understand that you are a black racist who cannot admit to being a black racist or comprehending examples of black racism. But do you really think I’m trying to convert you ? Your narcissism is advanced indeed if you believe that ! When I post here I am writing for the record. More often than not to correct the record because of COINTELPRO morons like you, Shitcago Crabbie, TexASS, Scorpy Doobie AKA Master Bates, Major Major Private Private, What The Hell
and others from Division Five over at the FBI. Please do not address me again, I hate to have severely beat an old black’s racist ass but you’re trying my patience, bro.
Caslon, some nut up in Washington State wanted to outlaw “Oriental” as “racist.” Ignore these stupid fucks and to hell with PC.

One thing missing in the piece is a discussion of how to decide how to refer to people when the language changes faster than the style manual. In the end, this is about intercultural skills, not a rulebook. And it’s pretty simple:
1. call people what they choose to call themselves, as long as it is
2. what they wouldn’t mind being called by you.
Why is that so hard? Why shouldn’t everybody have the right to determine their own names? Oh, and if you don’t know the answer to those, then
3. have more personal interaction with people different from you.

re. pronouns:

I have wondered why no one simply uses the English popular style—dropping the H:

“E’s a queer one, ‘e is! ‘e’ll tell you so ‘i’self.”

It doesn’t always work if you’re being picky—so maybe it’s out for PC college hand-outs. For those occasions, how about making it plural? “They’re as queer as a $3 bill.”

(I’m from SF, where even the straights are queer, so I can say this).

ossan

Have you ever noticed how people that spend all their time figuring out appropriate language for groups rarely have good relationships or even interest in individuals?  And people who are easily offended by language that fails to meet their current personal lexicon tend to take themselves way to seriously?
I’m just saying check it out....
Oh, and people are so casual with the term Anglo...my ancestors may be white; but they weren’t Anglo...they were the people being oppressed by the Anglos : )
Hey it’s cool though...just don’t jump down my throat if I can’t divinate the particulars of your heritage either.

Let me register my disgust with the term “people of color”, which essentially means everyone but palefaces. To single us out, and I do mean “out” as in separating us from the rest of the human species, is racist.

Or maybe it’s just stupid and offensive, which is a broader category that racism falls into as a specific example.

It’s not as if there’s a single human tribe who’s “collective hands” aren’t tainted with the blood of countless people, in innumerable events from their (our… ALL of our) cultural histories (and the term “collective hands” is itself a fallacy, since each man or woman is only responsible for his or her own crimes, as far as I’m concerned).

We’re all a color. We’re all people. Treat all people of all colors with respect and generosity, and the source of the “PC or not PC” debate is undermined. It becomes as moot as it should have been all along.

lambyfish makes a good point…

...white ancestors persecuted by anglos...of Irish descent...?

Either way, let’s just deal with each other face to face, one to one, decent and cool. PC can mean “politely civilized”, how ‘bout that?

I don’t understand how you can say feminism is “out” while quoting the editors of Bitch magazine in the same article.

Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me.

Kuya, thanks as always for your perceptive remarks. The leftist “people of color” sounds like the old rightist “colored people” to me. Tex, thanks for you’re usual banal moronic noncontribution.

I seldom find myself in a situation where I need to decide on this form of categorizing. If I know the person, I use his or her name and if I don’t know it I just ask what it is.

For a passing comment or question—Sir, Miss or Ms seem pretty safe. Let’s just get over this kind of pettiness.

I do have one friend and business associate for about 35 years who is very PC aware who I occasionally tease by slipping “Oriental” or “girl” into the conversation. She is of Korean ancestry and still falls for it sometimes, but usually just gives me an elbow or a “dumb Swede” reply.

So right, Hxelen. I work with young women and they use feminist all the time. They have a lot of criticism for feminist organizations, but they embrace feminist. I can’t believe that you didn’t throw this one to Andi at Bitch as well.

Kuya’s got the right idea.  We’re all people of color.  If you doubt that, then stick your hand up against the monitor and then compare the color of your skin to the cultural ideal.  (In your case, Mike, you would be well-advised to release your cock before you perform the experiment.)

In other words, we’re all colored people.

As for the derivation of “politically correct”, I was under the impression that PC stood for “patriotically correct”.  What it might have meant a hundred years ago is completely irrelevant.  Nowadays, you can’t separate the wingnuts from the flags they’ve wrapped around their shoulders.  What once might have represented an expression of tragic respect for the people whose lives were sacrificed for their country is now an article of faith for the folks who worship at the altar of American nationalism.  Forget Christianity.  Patriotism is the national religion, and the patriotically correct are its faithful followers.

I was under the impression that the term Politically Correct has been bastardized over the past few decades to somehow come to mean inoffensive.  Instead, the term PC was meant to indicate people remaining “correct” in their political beliefs (i.e. A communist would advocate for communism not capitalism, An environmentalist would advocate for regulations aimed to protect the environment, etc.). 

When this term morphed and came to represent over-sensitivity to non-slights, we lost some of our ability to engage in productive, honest discourse.  This, one can argue, led to our politicians adapting to the environment and trying to be everything to everyone, instead of being politically correct and advocating for those things in which they truly believed.  It’s how we ended up with “compassionate conservatism”.

Major Major as usual your point is ludicrous, white people are pinkish except for Albinos, SO WHAT ? There are still black, white, brown, red, yellow peoples. Most blacks are more brown than black, but are you saying they are not different races ? There are great moral, cultural and intellectual variances among the majority members of all races, keeping in mind the inevitable exceptions which prove the rule.

There’s only one race, Mike, and that’s the human race.  The regional variations to which you refer are barely relevant and, with time (and a judicious application of miscegenation), they will become completely irrelevant.  Even the albinos are colored.

In other words, there’s no such thing as the “white” race.

But then, by then the dominant racist controversy will be resurrected along the lines of genetically modified humans and their unmodified counterparts, or among the divergent strains of modification.

After all, after eliminating all of our natural predators, how else are humans expected to evolve?

Not true, even UNESCO disavowed that Boasian nonsense in the mid-50s after they had endorsed it postwar. See Carleton Coon’s The Races of Man.

What a surprise Mikey trots out another discredited white supremacist as “science”. Modern science refutes, rebuts, and ridicules the notion of race. Human DNA analysis has determined that genetically we are all the same....................... Except for the white devils.

Coon was only the most highly regarded anthropologist in the profession for half a century and headed the department at Penn State. DNA has NOT determined that the different races are the same, we all have many similarities and many differences.  Modern science recognizes race, read The Bell Curve for starters.

The fact that The Bell Curve was written by a psychologist and a political scientist does not lend much weight to your already fallacious argument. Race is, after all, a biological distinction between varying peoples--not a psychological or political distinction. A biologist or a geneticist might be more qualified to write a book concerning the existence or non-existence of race.

Race is defined as “similar genetic stock.” Vague, much? Where do we draw the line? In reality, if you were to take even a visual survey of the people of Africa you would find that various regions share common physical features, such as nose or face structure, not characteristic of another region. The same is true for peoples of Asia and peoples of Europe. Is there a Nigerian race, an Ethiopian race, a Chinese race, etc? The only reason we use terms like “black”, “white”, and “Asian” is because they are convenient. What’s the race of American Indians? Are they Asian because they are from that “genetic stock”? Is Caucasian really a race? There are people in the Middle East as white as any Englishman, but they and most others would not consider them to be Caucasian.

In reality, the biological differences that separate me from any other woman is contained in junk DNA. All people are 99.999999999% alike. If a scientist were given DNA from me, a black person, and DNA from you, blondemike, a white person, they would not be able to determine what region of the world either of us were from or what color our skin was. Most modern scientists believe race is a myth. We see differences, but those variants truly are only skin deep.

Oh. I really dislike the term “African-American.” Adding the African seems to imply that I am somehow less American than just an “American.” It also implies that being originally from Africa (over 400 years ago, most likely...) plays as much a role in my life as being born and raised in America. In other words, that my “Africaness” is equal to my “Americaness.” This is simply not true. If I were to go to Africa I would be totally out of place. The way I speak, think, and act is the result of my very American upbringing. After all, we do not call white people “European Americans.”

You’re right, it is a biological distinction, which means it’s not a myth. I don’t know if “most American scientists” believe race is a myth but they are wrong if they do. It’s a fact of life and it doesn’t preclude much commonality among the different races as well as many differences. Like sex, we have similarities as well as differences but even the most wacko PC nut would deny two different sexes. Race is a little more variable, caucasian, mongolian, negroid.  The there is no race line was
even disowned by UNESCO after an earlier endorsement. You have to factor in the prevailing indoctrination system too. If most scientists believed in segregation you would say they have been brainwashed, the same applies to conclusions you agree with. The interaction between
nature and nurture is complex but it goes a lot deeper than mere skin color. I have never met anyone who disliked someone else solely on the basis of skin color. There are always deeper patterns of behavior involved, it’s plain stupid to deny this.  As far as the authors of The Bell Curve go if there any scientifically based counterstudies I’d like to see them. All I have seen is ad hominem attacks based on PC nonsense. Herrnstein was a very highly regarded cognitive scientist, I agree that Murray is a rightist ideologue in the sense that Chomsky is a leftist ideologue but you don’t automatically discount Chomsky, do you ?

I’ll start from the bottom and work my way up. I will use the term “race” because it is rather convenient. Just to restate my position, there is no sound, biological reason to believe that race exists on any more than a cultural or historical level. Okay.

I would discount Chomsky’s opinion if he were discussing matters that had nothing to do with his expertise. For example, in an academic sense a molecular biologist’s thoughts on recent economic trends is irrelevant. In a similar example, I’m not going to read a doctoral thesis concerning string theory written by a person who received his PhD in zoology.

Hernstein and Murray had their expertise in social sciences. The existence or non-existence of race is more a matter for those studying the physical sciences--namely biology and genetics. That was my only point.

I do agree that bigots are prejudiced because of “deeper patterns of behavior” that they may perceive in whatever given race. However, what are those patterns based upon? One may perceive that black Americans are more likely to steal, be unintelligent, or be violent. But the question is, “Is a black person more likely to steal, be unintelligent, or be violent BECAUSE of his biological make-up?” Evidence gathered by modern science suggests not. Many social reasons, such as poverty (400 years of enslavement, racism, and lack of education will do that) can account for patterns demonstrated in blacks. So really, the distinction that separates you, a white person, and me, a black person are historical and economical...not biological and thus not racial. Otherwise, we could look at the poor as a race or the uneducated as a race.

Unlike the differences between sexes, there are no physical differences between the races that go beyond the skin. If given DNA from one man and one woman, a scientist could determine which piece of DNA belonged to which sex. If he were given DNA from one black and one white he could not determine which piece of DNA belonged to which “race.”

I agree that we cannot rely on the scientists to reveal the truth, but we can rely on the evidence they gather...We can examine it and determine a reasonable truth. That is why past sciences, such as alchemy or phrenology, have been discredited.

Here are some sources that support what the others and I are saying regarding race being a myth. Enjoy.

http://www.bioethics.umn.edu/afrgen/html/Themythofrace.html
http://www.pbs.org/race/000_About/002_04-background-01-07.htm
http://www.physanth.org/positions/race.html
http://raceandgenomics.ssrc.org/Goodman/

Look, you need to read The Races of Man by Carleton S. Coon, a prominent anthropologist as well as The Bell Curve. It’s nice of you to refer me to sources that agree with your conclusions here but it
has to be a two-way street. And, no, your reiteration of your unproven, arguable assertion does not prove your premise. You, of course, contradict yourself because you previously correctly stated that race is a biological, not political or psychological fact. Which is true. Alchemy and phrenology were never sciences nor did I say that we can’t rely on science, I was talking about scientists dismissing out of hand incontrovertible facts because they find them politically unpalatable. The Bell Curve followed proper scientific methodolgy and the critics have beeen reduced to crying “racism” itself a questionable term that only came into being during the 20s at the latest. Also as regards the term “prejudice” I think the proper term is “postjudice” because people come to certain conclusions AFTER interactions with other groups. Too many tens of millions of Americans have had negative experiences with say, blacks, to stupidly dismiss them as ‘bigots” again your meaningless label has nothing to do with the facts of objective reality. IF they became bigots it was because they had too many negative experiences with blacks.  Slavery ended over 160 years ago, too late to use that as an excuse, legal segregation only existed in 17 states and that has been gone for almost half a century. Many groups from far more oppressive societies come here and are way ahead of blacks after a short time period here. Now it’s true that we don’t KNOW how much is nature and how much is cultural. Or how much they influence each other. But to dismiss biological factors out of hand is stupid. Obviously there are physical and mental differences between the races, whites don’t get sickle cell disease, gentiles don’t get tay-sachs, blacks are much better at basketball than swimming or mountain climbing. Exceptions here prove the rule, blacks mature sexually much faster. It’s not a question of better or worse but merely being different. Blacks on average do 15-20 points less on standard IQ tests than whites, again there are exceptions which prove the rule. German and Jewish culture is very learning oriented via book reading, black culture is much more oral and anti-intellectual. And so on.

Blacky
Mikey struggles with the assumption that somehow a lack of melanin has given him superpowers. 

Ok BM here is your rebuttal for The Bell Curve.
The Mismeasure of Man by Jay Gould ( Left wing rebuttal)
Lessons from the Bell Curve by James Heckman ( Right Wing rebuttal)

Both books have one common thread. This is junk science.
Coon was a highly regarded professor of anthropology and was the department head until he cracked and wrote the utter nonsense of The Races of Man. I would give his theories as much creedence as the theory that the white devils were created by a scientist Yakub as the Nation of Islam theorizes.

Coon’s book was exactly similar to his teaching over a 50 year academic career. He never flippped out but he was on the receiving of assholes who DID flip out.  His book was as well documented as the best of academic work.  Gould never rebutted anything, he was a straight Commie line promoter of “anti-racist” mythology. The other book never rebutted The Bell Curve and was a rightwing parody of Comrade Gould.  Anyway, how can you say a book is rebutted WHEN YOU NEVER READ THE ORIGINAL ALLEGEDLY REBUTTED ???????????? Same nonsense you pulled on holohoax revisionism.  As a certified Latino Beaner Boy Retard I can see why your so sensitive on the unrefuted Bell Curve.  Your people rank next to bottom on ALL IQ and intelligence tests.  At least blacks are Numero Uno in basketball.

The Rise and Fall of UNESCO Man
by Kenan Malik

The question of what constitutes human nature is usually understood in terms of the nature-nurture debate. Through the nature-nurture prism, we can survey the past century and see dramatic shifts in the dominant ways we have conceived of humanness - crudely from a prewar racialised concept of human nature, to a postwar largely cultural view of humanness, to the contemporary rehabilitation of Darwinian Man. These swings of the nature-nurture pendulum we often think of almost as paradigm shifts in the Kuhnian sense.

There is, however, another way of understanding this historical evolution. Underlying all debates about humanness is the attempt to understand the relationship between humans as physically determined beings and humans as social beings and moral agents. Or, to put it another way, between humans as objects who, like any other natural beings, operate under the purview of biological and physical laws; and humans as subjects who, uniquely among natural organisms, possess consciousness and agency. To understand how we are human is, therefore, to understand not so much whether we are creatures of nature or nurture, but how we are simultaneously object and subject, simultaneously a physically determined being and a conscious agent.

Bedazzled as we often are by the nature-nurture debate, we tend to overlook this issue. Yet it is a crucial issue because it is this that makes human nature distinct from that of any other creature. Moreover, if we understand the debate about human nature as an attempt to make sense of humans as both objects and subjects, then we can see that there are common threads to what otherwise might appear very distinct visions of humanness, and that both sides in the nature-nurture debate are dogged by similar kinds of conceptual problems.

A useful way of approaching the question of both the similarities and differences between the various historical concepts of human nature is through the rise and fall of UNESCO Man. UNESCO Man is the embodiment of the postwar cultural vision of humanness, a vision which emerged directly in response to prewar racialised ideas, and in response to which contemporary naturalistic theories have emerged. What I want to do is see if we can understand the relationship between prewar, postwar and contemporary theories through more than simply the nature-nurture prism.

For more than a century, from the middle of the nineteenth to the middle of the twentieth, race was central to any conception of human nature. ‘All is race. There is no other truth’, as Disraeli put it. The experience of Nazism and the Holocaust changed all that. In the words of the founding conference of the UN, ‘the barbarism was made possible by the propagation of ideas of the inequality of men and races’.

To combat such ideas, UNESCO convened a panel of social and natural scientists, and charged them with producing a definitive statement on racial difference. The two statements produced by the panel, in 1950 and 1951, declared race to be not so much ‘a biological phenomenon as a social myth’.

The UNESCO statements, however, were not simply about race. They also pulled together a number of themes about human nature that had become highly influential in social and cultural anthropology - particularly through the work of figures such as Franz Boas, Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict - and in behaviourist psychology; themes which laid the basis for postwar antiracism and the liberal consensus. One such theme was the belief that humans are post-evolutionary. Whereas the Ubermensch of racial science was entirely moulded by the laws of nature, UNESCO Man was a cultural being: biology played little role in his make-up. Linked to this was UNESCO Man’s second characteristic – his plasticity of mind. He possessed a pliable psyche, which could take many forms, and produce many behaviours and attitudes, depending on his particular social and cultural environment.  As the anthropologist Ruth Benedict put it, ‘The vast proportion of all individuals who are born into any society always assume the behaviour dictated by that society.’

The third key characteristic of UNESCO Man was that he was biologically singular but culturally plural. In a famous paper on ‘The Scope of Anthropology’, Claude Levi-Strauss argued that ‘universal forms of thought and morality’ pertain to ‘biology and psychology’. Human unity was manifested purely at a biological level, while culture expressed purely its differences. Given the pliability of human nature, Levi-Strauss believed, the universal aspects of the psyche were relatively unimportant. Some have taken the argument further still, denying any underlying essence, and hence any common nature, to humankind.

So sudden and dramatic was this shift in perceptions about human nature and human difference that we tend to understand UNESCO Man simply in terms of the transformation from nature to nurture, from race to culture. Certainly, UNESCO Man helped seal the destruction of prewar racial anthropology, presenting an image of humanness that made it possible to believe in equality, diversity and social planning. But the drama of this transformation should not blind us to the continuities that still existed between prewar and postwar concepts of humanness.

One such continuity lay in the very notion of human difference. Racial science denied the existence of a common human nature, believing that every race had a specifically constituted essence. Postwar anthropologists accepted that all humans possess a common biological constitution. But because they regarded universal aspects of humanity at best unimportant, at worst illusory, so they, too, understood humanness in terms of its differences, even though these differences were constituted in nurture rather than in nature.

Linked to this common denial of human universals was the common inability of racial science and postwar anthropology to deal with the question of human subjectivity. Postwar anthropologists tried to demonstrate the uniqueness of humanity by separating culture and nature. But UNESCO Man was as much a passive victim of external forces as was Racial Man. As anthropologist Leslie White argued in his influential Science of Culture individual consciousness has little impact on social behaviour because ‘it is the individual who is explained in terms of his culture, not the other way round’.

Humans do not make culture; culture makes humans. An individual cannot escape the force of destiny imposed by his culture and history. Culture, like race, appears as a transcendent category outside of our immediate consciousness but which is transmitted from generation to generation. Racial science expressed a mechanistic view of humanness, one in which human history flowed inevitably according to the laws of nature. UNESCO Man embodied an idealist view, in which humans were not rooted in their nature, and in which human history and culture are reified. What united the two was a common view of human beings, not as subjects, but simply as objects, in the one case of nature, in the other of culture.

The political needs of the postwar world meant that UNESCO Man was constituted in terms of nurture rather than nature. But if we take our eyes away from the nature-nurture question, and explore instead the issue of human subjectivity, we can see that UNESCO Man and Ubermensch inhabited the same conceptual universe.

Let’s wind the clock forward now to contemporary explanations of humanness. For a whole raft of reasons, both social and scientific, the nature-nurture pendulum has swung back. UNESCO Man was an embodiment of the postwar consensus; as that consensus weakened so did the purchase of the cultural vision of humanness. Political changes, in particular the demise of Marxism, have helped undermine social explanations of human behaviour, given that most such explanations were rooted in, or derived from, Marxist theories of history. And advances in evolutionary biology and genetics, and the recognition by anthropologists that cultural mores were not as relative as many had assumed, have helped strengthen naturalistic explanations.

It is not that the ideas about humanness embodied in UNESCO Man have disappeared. They continue to be influential, both in anthropology and in wider poststructuralist and postmodern currents. What has changed, however, is that such visions are being increasingly, and effectively, challenged by naturalistic views of human nature. There is increasing acceptance of the idea that human psychology must be understood in its evolutionary context. And there is increasing skepticism about the degree to which the human psyche is pliable: human nature, many now contend, is not only fixed but fixed in the Stone Age.

At one level the two sides were separated by a huge conceptual gulf, not to mention a gulf of invective. But once again, if we take our eyes away from the nature-nurture debate, we can see common threads arising from common conceptual problems.

One arises from the way in which contemporary naturalistic theories maintain the belief that universals manifest themselves biologically, differences culturally. Of course, the balance between the two has shifted, so that there is today, unlike previously, considerable stress on the importance of biological universals, or species-typical behaviour. But what both UNESCO Man and contemporary theories deny, though for very different reasons, is the idea of human universals emerging out of a social process, of the possibility of the human essence being constituted in social and historical, as well as natural, terms.

Second, and linked to this, is a failure to address the question of human subjectivity. Naturalistic theories take it as axiomatic that human nature should be understood in the same terms as rest of nature. But such an approach inevitably precludes the understanding of subjectivity. Natural organisms are objects. Humans uniquely are object and subject. Understanding humans in the same way as the rest of nature inevitably means understanding humans as if we were simply objects.

Another way of putting this is that humans are ontologically distinct from the rest of nature. A purely naturalistic account of human nature, therefore, cannot capture what it is to be human.

What is striking, and paradoxical, about contemporary naturalistic theories is how similar they are to the kinds of arguments put forward by Boas and Mead. Humans are, as many have observed in recent years, shaped both by nature and by nurture. The interactionist argument runs something like this. Humans have a common nature. Put a group of humans in environment A, they are therefore likely to exhibit behaviour X. In environment B, behaviour Y; in environment C, behaviour Z. And so on. A particular environment elicits a particular behaviour. That of course is the pure milk of Boasian functionalism, and indeed of Lockean ideas.

What neither side of the nature-nurture debate have come to terms with is this. We are clearly defined by both nature and nurture. But we are also defined by our ability to transcend both. Unlike any other creature, humans have developed the capacity to overcome the constraints imposed both by our genetic and our cultural heritage. It is not that human beings have floated free of the laws of causation. It is, rather, that as subjects we have the ability to transform our selves, our natures, our world, an ability denied to any other physical being. Moreover, the kinds of causes relevant to the human world are distinct from that of the non-human world. All events have causes, but only humans act by reason. A reason is a special kind of cause, one that is only applicable to subjects; an act determined by reason we generally treat as an act of free will.

To understand human nature is to understand the relationship between humans as physically determined beings and humans as moral agents. UNESCO Man and Darwinian Man both embody one aspect of our humanity, but deny the other. Unesco Man was an attempt to understand humanness entirely in cultural terms. Because he was not rooted in the physical world, the consequence was an idealist view of humanness. Contemporary naturalistic theories have restored humanity back to nature. But it has also denied itself the resources for understanding human transcendence. The result is a mechanistic view of human nature. From very different starting points, mechanistic and idealist views of human nature converge on a common vision of human beings as objects and exhibit a common inability to understand humans as subjects.

Looking at the historical development of the idea of human nature reveals the inadequacy of the nature-nurture paradigm. It reveals too, the common conceptual framework, and the common conceptual problems, that underlie what are often seen as incommensurate views of humanness.

The challenge is to go beyond both UNESCO Man and Darwinian Man, beyond nature-nurture, beyond idealism and mechanism, to create a conceptual framework that can allow us to understand human nature as the generator of human subjectivity.

I’d like to begin by saying that based on your comments you appear to be a racist. Racism:

1 : a belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race

You do mention that culture plays a factor in the characteristics of a given race; but the fact that “people” (not you, of course) have had some negative experiences with “say, blacks” and your keen observation that because blacks have not pulled themselves up from their bootstraps in 160 years time...means that they are some how inferior to other races. Smells like racism to me. Additionally, I’m not sure that the time a word came into existence is really relevant. Existentialism as a philosophy did not exist until even later than the 20s. That does not make existentialism as a concept is any less real. Even if the term has not always existed, the idea that one race is superior to others because of inherent biological differences is a pretty old school idea.

I have read The Bell Curve, so to say that I have not considered both sides of the argument is fallacious. Additionally, you stated above that “modern science recognizes race” because of statements made in The Bell Curve. Let me correct my original statement. If race in humans were to exist it would be a matter for biologists and geneticists to determine. I could say “species in humans don’t exist,” but if species did exist it would be a matter for those who study biology. Do you understand? So back to my original point...The writers of The Bell Curve are not qualified scientists to make the determination on race because neither writers were expertise in biology or genetics. I pointed you to a source that was a PhD in a relevant field. Science that would support your argument might be a picture of a black person’s brain and a picture of a white person’s brain describing how they are biologically different. Get back to me on that one.

I reiterated my point before in order to make the discussion easier. The statement was not an attempt to prove my beliefs. Sorry that irked you so.

They make judgments based on interactions with a certain number of people and subsequently conclude that all members of that race must be the same way. Concluding that all members of that race are a certain way is prejudice. They are judging people of that race that they have not met based on the ones that they have met. I have met a variety of black people that do not fall into the stereotypical image of a black person.

To call an idea stupid for dismissing the same thing most scientists dismiss based on evidence is...stupid. I have to get to class. I may say more later.

“Anti-racism” like the “anti-communism” of the 50s has become the first refuge of the scoundrel. People do not need a specific degree in a field to master it. A person could write a decent history of a subject without being an academically trained historian. The authors of The Bell Curve, particularly Herrnstein, are more than qualified to write on the subject and I suspect that if you had agreed with them, you’d never bring this point. In any case, your point is a nonsequitur. To me race is not an end all and be all but it definitely exists, a part of objective or external reality.  No one ever concluded that ALL members of a given race are the same way so let’s drop that strawman argument. If you have repeated bad experiences with a given group of people you will naturally be wary and make generalizations for survival’s sake while always hoping the next person will be different. That is POSTjudice, not prejudice. The IQ tests are a valid indication of intelligence so we don’t need to compare brain sizes here. I’ve read that there are in fact differences in brain sizes among different groups but research here has been politically stifled for generations. There is some but not what it should be. I never wrote that race is the PRIMARY determinant but only that it is a factor. I find Major Major’s lengthy comments of considerable interest and I do appreciate his sharing them with us. There’s a lot to take in and I do agree that the dichotomization of nature/nurture is not a good thing. But I don’t think the idea of transcending nature makes any sense since we are totally part of nature and nature, i.e., existence is all there is. As to culture making humans rather than vice-versa I totally disagree, that assumes that we all have to be passive spectators of a ready made culture created by others. Not so. There are several people in the black community who reject the Mo Fo culture, just to give one relevant example. Many of us reject the intense anti-intellectualism of the American culture, there are some Jews who reject the perennial victim culture of Judaism and you can multiply examples. It seems we are getting things backward here, things we can’t change like racial differences some here talk like it could be different and things we can change like human culture some people seem to think are carved in stone. Finally, NO scientist has ever dismissed the concept of race based on any evidence. PC yes, science, no.

Simply saying that they are qualified does not make them qualified. It is an important point to make that the writers of a topic be qualified to write about the given topic. Regardless of whether or not I would bring up that point if I agreed with Hernstein’s conclusion is irrelevant. I would be wrong not to. Anyway, I would never site examples I did not believe were from valid sources. Why would I allow the person I’m arguing with to do so without calling it out? We were discussing the existence or non existence of race. You stated that modern science supported the existance because of what was written in The Bell Curve. If the writers of the Bell Curve were not qualified to write about the topic of race--your point seems invalid. Thus how is my argument a non sequitur?

Prejudice is judging people based on pre-conceived notions. Even if these pre-conceived notions are based on experiences, judging others based on these experiences is prejudice...Additionally, you stated,"No one ever concluded that ALL members of a given race are the same way so let’s drop that strawman argument.” Um. So members of the KKK and neo-Nazi groups are willing to make exceptions to their conclusions? I doubt it. They are, of course, extreme examples...But to say that no one ever concluded that all members of a given race are the same way is an unfounded statement.

IQ...People today on average have higher IQs than people of previous generations. A person’s IQ reduces when he is outside of school. My point? Environment influences a person’s IQ; thus, no, IQ tests are not a valid indication of a person’s raw intelligence.

Please point me to a source that supports that different races have different sized brains, even if this researched is being “stifled.”

It’d be cool if you could organize your responses into paragraphs. It just makes your points easier to follow. My negro brain has trouble adapting to a single paragraph with a variety of different ideas.

Well, saying they aren’t doesn’t make it so either. I can’t see why one would have to be a geneticist or anthropologist to write on intelligence and even people who are totally credentialed like the late Carleton Coon of Penn State do, they are still attacked as racists.

On brain size, I thought The Bell Curve brought that up, think Coon did also and I thought Dr. Roger Pearson did in his 1970s anthropology textbook. If not, I’ll have to reseach it.

Environment may influence anything but how much is the question.
Heredity may influence it more. Also a person who takes the time and
effort to actually learn something may be yet the greater influence.

Ok, so there are some groups who make generalizations, they are not significant and in fact anyone who dissents from the PC orthodoxy is labeled KKK or Neonazi. Mostly it’s a term of abuse rather than a factual description, no different than rightists who label Pinko or Commie or
Terrorist everyone with whom they disagree.

Where are we going with this ? Judging others based on experience is NOT prejudice but POSTjudice. If we can’t even agree on basics like this maybe we better just agree to disagree.

Glad to accomodate your style suggestions.

Judging all the members of a given category, based on your experience of the actions of some of them, is prejudicial.  If your wife is mugged at gunpoint by several armed black gangbangers, then you would be justified in concluding that all armed gangbangers are violent and dangerous people, and ought to be avoided or confronted for their crimes.  You would not be justified in concluding that most colored folk are inherently less intelligent than their lighter-skinned counter-parts.  Prejudicial conclusions are simply unfounded conclusions which we accept uncritically and then search for the evidence to support them.

She was on Oct 26 by three of them, two of them with guns pointed at her head. While I never judged that ALL blacks were like this, a great many more ARE in proportion to their population size, 31% of the population here, 78% or more of the crime. I WILL make the appropriate generalizations and take the appropriate actions to avoid this if possible. If we see black youth approaching WE GET MUCH MORE SUSPICIOUS FOR GOOD REASON. This is POSTjudice, nor prejudice.
Most colored folk I have found to be less intelligent but there ARE exceptions. Between your PC manual and my own senses I will take the latter every time. You might do the same.

If you want to confront these gangbanger folk, good luck !

I read The Bell Curve and the statistics were skewed and distorted. The factual basis for the book was flawed from the outset so the finished product is garbage. Unlike you I actually examine facts before forming an opinion. I don’t wait for Chimpsky to tell me what to think.

So three individuals supposedly commited a crime against your wife, and somehow a great many more “colored folk” are criminals? And stupid?  And you accuse me of generalizations. Its all that Nazi propaganda you have been spouting. Its rotted your brain.

Racial groupings aren’t exactly artificial, I mean, you can see with your own eyes that people look like they’re grouped somehow by physical characteristics, but there’s a long-standing set of presumptions that the visible differences indicate more than they really do, especially in regards to who we’re kin with and who we’re not. And modern genetic science has undercut those presumptions, blessedly.

It has to do with degree of genetic variation between people. We have evidence that wasn’t available in the past, due to limitations upon research techniques associated with particular times in history. We’ve learned things we could not know before, because we had no way to measure them. Sort of like this: microscopic life was always present in water, but until we had the tools to see things at that scale, we didn’t know they were there and some wrong conclusions came from that lack of knowledge. Same with race. Now we can see things at a finer scale, so former conclusions about human variation, based on less complete information, are being invalidated.

As I read it, recent advances in genetic science add to and also go beyond earlier working theories about human variation that had to be based upon evidence that is at a grosser scale than DNA, like skin color, eyelid folds, skull shape, blood groups, etc. And what appears to be so is that, considering the amount of genetic difference between any two people on Earth, most of that difference lies within phenotypic groups, rather than between them. This means that the greater proportion of our differences come from genetic factors other than those that produce our “racially categorized” physical appearances, such as skin color, hair texture, etc.

This means that the basis for our racial associations is undermined. We assume people who look way different from us are less related to us, but that’s a mistake. It’s based upon the fact that we’re highly visual creatures, with great eyes for visible detail, plus a habit of xenophobia probably dating from the time when our distant ancestors were competing with each other to ensure that their own tribe survived life in a harsh wilderness environment, rather than rival tribes who might have crowded our ancestors out.

This is what I mean when I assert that we’re all cousins, maybe a bit closer cousins to some than to others, but cousins nonetheless. And stereotypic racial features are not a valid basis for conclusions about our relatedness to each other. You’re no less kin to the pinks than you are to the browns, as much a cousin to the round-eye as to the epicanthic-eye.

Now, if we can continue eroding the racial paradigm, we’ll be eroding the foundation for a huge list of historical crimes. If we can promote the newer, more evidence-based paradigm of human relatedness instead of human division into “breeds”, it means that our descendants can be liberated from the continuation of race-based disaffection. That would be a great advance, right up there with the concept that people actually have rights, instead of just being fated to obey the rich, the strong or the brutal.

We can talk all day. But unless people around the world gain a greater affinity for each other, gaining a greater sense of connectedness even with people who look way different, the miseries and atrocities of the modern day will not diminish, and the crimes of the past, based on disaffection with “those others”, will surely repeat. And intensify.

At least the idea of relatedness is based on something that’s actually real!

You know, Charles Manson pushed the idea that racial hatred and warfare will ebb and flow, but will definitely escalate, until our civilization basically exhausts itself and falls to pieces through continued fighting.

Seems like, if we had half a brain, we’d do whatever we had to socially and psychologically, to avoid fulfilling the prophecy of a mass-murdering freakazoid motherfucker like him.

Exactly HOW were the Bell Curve stats were “skewed” and “distorted” ? Evidence, not your assertions. We have been the victims of several crimes by blacks, the armed robbery was just the worst instance. See the Uniform FBI Crime Stats. Chomsky is very PC on race, so your example of him is off base as usual. Tell us what “facts” you examined before forming your opinion, TexASS. Tell us exactly HOW the basis of the book is “flawed.” If this is anything like the incredible nonreasoning you displayed as regards holocaust revisionism, then you simply never read The Bell Curve. I charge you with lying. AGAIN. Oh, I guess your Me Hi Can peepul don’t come out on the high end of the curve.
Kuya, let me take a look at your comments and get back to you. Wanted to take care of my light work first.

Charles Manson is totally irrelevant to the topic here. His opinion on anything would be exactly as valuable as a dog’s or a skunk ‘s or texass independent’s.
I think your central premise appears to be the old skin color line but that fails. No one sustains a dislike of a group based on skin color alone. There are deeper factors of behavior and thinking or lack of it. While always noting exceptions to every general premise, I am going to feel a lot safer going down a street at night or even in the day inhabited by Albanians than blacks. Look at all the reported crime stats if you want to know why and keep in mind that probably half the crimes aren’t reported. Even in the worst ghettoes, people will tell you the main issue is crime, not police brutality even though the police are not particularly liked either.  Nor are most historical crimes based on race. Even western imperialism including US imperialism is based more on manifest destiny and economics than race. The greatest world killers, Stalin and Mao, mostly killed their own kind, not based on race in any case. Ergo for Genghis Khan. The Spanish did kill millions of Indians but they killed millions of whites too.

“Its all that Nazi propaganda you have been spouting. Its rotted your brain.”

Texas, you employed a reductio ad Hitlerum argument (alternatively referred to as argumentum ad Nazium) and therefore, by virtue of Godwin’s Law, you automatically lose the debate.  If it’s any consolation, the person who coined the phrase, and thereby made Mike’s forensic victory possible, was Leo Strauss, the father of neoconservatism.

But you were right about The Bell Curve; the data was indeed skewed.  First of all, the authors falsely assumed that since intelligence is heritable, that therefore it must be determined, for the most part, by genetic inheritance.  And then they decided to weight the data to eliminate any non-genetic, or cultural determinants.  In short, they decided to ignore the influence of education (among other intervening environmental variables, such as health, nutrition, cognitive stimulation, parental intervention, etc.) on the development of intelligence.  Subsequent analysis has shown that ignoring the influence of education on intelligence will significantly overstate the correlation between intelligence and socioeconomic status, which implies that the cultural variables cited above are just as significant as genetic inheritance on the general development of intelligence, and the consequent correlation between intelligence, both genetically and culturally derived, and economic status.

Simply stated, it means that malnutrition, poor health, inadequate housing, exposure to environmental pollutants and the lack of an education will limit the potential intelligence of people as much as the absence of them will enhance it.  The cultural determinants to intelligence are just as significant as the genetic determinants.

It’s a broad-based habit of thought I’m planting seeds to erode, mike, the “us-and-not-them” habit that’s visible everywhere and that’s so very often triggered by physical features like skin color (and others, but that’s a biggie), the habit of excessive caution, avoidance, disaffection, suspicion.

And, what if I was able to plant that seed in the mind of a reader of this site, such that the webs in his mind actually began to rearrange over time, to take a new shape? What if my few words got someone to thinking in a way that led him to eventually change away from the racial paradigm?

It’s a vanguard worth being a part of. I intend to be part of it.

Major, my understanding is that the IQ data in The Bell Curve was collected across the socio-economic spectrum of both blacks and whites, so if this is true, the data would take into account the factors that you mention. Then if the better off people of color still fall 15-20 points behind whites in IQ, the environmental argument gets discredited in favor of hereditarian factors. Of course, if you have evidence the authors only used results from deprived sectors of Black America, then
we all stand corrected.  None of the relevant data show cultural factors as determining in intelligence. Again, if you have contrary data, let’s see it.
Kuya, why not accept objective reality ? People are different, both within their own groupings and with other groupings. Trying to make water run uphill is a waste for someone of your intelligence. If you are saying that every person should be judged on their individual merits, I think we all agree.
If you are arguing for any sort of collective equality, race or gender, forget it. As far as racial consciousness goes, blacks are even worse here than whites. I understand the history but the Left keeps pushing Identity Politics and as long as they do there will be a very deserved backlash.
As a white gentile male, I feel no guilt towards blacks, Jews or women.

What sector of minorities is not deprived? The problem with discussing “race” is a lack of comprehension of what it means to be “different”. How can you explain poverty to someone who has never been poor. How do you describe racial profiling to someone who has never been pulled over for the crime of being dark skinned. How do you explain crime statistics are for convictions not who actually commits crimes. The fact that 38 percent of incarcerated California inmates are African American speaks more to the shitty public defenders in that state than to who is a “criminal”.

Major
Mikey really loves the Nazi’s. If you ask him he will gladly expound on the entire history of the Third Reich for you.

I am doing my own research around the concept of PC and attitudes about it and happened upon this forum of discussion.  I would like to share a few resources I have found helpful in learning and thinking about race. 

The 3 part documentary, “Race, the Power of an Illusion,” looks at race within the contexts of science, history, and society, which are all important frames of reference to consider.  http://www.pbs.org/race/000_General/000_00-Home.htm

This is an article I happened upon that I found very interesting, highlighting the difference between colorblind and coloraware.
http://academic.udayton.edu/Race/03justice/justice06.htm#Colorblind

Also check out Katya Gibel-Mevorach, an anthropologist who identifies as Black and Jewish and Interracial. http://web.grinnell.edu/anthropology/Faculty/katya.html

Also, it would be pertinent to learn about the concept of stereotype threat, which provides a different frame of reference than the Bell Curve.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/sats/interviews/steele.html
http://www.mtholyoke.edu/offices/comm/csj/092404/steele.shtml
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/prem/199908/student-stereotype

My learnings on race in undergraduate and graduate school have taught me that race is a socal construct but it has real consequences and real privileges for real people in both historical and modern day terms.  Scientists have determined that there are actually more genetic differences within one socially constructed racial group than across socially constructed racial groups, which means that two people who are both “black” are actually less genetically similar than two people who are “black” and “white,” which I learned about in the book Readings for Diversity and Social Justice.  Prior to reading this, I was unfamiliar with this idea. 

I often see that we use terms related to this topic constantly without really defining or understanding them.  I would invite exploration into what the definitions of race, ethnicity, culture, etc. are from scholars in the field.  Also, remember that not everyone is seen and treated as an “individual.” As a white person, I take for granted being seen this way.  If a white person is arrested for robbing a bank and it’s broadcast on the evening news, I don’t have to worry that people are going to make (or reinforce) a generalization that “all white people are like this.” I will continue to be seen as an individual while people who are not white generally do not have that same luxury.  I am not suggesting we should ignore our group identities in favor of seeing people as individuals because I think our group identities are critical components of who we are and how we got to where we are today.  For example, I had the opportunity to go to college not just because I worked hard but because my ancestors benefited from systems that gave them more opportunities than my non-white counterparts.  I have to own that I am a product of that.  It isn’t guilt, it isn’t liberal, it’s reality.  These two concepts of individual and group do not have to be mutually exclusive.  Both things matter. 

Enjoy the resources if you choose to explore them.

No, TexASS, it speaks to the observable fact that blacks commit many more crimes proportionately than any other group except for yours, which runs a close second. Oakland used to be over 50% black, now 31% but blacks commit 78% of the crimes. Public defenders are very dedicated and overworked but they can only do so much with obviously guilty. I have studied national socialism so I can learn the roots of your type of neocon thinking, Tex. By the way, Jews are not deprived, they are a very affluent minority as is true with Koreans and Episcopalians. Ergo for Seventh Day Adventists and Unitarians, so much for deprived minorities. Tex, every statement you made is in error. What a surprise, eh ? Convictions are for people CONVICTED of a crime, Tex, I’d have thought that rather obvious but then you are a mongoloid, right ? Racial profiling happens precisely because blacks AND Latins commit many more crimes than whites and Asians in proportion to their population. Airport security is understandably quicker to profile Saudis or Israelis than Swedes or Danes. Common sense, Pepe. Didn’t they have schools in yo’ section of San Antone ?
Shallas, I’ll look over your message when I have more time, thanks for the refs. Had to take care of my Me Hi Can light work first.

Mike, “the idea that some races are inherently inferior to others is the definition of racism.” But then, like the holocaust, you’ve already demonstrated your willingness to deny the existence of racism.

Doofus.

Major, you have had no rebuttal to the reasoned arguments of holocaust revisionism and have even been silent in the face of laws imprisoning people for questioning the standard religious party line,
so your remarks are intellectually weightless.
I have never made an overall judgment as to inferior or superior among groups. It all breaks down to superior in what, inferior in what. If saying races are different makes one a “racist” so be it. Same with gender differences. I don’t play by those PC rules.

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

By Jim Naureckas

When the New Republic devoted almost an entire issue (10/31/94) to a debate with the authors of The Bell Curve, editor Andrew Sullivan justified the decision by writing, “The notion that there might be resilient ethnic differences in intelligence is not, we believe, an inherently racist belief.”

In fact, the idea that some races are inherently inferior to others is the definition of racism. What the New Republic was saying - along with other media outlets that prominently and respectfully considered the thesis of Charles Murray and the late Richard Herrnstein’s book - is that racism is a respectable intellectual position, and has a legitimate place in the national debate on race.

The Bell Curve was accorded attention totally disproportionate to the merits of the book or the novelty of its thesis. The book and its dubious claims set the agenda for discussions on such public affairs programs as Nightline 10/21/94), the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour (10/28/94), the McLaughlin Group (10/21/94), Charlie Rose (11/3/94, 11/4/94), Think Tank (10/14/94), PrimeTime Live (10/27/94) and All Things Considered (10/28/94).

In addition to the above-mentioned New Republic issue, the “controversy” made the covers of Newsweek (10/24/94) and the New York Times Magazine (10/9/94), took up nearly a full op-ed page in the Wall Street Journal (10/10/94), and garnered a near-rave review from the New York Times Book Review (10/16/94; Extra! Update, 12/94).

While many of these discussions included sharp criticisms of the book, media accounts showed a disturbing tendency to accept Murray and Herrnstein’s premises and evidence even while debating their conclusions. “While Murray and Herrnstein base their findings on various surveys and extensive research, many of the conclusions they draw are fiercely disputed,” declared Robert MacNeil (10/28/94). “You’ve written a long book,” Ted Koppel told Murray (10/21/94). “I assume a great deal of work and research went into it. But the problem is your book has become a political football.”

While Murray and Herrnstein were generally characterized as sober social scientists, their critics were sometimes identified with censorious political correctness: “Both Murray and Herrnstein have been called racists,” wrote Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen (10/18/94). “Their findings, though, have been accepted by most others in their field, and it would be wrong - both intellectually and politically - to suppress them.” Proclaimed Newsweek‘s Geoffrey Cowley (10/24/94): “As the shouting begins, it’s worth noting that the science behind The Bell Curve is overwhelmingly mainstream.”

Murray himself doesn’t think that the research they relied on was so mainstream. “Some of the things we read to do this work, we literally hide when we’re on planes and trains,” Murray told the New York Times Magazine (10/9/94).

Pioneers of Eugenics

As well they might. Nearly all the research that Murray and Herrnstein relied on for their central claims about race and IQ was funded by the Pioneer Fund, described by the London Sunday Telegraph (3/12/89) as a “neo-Nazi organization closely integrated with the far righi in American politics.” The fund’s mission is to promote eugenics, a philosophy that maintains that “genetically unfit” individuals or races are a threat to society.

The Pioneer Fund was set up in 1937 by Wickliffe Draper, a millionaire who advocated sending blacks back to Africa. The foundation’s charter set forth the group’s missions as “racial betterment” and aid for people “deemed to be descended primarily from white persons who settled in the original 13 states prior to the adoption of the Constitution of the United States.” (In 1985, after Pioneer Fund grant recipients began receiving political heat, the charter was slightly amended to play down the race angle - GQ, 11/94.)

The fund’s first president, Harry Laughlin, was an influential advocate of sterilization for those he considered genetically unfit. In successfully advocating laws that would restrict immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, Laughlin testified before Congress that 83 percent of Jewish immigrants were innately feeble-minded (Rolling Stone, 10/20/94). Another founder, Frederick Osborn, described Nazi Germany’s sterilization law as “a most exciting experiment” (Discovery Journal, 7/9/94).

The fund’s current president, Harry Weyher, denounces the Supreme Court decision that desegregated schools, saying, “All Brown did was wreck the school system” (GQ, 11/94). The fund’s treasurer, John Trevor, formerly served as treasurer for the crypto-fascist Coalition of Patriotic Societies, when it called in 1962 for the release of Nazi war criminals and praised South Africa’s “well-reasoned racial policies” (Rolling Stone, 10/20/94).

One of the Pioneer Fund’s largest current grantees is Roger Pearson, an activist and publisher who has been associated with international fascist currents. Pearson has written: “If a nation with a more advanced, more specialized or in any way superior set of genes mingles with, instead of exterminating, an inferior tribe, then it commits racial suicide” (Russ Bellant, Old Nazis, the New Right and the Republican Party).

“Leading Scholar”

These are the people that financed nearly all The Bell Curve‘s “data” on the connection between race and intelligence. (Murray and Herrnstein themselves have not been funded, although Weyher says of Herrnstein, “We’d have funded him at the drop of a hat, but he never asked” - GQ, 11/94.)

Take the infamous Chapter 13, which Murray has often claimed is the only chapter that deals with race (far from it - there are at least four chapters focused entirely on race, and the whole book is organized around the concept).

Murray and Herrnstein’s claims about the higher IQs of Asians - widely cited in the media as fact - are almost entirely cited to Richard Lynn, a professor of psychology at the University of Ulster.

In the book’s acknowledgements, Murray and Herrnstein declare they “benefitted especially from the advice” of Lynn and five other people.

Lynn has received at least $325,000 from the Pioneer Fund (Rolling Stone, 10/20/94). He frequently publishes in eugenicist journals like Mankind Quarterly - published by Roger Pearson and co-edited by Lynn himself - and Personality and Individual Differences, edited by Pioneer grantee Hans Eysenck. Among Lynn’s writings cited in The Bell Curve are “The Intelligence of the Mongoloids” and “Positive Correlations Between Head Size and IQ.”

Murray and Herrnstein describe Lynn as “a leading scholar of racial and ethnic differences.” Here’s a sample of Lynn’s thinking on such differences: “What is called for here is not genocide, the killing off of the population of incompetent cultures. But we do need to think realistically in terms of the ‘phasing out’ of such peoples.... Evolutionary progress means the extinction of the less competent. To think otherwise is mere sentimentality.” (cited in Newsday, 11/9/94)

Elsewhere Lynn makes clear which “incompetent cultures” need “phasing out”: “Who can doubt that the Caucasoids and the Mongoloids are the only two races that have made any significant contributions to civilization?” (cited in New Republic, 10/31/94)

Lynn’s fingerprints are all over the footnotes to Chapter 13. In discussing the question of Asian intellectual superiority, Murray and Herrnstein say that the affirmative position has been well defended by Lynn, but that the question can only be decided by “data obtained from identical tests administered to populations that are comparable except for race.”

“We have been able to identify three such efforts,” the authors announce - two that support the concept of Asian superiority and one that does not. A review of the footnotes reveals a sleight of hand: The two tests that support Lynn’s thesis were conducted by Lynn himself. (See New York Review of Books, 12/1/94.)

Credibility Gap

Media reports also treated as fact Murray and Herrnstein’s claim that black IQs are 15 points lower than whites. “For as long as Americans have been IQ-tested, blacks have trailed whites by that 15-point margin,” ABC’s Dave Marash reported for Nightline (10/21/94). “Murray sees in the consistency of these gaps proof that intervening to raise low IQs just doesn’t work.”

But The Bell Curve cites as its primary sources for this assertion R. Travis Osborne, Frank C.J. McGurk and Audrey Shuey - all recipients of Pioneer grants. Osborne, who has received almost $400,000 from Pioneer, used his “research” into black genetic inferiority to argue for the restoration of school segregation (Newsday, 11/9/94).

And, in fact, even the data collected by these racists does not show a consistent 15-point gap. The studies they present show a wide range of results, ranging from no black/white IQ disparity at all to the absurd finding that most African-Americans are severely retarded.

As for the “consistency of the gaps,” even The Bell Curve acknowledges that more recent tests have shown a narrower black/white difference, ranging from seven to 10 points. SAT tests have shown a similar convergence. But Murray and Herrnstein warn that “at some point convergence may be expected to stop, and the gap could even begin to widen again” - because “black fertility is loaded more heavily than white fertility toward low-IQ segments of the population.” In other words, the bad genes will triumph, no matter what the evidence says.

That sort of circular argument abounds in The Bell Curve. Although sociologist Jane Mercer has shown that supposed racial differences in IQ vanish if one controls for a variety of socio-economic variables, the authors reject her method because their theories assume that low IQ causes people to be poor, rather than poverty causing low IQs. Similarly, even though IQ tests show that average scores are rising - by as much as 15 points since World War II - “real” IQs must be falling, since low IQ women are having more babies.

Giants in the Profession

Another person whose advice Murray and Herrnstein “benefitted especially from” - and who shows up constantly in their footnotes - is Arthur Jensen, whose very similar claims about blacks having innately lower IQs were widely discredited in the 1970s. The Pioneer Fund has given more than $1 million to this “giant in the profession,” as Pioneer chief Weyher describes him (GQ, 11/94). And it’s easy to see why: “Eugenics isn’t a crime,” Jensen has said (Newsday, 11/9/94). “Which is worse, to deprive someone of having a child, or to deprive the child of having a decent set of parents?”

Elsewhere, Jensen has worried “that current welfare policies, unaided by genetic foresight, could lead to the genetic enslavement of a substantial portion of our population.” (cited in Counterpunch, 11/1/94)

Murray and Herrnstein also rely heavily on Thomas Bouchard, whose study of separated-at-birth twins has “proved” that not only is intelligence largely genetically determined, but so are religiosity, political orientation and leisure-time interests. The Bell Curve uses Bouchard to rehabilitate Sir Cyril Burt, whose twin-based evidence for inherited intelligence is now believed to be fraudulent. Their logic is that Burt’s research must have been sound, because Burt’s findings closely resemble Bouchard’s, and Bouchard’s research is “accepted by most scholars as a model of its kind.”

That illustrates the sort of scholars Murray and Herrnstein associate with. More reputable researchers have raised many questions about Bouchard’s work: While other twin researchers estimate that 50 percent of the average variation in intelligence can be attributed to heredity, Bouchard comes up with 70 percent. Even the twin studies that came up with more conservative estimates of intelligence’s “heritability” (itself a highly dubious concept) are flawed because the supposedly “separated-at-birth” twins usually turn out to have been raised in close proximity; Bouchard refuses to let skeptics examine the case histories of the twins he studied, essentially rendering his research into so many “Believe It or Not!” anecdotes (Scientific American, 6/93; The Nation, 11/28/94).

Bouchard, of course, is also a major recipient of Pioneer money--"We couldn’t have done this project without the Pioneer Fund,” he told GQ (11/94). And he’s a colleague and mentor of (and has some peculiar views in common with) perhaps the crankiest of all of Pioneer’s beneficiaries, J. Philippe Rushton.

“More Brain Or More Penis”

Rushton (who’s gotten more than $770,000 from Pioneer) has transformed the Victorian science of cranial measurement into a sexual fetish--measuring not only head and brain size, but also the size of breasts, buttocks and genitals. “It’s a trade-off: More brain or more penis. You can’t have everything,” he told Rolling Stone‘s Adam Miller (10/20/94), explaining his philosophy of evolution.

Rushton was reprimanded by his school, the University of Western Ontario, for accosting people in a local shopping mall and asking them how big their penises were and how far they could ejaculate. “A zoologist doesn’t need permission to study squirrels in his backyard,” he groused (Rolling Stone, 10/20/94).

Rushton’s creepy obsessions intersect with the ugliest sides of politics: A 1986 article by Rushton suggested that the Nazi war machine owed its prowess to racial purity, and worried that demographic shifts were endangering our “Northern European” civilization. Rushton co-authored a paper that argued that blacks have a genetic propensity to contract AIDS because of their “reproductive strategy” of promiscuous sex (cited in Newsday, 11/9/94). The other author was Bouchard, the author of those amazing twin studies celebrated in mainstream news outlets.

It’s not surprising that Murray and Herrnstein would defend Rushton, writing that his “work is not that of a crackpot or a bigot, as many of his critics are given to charging.” But it’s startling that a science writer for the New York Times, Malcolm Browne, would actually endorse Rushton’s book (10/16/94). Echoing The Bell Curve, Browne respectfully concludes his summary of Rushton’s bizarre theories with: “Mr. Rushton is nevertheless regarded by many of his colleagues as a scholar and not a bigot.” ("Browne doesn’t identify these ‘colleagues,’ but I expect he means Professor Beavis and Professor Butthead,” the Toronto Star‘s Joey Slinger wrote--10/20/94.)

Political Timing

Anyone who flipped through the footnotes and bibliography of Murray and Herrnstein’s book could see that there was something screwy about their sources. And there is hardly a proposition in their book that had not been thoroughly debunked more than a decade ago by Steven Jay Gould’s classic work on the pseudo-science behind eugenics, The Mismeasure of Man.

So why is The Bell Curve suddenly an “important book” that needs to have cover stories, news broadcasts, even whole magazines devoted to it? In large part, because the book is well-timed to take advantage of a resurgence of racism in U.S. media and society - a racism that does not want to face up to its own identity.

In a proposal outlining the book, Murray wrote that there is “a huge number of well-meaning whites who fear that they are closet racists, and this book tells them they are not. It’s going to make them feel better about things they already think but do not know how to say.” (New York Times Magazine, 10/9/94) The Bell Curve does indeed tell closet racists that they aren’t racist, and makes them feel better by saying that their prejudices are grounded in science.

The Bell Curve also fits in well with some current political agendas. The immigration issue has been seized upon by the U.S. right wing, as it has by the far right in other countries. Much of Murray and Herrnstein’s book is devoted to suggesting that “Latino and black immigrants are...putting some downward pressure on the distribution of intelligence.”

The connection between the book and the anti-immigrant movement is, once again, the Pioneer Fund; the fund has always feared immigrants, although its concerns have shifted from Poles and Italians to blacks and Latinos. The leading anti-immigration group in the U.S. is the Federation for American Immigration Reform (unfortunately sharing an acronym with the media watch group FAIR); the federation has received more than $1 million in Pioneer money, which was critical in getting the organization off the ground. (See Extra!, 7-8/93.) Pioneer also funds the American Immigration Control Foundation, a more overtly racist group whose work is cited by Murray and Herrnstein.

Similarly, the book also meshes well with conservative efforts to drastically restrict welfare spending. Murray has long been associated with the idea of eliminating welfare, and now with The Bell Curve he produces a eugenic justification: “The United States already has policies that inadvertently social-engineer who has babies, and it is encouraging the wrong women.... We urge that these policies, represented by the extensive network of cash and services for low-income women who have babies, be ended.”

For Their Own Ends

Many pundits carefully distanced themselves from the book, then made use of its claims to push their own ideological ends. In a New Republic column (10/31/94), Mickey Kaus argues against a genetic basis for IQ differences, saying, “There are obvious policies that might change the black ‘environment’ and therefore black IQ scores.” But what’s his example of such a program? “Abolition of cash welfare,” he suggests.

The McLaughlin Group (10/21/94) featured a whole parade of this sort of pseudo-critic: While no one wanted to embrace wholeheartedly Murray and Herrnstein’s genetic determinism, almost all were happy to make use of the conclusion The Bell Curve draws from the eugenic argument: that the poor and non-white are getting what they deserve.

Thus Pat Buchanan declared: “I think a lot of the data are indisputable.... It does shoot a hole straight through the heart of egalitarian socialism which tried to create equality of result by coercive government programs.”

And Michael Barone: “The implication of their argument is, if they’re right, that we really should not engage in a lot of government social engineering to create equal outcomes and so forth. They’d have to throw all the Chinese out of the Higher Math Department.”

Morton Kondracke found this message: “It does undermine the case, John, for racial quotas, which is the form of discrimination in our society.”

Clarence Page, the token liberal on the panel, described Murray as a personal friend, and gave a lukewarm critique: “It’s got some good data, but it’s Murray’s conclusions that he doesn’t prove.”

It was left to John McLaughlin, of all people, to say the obvious about The Bell Curve: “It is largely pseudo-scientific and it is singularly unhelpful.”

http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=1271

i notices north africans,dnt like to be call african american

Major, you promised a mountain but have brought forth a very tiny mouse. Ad hominem attacks by the usually Politically Correct sources do not an argument make. I have noticed one very bad habit of very bad writers on this board and elsewhere. They take up a great deal of space to say very little or next to nothing. Gould was a Marxist who has been challenged in regard to his premises by not only the Bell Curve but several other writers. A racist to you is anyone who acknowledges the reality of racial differences. More blacks are basketball players than physicists and that’s a “social construct” ????!!!!! Alan Sokal did a wonderful spoof on the academic Left ten years ago with his bogus paper arguing that objective reality is a social construct and I think that people like you believe it too ! I knew Dr. Roger Pearson quite well about thirty years ago and he published a first-rate anthropology textbook. Naturally anyone who doubts the prevailing stupid orthodoxy here is called a “racist.” It’s the old discredit the message by libeling the messenger ad hominem argument. Aristotle classified it a prime logical fallacy and to be frank it’s one that you have frequently employed here.

Hello again mike, I’ve been outa range for a while,

Yes indeed, objective reality is very much what I’m talking about (refs your response to me on Mar 2 above). The hurdle that I’m saying we need to clear is that of acknowledging the truly close genetic relationship all humans have, to bring it into our worldview as a central realization of what we are in our most basic nature. It’s not about pretending that we can’t tell the difference between dark and pale, but it is about incorporating new evidence into our understanding of racial distinctions.

So to clarify, it’s not really about saying that visible distinctions and their (generally ignoble) manifestations in terms of history have no reality. Of course they’re “real”, in the sense that they have existed and continue to exist. But the implications of those visible distinctions have been regarded as hard barriers between people, usually because “we” have a visceral reaction to the appearance of “them”, and the more different “they” look from “us”, the easier it has been to regard “them” as thoroughly unlike “us”. It’s a very frequent occurrance, and has been for millennia. It’s not hard to understand, in fact it’s quite easily understood, as an echo of primate xenophobia.

But now we know that, despite surface-level characteristics, we’re much more closely related than our ancestors realized (or would have been willing to admit). I continue to push that line, not only because of the human suffering that has proceeded from the older, less complete understanding (which would just be “ends justifying the means"-kind of thinking) but because, objectively speaking, our deep relatedness is now able to be confirmed. It’s not just “brotherhood of man” ideology, which, though it sounds quite lovely, most people have no patience for (probably because they really don’t want to feel obligated to give a damn about those they consider strangers). Now it’s observable, replicable, testable, and quite confirmable by examination of the newer evidence we now have and are continuing to compile.

And really, as much philosophically as scientifically, I think we as humans are able to incorporate new data into our view of the world and how it works quite handily, and are not deterministically bound by a predisposition for xenophobia. I guess that means I believe humans can outgrow racism, which I admit sounds a lot like faith but is somewhat more solidly grounded than simple “belief” alone.

The scientific diminution of the significance of “race” is a relatively new idea, drawn from relatively new evidence, so naturally it will have a middlin’-hard time competing with longer-standing concepts, especially those supported by past history and xenophobic tangles in our swollen primate brains. I do expect racialism to continue for quite some time ahead, most likely it will outlive me, but the pillars upholding it have taken some blessedly severe damage recently, and I think you and I will both live long enough to see further confirmation that, although color-coding of people once appeared to make perfect sense, the real truth is that skin color and all those other features we fixated upon are really just surface-level matters, not quite as trivial as, say, clothing or styling as a way of evaluating people, but damn nearly so. If it’s one thing that the advent of science has taught us, it’s that our eyes don’t tell us everything. Sometimes what they tell us is downright wrong (e.g. “sunrise” and “sunset”, even though we all know the sun doesn’t rise or set at all but only appears to do so as we spin in space).

Kuya, I always appreciate your thoughtful, reasoned explanations. I don’t regard race as the be all and end all but simply a fact of reality. Common sense is not sufficient but it is necessary. The earth looks flat but it’s not. Although the concept of race and “racism” is relatively recent historically, there have always been different tribes and groups with different as well as similar characteristics and abilities. I ultimately believe in the individual but then I’m an individualist so I’m biased.
I wish I could believe that skin color is just a surface matter but I’ve seen too much evidence to believe that. Again, I acknowledge all the caveats and exceptions but I have seen certain consistent patterns of behavior demonstrated by all groups of peoples, for better and more often for worse. Now obviously philosophy, ideology, culture, history come into play here but we can’t rule out genetics although I am very uncomfortable with any form of determinism. The hard fact is that we do not know how nature and nurture interact or even if there’s a clear separation between the two. The left blames everything on nurture, the right on nature, both strike me as simplistic but I don’t claim to have the answer myself.

Kuya, good to see you around here again. And good to see you getting along with Mike.
Come on everyone, let’s all join hands and sing ...

C’mon people, now
smile on your brother,
ev’ry-body get together,
try to love one another right now.

-- Get Together - Chet Powers

You mentioned sunsets and sunrises and I pointed the same thing out not too long ago ...

“but the sun doesn’t rise and fall ... it is we who rise and fall.”
(Posted by David in Canuckistan on Dec 20, 2006 at 7:07 PM )

... and Mike advised me