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Wednesday, November 30, 2011 - 6:16pmSanction this postReply
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I submitted the following article for consideration on the main page.  It was rejected by Teresa Summerlee Isanhart for reasons she explains here.  It's obvious that she vehemently disagrees with my essay, as I expect many here will.  But instead of leaving it at that, or actually focusing on the substance of my arguments as stated (as opposed to straw-manned), she called me "pathological," "dishonest," and "willfully ignorant," among other things.  She also wasn't the first here to loudly and openly call me "racist" -- though she could have been the first to define it objectively so that I could either confirm or deny the charge. 

 

The vague and subjective operational definition of "racist" as it is commonly used -- and the failure to conceptually separate normative from descriptive evaluations of race -- is the very topic my essay addresses.  I invite you to judge the actual content of it for yourself...

 



 

On Ayn Rand on Racism

 

Ayn Rand repudiated collectivism in all forms, but she reserved her most strident and sweeping condemnation for what she regarded as collectivism applied to racial identity.  She wrote, “Racism is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism. It is the notion of ascribing moral, social or political significance to a man’s genetic lineage…”

 

This oft-quoted passage from The Virtue of Selfishness is, of course, intended to be an affirmation of individualism.  But, as I shall argue forthwith, Rand’s overly broad conception of racism affirms premises of political correctness that stifle independent thinking.

 

According to Rand, asserting that race carries moral or social (which subsumes political) significance constitutes racism.  A Black Panther who advocates killing white babies is surely, then, a racist, insofar as he regards whites as morally less deserving of a right to life than blacks. 

 

But a racist in Rand’s lexicon, as in the Orwellian lexicon of political correctness, can also be anyone who studies racial variation honestly and in full context, taking into account aspects of it that are socially significant. An evolutionary biologist who offers an explanation for the disproportionate success of sub-Saharan Africans in sprinting, based on their longer limbs and higher centers of gravity as compared to other races, risks facing the same charge as a militant Black Panther: racist.   (Though for political correctness’ most militant adherents, only the scientist would be considered racist.  Blacks, they say, can’t be racist, and ethnocentric blacks are automatically deemed civil rights activists.)

 

Racial variation in athletic ability arguably doesn’t – or shouldn’t – carry much social significance.  But racial variation in intelligence – the very attribute that distinguishes the human species from all others and makes wealthy, free societies possible – surely is socially significant.  A geneticist who seeks to identify markers for East Asian aptitude in mathematics, or for Europeans’ higher scores on tests of verbal ability as compared to Africans, will be branded a racist regardless of whether the findings are objectively true. 

 

The geneticist will be condemned not for ascribing moral superiority to any one race over another, but simply for making an assertion of fact pertaining to the distribution of genes that code for intelligence.  The only way a geneticist or an evolutionary biologist can be sure to avoid being the target of a “racist” epithet coming from the politically correct thought police or a strict adherent of Rand’s definition of racism is to profess a belief that cognitive capacity is distributed roughly equally among all branches of the human species, in spite of:

 

  • the fact that biogeographical branches, or races, of humanity possess characteristic, measurably distinguishable skull morphologies that affect brain size and structure;

 

  • the impossibly low probability in evolutionary theory that cognitive adaptations would be exempt from the same adaptive processes that formed variations in physical traits;

 

  • the consistency and persistency of racial IQ orderings around the world that no real-world combination of cultural, political, and economic influences has proven capable of reordering. 

It’s not that the weight of the evidence augers against the premise that all races are equally equipped cognitively.  It’s that there is no evidence to weigh in consideration of the equalitarian hypothesis even being plausible.  Equalitarianism is pure idealism. 

 

There isn’t a single nation, a single city, a single school district anywhere in the world where black students perform at or above white and Oriental students on average.  Yes, some individual blacks do excel academically.  Cognitive capacity, as with height, nose width, vocal strength, and other phenotypes, is distributed in a range that approximately takes the shape of a bell curve for both blacks and whites, respectively.  The bell curves for blacks and whites overlap, so there is a fair chance that a random black person would be more intelligent than a white person selected at random.  But there is virtually no chance that a large population of blacks would be endowed with mental hardware that functions on par with a large population of whites.

 

The average IQ score of blacks in the U.S. is slightly more than one full standard deviation lower than the average for whites. The IQ gap has held steady for as long as it has been measured – even going back to the days of segregated schools – increasing modestly in some years and decreasing modestly in others.  Averages matter because they have long-term predictive power.  If a black population were to completely replace a white population in a geographic area (as has nearly occurred in Detroit, for example, which went from 90% white to 90% black in the latter half of the twentieth century), the social consequences would necessarily be significant. 

 

They would be as predictable as the consequences of lowering that population’s average IQ by one full standard deviation: more poverty, more crime, more corruption, more dysfunction, and less freedom for generations to come.  From Detroit, to Rio de Janeiro, to London, every non-African city on Earth that has attempted to integrate African populations has experienced varying degrees of these very predictable consequences. 

 

Under the regime of political correctness, welcoming more African diversity is deemed to be a moral virtue.  But proffering an accurate prediction of the effects of  African diversity is verboten.  Given that the United Nations projects the population of Africa will triple in this century, growing by an astonishing 2.6 billion people while the developed world shrinks, citizens in countries that will be subject to massively increasing immigration pressures from Africa ought to know what to expect before they elect to enmesh themselves ever-increasingly in the genetics of Africa.

 

The idealists expect what they’ve been expecting for decades: that which never has been and never will be. Ever since the landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, the idea of achieving substantive racial equality has trumped recognition of racial realities. 

 

Leading up to the Brown decision, the neologism “racism” popped into popular discourse.  The invention of the term coincides with the rise of political correctness, which renders the pursuit of truth inseparable from and subservient to ideological imperatives.

 

A racist in popular parlance is anyone who says anything about race that is socially unacceptable.  What makes one a racist is vague, subjective, ever-changing, and ultimately ungraspable.   The arbitrariness of the term means anyone can hurl an accusation of racism against anyone on virtually any grounds. 

 

If the term ever functioned as a valid concept, Rand failed to articulate it.  Instead, she conceived of racism as being anything that ties race to moral or social significance.  This amounts to a mis-integrated package deal. 

 

The reason why is illustrated by the ideas of Thomas Jefferson.  The man who penned, “All men are created equal” didn’t intend to imply what modern-day egalitarians believe: that nature endowed all races with equal attributes.  To the contrary, Jefferson believed that blacks were “in reason much inferior” to whites. But he regarded blacks as the equals of whites morally, as far as their basic rights as human beings were concerned. 

 

Jefferson would have found the attempt to lump views on morality together with observations of intelligence differences into a single concept to be strange and unenlightened.  Observations are either accurate or inaccurate, irrespective of any notions of morality.  As Jefferson urged, “Follow truth wherever it may lead.”

 

A conclusion that racial disparities in intelligence are explainable by racial genetics is not a normative assertion. It either corresponds with reality, or it doesn’t. Either the adaptive process over hundreds of thousands of years created unique physiological variations within geographically isolated branches of the human species that extend to their respective brain development, or it didn’t.

 

The truth can’t be deduced from moral proscriptions against racism, however one wishes to define it. The truth about race is that which corresponds to reality of race. Efforts to demonize discussions of the social significance of racial lineage are tantamount to efforts from religionists of centuries gone by to prevent astronomers from informing the masses that Earth isn’t the center of the universe.

 

Those who hurl the charge of “racist” against those who merely identify biological origins and properties of human races are, in effect, declaring that they regard nature itself as racist. They take their idea of racial equalitarianism as a metaphysical starting point and condemn those whose grounding is in a reality that doesn’t conform to idealistic impositions.

 

Metaphysical realism is the foundation of Ayn Rand’s Objectivism. Rand made a number of normative assertions that Objectivists widely regard as non-essential to her philosophy. For example, she infamously remarked that it would be improper for a female to run for President of the United States. She also held that homosexuality was disgusting and immoral. Rand’s moral proscriptions on female political ambitions and particular sexual expressions can be rejected as being at odds with more fundamental principles she espoused and with what science now tells us.

 

We know, for example, that homosexuality is innate to some people’s genetic makeup.  They cannot be judged morally for the sexual orientation that nature gave them. 

 

We also know that racial differences that are more than skin deep inevitably do manifest in ways that are socially significant.  Black sub-Saharan Africans aren’t immoral for carrying genes that code for relatively low general intelligence; nor are people who identify this fact of reality.  Blacks aren’t heroic for carrying genes that give them superior running speed; nor are those who substitute an idea of innate racial equality for the racial variation that is metaphysically given.

 

Just as Ayn Rand was mistaken to morally impugn homosexuals, she was mistaken to apply a term of condemnation to those who seek the truth, wherever it leads, about the nature and social implications of racial variation. In attempting to package two disparate standards by which racism could be identified – ascription of moral or social significance – into a single concept, Rand created an anti-concept. Without an objective criterion for differentiating a racist from a non-racist, “racist” has no clear meaning other than that of a vacuous insult, which is what the term as it's popularly used, overused, and abused to no end today, functions as.

 

It’s time for serious advocates of reason and liberty to ditch the anti-conceptual epithets, ditch the unfounded idealism, and pitch any remaining vestiges of political correctness into the ash heap of their personal intellectual history. For too long, too many within and without Objectivist and libertarian circles have felt bound by ideology to evade the realities of race. Evasion, regardless of the ends to which it is employed, is, as Rand herself might well have put it, the lowest, most primitive form of irrationality.


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Post 1

Wednesday, November 30, 2011 - 6:32pmSanction this postReply
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Trun,

You show a remarkable lack of respect for this site to disregard the owner's chosen editor's decision. If I were the site's owner I'd delete that racist post (and it is racist) and I'd ban you for doing an end run around the editor - for violating the rules. You and I are guests here and have an obligation to follow the rules. You should delete that post on that basis, if for no other reason.
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Teresa, that post is racist and it should be deleted. We will see if Trun has the decency to delete what he was told could not be run as an article. If he doesn't I hope that you or Joe do so. Because as it stands it is a blight on this forum.


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Wednesday, November 30, 2011 - 7:01pmSanction this postReply
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For those who are interested, here is why Trun's wanna-be article is racist:

He writes, "But a racist in Rand’s lexicon... can also be anyone who studies racial variation honestly and in full context, taking into account aspects of it that are socially significant."

That is totally wrong. Rand specifically tied racism to "...ascribing moral, social or political significance to man's genetic lineage..." While Trun is talking about things like the physical characteristics of muscle cells that vary by race, and ignoring the fact that that is NOT a moral, social or political issue.

Then Trun shifts from muscle cell properties to 'intelligence' and implies that it is solely genetic and then goes on to imply that wealthy, free societies require intelligence at some unspecified level. That is his shaky, illogical connection that takes him to his implied objection to blacks holding political power.
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He makes the claim that logically, the only way to avoid being a racist - as defined by Rand - is "...to profess a belief that cognitive capacity is distributed roughly equally among all branches of the human species..." That is nonsense. Neither Rand nor any other Objectivist I have read takes that position. This is his straw man argument. But it is not responsive, since even if there is a strictly genetic component to intelligence, it is not a moral component. Being a racist is about ascribing character traits - not intelligence. Trun uses statistical variations in IQ that corellate to race as his wedge to begin to discriminate against blacks as morally inferior - which he denies that he is doing.

He wrote, "Averages matter because they have long-term predictive power. If a black population were to completely replace a white population in a geographic area (as has nearly occurred in Detroit, for example, which went from 90% white to 90% black in the latter half of the twentieth century), the social consequences would necessarily be significant." This is an example of him making the sneaky shift from "average intelligence" to "social consequences" - but that is not logical! He is equating an given IQ range with a given set of beliefs.

Anyone could say that the average IQ of political grad students is higher than the average IQ of the general population and they would be right. But does that mean that the illogical socialist positions prevalent in today's grad school inhabitants are superior beliefs?

His illogical approach would tell us that their beliefs would be better (despite being mostly socialists).
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He lists "...more poverty, more crime, more corruption, more dysfunction, and less freedom..." as direct functions of IQ - they are NOT. They are the function of beliefs which can be held just as easily by people of average IQ as people with high IQs. He is equating beliefs - which we choose - with genes - which we inherit. He is purposefully mixing up race with subculture. We all know that there are many blacks that subscribe to a subculture with progressive political views - but it didn't come from the melanin in their skin or from whatever each individual's IQ was - it was a choice.
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He says, "The invention of the term [racism] coincides with the rise of political correctness..." I doubt that this is true. But it doesn't matter because the underlying concept - the concept that some races are morally inferior - is as old as races themselves.
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He writes, that those who hurl the charge of 'racist', "...take their idea of racial equalitarianism as a metaphysical starting point and condemn those whose grounding is in a reality that doesn’t conform to idealistic impositions." That is not true for most of the people I know, and it certainly isn't an Objectivist position and it wasn't Rand's position.

He is still using that false straw man that claims that everyone but him and his cronies see all races as having the same average IQ. Nonsense.
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He says, "Black sub-Saharan Africans aren’t immoral for carrying genes that code for relatively low general intelligence..." but, remember, he accuses blacks in Detroit of destroying freedom, engaging in corruption, creating poverty, etc. - all actions that derive from moral choices. This shows how clearly he has put on a thin, pseudo-scientific disguise to hide what is really just simple racism.

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Wednesday, November 30, 2011 - 7:21pmSanction this postReply
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Very well said Steve, and I agree its time to take out the trash.

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Wednesday, November 30, 2011 - 7:23pmSanction this postReply
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First of all, I appreciate Brad's integrity in having the good sense to post this in the Dissent forum.  It can stay for future reference as: "This is not Objectivism, kids, but it is bigotry and evasion."

I agree its racist. Superficial and ignorant, too.

If Brad was serious about this, he'd cite some kind of biological study, but, alas, there is none.  If Brad is a genetic scientist, like Spencer Wells, I would expect a formal paper worthy of professional journal entry, but, again, he comes up short. If he's writing a screen play for "Idiocracy 2,"  a story board is in order so we can all enjoy the comedy. But Brad isn't writing a comedy.   

From an article I link to below:
"The human genetic code, or genome, is 99.9 percent identical throughout the world."  That means were are more alike than different.  In fact, human beings are less genetically diverse than any other group of mammals. 

 Further, modern human beings are only 50k to 60k years old. That's when the migration from Africa, where we all came from, began.  I would expect Brad to outline the exact factors which lead to any inherent differences in intelligence among racial groups during the trip.  Can he do that?  I doubt it, because they don't exist. 



http://eebweb.arizona.edu/courses/ecol223/Greatest_Journey_NG_06.pdf


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Wednesday, November 30, 2011 - 8:47pmSanction this postReply
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Brad Trun wrote (Post 0): " The reason why is illustrated by the ideas of Thomas Jefferson.  The man who penned, “All men are created equal” didn’t intend to imply what modern-day egalitarians believe: that nature endowed all races with equal attributes.  To the contrary, Jefferson believed that blacks were “in reason much inferior” to whites. But he regarded blacks as the equals of whites morally, as far as their basic rights as human beings were concerned.  

A conclusion that racial disparities in intelligence are explainable by racial genetics is not a normative assertion. It either corresponds with reality, or it doesn’t. Either the adaptive process over hundreds of thousands of years created unique physiological variations within geographically isolated branches of the human species that extend to their respective brain development, or it didn’t.

TSI replied (Post 4):   Further, modern human beings are only 50k to 60k years old. That's when the migration from Africa, where we all came from, began.  I would expect Brad to outline the exact factors which lead to any inherent differences in intelligence among racial groups during the trip.  Can he do that?  I doubt it, because they don't exist.

This is the level at which the discussion should continue, based on the facts.   See, for example, The Bell Curve.

The Bell Curve is a best-selling and controversial 1994 book by the Harvard psychologist Richard J. Herrnstein (deceased before the book was released) and political scientist Charles Murray.  Its central argument is that intelligence is substantially influenced by both inherited and environmental factors and is a better predictor of many personal dynamics, including financial income, job performance, chance of unwanted pregnancy, and involvement in crime than are an individual's parental socioeconomic status, or education level.

Much of the controversy concerned the parts of the book in which the authors wrote about racial differences in intelligence and discuss the implications of those differences

They also stated that the average IQ of African Americans is 85; Latinos 89; Whites 103; Asians 106; and Jews 113.

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

Arguing from a priori morality achieves nothing. 

 

Some here actually adhere to "Jeffersonian racism" agreeing that race exists, but denying that it is morally important.  (Trun seems to agree with that.)  I deny that race exists. 

 

I know from studying blood groups for a presentation on crime scene investigation that if you look at all of the proteins in a blood sample, you can narrow down the origin.  While there exist proteins that appear in 95% of Pacific Islanders and 95% of Icelanders, other proteins are known only to certain villages.  Genetic groups do exist.  But "race" (so-called) does not.  Argue it as we do - and see above: people do argue it - no one seems willing or able to define it.

 

Be all of that as it may, Brad Trun is within the intentional discourse here if he challenges a famous claim by Ayn Rand within the Dissent Forum.

 


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Wednesday, November 30, 2011 - 9:27pmSanction this postReply
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What are you looking for, Brad Trun?  Are you simply looking for acceptance and sanction of your views among Liberty-minded people?  If so, then you need to be open and honest about what your views are.  In your post you bemoan the fact that people so often use a "straw man" approach when responding to you.  Can't you see that you leave them very little choice?  You have listed some evidence, but refused to draw a conclusion from it.  Any reasonable person attempting to guess your conclusions will be led to think that you share the same racist beliefs as other people who put a great deal of effort into the type of arguments you have put forth.  We (pretty much everyone in the Western world) have a great deal of historical and contemporary experience with people who use perceived superiority  of one race over another as a justification for all kinds of actions that we (objectivists specifically and the Western world in general) consider immoral, even outright evil. You have put a lot of effort into your post about racial superiority in IQ testing.  Your tone and a few of the things you've said suggest that this is something you've done many times among many groups of libertarians and objectivists.  Surely you must realize that in the absence of evidence to the contrary, any reasonable person would conclude that you would also support the immoral and evil ideas we've all seen from so many other racial supremacists. 

Now, I'm open-minded enough to see the slim possibility that such an assumption could be wrong, but I'm at a loss for why a person with so much self-professed experience at being confronted with "straw man" arguments wouldn't write just a couple of lines to preemptively dispel those arguments, especially when the person is positioning himself so closely to such widely understood systems of white supremacist ideas. 

If it's acceptance of your ideas that you want, why don't you let us know what your ideas are?  You have told us that you see a problem in the fact that the population of Africa is predicted to explode and that the demographics of Detroit have shifted.  If you see those situations as problems, then what are your proposed solutions?  What is your motivation for wanting a discussion about racial superiority among libertarians and objectivists?  To get right to the point, do you condone laws or public policies  that treat one human being different than another based on his race?  Do you promote (not tolerate, but promote) personal judgements based solely on race? 

If you believe that a person should be judged as a member of his race rather than as an individual, then I predict that you will continue to find libertarian and objectivist doors slammed in your face.  If not, then I'm actually interested in hearing your motivation for such a long post about racial superiority in the area of IQ, since I've never met a reasonable and rational person who considered those studies anything more than information of trivial interest. 


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Wednesday, November 30, 2011 - 9:28pmSanction this postReply
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Michael wrote, "Brad Trun is within the intentional discourse here if he challenges a famous claim by Ayn Rand within the Dissent Forum."

The "famous claim" was that it was wrong to declare people morally inferior due to race. Michael, it doesn't matter if you want to join the looney-tune race deniers, but I would have thought that even you would have agreed that some degree of melanin content isn't a rational standard for judging an individual's moral status.

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Thursday, December 1, 2011 - 4:42amSanction this postReply
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Steve -

The "famous claim" was that it was wrong to declare people morally inferior due to race. Michael, it doesn't matter if you want to join the looney-tune race deniers, but I would have thought that even you would have agreed that some degree of melanin content isn't a rational standard for judging an individual's moral status.
 

Mike does agree with that.  He can correct me if I'm mistaken, but I think he's just acknowledging that race is merely short hand for certain superficial genetic attributes, like hair color.  Nothing as important and defining to the human genus as brain function. 

(Edited by Teresa Summerlee Isanhart on 12/01, 4:53am)


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Thursday, December 1, 2011 - 6:32amSanction this postReply
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Thanks, Tress.  Yes, you are right.  I deny the existence of race.  Like other things you hear people claim in the popular media, words are tossed around but never defined. 

However, Brad Trun is making an important distinction.  While granting with Thomas Jefferson among others that race brings no moral measures, Trun (like Jefferson and others) asserts that race exists.  His deeper question is whether this topic is allowed to be discussed.  I think he has many problems with his claims, all of which are typical of pseudo-science (including pseudo-economics), but he has a right within the context of objective philosophy to attempt to ground them in theory and prove them in fact. 
Steve Wolfer wrote:  Michael, it doesn't matter if you want to join the looney-tune race deniers, but I would have thought that even you would have agreed that some degree of melanin content isn't a rational standard for judging an individual's moral status.
That is exactly why I think that this needs to be discussed.  Steve Wolfer is a racialist.  He accepts the existence of race.  I believe also if my memory serves me correctly here that Dean Michael Gores also accepts the existence of race. 

 The emotional content here is clear in Steve's phrase "looney-tune race deniers."  That is why I opened with The Bell Curve.  It at least had a patina of scientific method.  If we are going to discuss this well, we need to keep to replicable facts that explain consistent theories.

(Edited by Michael E. Marotta on 12/01, 7:01am)


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Thursday, December 1, 2011 - 7:01amSanction this postReply
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In the discussion in this Forum on "Race and Intelligence" I posted research studies about Twins and also about Epigenetics (how acquired biochemistry alters inheritance).

Epigenetics -
http://rebirthofreason.com/Forum/Dissent/0246_1.shtml#29
Twins and Intelligence
http://rebirthofreason.com/Forum/Dissent/0246_1.shtml#20

On a related topics of sexism and ageism. I have a paper I wrote on Herbert Spencer.  Like other English liberals of the early 19th century, he advocated for political rights for women (also children, as did Hillary R. Clinton in a famous law school paper).  Nonetheless, he also admitted to the sexual dimorphism that makes most women more emotional than men and less capable in certain cognitive skills.  He granted the existence of brilliant women of his time in mathematics and astronomy, but asserted that the statistical evidence remained undeniable.  It may still.  I point out that the man who wom the first Boston Marathon if he ran today, would finish fifth among the women aged 40-49.  That may not change the fact that most men finish the race before most women.  The relationship between environment and heredity is complex.  I mention all of this because sex and age can be defined, though race cannot.

 To put this into historical perspective, the first Boston Marathon measured 24.5 miles. “On April 19, 1897, John J. McDermott of New York, emerged from a 15-member starting field and captured the first B.A.A. Marathon in 2:55:10.”[1]  In 2006, that mark would place him 5th among the women age 40-49 (Gina M. McGee, 2:55:03).  However, the modern race is longer.  Therefore, today, McDermott would beat all of the women 50-59, but none of the women 40-49.  His time calculated for the longer course would be the same as John Smallwood, in the Men’s Age 60-69 who clocked 3:10:44. 


[1] http://www.bostonmarathon.org/BostonMarathon/History.asp


(Edited by Michael E. Marotta on 12/01, 7:12am)


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Thursday, December 1, 2011 - 9:50amSanction this postReply
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Would it be helpful in this thread to discuss the difference between race and breed?

From Wikipedia:

A breed is a group of domestic animals or plants with a homogeneous appearance, behavior, and other characteristics that distinguish it from other animals or plants of the same species.

 

In biology, races are distinct genetically divergent populations within the same species with relatively small morphological and genetic differences

To my mind, the only difference is that breed applies only to domestic animals and race applies only to human animals.

Sam


Post 12

Thursday, December 1, 2011 - 10:03amSanction this postReply
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Michael wrote,
I mention all of this because sex and age can be defined, though race cannot.
Could this be like pornography? I can't define it, but I know it when I see it? :)

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Thursday, December 1, 2011 - 12:01pmSanction this postReply
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Teresa,

Your statement, "...race is merely short hand for certain superficial genetic attributes, like hair color," makes perfect sense and I agree with it. That IS what race is.

That is not what Michael says. He says, "I deny the existence of race."

Those are totally different statements and Michael's makes no sense at all. If Michael's position were even a tiny bit rational, it would make as much sense to say that Michael Marotta is a black American as to say that Michael Marotta is an Asian American, or a Caucasian American. All would just be meaningless adjectives unable to signify anything. He denies the existence of any genetically transmitted traits related to those adjectives.

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Thursday, December 1, 2011 - 2:19pmSanction this postReply
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I think you misunderstand his intention in denying it, Steve.     I honestly don't see anything "loony tune" with it, either, unless you think there's something more than a physical description involved with the concept.  What's wrong with denying race? Is the concept relevant to anything in the human condition? 


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Thursday, December 1, 2011 - 2:38pmSanction this postReply
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Teresa, there are races. I find it very peculiar that some people want to deny it. Why?

I guess that race has become such an emotionally charged issue that there are those who will simply pretend that there are no races and that somehow that will make all the problems go away.

The concept of race has been extremely important throughout history and remains important today. It matters that people make moral judgments based upon race and that terrible error can't be corrected by pretending that there are no races. That isn't a workable solution - it is an ostrich position.

Members of the black race were subjected to slavery... oh, excuse me, there is no black race. Then who was enslaved? Some people who all shared certain genetically transmitted traits that include black skin. Isn't that what you call the black race? There is no black race - blank-out. What's next - saying there are no sexes, no men, no women - we are all just humans?



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Thursday, December 1, 2011 - 4:09pmSanction this postReply
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Yea, but -

Members of the black race were subjected to slavery... oh, excuse me, there is no black race. Then who was enslaved? Some people who all shared certain genetically transmitted traits that include black skin. Isn't that what you call the black race? There is no black race - blank-out. What's next - saying there are no sexes, no men, no women - we are all just humans?

I don't know anyone who was a slave...do you?  I don't understand the perpetual guilt tripping over something no one alive had anything to do with.   Race doesn't equal culture.  Culture is learned, race is not.  I think you've adopted a flawed view of race, in that our genes come with some inherited, intrinsic ideas written on them when they don't. 

Slavery dominated most of human history. Members of every race were victims of the practice at some point.  


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Thursday, December 1, 2011 - 8:38pmSanction this postReply
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Steve, if you think that you know what "race" is, then please define it.  As a test, please identify my race.


Post 18

Thursday, December 1, 2011 - 8:44pmSanction this postReply
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Sicilian/hungarian/human?

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Post 19

Thursday, December 1, 2011 - 9:37pmSanction this postReply
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Teresa, I don't know what the hell you are talking about! I have NO guilt, I do not confuse race and culture, I'm quite clear about race being inherited and culture learned, and everything I've been writing is to make the point that genes do NOT carry ideas! What in hell are you smoking?

I used the black race and the American history of slavery to illustrate a point... as an example - to show how powerful the concept of race has been in our history.
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Michael, I'm not going to play definition games with you. If you are clueless as to what people are referring to when they mention a race, like the the white race, that will have to remain your problem. If you do have a sense of what they are talking about then you are just playing word games.

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