The Washington Post writes today about Carlos Hoyt:
The 63-year-old educational consultant and psychotherapist is part of a small but increasingly vocal group of people who favor phasing out racial categories.
....Hoyt read aloud the Census Bureau’s caveats, that “the racial categories included in the Census Questionnaire generally reflect a social definition of race recognized in this country, and not an attempt to define race biologically, anthropologically, or genetically.”
“To recognize that race … is a false concept but to keep doing it anyway, there’s something intellectually problematic about it.”
I'm sure Hoyt and others like him are arguing in good faith, but they're deeply misguided for three reasons:
- "Race" may or may not be the the most useful word here, but humans are divided into population groups that can be identified genetically. A recent study identified nine groups, and for our purposes the key finding is that two of the groups are Northern European and East and West African. In other words, what we colloquially call white and black.
- The Post article starts out by noting that humans share 99.9% of their DNA. This finding of the Human Genome Project, it says, "gave waste to the notion of 'race' among the vast majority of scientists." But humans share about 99% of their DNA with bonobos and chimpanzees, which obviously produces a gigantic difference. That 0.1% difference among humans amounts to about 5,000 SNPs (a measure of genetic variation). That's not trivial
- Everyone agrees that "race is a social construct," so to say that race doesn't exist is to imply that social constructs are somehow less real than biological constructs. But nothing could be farther from the truth. Social constructs are tremendously powerful and dominate all of human existence. So even if it were true that race has no biological basis, it would still be very real indeed.
In summary: (a) there are population groups that correspond fairly closely to ordinary notions of race, (b) there are genetic differences between these groups, and (c) even if this weren't the case, race would still be socially very real. We're stuck with race or something very like it, I'm afraid.
Set aside biological differences. What about cultural and linguistic differences?
If there were two populations with similar DNA that had, what, maybe 1000 years worth of separate social structures, spoken word, alphabet, religion, economy, I'm pretty sure they' be considered two races.
If there were two populations with similar DNA that had, what, maybe 1000 years worth of separate social structures, spoken word, alphabet, religion, economy, I'm pretty sure they' be considered two races.
Maybe, though I'd say if you make it more like 2,500 years instead of 1,000 years, you're basically describing Arab and Jew. So maybe "ethnicity" would be a likelier descriptive than "race."
I thought I pitched the 1,000 years on the low end (but was willing to be as brief as 500 years). Certainly 2,500 would do it (thinking about Indo-European and other language groups' expansion and modification).
Arab - Jew is an excellent example to consider.
Ethnicity is much closer to what people react to instead of mysterioso chemical differences which were hidden for centuries - people didn't know about DNA or blood types until recently. The differences were what they *observed* (language, clothes, social structure, physicality) which usually didn't require test tubes and reagents.
I think this is very true. We're not getting rid of the concept of race any time soon. Still, many people use the term race when tribe might be more accurate.
Ive lived in many different countries and am always astounded by the prejudices between groups in the same country among people who look exactly the same for all intents and purposes, but that the natives claim have nothing in common with them. "Oh, don't talk to them. They are filthy and will cheat you blind."
I've been a subject of curiosity in many countries in which people can't believe anyone could be so white and that I can eat spicy food without immediately collapsing.
But I've been treated well everywhere I've been and if there is any meaningful difference between races beyond physical characteristics, I've yet to detect it among my many friends and colleagues.
Phasing out racial categories would have been a useful idea when slavery was legal. Phasing out racial categories would have been a useful idea when Jim Crow was practiced.
Now we have laws ensuring rights for all races and laws against discriminating based on race. So now, of course, some people want to phase out use of racial categories. Of course they do.
Except of course the residual systemic impacts of racial discrimination still remain in place.
Until these are eradicated, race still has a legal meaning.
Over the last few days I've been hanging out with extended family, and had occasion to discuss the subject with my niece's partner who has South Asian ancestry.
He was inclined to agree that the Greeks of Alexander's time had a rather different outlook. They had a far higher regard for their civilized neighbors in Persia, Egypt, Mesopotamia and India than they did for the comparatively uncouth "barbarians" to the north.
And with 23andMe, etc., people are finding they haven percentages from different groups. There's a bit of mingling going on, at that's a good thing.
I think this is a future question that is coming at us (the US) quickly, though.
According to the 2020 Census, 10% of Americans (33.8m) self-identified as two or more races. At some point in the future, the question will be moot as America will have become truly multicultural and multiracial.
The question isn't on the census for the purpose of measuring biological diversity. It's there to determine the size of social groups. So race is a social construct? It's valuable for government to know the social makeup of the population.
The problem is that "race" is essentially a shorthand for matching skin tone with a social group... basically profiling. We need better descriptions of social groups that don't rely on immutable visuals like skin tone.
Does anyone really think Eugene Robinson and Flava Flav are members of the same social group, and would be greeted equally at the average suburban white family's Thanksgiving table?
Yawn. Money is a social construct, too, and no one serious is suggesting its elimination
Yup!
This is simply inaccurate and wrong:
" "Race" may or may not be the the most useful word here, but humans are divided into population groups that can be identified genetically. A recent study identified nine groups, and for our purposes the key finding is that two of the groups are Northern European and East and West African. In other words, what we colloquially call white and black."
The cultural categories - which agreed are real social things and thus quite real - are not good maps to the genetic categories of Black and White as the American black really (1) covers a range of persons that are not principally of West African genetic sourcing, (2) Black African is internally genetically structured so lumping them is outright wrong (notably from a science-medicine POV), (3) broader Black in Anglo world includes populations as the Negritos of S.E. Asia that phenotypically look sub-Saharan but are in fact Asian by genetics.
The social construct reality is perfectly strong on its own (race being then entirely valid socio-cultural construct) without introducing the error of asserting incorrectly that it has a good bio-genetic utility where it in fact does not and introduces real error, notably in medicine where if one adopts such a naive and ill-informed view, one will be confounding West African (and indeed within West African, a more Coastal W. Africa populations sourced) specifics with wider black sub-Saharan with different patterns.
The Post article is rubbish and poorly written and poorly informed on the genetic side, thus making bozo arguments in that area from simply not understanding the genetics well (so making simplifications that end up being wrong), however this does not mean American Race categories are founded genetically in a useful sense for medicine for example, especially emerging genetics based medicine. So points (1) and (2) are wrong (although it is accurate enough to say Post actual presentation was complete rubbish and wrong too).
But your point on three is absolutely valid and important - the fact that Anglo meanings of Race are poorly founded in genetics does not in any way remove their reality (as like indeed it would remove someone's Jewishness)
It sounds like Kevin was as frustrated by this article as I was. Like every news media article built around the premise that "race doesn't exist," it never actually makes the case for that proposition or even explains precisely what it means. It's just breezily taken as something that is not only established but so obvious that it doesn't even need to be defined, which is odd for an article the bemoans the fact that people and institutions still don't take this proposition to heart.
It was indeed a rubbish article, by someone who rather didn't understand what she was writing about. (and so utterly bungled the science side while equally not really thinking clearly on the socio-cultural side).
Race in the US was in fact a legal concept. It was associated with what we know as race, but the single drop of blood argument admits that it is not a racial concept per se: all of use are mixes.
So long as we continue to have the residual impacts from these heinous legal constructs we will need the legal understanding of race to measure how well we are undoing these heinous legal concepts.
The 5000 SNP difference between individuals is wildly wrong. The difference just from SNPs between any two genomes (of which we each have two copies) is 0.1%, which is about 3 million SNPs.
You are unaware that the humane genome project (and most genetics) only deals with the minority of dna that codes for proteins whereas you are referring to all of the nuclear dna.
No, you're thinking about the old days when we only had transcript sequence data. 'glipsnort' is right. The typical pairwise differences for two individuals is ~0.07 - 0.10 percent of the genome. Since our genome is ~3 billion basepairs (6 billion counting both copies of our chromosomes), the single nucleotide differences between individuals are on the order of 4-6 million.
Now, it's true that most of those differences are in functionally unimportant regions of the genome, but the number of SNP differences that contribute to differences in phenotype is way, way more than 5000
Nine racial categories. Two of them African, seven for the rest of the world.
That makes no sense. Any geneticist will tell you that Africa has more human genetic diversity than the rest of the world combined. Which makes sense, since humans originated in Africa.
That "nine races" study is bogus. They need to start over, and try harder this time.
The article fro NIH is rather more and different than Kevin's understanding of it, and should be read. Their focus is different than what one might take from his summary / comment.
Some things discussable (certainly immediatly on skim as informed non specialist) but it is not a crude nine races article
Example of context of their focus (discussable perhaps but making clearer their aims in analytical term) :
We acknowledge that the most common approach for studying African populations is accomplished through comparing populations from the North and South African regions [36,37]. We saw a very strong admixture of Northern African populations with primarily Middle Eastern and secondarily European populations. Meanwhile, this admixture is virtually absent south of the Sahara Desert. This regional difference in admixture is well-known, therefore, we decided to make our main focus the largely unexplored West-to-East genetic variability of populations within the African Continent [38]. Thus, we separated and compared the data from both West and East Africa regions, and this became one of our primary focuses of the continent (Supplementary Table S4). Our data demonstrates that the largest impact on African relatedness to other populations is seen in the Middle East where the relatedness from East Africa reaches 20%. Beyond the Middle East, the noteworthy relatedness (about 5%) is observed to be spread throughout the neighboring Caucasus. Southern Europe is another region that contains populations with strong genetic relatedness to African populations: Relatedness reaches up to 10% in Spain and 7% in Italy.
----
Just jumping on their nine population groups doesn't quite convey the article as such.
The Middle Eastern group overlaps Northern Africa. So Africa hits three out of the seven.
More to the point, the study is looking at interrelatedness, not diversity. You can have a hugely diverse population which is still highly interrelated.
North Africa is not the relevant one to be precise, it is Horn of Africa (which they mention but do not directly characterise).
In any case yes, the article is different than Drum has understood it.
Kevin, am I missing something? European and West African and East African, makes 3 groups as far as my mathematics are concerned. I'm pretty sure the genetic difference between Europeans and East Africans is less than than the genetic difference between Europeans and West Africans (since we know that the first African migration into Europe came via East Africa). Yes Africans are darker skinned than Europeans, but some Europeans are darker skinned than others, AND some Africans are darker skinned than others. The distinction seems arbitrary to me.
Quite.
Beyond darker skinned, which is a fallacious basis really (or even having Sub-Saharan African phenotype broadly as will pull in Negritos of Asia), the population structure within Africa (e.g. Saharan distinguishable from broader West Africa) - here we have to have caution as Africa is under-sampled compared to Europe or Asia - is such that certainly it'snot medically wise to lump together from a medico-genetics PoV.
The Anglo-American idea of race is just piss-poor and inaccurate for the medico-genetics purpose and that is the purpose relative to any genetics conversation.
His remarks on this point (include internal genetic difference distribution) are just wrong.
Of course the article was a mess and poorly thought through and informed so no defence of it.
Actually his article cited - NIH 2020 is illustrative of the potential problem of over-characterisation on a known more diverse distribution in SSAfrica, their Reference Samples for characterising WAfrica and EAfrica being
AFE East Africa Luhya Webuye Kenya (LWK); Dinka (Sudan); Masai (Kenya)
AFW West Africa Yoruba (YRI); Esan Nigeria (ESN); Mende Sierra Leone (MSL)
--
Immediately one sees a potential issue as from what is known from other work in the under-sampled African context is West Africa has a distinct North-South structuring in populations (showing up partially in langauge distribution as well, although language switching makes this just an echo) from Sahara to Sahel to old Forest / Coastal (eco-climate zones). Equally East Africa has a Horn outwards structuring.
The cited West Africa ethnicities are all coastal / Forest zone. And to find coherence there is not surprising. But given other known patterns it should not be assumed that Coastal extrapolates to Sahara for example given eco-climate ethnicity structuring.
East Africa also gets characterised sans Horn of Africa (via Kenya and the Dinka of Sudan).
In light of known diversity and population structure, caution then on assumptions.
There are many historic examples of people defining their race differently than they do today (social construct). And there are some common biological traits common to groups of people and there is nothing inaccurate about dividing the population into genetic races. I find it amusing that people here are declaring that the story in question got this racial group wrong because blah blah blah. You could divide up the world into 8 billion races if you wanted to, but why bother.
The thing that makes this all so annoying is because the people who never tire of saying race is a social construct do it because they honestly seem to believe that repeating that over and over again is actually going to change the world. That racism will cease. Believing that is just a silly fantasy and some of us have better things to do than pretend we're changing the world when we are not.
I like history. It is interesting how race has evolved over time. I encourage people to learn about it. But that won't suddenly stop a racist from being racist. As people here have pointed out, there are an endless number of places where they designate a group of people as The Other even though they look identical.
Re: two of the groups are Northern European and East and West African. In other words, what we colloquially call white and black.
Historically, "white" took in a lot more than just Germanic and Celtic peoples: it included all Europeans (including those in Eastern Europe), Middle Easterners, North Africans, Central Asians and "Aryan" Indians. The original 19th century racial theorists also stuck the Negritos of Australasia in the "black" category-- quite erroneously as the two peoples are the most distant genetically on the planet despite superficial similarities in their appearance.
The issue is not the logical points you raise, it's the use of race (and other identity concepts) for legal purposes.
Suppose that a company is required to have so many "black" and so many "female" board members. (It doesn't even matter if this is not a genuine law, as long as it is something publicized by some organization, in such a way that other people care.) Now it becomes an important issue who is defined as "black".
At this point the contradictions inherent in various claims by "the Left" become untenable. These claims include things like
- there is no biological basis to race (see any anthro textbook of the past fifty years)
- there is no biological basis to gender (see any radical trans statement of the past five years)
- at which point what stops any random person from declaring themself the "black female" member of the board. ("What, I don't look like what you expected a proud black woman to look like? Well fsck you and your narrow-minded worldview.")
This pushing the system to its (il)logical extreme hasn't happened yet, but it's going to.
What HAS already happened is a substantial rise over the past few years in "Latine" (yes, you thought Latinx was the correct term, you are so 2022) students in college. The only people who think this reflects anything "real" are useful idiots. What it ACTUALLY reflects is white kids and Asians realizing that no-one can stop them from declaring themselves as Hispanic and getting a diversity boost (shh, we'll pretend that doesn't exist) from the college admissions office.
It's only a matter of time before this
(a) becomes well-known, in this particular Hispanic version, and used by every college kid
(b) moves on to becomes used for every other "identity" which is given some privilege or other.
Some large fraction of the US elite wants to create a society of castes, each with different privileges, but ALSO doesn't want to (or at least cannot get away with) actually legislating Nuremberg laws defining each caste.
This is not a stable situation...
The shrill insistence by some on the left that "there is no such thing as race" when everyone who is not blind can obviously see that there are clear inherited differences between people whose ancestors came from East Asia vs. West Eurasia vs. Africa, etc makes the left look silly. The fact that they are not perfectly sealed off from each other (e.g. mestizo populations exist) does not disprove these broad categories.
What is more interesting to me though is the rapid erosion of these broad differences in large parts of the West as there is a rapid genetic mixing of the different traditional races as interracial marriages boom. In a few short generations, most Americans are gonna look like Tiger Woods or my (half-white half Asian) kids or "light-skinned" blacks like Pat Mahomes or Steph Curry. That is a BIG change. It's like if this continued, most people on the USS Enterprise would be mixed race... (sorry Uhura, Sulu, and Kirk...)
No it does not as it is not the Left, it is genetics.
There is not coherent population genetic structure that matches "East Asia v West Eurasia v Africa" - and basing it on what you see is naive bollocks.
Africa itself is quite structured and so "black race" nonsense genetically within Africa (West African Coastal illusttratively).
That is genetics and one can see the population structures and flows echoing. And not becuase of silly kumbaya eveyrone is going to look like Tiger, rather it is old historical
" 99.9% of their DNA. " That's expressed DNA. But the difference between a Chihuahua and a German shepherd is largely in the level of expression, which is in the unexpressed, or non coding dna, which has a much greater variability.
It's not clear that the point of the census is to identify biological differences, but rather to identify differences experienced by the social constructs we create.