DK
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 Posted: Thu Jul 10, 2008 11:12 am Post subject: Race - Social, Biological, or Lemonade? (Was: Genographic, i |
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To those who claim that human races don>t exist,
here is a brief sensible commentary:
http://psycnet.apa.org/index.cfm?fa=search.displayRecord&uid=2006-01690-008
Race--Social, Biological, or Lemonade?.
Carey, Gregory
American Psychologist. 2006 Feb-Mar Vol 61(2) 176
Abstract
Comments on an article by R. L. Sternberg, E. L. Grigorenko,
and K. K. Kidd (see record 2005-00117-006) and another article
by H. Tang, T. Quertermous, B. Rodriguez, S. L. Kardia, X. Zhu, X.,
A. Brown, et al. (2005). On the day that I read Sternberg, Grigorenko,
and Kidd>s (January 2005) article on race, an article from the
American Journal of Human Genetics (Tang et al., 2005) also crossed
my desk. As part of their research, the latter authors compared the
results of a cluster analysis of people using many genetic markers
with the respondent>s self-identified race/ethnicity: "Of 3,636 subjects
of varying race/ethnicity, only 5 (0.14%) showed genetic cluster
membership different from their self-identified race/ethnicity" (Tang
et al., 2005, p. 268). I would very much like to hear a response to this
finding from Sternberg et al. (2005), who maintained that "race is a
socially constructed concept, not a biological one" (p. 49), that reifies
those physical correlates of ancient population dispersions "as deriving
from some imagined natural grouping of people that does not in fact
exist, except in our heads" (p. 51). My take is that if we psychologists
could use genetics (or any other biological variables) to distinguish
those with schizophrenia from those with bipolar disorder with an
error rate even a hundredfold greater than that of Tang et al. (2005),
we would announce--and do it with no small fanfare--that there are
valid, biological differences between the two disorders. I suspect that
much of the difficulty in discussing this issue stems from a tendency
to treat "social" and "biological" (or "genetic" and "environmental")
phenomena as mutually exclusive. Placing a complicated construct
like race into a discrete "social" or "biological" box makes as much
sense as asking whether lemonade is (a) lemon juice, (b) water,
or (c) sugar. |
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Day Brown
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| Posted: Thu Jul 10, 2008 2:36 pm Post subject: Re: Race - Social, Biological, or Lemonade? (Was: Genographi |
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My sympathies DK; but I dont find challenges to political correctness
responded to with anything other than ad hominum. Which you>ve seen lots
of here.
Partly this is due to the fact that academia evolved in Christian
educational institutions, and any challenge to their sensibilities would
not result in tenure.
With regard to anthropology, this is most obvious in the shamantic use
of powerful psychoactive compounds which the academics here denigrate as
"drugs" and the spiritual experiences as "delusional".
The nature of those experiences with psychoactive compounds is somewhat
a function of race. The Christian church only permitted alcohol, and
this fits with its long history of aggression and exploitation.
Those races which relied on psychedelics produced traditions that let
other tribes be as they were without trying to impose their own
cosmology on others. Peyote, Mescaline, and Pscilocybin for instance
produced a direct experience of the divine that often revealed that
"god" was not Jesus, and because of that, these compounds were made
illegal. Even tho there>s no evidence of fatal overdose or addiction.
Recently, I>ve seen video of anthropologists going with the spirit guide
into the sacred space, at the sacred time, to use the sacred potion in
the sacred way for a sacred experience. The Anthropologist who does this
has a vastly greater understanding of the values and how they evolved in
that spiritual tradition. But of course, he>s not a Christian.
Much of the political correctness you challenge is an outgrowth of
Christian sensibilities. The notion of all 'races' as being equal is
based on the assumption that their cosmology is therefore correct for
all mankind. |
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