Scientific racism in the modern era?

[Flying Purple People Eater]

As the title asks - does anyone have any knowledge on the 'scientific' brands of racism active in the modern era? I did read some things on old scientific racism and, while it did explain the eurocentrisms and flaws in the pseudoscience of craniometry, some of the books debunking said pseudoscience went very in-depth on them before going in for the attack, making said books not for the faint of hearted and certainly not something I would read again unless in summary - I recall a particular book that attacked racist pseudoscience about 'jewish' and 'african' people actually making me feel physically unwell (I'd never read anything so personally scarring and disgusting).

[Flying Purple People Eater]

No one? :(

[Creative Destruction]

There are people who are still trying to go with the IQ/race thing. That showed to be a third rail (rightfully so) a few months ago when that conservative columnist put out an article asserting that Mexicans are of inherently lesser intelligence than white people.

Aside from that, Andrew Sullivan often tries to revive the question under the dishonest reason of wanting to "advance science" and he often gives Charles Murray a platform. The last time he tried pulling that shit, Ta-Nehisi Coates got after him. It made for a good take down by TNC.

[Flying Purple People Eater]

There are people who are still trying to go with the IQ/race thing. That showed to be a third rail (rightfully so) a few months ago when that conservative columnist put out an article asserting that Mexicans are of inherently lesser intelligence than white people.

Aside from that, Andrew Sullivan often tries to revive the question under the dishonest reason of wanting to "advance science" and he often gives Charles Murray a platform. The last time he tried pulling that shit, Ta-Nehisi Coates got after him. It made for a good take down by TNC.

Who are Andrew Sullivan, Charles Murray and Ta-Nehisi Coates?

I'd like to go back into criticising these groups but damn, the racism argued against in The Mismeasure of Man was actually so emotionally excruciating to read for me - it had references to the discrimination some of my family had taken during their migration from Europe and Africa, with the whole 'Eastern European people are dumb', 'Black people are below chimpanzees' and 'Jewish people are disfigured, short-sighted and unintelligent' shit - that I felt quite angry after reading it. It really makes you ill when you read things that were for a long time the accepted norm in science from someone who thinks you're subhuman. Even though they were wrong (often consciously wrong), and the whole purpose of the book was to attack and dispel said myths, I still felt genuinely stressed and had a very lethargic sensation in my chest by the end of it. I know it sounds silly, but that form of absolute top-down malicious, myopic and cold racism, written into normality, that Jay Gould quoted before attacking said racism, was by far one of the most terrifying and disgusting things I have ever had the misfortune of reading.

I appreciate the info, though.

[Creative Destruction]

Who are Andrew Sullivan, Charles Murray and Ta-Nehisi Coates?

I'd like to go back into criticising these groups but damn, the racism argued against in The Mismeasure of Man was actually so emotionally excruciating to read for me - it had references to the discrimination some of my family had taken during their migration from Europe and Africa, with the whole 'Eastern European people are dumb', 'Black people are below chimpanzees' and 'Jewish people are disfigured, short-sighted and unintelligent' shit - that I felt quite angry after reading it. It really makes you ill when you read things that were for a long time the accepted norm in science from someone who thinks you're subhuman. Even though they were wrong (often consciously wrong), and the whole purpose of the book was to attack and dispel said myths, I still felt genuinely stressed and had a very lethargic sensation in my chest by the end of it. I know it sounds silly, but that form of absolute top-down malicious, myopic and cold racism, written into normality, that Jay Gould quoted before attacking said racism, was by far one of the most terrifying and disgusting things I have ever had the misfortune of reading.

I appreciate the info, though.

Andrew Sullivan is a British blogger who lives in America. He calls himself a conservative, but he is out-of-step with the GOP of many things...so, he's more of a Conservative in the UK sense. A Thatcherite if he could be called anything, though he doesn't seem to have much love for the current Conservative Party, either. http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/

Ta-Nehisi Coates is a blogger for The Atlantic. His output is usually pretty good, and the tangents he goes on when he tries to learn new things is interesting (his last two obsessions were the North American Civil War and learning French.) He's pretty liberal, though he says he was more militant in college, along the lines of the Black Panthers (his father was a Panther.) http://www.theatlantic.com/ta-nehisi-coates/

I don't follow Sullivan as much as I used to because he started in with the IQ-Race thing again and he switched his blog to a subscription model, and his writing simply isn't worth paying a subscription for. Not for me, anyway. I still follow TNC a great deal because he's a really careful and considered writer. If you disagree with something, he'll debate you within reason (that is, he's not going to debate racists.)

Anyway, that's a tangent.

Charles Murray is the guy who wrote The Bell Curve and kind of set off a revival of the Race-IQ bullshit in America. Stephen Jay Gould actually wrote The Mismeasure of Man in response to Murray and The Bell Curve. After Gould wrote that book, the debate kind of died down, though there are still torchbearers of Murray like Andrew Sullivan. This is a run down of their latest spat:

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/the-sullivan-tnc-raceiq-debate/

Ignore that it comes from The American Conservative and whatever commentary they attached to it, but this is the only blog post I've seen that lists the arguments in chronological order.

[Red Commissar]

The issue with finding racism in some scientific fields is that they'll usually deflect it away by trying to present the results as objective rather than for a specific cause. But generally from my experience this kind of interpretation is opened by specific fields, say debates in evolution, behavioral genetics, or the mess of sociobiology.

I'll say though that it really isn't as widespread as it might seem. The problem is that the groups that often fund this kind of research are more media savvy on account of having interests outside of science. And unfortunately they are the ones with the money, which is becoming all the more important as most public research is now becoming more reliant on private donors with government grants less generous and more difficult to acquire.

Gould attacked The Bell Curve for the sentiments you express, as he too was uncomfortable with how the conclusions that could be drawn from it was harkening back to point when biology was used to boost the idea of (west) european dominance as well as mess around social darwinism and eugenics. Gould's own criticism of the bell curve was itself criticized over his methodology and calling out the two main writers of being racist, and in many cases this wasn't just by defenders of the bell curve but people who simply had a beef to settle with Gould in the first place.

Generally though you see the conclusions of the Bell Curve being pushed more heavily by interest groups more than being seen as a generally accepted truth among researchers. From my time on the internet I think this is true- the first time I actually heard of the "Bell Curve" and Gould's response wasn't even when I was going through biology but from the internet when it was invoked when ever some study would come out talking about how immigrants to the US were in someway "different" which was then used to explain why x group had lower ses than y group and propose some bullshit policy.

When you get racially-tinged topics in science it's usually very subtle and they avoid actually making a comment on it, but instead just present data and say how this characteristic must have been positively selected and evolved in certain populations, but not others. They avoid saying what is the significance of this being positively selected.

A good example of this is the microcephalin paper (http://www.sciencemag.org/content/309/5741/1717.short) written a few years ago which basically concluded that a particular variant of the Microcephalin gene they studied was more common in populations outside of subsaharan Africa and that the speed it came to be fixed in those populations indicated that it was positively selected for, and thus a (relatively) recent evolved trait in humans.

From the get go this was controversial since the microcephalin gene is usually seen as responsible for humans developing larger brain size from their distant ancestors, and is tied to the development of the frontal lobe that is acknowledged to be a major part in our ability to reason and generally what we consider to be "intelligence". However, it was before seen that the gene was already developed in humans long before as they arose in Africa- they paper asserted that a particular type evolved in the populations that first moved out of Africa and were driven to dominance in those populations. So this was as the paper asserted a recently evolved characteristic of humans that is continuing to change.

While the paper only reported results, some people obviously used this as a way to explain why sizable civilizations were seen in the Mediterranean, Mesopotamia, the Indus River Valley, etc. while lacking the same scope in subsaharan Africa, because this variant of the microcephalin gene made humans even more intelligent.

Most of the criticism on the paper didn't focus on what conclusions were drawn from it, but rather the methodology to get the conclusion that this variant of the gene was selected for. There were responses that showed that contrary to the paper's conclusions, that one could make plausible scenarios where this gene was driven to dominance in the populations outside of Africa by genetic drift without having to invoke selection (and by extension, the gene being "fit" and advantageous).

You can see plenty of responses defending and criticizing this paper if you run it through google scholar, and you'll see this replicated pretty much anytime someone tries to assert that a gene(s) is responsible for intelligence and is specific to certain distributions and was positively selected for.

Generally though this stuff doesn't fly, at least publicly, in research. Usually you'll see a handful of pissed off PhD's who aren't getting the kick they want from their institution and lend their name to some racist studies being pushed by right-wing nutjobs. A good example of that is the idiotically-termed "Human Biodiversity (http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Human_biodiversity)" which is an attempt to mask racism with a more respectable veneer of presumably empirical studies and scientific explanations.

What I've noticed more recently is that among both people in the science field and those in more explicitly political, they'll usually single out Middle-Eastern and African populations as being inherently inferior and prone to violence, while holding up "European" cultures as more tolerant and culturally developed, and try to justify this with attempts to tie violence to some inherent difference. It seems as of late honorary membership in this club by the nutters has been given to east and south asian groups they're trying to present as a bastion of culture and economic success against violence and intolerance (Middle-east and Africa).

This isn't really all that different from constant dialogues of trying to present certain groups as having success because of their supposedly inherent superiority, it's just weird to me because it's sugar-coated with self-proclaimed "progressive" notions of secularism, education, public health, etc. that some groups apparently "can't get" according to some armchair politicos.

[Flying Purple People Eater]

The issue with finding racism in some scientific fields is that they'll usually deflect it away by trying to present the results as objective rather than for a specific cause. But generally from my experience this kind of interpretation is opened by specific fields, say debates in evolution, behavioral genetics, or the mess of sociobiology.

I'll say though that it really isn't as widespread as it might seem. The problem is that the groups that often fund this kind of research are more media savvy on account of having interests outside of science. And unfortunately they are the ones with the money, which is becoming all the more important as most public research is now becoming more reliant on private donors with government grants less generous and more difficult to acquire.

Gould attacked The Bell Curve for the sentiments you express, as he too was uncomfortable with how the conclusions that could be drawn from it was harkening back to point when biology was used to boost the idea of (west) european dominance as well as mess around social darwinism and eugenics. Gould's own criticism of the bell curve was itself criticized over his methodology and calling out the two main writers of being racist, and in many cases this wasn't just by defenders of the bell curve but people who simply had a beef to settle with Gould in the first place.

Generally though you see the conclusions of the Bell Curve being pushed more heavily by interest groups more than being seen as a generally accepted truth among researchers. From my time on the internet I think this is true- the first time I actually heard of the "Bell Curve" and Gould's response wasn't even when I was going through biology but from the internet when it was invoked when ever some study would come out talking about how immigrants to the US were in someway "different" which was then used to explain why x group had lower ses than y group and propose some bullshit policy.

When you get racially-tinged topics in science it's usually very subtle and they avoid actually making a comment on it, but instead just present data and say how this characteristic must have been positively selected and evolved in certain populations, but not others. They avoid saying what is the significance of this being positively selected.

A good example of this is the microcephalin paper (http://www.sciencemag.org/content/309/5741/1717.short) written a few years ago which basically concluded that a particular variant of the Microcephalin gene they studied was more common in populations outside of subsaharan Africa and that the speed it came to be fixed in those populations indicated that it was positively selected for, and thus a (relatively) recent evolved trait in humans.

From the get go this was controversial since the microcephalin gene is usually seen as responsible for humans developing larger brain size from their distant ancestors, and is tied to the development of the frontal lobe that is acknowledged to be a major part in our ability to reason and generally what we consider to be "intelligence". However, it was before seen that the gene was already developed in humans long before as they arose in Africa- they paper asserted that a particular type evolved in the populations that first moved out of Africa and were driven to dominance in those populations. So this was as the paper asserted a recently evolved characteristic of humans that is continuing to change.

While the paper only reported results, some people obviously used this as a way to explain why sizable civilizations were seen in the Mediterranean, Mesopotamia, the Indus River Valley, etc. while lacking the same scope in subsaharan Africa, because this variant of the microcephalin gene made humans even more intelligent.

Most of the criticism on the paper didn't focus on what conclusions were drawn from it, but rather the methodology to get the conclusion that this variant of the gene was selected for. There were responses that showed that contrary to the paper's conclusions, that one could make plausible scenarios where this gene was driven to dominance in the populations outside of Africa by genetic drift without having to invoke selection (and by extension, the gene being "fit" and advantageous).

You can see plenty of responses defending and criticizing this paper if you run it through google scholar, and you'll see this replicated pretty much anytime someone tries to assert that a gene(s) is responsible for intelligence and is specific to certain distributions and was positively selected for.

Generally though this stuff doesn't fly, at least publicly, in research. Usually you'll see a handful of pissed off PhD's who aren't getting the kick they want from their institution and lend their name to some racist studies being pushed by right-wing nutjobs. A good example of that is the idiotically-termed "Human Biodiversity (http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Human_biodiversity)" which is an attempt to mask racism with a more respectable veneer of presumably empirical studies and scientific explanations.

What I've noticed more recently is that among both people in the science field and those in more explicitly political, they'll usually single out Middle-Eastern and African populations as being inherently inferior and prone to violence, while holding up "European" cultures as more tolerant and culturally developed, and try to justify this with attempts to tie violence to some inherent difference. It seems as of late honorary membership in this club by the nutters has been given to east and south asian groups they're trying to present as a bastion of culture and economic success against violence and intolerance (Middle-east and Africa).

This isn't really all that different from constant dialogues of trying to present certain groups as having success because of their supposedly inherent superiority, it's just weird to me because it's sugar-coated with self-proclaimed "progressive" notions of secularism, education, public health, etc. that some groups apparently "can't get" according to some armchair politicos.

Thanks for the info. I'd heard of craniometry and the Bell Curve from Gould's book, but I had no idea about the microcephalin thing. I'd also heard some (unsurprisingly less frequent) racist pseudo-science from the other end of the spectrum, with one arguing that people with lighter eye-pigments being more susceptible to macular degeneration, and another arguing that low melanin in the body leads to slower brain-function or acid that causes mental retardation or whatever. There wasn't any Jay Gould for those, but other arguments basically showed them up for being weird black-supremacist-masked-via-new-age-rhetoric bullshit.

And how hilarious the second-to-last paragraph is! For millennia, compared to the Fertile Crescent and Persia, Europe was a steaming cesspool of slaughter, tribalism, disease and savagery! Even during the crusades, the Byzantine Empires' medicinal knowledge was jack all compared to the caliphate. Until very recently, Europe was a horrible, degrading place to live, with horrible diets that led to nutritional problems, the spread of disease, murder and religious extremism. I would think that the Abbasid Caliphate, or the earlier Sassanid Empire would be far more tolerable, 'developed' and 'non-violent' places to live than the valleys of death that lie beyond the Black Sea.

I mean, I wouldn't have even thought racists like that could divorce things from their historical contexts so enormously. It was only a few centuries ago that most of Rome, Greece and the Middle-East thought of the rest of Europe as 'Frangistan', and its own inhabitants as 'violent savages'!

[the debater]

I mean, I wouldn't have even thought racists like that could divorce things from their historical contexts so enormously. It was only a few centuries ago that most of Rome, Greece and the Middle-East thought of the rest of Europe as 'Frangistan', and its own inhabitants as 'violent savages'!

If that part of Europe was "inferior," then it's only because of the Jews! The Jews were somehow responsible for making those Europeans inferior. I don't know how they did it, but I know they did it somehow!

Anti-racist is code-word for anti-white.

Africa for the Africans, Asia for the Asians, European countries, for non-whites only! (With the exception of Eastern Europeans. But they're not the problem, they've adjusted much better to Western European life than the Muslims and Chinese immigrants.)

[Red Commissar]

And how hilarious the second-to-last paragraph is! For millennia, compared to the Fertile Crescent and Persia, Europe was a steaming cesspool of slaughter, tribalism, disease and savagery! Even during the crusades, the Byzantine Empires' medicinal knowledge was jack all compared to the caliphate. Until very recently, Europe was a horrible, degrading place to live, with horrible diets that led to nutritional problems, the spread of disease, murder and religious extremism. I would think that the Abbasid Caliphate, or the earlier Sassanid Empire would be far more tolerable, 'developed' and 'non-violent' places to live than the valleys of death that lie beyond the Black Sea.

I mean, I wouldn't have even thought racists like that could divorce things from their historical contexts so enormously. It was only a few centuries ago that most of Rome, Greece and the Middle-East thought of the rest of Europe as 'Frangistan', and its own inhabitants as 'violent savages'!

Yeah, in those cases they usually resort to historical revisionist texts which have tried to downplay the role of Mesopotamia, Persia, and the Indus River Valley while playing up Greek and Roman civilization- if they accommodate for the ancient Middle-East it's usually on the mindset that the populations that made those civilizations great were killed or forcibly assimilated by more "inferior" tribes from the Arabian peninsula, making them less successful. This is the same logic they usually use when touting the presumed success of Israel over neighboring Arab states, because both the Middle-Eastern and European Jews were of a more "civilized" stock, a throwback to pre-Islamic Middle-East.

Even when it comes to the golden age of the caliphate and successor states, they usually take the position that the achievements attributed to those civilizations have either been exaggerated or fabricated by "politically correct" academics. It's not a surprise that this pretty much overlaps with bigoted islamophobe positions on the region, so they're just pulling shit of their ass to find anything that gives their position some sort of intellectual cred- eg it's published in a book, not some random stuff I read on the internet.

It's never been very consistent though. When Europe began to set up their influence in the waning years of the Ottoman Empire and after WWI, the common idea then was that the people of the Middle-East were naturally subservient and unlikely to rebel because they weren't developed enough to appreciate "liberty" in the same way a European might. Nowadays, it's the opposite, people from the Middle-East (and insert about any other third-world country/region that is the focus of attention), are in fact so uncivilized because they can't accept authority. A 180 on why they are backwards.

Even when it comes to the Microcephalin study the same kind of conclusion was attempted by others trying to use it to push their position- basically while the migration Middle-East was the first bottleneck that helped the gene be more dominant, successive bottlenecks of populations going into Europe or further East into the rest of Asia resulted in a higher concentration of the desired Microcephalin gene than was found in the Middle-East, ergo it's touted effects were more dominant in those areas.

As far as mainstream genetics is concerned humans as we know it evolved most of their major characteristics long ago, and there is no appreciable difference between races- there might be variations among individuals in certain areas but they (things like intelligence) are not inherently specific to races or ethnic groups. You have exception for stuff like lactase persistence or variations on alcohol dehydrogenase among certain populations (how you hold alcohol) that came as a result of different diets, but extending this into somehow one group is inherently more intelligent is where the problem begins.

[Flying Purple People Eater]

Yeah, in those cases they usually resort to historical revisionist texts which have tried to downplay the role of Mesopotamia, Persia, and the Indus River Valley while playing up Greek and Roman civilization- if they accommodate for the ancient Middle-East it's usually on the mindset that the populations that made those civilizations great were killed or forcibly assimilated by more "inferior" tribes from the Arabian peninsula, making them less successful.

Even if you go by their racialist logic then, that's just silly. The fact of human beings being so closely related aside, many haplotypes found in the skeletons of ancient carthaginians and Mesopotamians are almost identical to those found in the average Palestinian.


Even when it comes to the golden age of the caliphate and successor states, they usually take the position that the achievements attributed to those civilizations have either been exaggerated or fabricated by "politically correct" academics. It's not a surprise that this pretty much overlaps with bigoted islamophobe positions on the region, so they're just pulling shit of their ass to find anything that gives their position some sort of intellectual cred- eg it's published in a book, not some random stuff I read on the internet.

I have noticed this conspiratorial line of thinking before when reading, as I will bring up again, Mismeasure of Man. Even the craniometrists from the 1700s cried 'political correctness' when their work was criticized.


It's never been very consistent though. When Europe began to set up their influence in the waning years of the Ottoman Empire and after WWI, the common idea then was that the people of the Middle-East were naturally subservient and unlikely to rebel because they weren't developed enough to appreciate "liberty" in the same way a European might. Nowadays, it's the opposite, people from the Middle-East (and insert about any other third-world country/region that is the focus of attention), are in fact so uncivilized because they can't accept authority. A 180 on why they are backwards.

This weird thinking seems to have dotted the entire of Western political thinking at the time - I remember reading in a museum about how massive numbers of Indonesian agricultural laborers were allowed to migrate to Australia to work under white-supremacist rule because current superstition was that they were 'naturally inclined' to harvest sugarcane, lol.