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lucern -> RE: There isn't such a thing as 'races' in humanity. (8/7/2007 11:48:57 PM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Alumbrado
quote:
You very clearly are not a population geneticist nor an evolution biologist
That horse died some time back.
Everyone one here gets that genetics doesn't use that term for measurment.
Some people here refuse to get it that many other disciplines do use that term.
In any case, the concept of race may have been created in response to social adaptation, not biogical.
Excuse the long post, but I believe it settles an important question. Since the early post where Alumbrado posted departmental anthropology course descriptions, highlighting that other sciences use race, I've been wanting to add an explicit explanation of how some sciences use race. Between the 'race exists' and 'races do not exist' postings, the position of the social sciences hasn't yet been rendered as fully as I'd like. For reference, I probably know about 300 social scientists from their writing, and about 40 personally.
First off, we have competing meanings of identical statements, like "Race exists." and its opposite. For "Race exists" we have people, like myself, who argued that race reflects a social reality that social scientists have to take into account in order to accurately describe society. Race exists in the sense that it has meaning(s) that differentiate people. To borrow from practice theory, it is the doing of race that makes race, rather than the reflection of a logical quantifiable system that people simply perceive. This doing of race reifies its existence socially, naturalizes it, and reinforces its place in the world. Let's not kid ourselves: this is the position of the learned, whether it's self taught or not. You don't start out thinking this way unless you're too intelligent to be wasting time on electronic forums (heh heh). To further differentiate, it's the most common position of those learned in the social sciences. It's not common knowledge, and it conflicts quite readily with simplistic notions of multiculturalism and 'we're all the same' discourses just as it does with the meaning below. I can expand on this at will, but there are so many astounding works of research on the matter. It is an extremely common element in broader research questions, because has pervasive impacts on so many areas of human interaction. I'm calling this usage #1 for shorthand.
That brings us to the opposing side of the 'Race exists' coin (#2), that race or some synonym of it, like ethnicity, provides a system of natural classification of humanity, and that it's some brainwashing or PC crap that strives to say otherwise. In my experience, most of us grew up seeing race, and knowing race when we saw it: this makes it an attractive concept. This doesn't mean that people who hold this concept think that this difference should be used to treat people differently, though some who believe this certainly do. When I call this concept attractive, I have to laugh at myself a bit - in truth I imagine that most people are raised with some variant of this. I would guess that the majority of hits on this thread have been by people with this stance - most people, in my experience, don't have the time to dabble in abstract theories and see it as a fanciful waste of time as long as they treat other people with respect. Can't say I blame them.
The notion that "Races do not exist" is made out to broadly contradict each of the previous two concepts in the vast majority of posts here. The intersection with this idea and the other two are worth pointing out. It absolutely contradicts the underlying principle of #2, but it does so in a way that leaves people with nothing, including a way to actually conceptualize WTF they've encountered in their experience. If races aren't races as described in #2, it leaves many people with little else besides skepticism: it simply contradicts what they know about the world. It would be a little like saying "Hey, the sun doesn't revolve around the earth.". It clearly looks like the sun revolves around the earth to most people. I mean, just look at it, not for too long! Nobody's going to believe that a geocentric universe wasn't true until there's another way of conceptualizing the universe as non-geocentric until there's some idea to replace it in a way that actually makes sense (and even then, it's a long battle of words, wit, et al). While an important criticism was made early on of systems of classification as well as the potential to abuse science when it becomes authoritative (as it tends to do), the case for race as physical science need not clog up this thread as much as it does. The case hasn't been made by respected scientists in years, or even by those without ulterior motives (like with expressly racial meds - $$). That much is clear to me (and I get that not all are with me), but what's also clear is that the physical sciences readily falsify racial hypotheses without giving people something else, an intellectual bone to gnaw in its stead.
And why should they? More importantly, how could they, even if they wanted to? Race is first a social phenomenon, and it is researched as such. When social scientists study race, they do it as per #1, with an understanding of the findings of the last 80 years of physical anthropology. When current physical anthropologists write about race, they will also do so as per #1. Social scientists deploying #2 'Race is real' will find themselves in an incomprehensible quagmire. Take LadyEllen's brief mention of Rwanda (which isn't to say she is or isn't a social scientist. I don't freaking know) :
quote:
...Every “race” does it to other “races” – all that’s required is for a group of type 1 to be able to identify those of type 2 and have some reason – and we being human its competitive often – to ascribe negative traits and behaviours to type 2 such that theyre not quite as good as type 1 and can thus be defined and treated with less respect. Natural behaviour unfortunately – we saw it in Rwanda, and to be honest whilst we cant tell the difference between one type and the other in Rwanda, they certainly could.
Though LadyEllen expressly wrote with tolerance and respect for others, her post nevertheless echoes #2 above, that people see races that they're familiar with, and thusly categorize them. This seems to be true in the self-contained concept of #2, but as is often the case, reality isn't quite as we'd imagine it. According to Philip Gourevitch's work We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families, people actually had a very difficult time establishing who was or was not Tutsi after the first planned killings. Many times Hutu extremists would resort to looking at identification cards which long before had divided people into who self-identified as Tutsi, Hutu, or Twa. The Tutsi ideal type was of taller stock with lighter skin and more delicate nasal features. The Hutu ideal type was the robust variety, strong from working the fields, being shorter, more muscular, and with broad noses. These aren't quantifiable, and after the extreme and 'obvious' examples were annihilated, things got confusing and more violent, as people singled out neighbors and enemies for the death squads. What few know about the situation is that these categories were contrived to fit pre-conceived notions. Belgian colonial rulers, following the best racist science of the time, believed that the Tutsis were most obviously descended from people most like them, having gone down the Nile after the Flood, from the infamous Biblical 'story of Ham'. The Hutus were the most African to them, and in classic Machiavellian strategy, the colonials sowed the seeds of differentiation: Tutsi minority on top, Hutu majority on bottom. The racialized notions were instituted - Tutsis became the superior class, and Hutus the rightfully inferior underclass until democratic elections established majority rule. Disturbingly, Hutu extremism was essentially a racist movement along the lines of 1930's fascism, fueling popular support with anger from those original racial notions to the point of the same conclusion: wiping out the Tutsi 'race'. I can't say how differences were contrived originally, but I can say that modern Hutus slaughtered Tutsis not by phenotype, but by tracing their heritage from those days. It is repeated often in eyewitness accounts (by victims and perpetrators alike), that the Interahamwe (the group-laborers-turned-death-squads) would operate by receiving a tip that someone was actually a Tutsi. They'd drive over, armed to the teeth, ask for papers, and proceed from there. The point is, that they regularly didn't know who was a Tutsi without papers, without an anonymous tip. In this light, seemingly natural division of what people look like pales in comparison to the machinations of colonial power and modern politics.
That diversion was to demonstrate how one might understand race as socially constructed - in full recognition of the physical science, but more importantly, in pursuing the meaning inherent in racial terms, from their origins to their most predatory social roles. There has been some talk of whether or not to use the term race. I say use it in full understanding of what it is, what it was, what it isn't, and what it can be made to do.
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