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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 17, 2022

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I'm not woke, but I do think "Race is a social construct" has some merit. It's a terminological disagreement rather than a scientific one.

Someone who has one white parent and one black parent is often considered black, despite the genetic make-up being 50/50. National demographics on race also largely come from self-reported data in surveys, which have a famously growing list of races you can pick from.

As for intelligence differences between races, I think most people are simply ignorant rather than cognitively dissonant. It's not obvious to everyone that racial groups have different mean IQs, it's not something you learn from mainstream sources. Even once this fact is known, it's not crazy to think achievement disparities can be explained by culture and social institutions. We would all be a lot less economically productive if we moved to Haiti. Oppression isn't even a necessary factor.

Oh there are obviously issues with institutions, history and so on - but the sheer biologicality of it! Those very black-white mixed-race children have issues getting bone marrow because their parents often can't be donors. It was subtle discrepancies in the orbit of Mercury that doomed Newtonian physics. Above bone marrow issues alone would be enough to disqualify the 'race is not biological' argument if we were working purely quantitatively. A quick trip to the Olympics shows that African/blacks dominate sprinting but there's not a single black weightlifter to be found at the very top.

Race may be a social construct in a certain sense, but it's a very strong, useful social construct. The distinction between green and blue is arbitrary and continuous - but it's still there. There are such things as turquoise but green and blue are still real and useful. If the sky was green one day I'd be pretty shocked, if my apple was blue I'd know not to eat it!