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non_radical_centrist  2mo ago (astralcodexten.com)   2511 thread views

How Should We Think About Race And "Lived Experience"?

astralcodexten.com

I'm generally a fan of "blurry" definitions where something can qualify as X if it fulfills a few of many criteria. I think trying to create hard rules around blurry areas like race and culture is fool's errand, and Scott does a great job laying out how overly strict definitions can go wrong.

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People use the claim “there’s no such thing as biological race” for a lot of purposes, mostly to confuse and deceive people, but here it’s worth focusing on the tiny sliver of justification for such a claim: the biological clustering of populations isn’t exactly 100% the same as socially-defined racial categories

Scott seems to not understand. Race is still a social construct. There are genetic variations among different populations, but this doesn't mean the categories of race are not socially constructed. Who decided we are going to define one race white and another black, based on skin color? He uses the example with Jews, but this makes no sense since their categorization of race is different from the Western categorization. These racial categories have a purpose and are useful for a variety of reasons, but he's not making a convincing point that racial categories are not socially defined. Certain racial categories are fuzzier and an American invention: whites and blacks.

Scott agrees with you, except for the assertion that biological race is entirely useless. Biological race is what ancestry.com identifies you as when you do a DNA test. It's different but has substantial overlap with cultural race. Biological race is, usually, less useful than cultural race, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist like how, say, a biological Star Wars fan doesn't exist. There are lots of genes associated with certain geographic regions and cultures, there aren't genes particularly associated with liking Star Wars.

I think Scott is opening with a straw man (or is it motte and bailey? I don't know). There probably are people who will deny that there is some genetic variation in different populations if you cherry pick for radicals, but just because something is a social construct doesn't mean it has no utility. I am not sure where this claim of his is coming from. It's understood that money is a construct, but we don't deny it's utility. Saying something is a social construct was never meant (in a serious discussion) to mean it is useless.

There probably are people who will deny that there is some genetic variation in different populations if you cherry pick for radicals, but just because something is a social construct doesn't mean it has no utility.

There are lots of people who deny that race has any biological basis. If you grill them on what exactly they mean by it they might eventually realize that obviously race has some biological basis, but otherwise, they'll be pushing HR policies and going to the ballot box working under the assumption there is no such thing as biological race.

Saying something is a social construct was never meant (in a serious discussion) to mean it is useless.

He concludes with essentially saying that the social construct definition, where race is based off lived experience, is more meaningful anyways.

As I understand, what the professional geneticists mean by "human racial classifications have no basis in biology" is something like the claim

(1) "Inasmuch as there's a sensible biological phenomenon of "race" or "subspecies" that we can talk scientifically about all across biology (not just humans), we've broadly agreed to define this phenomenon in terms of ratios of genetic variation within and between populations. Morphology and behavior isn't enough. If you want to tell me that you've discovered a new subspecies of gray flycatcher, the distinctive markings on its tail feathers and the distinctive song that it sings aren't going to cut it -- you have to show something about the ratio of overall genetic variation within vs between candidate populations of gray flycatchers.

Many biological "subspecies" that were previously identified based on morphology and behavior don't hold up to modern genetic analysis. This is not to say that your candidate subspecies of gray flycatcher can't be reliably identified by genetic analysis -- maybe it has a handful of mutations that always appear in it but not in the rest of the species, and maybe those mutations underlie the distinctive behavior and morphology -- but those distinctive differences may be located in too few genes to make the cut overall. Maybe the genetically-mediated differences in morphology and behavior will drive true subspeciation in the future, but it's not there yet.

Applied to human races, the genetic differences between human racial groupings fail to stand out against the backdrop of human genetic diversity sufficiently, across the whole genome, to make the cut as biological subspecies, at any threshold of "sufficiently" to be useful across the rest of biology (not that biology has a lot of use for subspecies in general -- species are fuzzy enough already)."

What some people seem to want this to mean is more like

(2) "Observed average morphological and behavioral differences between members of different human races are not genetically mediated."

This is absurd on its face, and is not implied by (1).

There's plenty of room for different socially-defined and approximately ancestry-tracking racial groups of humans to exhibit genetically-mediated differences in morphology and behavior without qualifying as biological subspecies. There's plenty of room for greyhounds and pitbulls to do so as well, also without qualifying as biological subspecies.

we've broadly agreed to define this phenomenon in terms of ratios of genetic variation within and between populations

But then I have to press you: what exactly is this ratio, and how is it computed? How can I calculate it for various subspecies and for humans in order to verify independently that indeed, native Scandinavians and Aboriginal Australians are more closely related than any pair of subspecies of Chimpanzee?

And I have to point out that “subspecies” is a social construct too, in that the definition of subspecies is determined by biologists, who could very well define it as “subspecies are any subpopulations that have greater genetic differences than any two human subpopulations”. It doesn't tell you how to calculate genetic similarly, but it's clear that, by definition, there cannot be subspecies of Homo Sapiens, so problem solved. But of course that creates two problems:

  1. That's hardly carving reality at the joints: it's plausible that there are relevant distinctions that are more fine-grained than you allow. If there really is no significant difference between human subpopulations, you have to show that from first principle, not simply assert it by definition.

  2. Is this standard really being consistently applied? Again, think about the Chimpanzee subspecies. Are they really more differentiated than some human races? If biologists aren't using their own definition to determine subspecies in the first place, then appealing to the definition to assert there are no subspecies within the human race is meaningless.

(1) "Inasmuch as there's a sensible biological phenomenon of "race" or "subspecies" that we can talk scientifically about all across biology (not just humans), we've broadly agreed to define this phenomenon in terms of ratios of genetic variation within and between populations. Morphology and behavior isn't enough. If you want to tell me that you've discovered a new subspecies of gray flycatcher, the distinctive markings on its tail feathers and the distinctive song that it sings aren't going to cut it -- you have to show something about the ratio of overall genetic variation within vs between candidate populations of gray flycatchers.

I am pretty sure racial categories from professional scientific point of view has been criticised, not because of politcal pressure, but more or less along the lines of what you are saying, due to lack of precision.

Because of both. There are inherent problems in biological classifications and human races are nothing unusual about this. It is Lumpers and splitters when it comes to other organisms, but "progressives" and "evil racists" when it comes to humans. Species problem And even this: Ring species No anti-racist says that existence of ring species proves that biologists are doing something bad with classifications, that species don't exist, it's just isolated demand of rigor regarding humans.

I've never seen the claim that different human races should be considered sub-species, at least not by anyone who isn't absurdly racist.

I honestly don't entirely know what people who say "race is 100% socially constructed and not biological" are thinking. I usually give people the benefit of the doubt, but in this case I think it's really just double think.

Maybe the geneticists are just knocking down a straw man when they say humans don't have subspecies and therefore there aren't biological races of humans, but it is a thing they do. See Biological Races in Humans:

The word “race” is not commonly used in the non-human biological literature. [...] Of all the words used to describe subdivisions or subtypes within a species, the one that has been explicitly defined to indicate major geographical “races” or subdivisions is “subspecies” (Futuyma, 1986, pg. 107–109; Mayr, 1982, pg. 289). Because of this well-established usage in the evolutionary literature, “race” and “subspecies” will be regarded as synonyms from a biological perspective. In this manner, human “race” can be placed into a broader evolutionary context that is no longer species-specific or culturally dependent.

The question of the existence of human “races” now becomes the question of the existence of human subspecies. This question can be addressed in an objective manner using universal criteria.

This guy goes on to argue that by the broader race/subspecies criteria, there are biological races of chimps, but not of humans.

I also have no idea what people who think race is 100% socially constructed and not biological mean. Do they think a baby born to self-identified black parents is not likely to have noticeably darker skin than a baby born to self-identified white parents? There's something to be said for "racial classifications are not cross-culturally consistent", such that in Brazil people might be called "white" while having a large percentage of African ancestry than many people in America who are called "black", but that just reflects how the map is socially constructed, not the territory -- which is a truism.

Maybe the geneticists are just knocking down a straw man when they say humans don't have subspecies and therefore there aren't biological races of humans, but it is a thing they do.

There are admittedly an handful of absurd racists out there, so at some point I think scientists do have to knock those down. Like how scientists also have knocked down flat earthers; they're hardly a serious position, but they do exist, and occasionally you need to remind the mainstream population why they're absurd.

I also have no idea what people who think race is 100% socially constructed and not biological mean. Do they think a baby born to self-identified black parents is not likely to have noticeably darker skin than a baby born to self-identified white parents? There's something to be said for "racial classifications are not cross-culturally consistent", such that in Brazil people might be called "white" while having a large percentage of African ancestry than many people in America who are called "black", but that just reflects how the map is socially constructed, not the territory -- which is a truism.

Yeah, I really think this is just pure doublethink. I'm not sure if there's any other political issue where doublethink is as common; usually I think people just hold regular false beliefs instead believing two contradictory things at once.

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