Steve Sailer writes: One of the weirder contradictions of contemporary dogma is the belief that race does not exist combined with the government’s obsession with counting everybody by self-identified race. If race doesn’t exist, you’d think that, say, the Obama Administration would be under a lot of pressure from its supporters to dump the racial/ethnic classification system. Strangely enough, it never seems to occur to all the True Believers to ask their friends running the federal government to change the system.
About 15 years ago, I wrote a long series of articles for VDARE in which I started out with a lot of anecdotes I had saved up over the years about how absurd the government’s racial/ethnic classification system was. But by the time I had gotten to the end, it struck me that the methods were, well, good enough for government work.
One of the common cliches is that race doesn’t exist at the genetic level. But there’s almost never any citation of the huge amount of data generated by genome analyses in the 21st century, which says the opposite.
In reality, not only does race pretty much exist, but self-identification is, at present, a reasonable way to get at the genetic reality.
COMMENTS:
* If races are, as Steve Sailer has said, very large in-bred populations, wouldn’t it make sense that a person would know their own family, even if it’s a big one?
Denying races existing but enforcing laws against racism strikes me as denying witches exist but enforcing laws against witchcraft.
* Do shoes exist? On the one hand, you would think, obviously, ‘yes.’ On the other hand: we have shoes. We have boots. What do you call a shoe with a heel? Or a shoe with extra ankle support? What do you call a shoe that is designed with vibram soles, is brown, and is intended to be used to hike in the woods? Is it a shoe or a boot? What do you call a low cut boot with laces? On the fringes, it is hard to tell.
Since shoes (and boots) can’t be fully distinctly defined, shoes (and boots) do not exist.
This frivolous example has a purpose. The entire argument is Wittgenstein, and his ‘family resemblances.’
* Check out your local SS offices that dispense disability and other goodies. I hear that only foreigners and minorities are employed there and that they give their homies inside track on scoring disability etc. IOW you have to know someone and bribe that someone who just so happens to be the same ethnic group as you, be it black, muslim, Hispanic, angry Samoan, Aleutian Islander and so on…
—IOW close enough for affirmative action government work. A limping disabled white man on crutches who goes in there will never get a thing.
* Race definitely exists for the driver of the bus I’m taking to work right now, who just let one of his fellow black guys on without paying.
* Races exist, but they are fuzzy around the edges and there is no scientific test that can determine precisely where the borders lie. For example, if Dred Scott was still in force, there would be no completely accurate way to determine whether certain individuals were citizens or farm machinery.
One would have to make up laws, for example that race was determined by the mother, not the father, or by either, or by mandatory DNA testing.
That is why government would rather not make laws that differentiate on race, except a few giving preferences to descendants of slaves, which don’t work very effectively, because they also benefit many people who are not the descendants of slaves. For example Barack Obama gets a racial preference just like his daughters who ARE descendants of slaves, which he is not. Colin Powell is a descendant of slaves, but not slaves in the US, but apparently also has ancestors who were not slaves, and so on.
However we don’t have laws that make killing a white person homicide and killing a black person a property offense, which would be the case if Dred Scott had not been reversed.
* Skin color and DNA sequences are both equally physical manifestations of the reality of race. There is nothing magical about DNA, but most people can’t break the habit of thinking about it as if it were some kind of ghost in the machine. It is not a ghost in the machine. In fact, it’s not even the machine. It is simply an organ system like the digestive tract—the system responsible for protein synthesis—whose workings should not be considered any more mysterious than the latter just because it is microscopic.
Race is first and foremost a spiritual reality. It is derivatively a biological reality. Both are malleable within certain limits, but the situation is extremely complicated and the degree of blinking away racial realities demanded by our current social structure has already reached and exceeded the limits of malleability. It’s time to stop now.
* Ask a liberal academic doctor “Is race a social construct?” or “Is there such a thing as race?” If you ask them in a social context, they will give the politically correct answer “There is no such thing as race.”
However, if you go to their office for a medical problem, the first thing they do is profile you according to race and national/ethnic group. Because it’s handy. Blacks are more likely to have sickle cell and colon cancer, Ashkenazi jews are more likely to have Tay-Sachs, east asians are most likely lactose intolerant, and so on. The CDC website will provide you with graphs of incidence rates sorted by race and ethnicity.
Read Nicholas Wade’s “A Troublesome Inheritance” for another perspective on genes and race.
* Race is downplayed when advocating mass immigration or sharing government resources and government redistribution. Race is hyped when advocating racial injustice and affirmative action racial redistribution and also when emotionally firing up a racial demographic.
Everyone knows race exists. Also, everyone knows that the government racial taxonomy is highly flawed. Hindu Asians are obviously different than Han Chinese Asians, that’s blatantly obvious to everyone. But, self reported racial taxonomies are basically impossible to get right. Ideally, move to a spit test derived ethnic profile that fully compensates for admixture, but that would be politically difficult.
* Years ago I attended a lecture at UVM (University of Vermont) entitled, “Can Race be Erased?” The researchers (I think that they were from UCLA) were seeing if in certain experiments subjects could be induced not to recognize or remember the race of the persons pictured. I don’t remember the precise methodology. They said that your brain automatically encodes three things when you first meet someone: sex, approximate age and race. Automatic encoding means that there’s nothing you can do to prevent it; it occurs at an unconscious level. The first two factors are probably related to reproduction–is this person a potential reproductive partner? Race, the researchers said, is probably a “friend or foe” identifier. In the ancestral environment incorrectly identifying an enemy could be quickly and unpleasantly fatal–you needed every clue you could get.
* I recently had my first child. The New York State forms to get a birth certificate were telling.
First it’s split into Hispanic and Non-Hispanic. Then the non-Hispanic options are: White, Black / African-American, and then *thirteen* types of Asian. So according to them, Saudis and Swedes fall into the same category, while Koreans and Japanese should be counted separately. Seriously, who comes up with this stuff?
* The left-liberal argument is that races are superficial categories (based on skin colour and facial appearance) which whites over-emphasise to put down minorities.
However, why it is that whites are able to successfully “put down” some minorities and not others. Why for example, do East Asians and middle-class South Asians often out-perform whites, if whites have successfully stereotyped them into superficial categories for the purposes of putting them down.
Similarly, if whites put blacks into a superificial category to oppress them, why do these people self-identify as black so much? The only possible reasons are that blacks naturally self-identify as black, and so can’t help themselves, or that the AA benefits of identifying as black outweigh the disadvantages. Either way the argument that whites have put blacks into an artificial category that puts them at a disadvantage is very weak.
If blacks were the same as whites (other than in appearance) then the most rebellious thing for blacks to do would be to act as white as possible. Following liberal logic, that would also be the most effective way to undermine racial labelling and stereotyping by whites.
* There is no parallel with the hostility towards white people, because it’s everywhere. You could include it in a list of names for hatred of various races, but it’s not the same as the others. Nowadays, hatred of blacks, Jews, etc. is anomalous and fragmented into isolated cases, and it makes news whenever it’s seen to occur. But dislike of whites is a fish-and-water thing. People have become so immersed in it that they no longer see it – in the media, politics, the education system, the entertainment industry, advertising, etc.
* Racism covers a wide spectrum of attitudes when applied to whites. I tried making a list describing white racism from its most virulent, KKK-level form, to the type of racism found in deans of Ivy-league universities.
LEVEL 1. Having an irrational hatred of blacks, a desire to do them harm, pleasure in using racial slurs. (Birmingham church bombers.)
LEVEL 2. Having rational concerns about black criminality and dysfunction, reflected in a conscious effort to insulate oneself from them. Race realism rather than race hatred. This type of person is genuinely pleased to see blacks do well. (Jared Taylor type.)
LEVEL 3. Similar to #2, but the concern about black criminality and dysfunction is never acknowledged and all precautionary measures are rationalized–i.e., “good” schools, not “white” schools. Focuses blame on other whites for black problems. (Typical DWL.)
LEVEL 4. Positive views of blacks, no efforts to self-segregate, do-gooder attitude, but may occasionally commit a microaggression by being insufficiently up on the latest protocols. (Typical Millennial.)
LEVEL 5. Being a white person, no matter how cravenly, you prostrate yourself before black demands. (College professor, politician.)
