Travis, it is no evasion to tell you that because racism is forbidden by Free Republic, I've been saying repeatedly that I'm not going to get into defining it because then I'm saying whether people in “gray areas” should be banned or not. I don't run this website and I will not make that kind of statement.
I don't avoid racial issues. I'm white. In college and graduate school, I lived in the inner city and attended a church that changed from being predominantly white to being predominantly black. I'm married to a Korean woman I met in graduate school, and in the not-too-distant past, I've attended Korean Presbyterian churches where not only was I one of the few white people, the language of the church was not English. My Korean niece attends a Christian school run by a fundamental Baptist church which is interracial in both the school's students and the church membership. I live in an upper-class neighborhood where most residents are white, but there are a number of black families, generally retired or active-duty military.
Kind of hard for me to tap dance around racial issues, don't you think?
This was the original question:
112 posted on Sat Apr 07 2012 21:38:09 GMT-0500 (Central Daylight Time) by reaganaut1: “Define ‘racism’. Is doubting that all races are equally intelligent on average ‘racist’?”
If you're asking my personal views I could tell you what I think, but I already did. Post 270: “On race, I couldn't care less what somebody’s skin color may be; I care a great deal what they believe.” Post 271: “I do have strong opinions about racism. There's no excuse for blaming people for the color of their skin, only for what they have or have not done.”
I know smart white people. I know stupid white people. I know smart and stupid blacks, Hispanics and Asians.
That last group (Asians) makes me very hesitant to say intelligence is racially based. In the 1800s, Asian immigrants were used as “coolie labor” and their reputation was based on some very bad stereotypes. Today, Asians are regarded as a “model minority” and the stereotype is that they're very intelligent.
What changed? I don't think it was the gene pool.
Some people are going to point out, correctly so, that there is a genetic basis for being tall or being short, having blue eyes or brown eyes, or having blond hair or black hair. Moving from that, they ask if there's a genetic basis for intelligence. I suppose as a purely theoretical question, that, like anything else, is open to research, but as we saw with the global warming debacle, scientific conclusions are all too often based on something other than “pure science,” whatever that term may mean.
If conservatives want to go down the road of race-based genetic studies of intelligence and cultural behavior, it would be wise to look at what the founders of Planned Parenthood and the Germans did with such studies. Black people have not been the only targets of such “research.” Jews, southern Europeans, and numerous other “white” groups were once blamed for being genetically inferior.
If we start down that road, it will take us places we do not want to go.
My strong suspicion is intelligence is based mostly on the way parents raised their kids. Is little Johnny encouraged to read, or told to go outside and play? Is little Jenny encouraged to study, or told that being a responsible family member means taking care of her little sisters when she gets home from school? Conservative white Americans will give different answers to those questions, and those answers will likely have a lot to do with how the kids turn out. And by the way, I don't think everybody needs to go to college — there's absolutely nothing wrong with being a manual laborer or a housewife if that's what somebody wants to do with their life, especially if it's what they're good at doing.
Now, Travis, have I given you your answer?
If the underlying question is my views on Charles Murray and the Bell Curve, you're not going to get me to give strong opinions on that. It's been a long time since I've read the book. I think I heard Murray speak at a college lecture back in the 1990s (I know I intended to go but don't remember if I actually made it or not) and my recollection is most of the people reacting against him weren't interacting with his arguments. I don't want to be one of those people. If we're going to get into the question of whether intelligence is genetically based, I can say that I don't see the evidence for that and I think a much better case can be made that culture is the primary factor in academic achievement of different groups, but I'm not going to publicly criticize a book I haven't read for a very long time.
Your criticism here is of bad science, which of course is not really science at all.
What you are essentially saying, and it's not actually entirely unreasonable, is that we should not do such studies (using good science) because we might not like what we find. From a standpoint of the effect on society of such findings, you are probably exactly right.
The problem is that "we" do not control what studies will be done. The Chinese, for one example, have a cultural imperative that is thousands of years old that the Chinese are superior. They are quite likely to fund studies, again using good science, to try to prove it. They WANT to find out that Chinese are intellectually superior.
Of course not. And so let me congratulate you on winning the coveted Pharisee Merit Badge, inscribed with:
"Oh thank you Lord for not making me a racist, sexist xenophobe like these untermenschen swine that I am trying to enlighten through my noble example. Amen."
Wear it in good health!