Posted on 03/21/2016 6:32:34 AM PDT by Kaslin
At Milton Academy, the tony Massachusetts prep school, the longstanding "one boy, one girl" rule requiring equal representation on the student council has been scrapped. The student government voted this month to move beyond what the council's cochairman refers to as the "archaic norms" of male and female, and instead "accept the world and the people within it the way they are now."
To which I say: Out of the mouth of babes.
To be sure, there is nothing archaic about the labeling of human beings as either male or female. The distinction between the sexes is objective and fixed, and written into the DNA of every individual. (In rare cases, congenital irregularities can cause an infant to be born with intersex ambiguity.) Nevertheless, Milton's well-intentioned student leaders want to be as accommodating as possible toward students who are transgender or "grappling with their identities." Hence the vote to repeal the student council's gender-based quota proviso.
In practical terms, nothing will change at Milton, where the student body is divided equally between boys and girls, and no one has much difficulty telling one from the other. But let's give the kids credit for a sound insight: As a matter of fundamental fairness, quotas should not be tied to rigid classifications that cannot be clearly defined.
Do gender quotas pose that problem? No. But racial quotas certainly do.
American society is awash with race-based quotas, check-offs, preferences, and diversity policies. In countless settings — from college admissions to workplace hiring, from government contracts to legislative redistricting — opportunities and benefits are tied to racial percentages. Twelve decades after Plessy v. Ferguson, the notorious Supreme Court decision in which eight justices upheld the constitutionality of racial segregation, Americans are labeled and sorted by race more obsessively than ever. It was in Plessy that Justice John Harlan delivered his ringing dissent: "Our Constitution is colorblind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. . . . The law regards man as man and takes no account of his surroundings or of his color."
Harlan's fierce insistence that Americans are not to be treated differently on the basis of race became the great objective of the Civil Rights movement in the 20th century. "Racial criteria are irrational, irrelevant, [and] odious to our way of life," argued Thurgood Marshall on behalf of the NAACP in 1950. "There is no understandable factual basis for classification by race."
Marshall's statement was even truer than he could have imagined. Today we know for a fact what scientists in the 1950s could only have surmised: Race is not biological. It is a social construct, not a genetic reality. The DNA of blacks cannot be distinguished from the DNA of Asians or the DNA of whites. Unlike our sex, which is stamped in our chromosomes, our racial and ethnic identities are purely subjective.
"I am an African American, but in parts of Africa, I am white," says Stanford professor Duana Fullwiley, an anthropologist of science and medicine. When research in West Africa requires her to fly from California to France to Senegal, she told Harvard Magazine in a 2008 interview, "My race changes as I cross the Atlantic." In the United States she is black; in France she is considered métisse, or mixed-race; in Senegal, everyone regards her as white.
Of course human beings vary widely in their appearance. Populations from different parts of the world differ notably in their skin color, facial features, and hair texture. But those distinctions are superficial, not racial. They have no immutable significance. They contribute no more to "diversity" than right- and left-handedness do. To rely on such criteria when hiring employees or drawing electoral maps or assessing a corporate board is about as sensible as consulting a Magic 8 Ball.
Racial definitions change constantly. The US Census Bureau has regularly revised the categories it uses to measure race. In 1890, census enumerators divided Americans into eight racial groups: "White," "Black," "Mulatto," "Quadroon," "Octoroon," "Chinese," "Japanese," and "Indian." The most recent census, in 2010, generated data for 63 racial categories — "six single-race categories and 57 different combinations of two or more races," as a government press release announced at the time. Orlando Patterson, the prominent sociologist, has observed that federal immigration authorities used to classify Irish, Italians, and Jews as separate races.
With millions of Americans marrying across the color lineand raising biracial or multiracial children, our ubiquitous affirmative-action check-offs and diversity quotas become more nonsensical — and unjust — by the day. The present fashion for treating "Hispanic" as a quasi-racial category exacerbates the problem. Hispanic identity is not a distinctive and heritable characteristic; it's an ancestral affiliation that fades over time. That is why immigrants from Latin America commonly describe their identity with reference to their Hispanic origin, while a majority of their grandchildren call themselves simply . . . American.
What is true of Hispanics is true of other racial/ethnic groups. A study published last month by the National Bureau of Economic Research finds that when respondents are asked to specify their race, 96 percent immigrants from Asia self-identify as Asian. But that rate falls to 79 percent for their children, and only 58 percent for their grandchildren.
In the ways that matter most — how they label themselves, whom they marry — tens of millions of Americans have no use for racial pigeonholes. To turn those pigeonholes into litmus tests for employment or voting rights or college admissions is, as Thurgood Marshall said of Jim Crow, "irrational, irrelevant, [and] odious to our way of life."
In a nation that aspires to meritocracy, quotas of any kind are an embarrassment. Racial quotas should be unthinkable. Our DNA has always known that race is only a delusion. When will our law and public policy catch up
African is merely a continent of origin, white people born in Africa are Africans, black people born on either the North American or South American continent are Americans, it has nothing whatsoever to do with skin color or other racial differences and you don’t have to be a United States citizen to be American. It makes no more sense to refer to black people as African American than to refer to all white people as European American. Oh, by the way, what the heck does “antropologist of science and medicine” mean?
bump
So it makes more sense to limit the racial classifications to these three rather than the current politically inspired hodgepodge used by the U.S. government for racial classification purposes.
There are genetic differences but the big difference isn’t genetic. We have a problem with some Black people behaving abominably because they were raised to (or not raised at all).
If (insert name of latest Black kid shot by the cops) had been adopted by a normal White family he’d be alive and tattoo free today.
Nurture > Nature
The poison in the Black community is in the mind, not the blood.
It sure would screw up the crime channel if it were true.
I have read it - but if I were to argue in favor of the concept of "race" (i.e., that it is NOT 90% a mere construct), then I would cite data on the distribution of pigmentation, dolichocephaly / brachycephaly, blood types, etc. - long before I resorted to such debatable findings about I.Q.
Indeed, the Bell Curve is predicated on the concept of "race" - it assumes it a priori - and so to refer to it in this discussion is to commit the fallacy of petitio principii.
Regards,
I agree the term “race” is ill-defined and often misused.
Even the biological classification of “breed” seems I’ll suited to human beings.
But what can be measured objectively are differences in DNA, though even there, my understanding is we find more than ten times the number of differences within any given “race” as between any two “races”.
Further, I’ve read there are fewer DNA differences between, for example, Europeans and Asians than there are among various populations in Africa..
What does it all mean?
I’d say the word “race” doesn’t mean much.
It turned out to be densely populated with roughly 12,000 tribes and 6,000 languages. Most of them were darker skinned than most Africans, but they couldn't be classified as African. Beyond the scattered coastal tribes which Australian and other traders had encountered, they couldn't be accurately classified as Melanesian either.
They were also using tools from the stone age, so they essentially have advanced tens of thousands of years in the last 80 years alone. Plus they have gone from a constant state of tribal warfare to being one of the more functional third world countries on the planet, a remarkable achievement in a short time.
Ignorant.
“I am merely saying that human “race” is equivalent to animal “breed” and plant “variety”.
They do indeed signify differences in appearance, though very little difference in terms of underlying DNA.”
Aren’t some breeds of dog smarter than others?
Culture is in the DNA also.
Yes, but there's a key difference with humans, and we can verify it from our own experience.
Just consider all the members of our extended families, OK, including in-laws & out-laws. ;-)
Now, we readily admit that some are smarter than others, right?
And some are more athletic, others musically inclined, some more adept with numbers, others very good with people, etc., etc.
Point is: for humans there's a wide range of talents & abilities within our own families & "races".
And, so it turns out, this range is greater within our groupings than are the averages between most groups.
For example, within most normal populations we can find individuals with IQs of 80 to 150, a huge spread.
But most "races" average out to about 100, plus or minus a few.
And many groups have experienced steady increases in IQ over many years, suggesting there's more to it than just genetics.
Bottom line: "race" is far from the greatest factor contributing to the many differences we see amongst humans.
“But most “races” average out to about 100, plus or minus a few.”
Not according to Herrnstein and Murray. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bell_Curve
“And many groups have experienced steady increases in IQ over many years, suggesting there’s more to it than just genetics.”
What it suggests to me is that the people who have been saying since the 1970s that IQ tests are racially biased have made progress in biasing them toward blacks.
“But most “races” average out to about 100, plus or minus a few.”
Not according to Herrnstein and Murray. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bell_Curve
“And many groups have experienced steady increases in IQ over many years, suggesting there’s more to it than just genetics.”
What it suggests to me is that the people who have been saying since the 1970s that IQ tests are racially biased have made progress in biasing them toward blacks.
You may be missing my point here, and getting some ideas backwards.
I had to read a long ways before getting to Murray's bottom-line: IQ is about 60% genetics, 40% environment and blacks average 15 points lower on IQ scores.
So, looking at those same numbers, I think we can say:
Bottom line: the 40% of IQ which is not genetically predetermined is certainly enough, given good education, to raise up an "average" child to well above average or, correspondingly, reduce a potential genius to failure under the wrong circumstances.
Do you disagree?
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