[PEN-L:3846] Re: Re: Re: Papa Doc and the Social Construction ofRace

["Charles Brown" <CharlesB@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>>> Peter Dorman <dormanp@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> 02/24/99 10:34PM >>>
Jeez, it's hard to get through to some people.
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Charles: Yea , I know what you mean. Read the below carefully.
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Charles Brown wrote:
>
> That race  is a socially constructed category means two things > especially.Firstly, skin color, hair texture and facial features ( the main > elements of the modern concept of race), though determined in part by > heredity are not correlated with a hereditary determination of "humanness", > virtue, soulfulness, intelligence, and other behaviors.

Peter:
Repeat: skin, color, hair texture, and facial features do not constitute
a basis for "race".  The "modern concept" of race is that it has *no*
basis in biology.
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Charles: Repeat: the modern concept of race DOES have basis in biology. BAD BIOLOGY. You seem to forget that Darwin made racist statements. Wasn't Darwin a biologist ?? You have the naive position that "biology" , the academic enterprise , has had a correct position on this issue all along. That is stone wrong and historically ignorant.

The scheme Caucasoid/Negroid/?oid/??oid that is in millions of household encylopedias came from BIOLOGY !
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Peter:
 Neither these three features nor any other set (with
N>1) provide a stable foundation for dividing humankind into races.
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Charles: True. But that has been established only after a long struggle within BIOLOGY.
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Peter:
People with darker skin colors have a vast variety of facial features
(within Africa alone the variety is extraordinary), etc.  You define
racism as attaching a higher value to some "races" than others.  I
reject that.  Racism, as a belief condition, is holding the view that
races exist as biological entities -- that there are discrete racial
genuses of species homo sapiens.
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Charles: Actually, it would be two or more SUBspecies, not genuses. Different genuses cannot interbreed. The racists knew that Blacks and Whites could interbreed, so they had to postulate subspecies.

Racism DOES attach higher value to some "races". What do you think racism is ? It is true that racism is based on bad biology, but bad biology existed in biology for a long time.
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Peter:
The only reliable (politically and
scientifically) view is that race is *entirely* a social construct.
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Charles: That is what I said in my post. Racism is a social construct, because it doesn't work as a biological concept. Maybe you didn't read what I said. I was explaining why race IS a social construct and is BAD  biology. Go read it again.

However, skin color, hair texture and facial features do have some genetic basis, but they are not correlated GENETICALLY with other the other characteristics that racists falsely correlate them with.

Secondly, racists are not racists by instinct. That is just as important as the aspect you discuss.
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Once you accept the notion of biological races you open yourself up to
all sorts of stereotyping and labeling.  The alternatives then become
invidious racism a la Herrnstein and Murray and benign racism a la
Charles Brown (races are different but not better or worse with respect
to "humanness").  And then you have to play the numbers game to
determine whether racial differences are benign or malignant.
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Charles: That is slander and an inaccurate reading of what I said. I am an advanced ANTI-racist teaching you something.

 People do have different skin colors, hair textures and facial features in part due to different genes. But those features do not correlate  genetically with the behaviors that racists
try to correlate them with.

Peter:
Don't play that game.  Open yourself up to modern biology and reject the
biological category of race.

Charles: I did reject the biological category of race. You do not understand what I said. I'm not playing games. I am clarifying the biological and socio-political elements of race. You can't fight racism if you don't understand that it orginated in the field of biology. There have been many bases for discriminating against groups of people throughout history. In the modern era, the field of biology was perverted to generate the concept of race as a major way to do it. You will not be able to fully fight racism if you do not understand that racist biology uses partially true hereditarily caused physical characteristics BUT MAKES A FALSE CORRELATION BETWEEN THOSE AND OTHER BEHAVIORAL CHARACTERISTICS. In other words, the error of racism is not that skin color, hair texture and facial features are not in part genetically  determined. The ERROR is to try to correlate these characteristics with somekind of genetic determination of general behaviors such as "intelligence", humanness!
, virtue,
etc., etc.

 The other part, by the way, is that racists are not racist by instinct. You don't even seem to be aware of that important point to make.

Wake up ! and read carefully.

Charles Brown

MA anthropology 1975 University of Michigan
Member of the Black Radical Congress