I am inclined to believe that it stems from a biological inclination which is manifested in multiple cultural phenomena including tribalism and collectivism.
It's interesting to read those who claim it is a purely a cultural phenomenon. They tend to be Marxists or suffer from the same logical failings that those who do not understand economics have. Here is one such example http://www.bolshevik.org/1917/no12/no12capitalismandracism.html
One interesting quote-
"Racism as an ideology is a form of biological determinism, premised on the idea that different human populations ("races") have different capacities because of their genetic makeup. Inevitably such categorizations are aimed at rationalizing an existing social hierarchy."
How is this inevitable? Is classifying birds according to size and color racist? Is it inevitable that this will rationalize a heirarchy?
Does that mean there's some sort of chemical imbalance for people who are or aren't racist?
It's biological in the sense that our ability to rationalize, subdivide, and think are all results of our biology. Beyond that, there's not much that saying "racism is biological" can do other than haphazardly or unintentionally justify racism by virtue of its biological inevibtability.
Unless you think our conscious beliefs are subject to some sort of biological determinism, there's no good reason to argue about the biology behind race for reasons other than understanding the greater biology beyond belief or prejudice. The social implications of racism being a fact of biology are just silly. For one, races themselves are not constant over time, nor can they be scientifically determined, so suggesting that racism defined by anything more specific than simply an ingroup/outgroup dynamic is biological just doesn't do much.
Perhaps a study on twins which have been separated at birth would solve the issue?
Wow, check this out:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2292426/
The results suggest that variation in attitudes toward homosexuality is substantially inherited, and that social environmental influences are relatively minor
Crazy. Of course, I am hesitant to accept the conclusion, as I'm not sure how they can isolate all factors (as it doesn't appear that the study was a control study but rather a survey).
Good point- how is your mind being affected by a cultural upbringing "not" a biological change? Everything we do and feel is a result of our biology, the mind and its decisions aren't separate from the body- it is the body.
Porco Rosso is more asking perhaps, is racism completely instinctual or is it something that's learned. If it is instinctual- why is it in some but not others? Perhaps you could buy a prescription to quell racist tendencies.(or just pop some ecstasy pills).
It doesn't really have to be that complex. Read Othello (my favorite example). Shakespeare doesn't write about Othello as if he were subhuman or a different species from the rest of the characters in the play. Apparently, Shakespeare was way ahead of his time or racism towards Africans isn't a historical constant. Read any contemporary anthropological report. Race just can't be genetically proven. Most US citizens actually have a higher percentage of genes recently descendant from Africa than is required to legally be considered African American. I'd have to dig through some old papers to find the source on that one though.
If race itself isn't a biological fact, how can racism be?
It's kind of irrelevant. Either way, it's just simple social signaling atavism and tribalism, which is kind of the complete opposite of what the liberal order states is necessary to thrive. Frankly, I think the word gets thrown around in a haphazard manner and in the west is only meant to appeal to certain people in a certain way.
Either way I thin BP is right to say that it may be interesting that it is probable to our biological history, but so what? I think Austrians would say the same thing, this is the type of positivism / scientism Mises railed against.
The reality is - it should only be looked at as a serious thing when it becomes some sort of policy that causes the shit to hit the fan for some unlucky bastards who were in the wrong place at the wrong time - that is to say racism could only be called "as it is happening / shown the capacity to happen"...or something along those lines (I could probably state this better if I have to think about it more) .
It could probably also be used in a customary retrospective verifing showing of events. Ex: I could show pics of Slavs, Jews, Gypsys, or whatever under some pretty crappy conditions due to certain national/ govt/ cultural policies.
My overall point: it is usually a red herring that adds uneccessary fuel to the fire when scientists "do studies" (ex: black women less attractive than white women, etc), left wingers throw out social signaling devices, or right wingers get all reactionary and racist just because. Like all other "fixed ideas", it is a shit concept, that can lead to some insane results, when used in a theoretical void.
"As in a kaleidoscope, the constellation of forces operating in the system as a whole is ever changing." - Ludwig Lachmann
"When A Man Dies A World Goes Out of Existence" - GLS Shackle
Also, I wonder if it could be looked at as a very specific modern problem to modern man. That is "racism" is more or less ideas gone heywire, and it is a peculiar and bat fuck crazy custom that is kind of unique with the rise of nation-states, the enlightenment, political ideology or something along those lines. To rephrase: it is a very specific way and issue to look at race that really didn't have much precedence in the past.
I could see a case for that, though that is beyond my capacity to really think about
It's taught as such by all the commies at university these days. At least I have yet to meet someone with a PhD in anthropology that claims racism existed pre-1600. Ironically, anthropology is the one area of study that is on the forefront of post-race theory now, but started as the study that created racism as we understand it today.
I am inclined to frown at attempts to pathologise tribalism by liking it to racism.
I am inclined to think racism has the most to do with narcissism — a common trait among people eager to pat themselves on the back for being cosmopolitan and non-tribal.
Can you restate that sentence please, I'm not reading it right.
Are you saying commies are saying that racism didn't really exist pre 1600?
If so that is interesting and the commies may have a point. My hunch was it was specfic cultural strands that really made the concept manifest (either for or against) somewhere around that time.
Note: "commies" is a bit tongue in cheek. Though a friend of mine that's a Marxist history professor is one of the folks I'm talking about.
Generally, anthro and history departments are teaching that racism wasn't a codified or easily recognizable social phenomenon before around the 1600s with the publication of the first anthropological study that classified humans into (I think) 5 different hierarchized subspecies. Foucault was saying, essentially, the same thing about sexuality (that it's codification gave rise to its discourse and, therefore, the oppressive side effects of that discourse).
It's a point that's quite worthwhile. While throughout all history there tends to be disdain for invading forces and other tribes with feuds, there wasn't anything that came near a modern understanding of race, let alone racism. And anthro PhDs will tell you race cannot be biologically identified, which, as far as I can tell, is true. It seems as though it's an enlightenment idea to start defining people biologically and then codifying policy about how each group fits into society.
Another interesting point from a US history friend is that after Bacon's Rebellion, since those in charge of suppressing the rebellion had a hard time figuring out which Europeans were indentured servants, and possibly rebels, and which weren't, there was a conscious decision to use Africans as the labor population in Virginia. I can't verify that by myself, however.
A racist will look at both, biological and cultural, to make a case. Biological will be along the lines of human development to something like brain density/size and goes into anthropology. The cultural looks at various groups (or races) cultural output in the area of industry and the arts.
Generally the above will be articulated and initiated in debate by a more sophisticated person, because you have two types of racist. A low level racist, who can't make the argument well defined, and a high level (or upper class) racist, the one who may even see the low level racist as embarrassing trash as well. This is how I've seen it.
This leads to someone generally making the argument of human development and output over time based on different ages and how each race or population reached that area of output. One may say the Greeks were at the height of civilization, and at the time were superior in the arts and infra structure. Go 1,500 years ahead. Someone may say that Germany reached a height of superior output, they'll look at art, philosophy, industry, etc. and contrast it with other races at the same time.
I'd like a link to that if you could find it, please. This is interesting.
Give me a minute to dig up some ancient notes and I'll give you some titles.
Can't find it, but there's a quote from The Republic that talks about the roles of the guardians, and leads to, "...and above all, the purity of race." There must have been some idea of racial differences, whether it can be biologically found, even then. There was a site (was bookmarked, can't find it) that would classify different European sub-races (or classify Europeans into sub-races) based heavily on bone structure and facial characteristics. Beyond perhaps structure and brain density/size, I haven't found anything else biologically that differentiates between race, it mainly seems cultural.
I've located Linnaeus' Systema Naturea as the basis for the five subspecies of humans (and also realized it was 1700, not 1600), but I cannot locate the contemporary history of Anthropology that critiques his, and many others, work regarding anthropological racism.
Barbara J Fields' essay "Slavery, Race, and Ideology in the United States of America" is a good read regarding the prominence of race as a justification for slavery. I can only find it on journals that cost money online, but a library should have it if you're interested. If not your regular old library, definitely a public university one, which shouldn't be a problem as long as you're not checking it out.
@BP
Yeah, I figured "commies" was a joke. It's a fun word to say.
Overall, I think I agree with what you posted based off my intuition and knowledge of things, including the Foucoult thing.
As far as the biologically identifiable thing, that's probably true when you really look at what reproduction is and where we came from, and how people just adapt physically differently to different environments. I mean to say there is a "Chinese gene" or whatever is kind of insane. Race really does becomes a bit of a red herring.
Based off of what you are saying, my hunch is the major disagreement than between liberals and left wingers it would be what codifying is and the nature of it. Or not, Foucault desreves more serious attention than I think he has been given.
@Bert
I don't think you can use the word "racist" that way. Like it or not, I think the word inherently carries a different connotation to it, and perhaps even inherently negative. I do not think the word is even an academically positive/neutrzl word (like Aryan for example) ,nor do I even know if it ever was.
If you are trying to put a positive spin on something, what is the difference between your positive spin and what an anthropologist / historian/ archaeologist is?
Trying to figure that one out.
Cool video, F4M. Have you seen this one? It seems to make just about as much sense in a fraction of the time.
Diversity is a terrible thing. Case-in-point: New Hampshire is 95% white and it has the highest quality of life of any state, and is the most libertarian by far.
Please make that your sig.
But let's just see if I get the facts of life straight:
a) Gold always was and always will be. We were born with it. There is no objective value except gold.
b) Freedom is 100% isolation and self sufficiency, because that makes sense. Oh and I need gold
c) Even though I ought to live like a madman out in the wilderness it has to be in a place that is 95% white
d) libertarianism, a cosmopolitan bourgoise philosophy of societal interdependence is the way to go - anarcho primitivism is bad
e) New Hampshire is awesome
When did I ever say that?
For when I have to go into civ in order to trade. Gold always comes in handy.
I never said that. I said you can't deny NH's lack of diversity and it's high quality of life. Take a look at Detroit or Cleveland if you want a comparison.
Anarcho-primitivism IS anarcho-capitalism. Hunter-gatherers freely traded and had no violent monopolies.
There are almost 1000 anarcho-capitalists in NH. Have you ever been?
I have lived in both Detroit and Cleveland and am from that region, I love it.
New Hampshire is for pinko socialists
"Foucault desreves more serious attention than I think he has been given."
I think it is very much a shame that most philosophy departments do not really delve into continental philosophy beyond Kant, maybe Hegel. When I was in school I found that the English department was the one that covered stuff from the second half of 20th century, while the philosophy department had a few radicals that didn't mind Nieztche. Could have been my uni though.
There's a lot of stuff here. One thing I would really like to discuss is this idea about using race as a justification for slavery. It is definitely true that this occurred. However, there is nothing inherently racist about classifying things. Obviously there are differences between different groups of people from different areas of the world. This is most obvious in varying skin color, eye shape, and even body size. Where this gets controversial is when you start talking about intelligence. We can postulate, I guess, that among all humans there is a maximum level of intelligence that is attainable. From this we can say that between individuals there are differeing levels of intelligence and a maximum level attainable by each individual. Whether or not this can be generalized to different groups of people based on, say skin color or geographic region, is questionable. Whether or not this is even worthwhile to do is also questionable. However, if, for example, it can be determined that a certain group has a higher rate of some kind of mental illness why is this a bad thing to bring to light? This would help those people and others because you would presumably be able to isolate what it is that causes that mental illness.
Another thing I wanted to discuss is the animosity of leftists/Marxists in this area to science. Whether it's implicit or explicit is irrelevant. What it amounts to is politicizing a scientific endeavor. The claim is essentially that classification is ideological. This does not necessarily have to be the case. While it can be used, like anything else, to justify ideas or ideologies, it is not itself ideological. To say that one group of people has differences from another group is not to say that one of those groups is superior, that is a value judgment on a fact. Let's look at linguistics. Is that racist? Is it languist? Obviously that is ridiculous.
The last thing I want to address for now is the idea of a "Chinese" gene. Of course, it's not a "chinese" gene, but there must be something there that affects development in the embryo. To point that out isn't racist nor is it implying in any way that they are inferior. It's just curiosity and fact.
I have lived in both Detroit and Cleveland and am from that region, I love it. New Hampshire is for pinko socialists
Detroit and Cleveland are too of the poorest cities in America. NH continually ranks high on all the surveys for quality of life. NH has the LOWEST poverty, one of the highest median incomes, and the lowest unemployment. It also has relatively low crime. Not surprisingly, NH is the most free market state by far: NO income tax, NO sales tax (meaning the state is nearly 100% divroced from the market) and low taxes everywhere else.
Give me ONE example of how NH is pinko socialist. It is by far the least socialist state probably in all of North America.
Classification isn't necessarily ideological, and the link you posted is written by ideologues and not anthropoligists or people with credentials in any field other than being ideologues. So no, classification isn't necessarily ideological. If that's the discussion you're trying to have I can't see anyone here disagreeing.
Race is another subject. Skin color seems like a pretty arbitrary trait to go by, especially when we consider examples of "passing" for one race or another. So skin color is pretty much out the window. Moreover, people with similar skin colors and hair textures still have a huge degree of variability when it comes to things like size, head shape, etc., etc., and these are just phenotypic traits. There's all kinds of crazy shit happen genotypically.
Studying populations (as opposed to races) is useful in treating diseases. The important factor there is not so much race as it is the people that are likely to breed and the conditions of their environment. It shouldn't be surprising that people in Sicily have a higher incidence of genes that can fight malaria, but that doesn't do much to put them in a separate category since plenty of other people (who are not Sicilian) have the same genotypic trait. So maybe they have this trait, plus similar phenotypic traits. Well, what about the Sicilians that don't have that trait but have similar appearances? So maybe we bring the shape of some body parts into the mix, in which case we have so much variability we should give up.
The problem with trying to classify discreet groups of races is that there is literally no reasonable point at which to stop. Even studies of a certain homogenous group give vague, probabalistic results. If race is a matter of probability, then I think we've turned the modern understanding of racism on its head. Few people wait in the delivery room waiting to see what race their baby will be. Moreover, cross cultural studies of race fail to hold up to any standard. In Brazil, for example, race is wildly different than it is from the US. A non-white here could be white in Brazil, and two Brazilian people can have a child that would be considered a different race. Wikipedia has a nice, but cursory, entry on race in Brazil.
@Porko
BP put it very well, and to go off of what she is saying:
Biology is going to tell you what reproduction is doing and that is about it. And when we go into practicing medicine - it is a practice, the presuppositions and methods are right on the table. It is a utilitarian and pragmatic skill set that serves a purpose while going off of biological narratives. It doesn't posit race as some axiom or thing initself, nor can science really do that.
The second you start doing that, you start making metaphysical claims, and we have to ask, why are they being made? Science does not say what is smart, beautiful, good, bad, French, etc - it is out of it's realm.
Also if you start with a syllogysim as "race is a thing in itself", it is fair to ask what are you doing and why are you doing that?
@F4Me
New Hampshire is pinko because it is 5% non white and they don't enforce the gold standard. Detroit is pure liberterian because Ted Nugent can hunt dear in his backyard with a crossbow and hunting season is a holliday. Plus we have militas, and people shoot guns off, and do drugs all the time here. Plus Detroit is like 10% white, which is ALOT of white people
Just wanted to add that, by the standards used by many scientists to 'discredit' the notion of race, other notions like beauty would also be discredited (there's no 'beauty gene'). Yet, if you got a thousand people to rate a series of photos based on attractiveness, there'd be general agreement about what the most and least beautiful faces were; whilst beauty is a subjective thing, it also has an objective component, in that the majority of people would agree that a very attractive person is very attractive, and that a very ugly face is very ugly. Equally, if you got a thousand people to rate a series of photos based on what race they thought faces were, there'd be general agreement upon which face was which race, much as there was agreement upon which faces were the most and least attractive. So whilst things like beauty and race may be seen as subjective phenomena, existing solely in the minds of individuals, they're also objective in the sense that for obvious manifestations of a certain race or extreme beauty/ugliness, most individuals generally agree in their appraisal of it. The human mind is capable of extremely advanced pattern recognition (such as facial recognition, a task which no computer yet designed can perform as well as a human), so just because science is incapable of recognising a genetic basis for race, doesn't mean it doesn't exist (there could be a pattern that current software is just not advanced enough to recognise, much as current techniques couldn't measure a persons attractiveness by analysing their genes).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJ-e5XjlmZA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J59sTRqxfwo - Abridged
May be of interest.
I hope I've replied correctly. I registered a week or two ago to ask an economics question, but I ended up losing my message.
@F4Me New Hampshire is pinko because it is 5% non white and they don't enforce the gold standard. Detroit is pure liberterian because Ted Nugent can hunt dear in his backyard with a crossbow and hunting season is a holliday. Plus we have militas, and people shoot guns off, and do drugs all the time here. Plus Detroit is like 10% white, which is ALOT of white people
Have you ever been to NH? I've been to Michigan and I hear its one of the most statist places on the planet. Same with Ohio. There's a reason businesses have been leaving those states since the 1980s. All while NH is flourishing in business. NH is constantly ranked as the best place to open a business.
NH has a growing gold and silver exchange network (mostly agorist). I suggest going over to Shire Silver website.
Whites have historically been more libertarian. Ron Paul was right when he criticized black voters for supporting more statist laws like higher welfare and higher taxes on businesses. I know it's because the government has made them that way but it's the truth.
In Detroit, all the state does is oppress us, welfare is minimal and being cut, the schools are being privatized, the roads are never fixed, and the lights are always out. So we're actually building a lot of alternatives like permaculture farms, policing our own neighborhoods and such. Also most Michiganders probably know a lot more about hunting and gathering than the average FSP lackey.
Still, we'd rather you stay in NH.
Rome wasn't built in a day. NH will be Hong Kong in no time. Every single free stater in NH is active in libertarian causes in some way. Schools are on their way to being privatized, gold and silver are making a huge mark, agorism is everywhere and you can always leave civ for the woods at any time.
Hong Kong wasn't white, you sure you want that?
Also, there really are parts of Detroit City, like actual houses, you could probably homestead and no one would fuck with you...if you could defend yourself properly.
I believe that it's a social phenomena; a relic of pre-capitalistc society, where individuals of different races were a real and tangible threat (would attempt to expropriate your property/land and enslave your people). The mechanisms within the capitalist system (what Hayek called the "extended order") moves society away from such sentiments.
****Of course it depends on your definition of racism. I define racism as hatred of other races.
"If we wish to preserve a free society, it is essential that we recognize that the desirability of a particular object is not sufficient justification for the use of coercion."
Generally, anthro and history departments are teaching that racism wasn't a codified or easily recognizable social phenomenon before around the 1600s with the publication of the first anthropological study that classified humans into (I think) 5 different hierarchized subspecies.
Sounds like (European) racism is distinct from other kinds of chauvinism in its attempt to link itself to science. Ancient Greeks for example were famous chauvinists but they didn't try to bring science into their disdain for Barbarians. It would be interesting to know if racism of the Japanese and Chinese was also "scientific" like that.
First, Hong Kong is full of Chinese, not whites. Second, Hong Kong is very diverse. Your premises are flawed.
Third, you seem to assume "diversity" is a word for "not white". North Korea, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Sierra Leone are all far less diverse than the United States, Canada, and Germany.
Fourth, whites are absolutely not "more libertarian", its just that conservatives and pseudo-libertarians often push non-whites into becoming slaves of the state when (a small minority, but a vocal and incredibly irritating one) they claim that whites are biologically superior or that the holocaust didn't occur. Hell, many of the places moving in the direction of libertarianism are distinctly not-white, in places like Central America and Asia.
Fifth, Detroit is bad because of the state screwing everyone over and creating dependants/slaves with welfare. There are individuals there who are altogether making the best of things, and in some ways things are improving there (though not in the sense that the Michigan government is getting better).