There Is No Race

Racing Against the Clock

Race Against Time

Earlier bread
and
earlier rice
keeps a man
healthy, and nice will suffice.

Racist Chips Off the Old Block?

I was indifferently pouring myself a bowl-full of corn chips the other day when from the bag emerged this:

How does this sort of thing happen? No, really. How does it happen? Do the workers save a burnt chip -- hereafter known as "Burnt Chip + Number" -- that was rejected by quality control and surreptitiously toss it into a passing bag just prior to the bag's sealing? Or does quality control simply miss one of these burnt fellows every once in a great while? Whether intentional or stochastic, the consequence is a race to the bottom of e-quality, this being an online query.

But the query could easily devolve into that putatively much-needed discourse, "A Conversation on Race." For example, which runner is faster: Achilles or Usain Bolt? Neither, as we learn from Zeno, for neither of the two can take the first infinitesimally small step.

No race, therefore, exists, and since there is thus no race, Burnt Chip 1 thereby needn't worry about possible racists!

It's a wonderful world . . .

An Interesting NYT Article On Race

Race

According to Harvard genetics professor David Reich, despite the current orthodoxy that race is only a social construct, "it is simply no longer possible to ignore average genetic differences among 'races."' Oddly enough, Reich accepts the view that race is a social construct. He explains as follows:

A classic example often cited is the inconsistent definition of "black." In the United States, historically, a person is "black" if he has any sub-Saharan African ancestry; in Brazil, a person is not "black" if he is known to have any European ancestry. If "black" refers to different people in different contexts, how can there be any genetic basis to it?

That's Reich on race as a social construct, but he otherwise believes that race is real, namely that the various races are human populations that are different enough from each other to constitute races. I'm sure that some of my readers understand all this better than I do. Such readers are invited to read the article - "How Genetics Is Changing Our Understanding of 'Race'" (NYT, March 23) - and try to understand the logic (that race is a construct and a real thing), then come back and explain it to me.

Really No Racial Bias in Police Shootings?

Roland G. Fryer Jr.
Wikipedia

Quoctrung Bui and Amanda Cox recently reported on "Surprising New Evidence [that] Shows [No] Bias in Police . . . in Shootings" (New York Times, July 11, 2016):

[W]hen it comes to the most lethal form of force - police shootings - the study finds no racial bias[, a finding that surprises everyone] . . . . "It is the most surprising result of my career," said Roland G. Fryer Jr., the author of the study and a professor of economics at Harvard. The study examined more than 1,000 shootings in 10 major police departments . . . . The result contradicts the image of police shootings that many Americans hold . . . . The counterintuitive results provoked debate after the study was posted on Monday, mostly about the volume of police encounters and the scope of the data. Mr. Fryer emphasizes that the work is not the definitive analysis of police shootings, and that more data would be needed to understand the country as a whole . . . . Mr. Fryer . . . . decided . . . to collect a bunch of data and try to understand what really is going on . . . . He and student researchers spent about 3,000 hours assembling detailed data from police reports . . . . They examined 1,332 shootings between 2000 and 2015, coding police narratives to answer questions such as: How old was the suspect? How many police officers were at the scene? Were they mostly white? Was the officer at the scene for a robbery, violent activity, a traffic stop or something else? Was it nighttime? Did the officer shoot after being attacked or before a possible attack? One goal was to determine if police officers were quicker to fire at black suspects . . . . [I]n these 10 cities involving officers, officers were more likely to fire their weapons without having first been attacked when the suspects were white . . . . [These] results undercut the idea of racial bias in police use of lethal force.

As already noted, this study has surprised everyone - not least of all me. For more surprises, read the entire, nuanced article. But just one point before you go. Note the following statement:

[Police] officers were more likely to fire their weapons without having first been attacked when the suspects were white.

This does not mean that there is no "racial bias in police use of lethal force. Rather, it means that there is racial bias against whites.

That is the surprising thing.

West to Wade in Troubled Gene Pool

Nicholas Wade
Wikipedia

Ed West, writing in "Darwin's unexploded bomb" (The Spectator, May 6, 2014), reviews Nicholas Wade's recent book, A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History, which gets into some long-contested, highly fraught territory, as the title itself shows.

I've not read the book, but West also makes it sound provocative:

[T]he most sensitive [issue in the book], and [one] potentially troubling to the modern psyche, is the difference between human population groups that have evolved over the past 50,000 years. As Wade writes: 'The fact that human evolution has been recent, copious, and regional is not widely recognized, even though it has now been reported by many articles in the literature of genetics. The reason is in part that the knowledge is so new and in part because it raises awkward challenges to deeply held conventional wisdom' . . . . [Moreover,] evolution can take place far quicker than people once thought. Greg Cochran and Henry Harpending, in their book The 10,000 Year Explosion, argued that human evolution had sped up since the advent of the first cities. The drastic changes in our ancestors' environment created new evolutionary pressures; among them were selection for qualities that were beneficial in our larger communities, such as lower levels of aggression, deferred gratification (vital for farmers), a greater willingness to trust people outside of close kin group, and the qualities required for craftsmanship, finance and various other complex skills. Thus civilisation had increased the rate of evolution, and was continuing to do so . . . . The implications of this will trouble many people, seeing as it suggests that certain traits differ on average among population groups . . . . [Wade] cites the MAO-A enzyme; people with only 2 copies (rather than 3, 4 or 5) have a much higher level of delinquency. And 'if individuals can differ in the genetic structure of their MAO-A gene and its controls, is the same also true of races and ethnicities? The answer is yes.' A team in Haifa looked at people from seven ethnicities and found 41 variations in the portions of the genes they decoded, with 'substantial differentiation between populations' . . . . [Why, then,] do so many people confidently argue that there is no such thing as race, because there are 'no clear distinct racial boundaries'. This he calls 'verbal subterfuge', arguing: 'When a distinct boundary develops between races, they are no longer races but separate species. So to say there are no precise boundaries between races is like saying there are no square circles.'

Interesting findings with significant implications, but Wade's analogy bothers me. To say that "there are no square circles" is to express a necessary, mathematical truth that cannot be logically denied. But to say that races don't exist because "there are no precise boundaries between races," is not so clearly contradictory. Between a circle and a square, there are "precise boundaries." But the boundaries between races are not clear. I've not done research to know for sure, but I suspect that races are defined as large populations of individuals sharing many of the same genes with one another but not with another large population. But how large? Two tribes might be distinguished in the same way, or two ethnic groups, or almost any two populations, I -- in my ignorance -- suppose. And two populations could intermingle and become one, but a square and a circle could never unify.

The analogy therefore does not fit, but I reckon I ought to read the book . . .

Religion is not an ideology?

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr.
Photograph by Matt Rourke
Associated Press
NYT

Matt Apuzzo, reporting for the New York Times, writes "U.S. to Expand Rules Limiting Use of Profiling by Federal Agents," (January 15, 2014):

The Justice Department will significantly expand its definition of racial profiling to prohibit federal agents from considering religion, national origin, gender and sexual orientation in their investigations . . . . The move addresses a decade of criticism from civil rights groups that say federal authorities have in particular singled out Muslims in counterterrorism investigations.

To the rational mind, this sounds so weird that I have to at least wonder if the report has been inadvertently edited in a way that conflates "profiling" with "racial profiling" -- except that I've too often seen the term "racist" itself deployed as an epithet against those who subject Islam to critical questioning (which perhaps has its intellectual origin in Edward Said's abusive use of the term "Orientalist"). I therefore find regrettably all too plausible this report that the Justice Department will expand its definition of race to include religion. (Not to mention gender and sexual orientation.) Wouldn't this mean, for example, that a Christian who converts to Islam is suddenly a different race? Perhaps the Justice Department labors under the arguably racist notion that all Muslims are Arabs?

Whatever else it might entail, a religion is an ideology, and whether one thinks Islamism is Islam pure and simple or Islam tainted and distorted, Islamism itself is a religion. Will the Justice Department refuse to consider Islamism as a factor in its investigations of terrorism?

Is the expression "religious terrorism" to be an oxymoron?