I (Rakesh Bhandari) am forwarding this from the marxism international line; the post was written by Rahul Mahajan. _____________________________________ Yes, race is a biologically incoherent category, but many of the arguments that start here miss the point or make incorrect assertions out of overzealousness. It's obviously not true that race is merely "socially constructed," although, of course, all races are tremendously diverse groups that shade by imperceptible gradations into each other. Still, I could never have grown up a white boy, no matter how I tried (the number of times I tried to bleach my face!). Second, even though it's true that there is a tremendous amount of phenotypic variation within a race (race is phenotypically incoherent), this is irrelevant. It doesn't mean, for example, that one cannot speak about genetically-based height variation based on race -- it may be true that most variation in average height between the large racial groupings is based on differences in diet, but a cursory examination of pygmies and Watusis (or of properly fed subgroups) will tell you that genetics has something to do with it. How is this possible, given the incoherence of race? It's because only a few genes are involved in the determination of height. Race is largely incoherent on the genotypic level, to the extent that one small African tribe has 75% of the genetic variability of the whole 5.5 billion of us, but there are certain clear, easily measurable differences in gene frequencies, e.g. blood types. The genes involved in the determination of height thus may well, at least in some cased, differ appreciably in frequency from group to group. Intelligence, however, even if it can be directly measured, which of course it really can't, is surely something that depends on a huge number of genes in an extremely complex manner, thus making it incredibly unlikely that there would be, in the terminology of scientists, a systematic rather than random bias between different amorphous genotypically incoherent groups. Systematic biases in environment are far more likely, but then the racist argument gets turned on its head and becomes an argument for social justice. So, anyway, the incoherence of intelligence is equally important. The scientific value of such studies is another matter. One can easily find a correlation between, say, skin color and race, but what does it help us to understand? Not much. The real reason for these studies is not hard to find, and has as much to do with science as the "4 out of 5 dentists surveyed" Carefree sugarless gum commercials, something which the Social Text types should ponder.
