RACE: SOME CONCEPTUAL AND EMPIRICAL ISSUES

Moral Conversation Project:  After critically evaluating all the materials assigned for 
11/11, 11/16, where do you think the truth lies in the race/intelligence debate?

I. What is Race?  Like sex and unlike gender, it purports to be a biological property.  
Is it?

A. What makes a set of individuals a race?
B. What makes an individual a member of one race rather than another?

II. Is race a natural kind?  What is a natural kind?  Example:  water vs. socially-
desired beverage.
 
A. Independent of beliefs and attitudes (natural rather than social category)
B. A "nature" which
C. Explains how it “acts.” 

III. Species are biological natural kinds.

A. Species and interbreeding—separate gene pools.
B. Homo sapiens and interbreeding.
C. An important consequence:  However race is defined, history is likely to 
confound the definition

IV. The idea of different races suggests a few, relatively discrete gene pools, contrary 
to what we observe.  Rather, there are gradual differences.  (Ocean-going vessels 
and the modern concept of race.)

V.  	A species is associated with a gene pool.

A. There is no gene for race per se.
B. There are genes for specific phenotypical differences (more accurately, for 
tendency to express certain phenotypical differences in certain sorts of 
environments), e.g.: skin color, facial characteristics, sickle-cell gene.
C. However, any clustering of these will be biologically arbitrary.  

VI.	In this way races are unlike subspecies.  

A. Subspecies have “concordant” features, like, e.g., the yellow-rumped warbler 
as opposed to the golden whistler.
1. The yellow-rumped warbler comprises two different groups with 
differences in throat color, voice, and habitat that tend to cluster.
2. The golden whistler shows diversity from island to island, some with 
black-winged males, others with green-winged males, some with 
yellow-breasted females, others with gray-breasted females, but these 
different characteristics are not concordant, they don't cluster.
B. Human phenotypical features don’t cluster in this way.
1. Dark skin color?  sub-Saharan Africa, but also many Indians, 
Pakistanis, Australian aboriginals, etc.
2. Sickle-cell gene?  many Africans, but also many Italians and Greeks; 
also Xhosas (a group of dark-skinned South Africans) lack it, like 
Swedes.
3. Body size, facial features, hair features?  Here again, we get different 
groupings.
C. Race is not, therefore, a naturally defined subspecies.
D. We can, of course, define race by some dimension or other.  But no such 
definition is naturally determined.  From the point of view of biology it is 
arbitrary.

VII. A final point about genetic variation and regional population.  There is much greater 
genetic variation within populations (94%).  Only 6% of genetic variation is a function of 
population difference.

VIII  So, if race is not a biological category, what kind of category is it?  A social 
category?  Of what kind?

      	A.  The Irish in 19th C northeastern U.S.
 B.  The myth of the Burakumin "race" (outcastes) in Japan.
 C.  The rule of "hypodescent" in the American South.  W.E.B. DuBois's "The 
Concept of Race."

IX.	What can explain these features of the concept of race?

IX.  	Hypothesis:  race is a concept whose function is to help sustain a system of 
dominance and control, by rationalizing it.

        More specifically, race is an ideological concept.  That is, a concept that:
A. purports to be empirically and naturally-based,
B. is taken to justify domination and control,
C. when people are regarded as if there is this natural basis this then becomes a 
self-fulfilling prophesy.

Bear this hypothesis in mind when we see Jane Elliott's “A Class Divided” next time.