The Greek philosopher Socrates made a name for himself -- as well as a good many enemies -- by pouncing on people who were using words like "virtue" or "truth" or "evil" and demanding that they define them. Then, by asking further questions, he gradually and inexorably demonstrated that those who were so confidently proclaiming their opinions couldn't come up with a thoughtful, rational, self-consistent definition of the terms they were using.
It's a technique we should employ when people use the word race.
Especially covert racists like Donald Trump and overt ones like Stephen Miller, despite the baffling question of how either one of them can look in the mirror in the morning and think, "Yeah, baby, that's a Master Race face, right there." The notoriously anti-immigrant Trump made the news a few days ago by saying he's tired of immigrants from "shithole countries" but would be just thrilled to welcome lots of immigrants from (for example) Norway, prompting many Norwegians to injure themselves laughing, which wasn't a big deal for them because at least they have a free national health care system. The subtext, of course, is that the northern European countries Trump is so fond of have lots of light-skinned people, and the "shithole countries" he hates mostly don't, but even he hasn't gotten bold enough to say it that bluntly.
Then there was Stephen "Temu Goebbels" Miller, who tweeted the heartwarming Christmas message that he'd watched a Frank Sinatra/Dean Martin Christmas special with his kids, and "imagine watching that and thinking we need infinity migrants," because apparently there's nothing like celebrating the birth of the baby of a homeless Middle Eastern couple so poor they had to bed him down in a stable by sending as many brown-skinned immigrants as you can find to concentration camps. Miller's statement becomes even more insane when you realize that the two performers he was enjoying with his kids, Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin, were both the children of poor Italian immigrants.
What puts this into even finer focus is that there's no good definition of what race actually means, and that's even if you ask the scientists who study it. I wouldn't go so far as to say it's meaningless, but what's certain is that (1) it has little to no genetic basis, and (2) it's primarily cultural. The characteristics laypeople usually use to define race -- things like skin, eye, and hair color, hair texture, eye shape, and various other facial features -- are under the control of only a handful of genes, and are highly responsive to natural selection based upon climate. (For example, West Africans and Indigenous Australians have a lot of the same "tropical" characteristics -- dark skin and eyes, curly hair, broad noses -- and yet are very distantly related.)
Besides the bigoted nonsense from Trump and Miller, the other reason this comes up is that I'm currently reading the book Genes, Peoples, and Languages by Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza. Cavalli-Sforza, who died in 2018 at the age of 96, was something of the elder statesman in the field of human population genetics, and his work is rightly viewed as foundational in our understanding of race, ethnicity, migration, and human evolution. Despite my background in the field -- population genetics is one of only a small number of disciplines in which I can honestly consider my background reasonably solid -- I have had a couple of eye-opening moments while reading this book. And there was one that made me say, out loud, "Wow!", which I reproduce verbatim below:
Classification based on continental origin could furnish a first approximation of racial division, until we realize that Asia and even Africa and the Americas are very heterogeneous... The observation has been made that almost any human group -- from a village in the Pyrenees or Alps, to a Pygmy camp in Africa -- displays almost the same average difference between individuals, although gene frequencies typically differ from village to village by some small amount. Any small village typically contains about the same genetic variation as another village located on any other continent. Each population is a microcosm that recapitulates the entire human macrocosm even if the precise genetic compositions vary slightly. Naturally, a small village in the Alps, or a Pygmy camp of thirty people, is somewhat less heterogeneous genetically than a large country, for example, China, but perhaps only by a factor of two. On average, these populations have a heterogeneity among individuals only slighly less than that in evidence in the whole world. Regardless of the type of genetic markers used... the variation between two random individuals within any one population is 85% as large as that between two individuals randomly selected from the world's population.
Just to hammer that point home: pick two people, one of them of the same race as you, and who lives near you in your home town, and the other of a different race from the other side of the world. The average genetic distance between you, the neighbor, and the other-race "foreigner" is only about fifteen percent, and perhaps much less.
Appearance confounds. We here in the United States (and many people in western Europe) would call a San Bushman living right next door to a Tswana man in Botswana as both the same race ("Black"), and an English woman and a Japanese woman of different races, despite the fact that multiple studies have shown the San and Tswana are far more distantly related to each other than the English are to the Japanese. (In fact, sub-Saharan Africa has more human genetic diversity than the rest of the world put together -- unsurprising if you consider that this is where the human race got its start, but perhaps surprising to those who believe in the principle of skin color über alles.)
Bigotry, of course, is based in fear. People like Trump and Miller are afraid of white people becoming a minority because of how they and their cronies treat minorities, and they're in terror of the idea of being on the receiving end for a change. Now, don't misunderstand me, I'm not asking for an open-borders policy; despite (once again) what you hear from the current regime, no one I've ever heard has demanded letting anyone and everyone in. There are real problems with overcrowding, stress on social support systems, cross-border drug trafficking, and so on. But neither is the answer "America is for white people, so keep everyone else out" -- especially given that we Americans of European descent are here because we swiped the land only a couple of centuries ago from indigenous people who had been here for tens of thousands of years.
And who didn't, despite what you hear from J. D. Vance's outrageous lies, "engage in widespread child sacrifice" until the Christians came in and forced them to stop.
Anyhow, I'm going to play Socrates. If Trump, Vance, Miller et al. want to have race-based quotas for immigration, I want them to give me a rational, scientifically-credible definition for what race actually means. My guess is that if Cavalli-Sforza couldn't do it, neither can they.
So maybe they should just shut the fuck up about it.
I suspect all this won't sit well with the bigots, and they'd be just as happy if I'd go somewhere quiet and drink my nice big cup of hemlock. Well, sorry, chums, that ain't gonna happen. If reality and the truth make you uncomfortable, seems like that's a "you problem."
Maybe you should take to heart the wise words of another great thinker -- the Fourth Doctor: "The very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common; they don't alter their views to fit the facts, they alter the facts to fit their views."
No comments:
Post a Comment