As I understand it, your view is that racists are treating some “other” people badly, and so you will treat the racists as “other” and look for ways to mistreat them enough to get them to quit.

This approach does not usually work. Just as the racists are intensifying the group identity of those they persecute, you intensify the group identity of racists by persecuting them.

I may have misjudged you. Maybe you’re fine about groups that don’t get along. Maybe you just want to affirm the practices of your group, which like most feels more connected when it has created external enemies.

For myself, completely apart from defending racism, I say that racism is like a religion and you aren’t going to persuade any racists by “scientifically debunking” it. That’s just another kind of attack to them because they don’t care about science when they’re doing racism, they care about the common observances that their group does. It doesn’t matter any more than it matters to fundamentalists what science says about the age of the earth. What matters is what their group agrees on and what their group does.

When I look at it that way, when I see race as simply one variety of us/other split, it leads me to think that we aren’t going to get rid of it. It’s something people do. People make us/other splits. They claim and want to believe that “us” is better than “other”, that members of their group can be trusted more than others, that members of their group will help them but members of other groups might attack them, etc etc. There’s an element of self-fulfilling prophecy to it, too.

So I want to look at ways that people can do us/other and still treat each other OK. If people ar racists but they work OK together with the people they’re racist about, if they sell to them and buy from them with no problem, if they get along even while they’re being racist, maybe it can work out.

I’ve seen hints of this in the american south. A lot of the whites whose status is low enough that they wind up supervising lower-class blacks, talk racist. But many of them are successful managers. (The others of course have to do something else.)

The supervisors say things like “blacks are lazy.”. They don’t mean they can’t find anybody who’ll actually do the work. What they mean is that lower-class white employees try hard to look busy when the boss is watching, and lower-class black employees often do not.

They learn to adapt. They give nonverbal signals of approval when the work gets done well. “Loan” a few dollars a bit before payday to good workers. Arrange a degree of flex-time, with the other employees pitching in. Not really different from anything else, except it isn’t the same culturally. And even while they’re showing genuine affection for each other, both sides are still racists. The manager is quite willing to use offensive language about them with his friends after work, and they do the same, both look down on each other, they see the white guy as extra uptight etc, and he puts up with things from his management that they wouldn’t accept. But they’re all polite to each other and they get along on the job.

We need that sort of thing to spread to the point that it doesn’t affect pay scales etc. When it’s often white employees under black managers and both sides know how to play their roles.

It has to be OK for individual people and social groups to be racist. They will, whether we decide it’s OK or not. What we need to change is the institutional racism that keeps some people down when it shouldn’t, and we need to develop the customs that let racists work well together with their complementary racists.

First, racism is not a scientific argument. It’s a cultural practice. So telling pepole that their racism is unscientific is no more justified or useful than telling people that their religions are unscientific. If you like, go tell some jewish people that cattle don’t have spotted calves from looking at spots while they conceive, and so Jacob couldn’t have done to Laban’s herds what the scriptures say he did. How do you suppose it will affect their faith? Tell christians their miracles are scientifically implausible, tell muslims they don’t understand the koran, etc. Will you shake their beliefs? No, they will think you are a boor.

Cultures are required to give their members a sense of how to deal with the “other”. There’s dealing with transient incidental “other” who’re polite and who’re just passing through, and then there are the “other” that they must somehow coexist with, or ethnic-cleanse, or run from. And a culture that doesn’t exclude the perpetual “other” will merge with them and change its special identity. Racism is one variety of this, one variety of excluding the “other”. I tend to believe today that this is all it is.

Suppose you want to get some racists to stop being racist. You want american white southerners to stop looking down on blacks, or texans to stop looking down on hispanics, and you want hispanics and blacks to fully accept whites, and so on. Does it do any good to call them racists? No, none at all. It shows that you disapprove of them. It shows that you consider them “other”, and you have no intention of accepting them.

So it seems to me that when Ozma was calling us racists she did not intend to have a rational discussion, she was saying that we were other and not worth attempting rational discussion with. And depending on her circumstances that might have been a rationally-best strategy at the time. She was helping to draw the distinction between her group and the others, which is an important thing to do when your group’s boundaries are too porous and need to be sealed some.

When people make distinctions based on income or class, there’s an issue whether they’re defining their groups that way. If you happen to be an upper-class republican who thinks of the middle class as “other”, then the difference between that and racism isn’t so much. If a lot of middle-class people believe that the boundaries are quite porous, that all they need is hard work and some good stock market choices and they will be accepted into the club, but you’re busy arranging the system so it isn’t true—that’s, well, unfriendly. But if the boundaries really are quite porous, if anybody can become a rich republican and join the club if they’re willing to work hard, then it isn’t so bad.

In general we can’t expect cultures to accept the “other”. Racism as one example of this will not go away. What we might possibly do is arrange for different cultures to live in close proximity (like, interspersed through the same cities) without a lot of conflict. Working together and knowing what to expect from each other. Treating each other well whenever necessary—so if you have a medical emergency you don’t have to be concerned what ethnicity the EMTs are etc.

I don’t know what it would take to get that, but we aren’t anywhere close. And people who don’t think they’re racists support a whole lot of institutional discrimination against “other”. As an example that won’t hit home to anybody here, I was surprised how many people denied they were racists and still supported the LA police against Rodney King. Similarly with Abu Ghraib. They were quite willing to have bad stuff done to the “other”. And I repeatedly heard the justification that things just as bad go on in US prisons, and that’s fine. They thought it was OK to have very bad things happen to criminals, as long as it wasn’t good people getting arrested for the kind of crimes that good people commit.

So, my guess is that Ozma belongs to a group where people recognise all this. And they feel a responsibility to improve US society to end institutional racism. This is a noble goal, but if they were to succeed at it in a way that left everybody sharing their special insight, they wouldn’t be a special group any more. They must continually fail at their goal if they want to keep their group identity. So, rather than finding ways to actually get the different groups to cooperate better, to maintain the group identities with a minimum of conflict, instead they firm up the boundaries between themselves and economists and other outsiders who just don’t get it. Very likely they don’t actually have the skills to accomplish their goals, even if their group identity didn’t come first.

“,,,you can make interesting and valuable arguments about social development that don’t directly invoke human agency (although they should indirectly rest on a theory of human agency – there’s a fascinating debate between Michael Taylor and Theda Skocpol on this), as long as you recognize, implicitly or explicitly, the limitations of your causal arguments (that there are some things that they simply can’t explain).”

As to whether or not Diamond does this I don’t know. Kerim and co. I think would say he doesn’t.

Your take on ev. psych is that it’s bad science. Another take, not on ev.psych itself but on studies that avoid dealing with agency, would be to ask that those involved in such studies have an understandng in the fullest sense of what agency is or can be seen to be. There’s a degree of preference here, of taste for a certain forms of logic, and the modern era is full of attempts to impose logical equations on the world. Modern economics after all is not a theory in the sense that evolution is a theory. Modern economics can’t explain the bahavior of my landlady, and it makes a lousy defense of sheetrock as a construction material.

This is not to say that science is relative, or even that having Asperger syndrome should preclude you from a career in the humanities, though it would strike me as an odd choice. But the social sciences make use of numbers, they aren’t defined by them. They’re defined by language, by arguments over what the numbers mean. Again, I haven’t read GGS, but I’m not making any argument about the book one way the other: I’m defending the right of people to criticise a scientist as a sloppy social observer, when such observation is a part of his thesis.

That, and I’m getting nostalgic for the 19th century.

Charles – there is a fair amount of literature out there that makes these arguments (Gellner on the arbitrariness of group distinction comes to mind in his book on Nations and Nationalism).

I’ve heard that anti-semitism was originally a German scientific study of the Jewish race. I’ve also heard about the American scientific study of cranial sizes between the “white” and “yellow” races. It’s expected that Imperial Japan would have its own cadre of scientists to justify injustice.

Personally, I feel a bit schizophrenic growing up and living in our hyper-race conscious great American society while not seeing any “race” or “races” around me to speak of. I’ve never met a “white” person, or “yellow” or “black” or “red” or “brown” or magenta for that matter. And I am not color blind.

Why are we all hung up about race?

If you consider yourselves scientists and get excisted about racism, why not rigorously debunk the notion and point out the hypocrits of “racism” for what they are. Need to be pointed in the right direction? It appears to me that racism has always been about securing privileges by the privileged. Somebody has pointed out that in the modern American welfare state (or what’s left of it), it’s even being used by the underprivileged to extend the priviledges of the welfare system.

My take on Jared Diamond was quite anti-racist:

The fact that Europeans conquered much of the world was not because they were “white” but because they were “people” who were endowed with very productive geographies. Similarly, the fact that the Korean Koguryo pioneers transplanted the Japanese Jomon hunter gatherers aroud 400 BC as much as the American pioneers transplanted the American Indians in more recent history was not because of their “race” but because of their productive system of agriculture. (And was there a “Korea” or “Japan” in 400 BC?)

Rather, I think if you are an anti-racist, it’s time to celebrate. Now instead of wondering if any deficiencies about race or anything personal had anything to do with losing your land, you can point to the impersonal forces of geography and human nature. (And you can stop feeling sorry that your race is so superior.) That’s what makes me excited about science vs. the quagmire of the political sphere.

I think Jared Diamond is more a student of technological diffusion theory, extending the theory into the analyses of population geography and the clash of civilizations (or peoples). Unfortunately, he started in the wrong discipline. But this is a Discovery article and us lays need as many plain talking integrators of the latest scientific advances we can have which otherwise would remain inaccessible.

Stop talking about race, do something about it.

Thank you for your illuminating discussions. And thanks Tak for igniting it and leading me to this wonderful blog.

“Depends on who you ask. Most historians and anthropologists think the overpopulation theory of Rwandan genocide is largely bunk, that it’s premised on old colonial mythico-histories of the region that backdate genocidal ethnic pressures into the precolonial era. I tend to agree: I’m sure that the fertility of the land in the region combined with high population is a small contributing factor, but it’s unimportant in comparison to the nation-state as a political technology, colonial definitions of ethnicity, the role of the development industry, and so on.”

You’re both quibbling over nothings if you accept that the above is true.—-
Marx was part of a literary and scientific culture before the great divide. I think the man known by his family and friends (and you too) as ‘The Moor’ would roll his eyes hearing arguments like this from an economist. J. K. Galbraith I think talks about Keynes chatting with pig farmers about feed and shit. Life is muck; I don’t trust DeLong’s awareness of that or his capacity for empathetic understanding of his fellow man. But judging from the comments above you seem to think it’s fine for those studying things which involve, or are said by many to involve human agency, to be woefully ignorant of the history and manner of human action. So modern ‘scientists’ are under no obligation to be worldly wise. Marx would disagree

Nobody accused Diamond of ‘being’ racist, they accused him of doing what Burke says he does.

No belief that distinctive characteristics and abilities are determined by race, there.

Diamond seems to me to use the term “people” as a catch-all term for something like ‘coherent social group.’ It clearly isn’t a surrogate for “race”: nb his statement that “the Japanese people are biologically undistinctive, being very similar in appearance and genes to other East Asians”

Seth – I’m not at all sure that I follow what you’re saying here, but it seems to be something along the lines that Marx can’t be assimilated to the kinds of “asocial, false and pseudoscientific” thought that you so dislike. As I’m sure you’re quite well aware, Marx himself would have disagreed vehemently with that assessment. He saw himself as the discoverer of large-scale, and quite impersonal laws of history (the bourgeoisie are trapped by them as much as the proletariat). He developed highly schematic accounts of different modes of production, lumping in very different kinds of society together in a far more cavalier fashion than Diamond. His magnum opus is best considered as a disquisition in the spirit of the classical economists whom he was trying, point by point, to argue with, not to replace their asocial and pseudoscientific form of reasoning with something more humanistic, but to replace it with a somewhat modified asocial and pseudoscientific Grand Theory of his own. Now you may quite reasonably say that the bits of Marx you find most interesting aren’t the Grand Theory bits. But to downplay them as an element of Marx’s thought in favour of those pamphlets, jeremiads and bits of off-the-cuff writing that can be assimilated with a bit of Procrustean chopping and stretching to the kinds of thought that you favour is to miss out on most of the fundamentals that guided Marx’s thought. Even the Eighteenth Brumaire doesn’t make sense unless you have some notion of base, superstructure etc to see where Marx is deviating from it. And if Marx can do this, can deviate in interesting ways from grand theories, why can’t Jared Diamond, or indeed Brad DeLong or other economists? If you think that Grand Theorizers, whose main interest isn’t in cultural context, can’t say anything worth saying by definition, you need to cut Charlie loose. No two ways about it. Or, alternatively you might consider getting off your high horse and actually start engaging in real argument rather than somewhat lazy dismissals-on-principle of forms of thought that you don’t personally care for. Either is fine by me.

Marx wrote about people and ideas. He was observant and wrote extremely well. Whatever claims he made for his macroscopic viewpoint, he was not naive about people or their motivations. Novelists still read him.
Did Marx make it easy for others to follow blindly? I suppose, but I’ve always thought of any argument from strict constriction, original intent, or literalism to be waste of time.

I don’t know the Derrida reference (I’d love the citation, it sounds intriguing!), but if he is referring to something like a modern political notion of the people, defined against the state or the market in some way, then the term “Jomon people” may not make sense.

So I’m curious to hear what you make of Diamond’s use of the term.