The stickers appeared to be part of a campaign started on the forum website 4chan, which called upon followers to put up posters with the message in their area on Halloween night. The author of the original post on the site wrote that they hoped the “credibility of far left campuses and media gets nuked” as a result of the incident, adding that they could help achieve a “massive victory for the right in the culture war.”What "incident"? I guess it's "the incident" of whatever reaction the stickers provoke (rather than the putting up of the stickers). Just don't react and there's no incident. But there's an anodyne reaction: The Law School Dean of Students asserts that the stickers will not divide us and we believe in diversity. So that's very close to no reaction. This is really a nonstory as long as we don't talk about it, but Harvard Crimson wrote it up, and I got sent here from Instapundit and TaxProf Blog, so now I'm feeling as though this is bloggable, especially since I got into the rathole of the comments at the Crimson.
There's this, from Haardvark:
Brilliant -- the very same folks who may claim the stickers to be offensive (by interpreting them to mean "it's NOT okay to be anything else") are forced to reconcile their outrage with their "Black Lives Matter" =/= "No other lives matter" position.And then there's this kind of thing, by Thrifty:
Whoop-de-doo. Obviously there's a sense in which it's "okay to be white"—every person has a right to exist and be respected, including people categorized as "white". Less obviously (at least to white people like me), there's a sense in which the familiar cultural artifact called "whiteness" can be harmful, by making it easier to limit this right to exist and be respected to some people but not others, and, although it's a stretch, "being white" could be interpreted as "deliberately perpetrating or perpetuating this harmful system," which is not "okay". 4chan knows the first sense is obvious while the second is only widely recognized in academia, and is hoping to perpetrate a transparent fallacy of equivocation by getting us to point out the second and sound like we're attacking the first. Like most of this part of the internet's efforts to push memes, this one is thankfully hamstrung by its own idiocy and will die out soon.Which made Lukas Oman say:
You use a lot of words but you say essentially nothing. First, define "whiteness" for those of us who opted to take STEM courses and are naive to the concept.Thrifty steps up, but not in a strong enough way to make me want to bulk up this post with a quote, and it makes (((kingschitz))) say "Your word salad is a target rich opportunity" and "you’ve transformed all discussion into racial shaming." And Lukas Oman comes back to say a few things, including:
The concepts of whiteness, white fragility, racial microaggression, and even "equality", as it is defined now, are complicated constructs with more twists and turns and holes than the surface of a nanoporous ingot. And dude, you don't even go here.
Posts
236 comments:
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Baby Lives Matter
I'd equate whiteness candor.
Etymologically, white people see the good in everybody.
“Affectation of candour is common enough—one meets with it everywhere. But to be candid without ostentation or design -- to take the good of everybody's character and make it still better, and say nothing of the bad -- belongs to you alone.” Jane Austen
Speaking of white people like Trump, Andrew McCarthy has some tuff love:
"As we recounted in a recent column, Trump’s bull-in-a-china-shop routine rumbled through the sentencing proceedings of the deserter and former Taliban prisoner. Unwilling (or is it unable?) to utter the words “no comment” when asked about the case during a press conference, the president reaffirmed his campaign-trail incitements about the “dirty, rotten traitor” (for whom he’d pantomimed a firing-squad execution).
Trump, or at least someone at the White House, must have known that the defense had already moved to get the case thrown out on the theory that Trump had prejudiced Bergdahl’s fair-trial rights. When he denied this motion, the military judge explained that candidate Trump had not been in command authority when he made his remarks. The clear message to the White House was that this would be a much tougher call if Trump spewed such demagoguery as president. Seemingly taking this as a dare rather than prudent advice, he proceeded to spew it as president. Naturally, the defense renewed the motion. After a few days of hand-wringing, the manifestly irritated judge denied it, on grounds that were far less defensible. Yesterday, undoubtedly concerned that the president’s comments could result in a reversal on appeal if a stiff sentence were imposed, the judge sentenced Bergdahl to no jail time — notwithstanding that desertion can carry a lengthy term of imprisonment, and Bergdahl’s desertion resulted in soldiers’ being severely wounded in the search for him."
"to denounce the signs as 'provocations intended to divide us,'"
And otherwise spoil the Era of Good Feelings which the country has blessedly enjoyed flowing from the Black Lives Matter movement.
I think that it would have worked better with some "It's OK to be Asian" stickers posted around Harvard too, given that they are giving Asians the treatment that had traditionally given Jews.
Black is beautiful.
But whiteness is just okay?
Are these self-effacing white provocateurs?
Actually we don't know if these provocateurs are white.
They could be black, brown, yellow or red.
I'm Okay, You're Okay is, I think, a self-help book.
I'm Beautiful, You're Okay is like a mean girl at the bar who has had one drink too many.
Color diversity denies individual dignity (i.e. Labels people by the color of their skin) as spontaneous conception (a.k.a. viability) denies intrinsic value (and human evolution).
The Surprising Revolt at the Most Liberal College in the Country
It is always funny to watch progressives forced to smell their own shit.
"I'm Okay, You're Okay is, I think, a self-help book."
Progressives, I'm ok, you're not ok.
It is a clever prank.
The intellectual consensus has gone far out on a limb; this little thing gives it a bit of a shake.
Btw, the problem these bits of paper attack is universal and broad. Its not just persons of whiteness that feel the heat, but all of their culture, which is being expunged. This is not a Harvard problem, it is all US education from high to low.
And it is not just English things. Cervantes too has been expelled from schools, for being white.
Ah, it must be "OK" to support those Black thugs who select out, ON THE BASIS OF RACE, White victims at a rate many times the reverse.
And this may be a sophomoric prank on the surface, but like all really good pranks it makes a very serious point.
In the US anyway all the roots of high culture are being erased, deliberately. There is a program to force a forgetting, an abandonment, a burning of books.
Any means that can be used to fight this evil are worthy.
@n.n:
Color diversity denies individual dignity (i.e. Labels people by the color of their skin) as spontaneous conception (a.k.a. viability) denies intrinsic value (and human evolution).
But race does convey some kind of meaning, does it not? After all, why are there races within the human species except for the effect of different environments on isolated populations of humans (e.g. sub-Saharan Africa, Northern Europe, and Northeast Asia)?
IOW, ARM, the judge prevented command influence by letting his command influence him. I hope he wasn't that unprincipled, even for a lawyer.
Yancey wins the internet for the day!
"...and, although it's a stretch, "being white" could be interpreted as "deliberately perpetrating or perpetuating this harmful system," which is not "okay"."
Yeah, it's a stretch all right.
The Law School Dean of Students asserts that the stickers will not divide us and we believe in diversity. So that's very close to no reaction.
It's the required horseshit genuflect to the great god Diversity. Ridiculous and harmful to us infidels and free thinkers.
Are the students in a trade union or military unit? Talk about fascistic. The Dean should speak for himself, not the students.
The Law School Dean of Students asserts that the stickers will not divide us and we believe in diversity. So that's very close to no reaction.
No, that's a reaction, and exactly the po-faced reaction I assume the pranksters were looking to provoke. No reaction would indeed have been the proper response, but the monkeys just couldn't control themselves and had to dance when a bunch of goofy 4channers told them to.
Does anyone with brains go into non-STEM academics (or secondary education) these days? Bait was dangled that permitted them only two embarrassing options, if they were stupid enough to take it: bleat the "they will not divide us diversity is our strength" cretin's mantra, or fall all over their shoelaces explaining why thinking white people aren't sub-human is "hateful" and "divisive".
They took it.
Ralph L said...
IOW, ARM, the judge prevented command influence by letting his command influence him.
Not sure that you are clearly seeing where the problem lies here.
I'd equate whiteness candor.
Hillary is white.
Is she candid?
Lukas Oman knows what “nanoporous” means. I’m impressed!
Angel-Dyne said...
Does anyone with brains go into non-STEM academics (or secondary education) these days?
While a little harsh, I have had similar (albeit gentler) thoughts. They are remarkably reactive, in ways that only hurt their own long-term interests - remind you of anyone?
It’s clear that liberals think it’s not okay being white. QED.
Poor ARM wants to comment on Bergdahl’s sentencing. Dude! That was, like, so yesterday.
I associate "white" with virginity, purity, snow, iciness, and coldness.
Skin color is not at all helpful when trying to judge the merits of individual people. Just a silly superstition and nothing more. That we continue to divide people into races on our census is unscientific and unhelpful. That universities do this is profoundly embarrassing for them.
I think the people who divide humanity into races are, at best, boring non-thinkers who continue to do what has always been done. At worst these are prejudicial bigots.
Hyphenated American,
Bingo.
But race does convey some kind of meaning, does it not?
According to doctors it does.
After all, why are there races within the human species except for the effect of different environments on isolated populations of humans
Actually it seems to have a lot to do with the type of other hominids that we interbred with. One genetic group didn't breed with any, one with one hominid and one with two.
ARM, I know exactly what you were saying.
The judge is wrong to let Trump bias him either way.
A retired Admiral recently recanted a decision he made over a sex crime conviction appeal because of the political atmosphere in the Pentagon. Military officers are supposed to have spines.
Thank you progressives for turning us into a tribal society; like Iraq but only worse.
As Justice Clarence Thomas said the other day, "Where's our unum?" We have little that unites us or makes us one. It is all identity politics all the time. But maybe the global warming scam is what unites us. High electricity prices for all!
@Hyphenated American, under Obama and with the blessing of Ruy Teixeira’s book, the Democrats deliberately set out to divide Americans and set us at each other’s throats. It worked in 2008 and 2012, but not so much in 2014 or 2016.
I was trying to decipher the relevance of ARM's post to this thread. Then I saw the "troll" tag.
The stickers didn't divide Harvard, Dean of Students, they are *already* divided with terms like "white fragility", "toxic whiteness", mere "whiteness", "diversity", and "intersectionality" - and the victim of "whiteness" pecking order that all that creates.
The stickers merely *exposed* the existing division *you* helped create.
If it were truly OK to be white, the media would have been uninterested.
@Gahrie:
Actually it seems to have a lot to do with the type of other hominids that we interbred with. One genetic group didn't breed with any, one with one hominid and one with two.
The amount of neanderthal or denisovan DNA admixture is relatively small. The phenotypic differences between human groups (e.g. differences in skin color, hair texture, and skeletal shape) are more likely due to the effects of those environments on humans over time.
Not sure that you are clearly seeing where the problem lies here.
The problem is this thread has nothing to do with Trump or Bergdahl.
Thank God for 4chan.
I am Laslo.
@Dave Begley:
Thank you progressives for turning us into a tribal society; like Iraq but only worse.
Progressives certainly deserve a big share of the blame, but the globalizing, profit-at-any-cost business community. Whether it's cheaper H1B1 IT workers or cheap farm labor for big agriculture, the business community largely abhors borders and has done its best in the last few decades to erase them, whether through exporting means of production to cheap labor companies or importing cheap labor into the US.
And as bad the situation is currently and will become in ensuing years, how is it "worse" than Iraq?
Chickenshit White professors are terrified of being called "white supremacists," or having to argue with the very same students they radicalized. They no longer believe in any other form of epistemology than faked victimhood.
Their reactions at Harvard are entirely predictable and hopefully eye opening to the honest liberals out there.
Anyone?
... ?
Bueller?
Young man home from college
Makes a great display
With some big fancy adjective
That he can hardly say
It can't be found in Webster's
And it won't be for awhile
Everybody knows he's just putting on the style
@Angel-Dyne:
Does anyone with brains go into non-STEM academics (or secondary education) these days?
See How Art History Majors Power the U.S. Economy by Virginia Postrel. Full disclosure, I have had a mild crush on Ms. Postrel for nearly 20 years.
But race does convey some kind of meaning, does it not?
Only for the superstitious.
After all, why are there races within the human species except for the effect of different environments on isolated populations of humans (e.g. sub-Saharan Africa, Northern Europe, and Northeast Asia)?
Why are some people right-handed and other people are left-handed?
Even if we concede there is such a thing, do we really need to divide and group human beings on this basis? (In baseball, yes! At Harvard, no!)
Our obsession with race is far, far larger than its importance. DNA actually tells us something! Yet consider how much we prattle about race and how little we talk about DNA.
There is almost no science, or truth, in any discussion involving race. Very basic questions, like how you define a race, remain unanswered.
How many races are there?
And how do you define such a thing when a man from sub-Saharan Africa and a woman from Northern Europe can mate and have a baby and create a new "race" at any time?
The whole subject is an attack on brain cells.
“Progressives certainly deserve a big share of the blame, but the globalizing, profit-at-any-cost business community. ”
This reminds me of an excuse given by a liberal for beating up his girlfriend... the lying Lyndon Johnson...
In short, the reason liberals hate white people is because of free market economy. It’s the free market economy that turned them into racist thugs. Yep, makes sense.
Trump, or at least someone at the White House, must have known that the defense had already moved to get the case thrown out on the theory that Trump had prejudiced Bergdahl’s fair-trial rights.
ARM can't bring himself to mention his favorite president's comments about Cambridge police (They are stupid) and Trayvon Martin who attacked a community volunteer and got shot for his trouble (If I had a son...) or Ferguson Mo ( "Excessive force in Ferguson Mo" )
Those were just observations by the "lightbringer" not crude "Command Influence" by you-know-who.
Poor ARM. No memory. It's often the first thing to go.
"...more twists and turns and holes than the surface of a nanoporous ingot."
I cannot wait to use this in a conversation!
Next up: "Is it ok to be white?" The correct answer is that of course it is ok to be white since people don't get to choose their color, to say nothing of the fact that most Americans are now and have always been of European origin both genetically and culturally.
However, the 'politically correct' answer in today's cultural climate -- given how important identity politics have become on campus and in the "progressive" wing of the Democratic Party -- is equivocal. The notion that "whiteness" (or Europeanness) is perhaps a morally negative category and not merely a neutral description of fact is suggested by the way the phrase "white privilege" is now being used as a way to flummox white people and shut down debate on morally sensitive issues of race.
The realities of human biodiversity challenge the liberal ideals and institutions upon which American society is based and I think they will continue to do so until such time as we can construct a society in which anyone who "works hard and plays by the rules" (Bill Clinton did have a way with words) can reasonably expect to lead a rich and fulfilling life regardless of the differences of race. But is that even conceivable? I think so. See here for example: https://goo.gl/q4kodC
@Oso, I remember listening to the Chad Mitchell Trio singing that. If you’d told me back then that fifty years later race relations would be worse I would never have believed it.
Without Western Civ. every POC on every American campus would be some variation of mule, cannon fodder, or brood mare. And so would most of the white folks. That's why I find this stuff more amusing than appalling. The more extreme the hypocrisy, the more fragile the sufferance that enables it. We're living on a carpet laid over a mound of skulls. And SJW's will be shocked when they realize how threadbare that carpet is.
"There is almost no science, or truth, in any discussion involving race. "
And yet Hawaii sues the makers of Plavix because it affects different races differently.
Nope. no genetics there.
Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. and Sanofi were accused in a lawsuit by Hawaii of failing to disclose that the blood-thinning drug Plavix has little effect on 30 percent of the population and puts patients at risk for gastrointestinal bleeding.
Bloomberg is so stupid that it does not understand that Plavix having "no effect" would not cause GI bleeding.
Angel-Dyne: "Does anyone with brains go into non-STEM academics (or secondary education) these days?"
Feelings, nothing more than feelings.
J. Farmer:
But race does convey some kind of meaning, does it not?
It does. But that's not the point. When is it appropriate to discriminate between individuals based on their race, skin color, eye color, sexual orientation, gender, sex, etc.?
The Atlantic article about Reed College posted above describes a Campus Gone Wild. Inmates in charge of the prison! They will soon be a pure snowflake school--if they aren't already. They could fire the administration and no one would notice.
And as bad the situation is currently and will become in ensuing years, how is it "worse" than Iraq?
The Iraqi government is trying to force a tribal society into a cohesive nation.
The progressive movement is trying to force a cohesive nation into a tribal society.
Advantage, Iraq.
"...more twists and turns and holes than the surface of a nanoporous ingot."
I cannot wait to use this in a conversation!
Saint Croix:
Skin color is not at all helpful when trying to judge the merits of individual people.
Exactly. I know why progressives, liberals do it, and why they think it's good. However, it's a wicked solution to a hard problem.
Here's a Reason magazine parody of Thriller satirizing SJWs. This is the funniest thing I've seen all week.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ynO-bqU6tUk
Yeah, its OK to be white.
Anyone who disagrees is a racist.
All the rest is blah,blah,blah.
J Farmer
More tribal violence. Black v brown; like in Chicago. Sunni v Shia as the Muslim population grows.
Read "Back to Blood."
And thank you Kevin. Well stated.
Mostly liberals worry that other people might be thinking bad thoughts, that means that this is inflammatory and done by White Supremacists. Because wrongthought can only lead to crimethink.
The headline is misleading. Law School Dean of Students Marcia L. Sells is the one that did the stupid announcement, not (apparently) the dean of the law school.
The true "Dean" of HLS is this guy - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_F._Manning
And the word on the HLS street is that he was brought in to prevent the school from being destroyed by BLM and their ilk.
Michael K said...
It's often the first thing to go.
It seems like your retirement savings were the first to go. People age differently.
@Kevin:
evin said...
And as bad the situation is currently and will become in ensuing years, how is it "worse" than Iraq?
The Iraqi government is trying to force a tribal society into a cohesive nation.
The progressive movement is trying to force a cohesive nation into a tribal society.
Advantage, Iraq.
I am not sure how much of an advantage that is. There are about 5,000,000 people in Iraqi Kurdistan for whom that's going to be an extremely tall order. But then again, I have been saying for years that America is doomed precisely because of diversity. I just don't think it's as bad as Iraq, or likely to be that bad anytime soon. But it is bad enough.
@Dave Begley:
J Farmer
More tribal violence. Black v brown; like in Chicago. Sunni v Shia as the Muslim population grows.
I do not think I would describe the violence in Chicago as tribal. If anything, it is intra-tribal. That is, it is mostly black people killing other black people. Plus Iraq has an active, violent separatist movement that encompasses nearly a fifth of the population.
@n.n:
It does. But that's not the point. When is it appropriate to discriminate between individuals based on their race, skin color, eye color, sexual orientation, gender, sex, etc.?
It depends on who is doing the discriminating and why. If a baker does not want to serve a gay person, I am completely fine with that. If a landlord does not want to rent their home to a black person or to men, I am fine with that. If someone wants to start an all girls school or all boys school or all white school or all black school, I am fine with that, too. In fact, peaceful separation of the races is probably the only chance we've got. But since I doubt that it can be achieved, we are doomed.
Martha Minow, the dean who just left, is a really nice woman and a great teacher, but she could not stand up to the assholes. Check out the fiasco at Brandeis where she was receiving an honorary degree. Some of the asshole hecklers that stopped the proceeding were HSL students. Minow just stood there and took it (not sure what she should have done, but it was not a great moment). https://vimeo.com/163173519
I like to think that Ann in her place would have torn these little pipsqueaks apart.
Michael K said...
Trump, or at least someone at the White House, must have known that the defense had already moved to get the case thrown out on the theory that Trump had prejudiced Bergdahl’s fair-trial rights.
ARM can't bring himself to mention his favorite president's comments about Cambridge police (They are stupid) and Trayvon Martin who attacked a community volunteer and got shot for his trouble (If I had a son...) or Ferguson Mo ( "Excessive force in Ferguson Mo" )
Those were just observations by the "lightbringer" not crude "Command Influence" by you-know-who.
Poor ARM. No memory. It's often the first thing to go.
11/5/17, 11:34 AM
Tep, and every liberal knows the names, and some still believe hands up, don't shoot, and poor boy Trayvon. But none can name one of the five Dallas cops ambushed and murdered. Maybe ARM. Inga, Ritmo or Robert Cook can, without google?
J. Farmer
Some of the Chicago violence is Latino v Black drug gangs. MS-13 stuff because we have open borders.
California wants to secede from the United States in case you didn't know.
Identify politics will kill the this country.
And, of course, the Harvard Admins reaction was EXACTLY what 4chan expected and wanted.
"... prompting Cambridge officials to remove them and a Harvard Law School Dean to denounce the signs as 'provocations intended to divide us,'" Harvard Crimson reports.
And this kind of idiotic over-reaction will have consequences.
I know Polls suck and are completely bogus.
But if this is even in the same universe as reality, I believe it is a VBFD.
I saw this at Daily Caller. – http://dailycaller.com/2017/11/04/shock-poll-white-people-overwhelmingly-think-college-is-a-waste-of-time/
Headline – SHOCK POLL: White People Overwhelmingly Think College Is A Waste Of Time
Overwhelmingly as in 65% unnecessary. And this POLL is from CA.
These are the same people who pay the majority of the taxes that makes these institutions possible.
Yes, in the Comments people talk about the difference between STEM Degrees and Studies Degrees, but I think this still potentially a game changer.
The story says that 65% of whites say that a college degree is not necessary today. They don't discriminate as to type of degree. It's baby with the bathwater.
I don't remember EVER seeing anything close to that. I believe that this attitude will start showing up in State Legislatures at Budget Time. No, Universities don't go away, they just no longer have first dibs on all of the money.
And, no, I don't think this ALL important. But I do think it reflects a real change in public attitude. Again, this was from CA.
DCP
Mueller Has Enough Evidence to Bring Charges in Flynn Investigation
Top comment on Reddit:
Reminder: this is the guy Trump was explicitly warned not to hire by Barack Obama, and who he wanted to rehire after he fired him.
STEM students are likely to be male, asian or white, with high high school GPAs and good ACT scores in math and science. Females are turned off by the strict regimen of STEM which requires a lifetime commitment of time and attention - which obviously interferes with motherhood. Females arriving late to the party pursue science and math with more vigor and success than males who have exhibited long-term interest in the sciences, demonstrating that interest alone is not a guarantee of success. Neither is race a limiting factor, as studies show that early interest among blacks (and hispanics as well) is relatively strong but a less-than-strong orientation to pursuing a college education lowers the ultimate STEM numbers for these minorities. This likely shows the influence of wealth in the final outcomes.
There is almost no science, or truth, in any discussion involving race. Very basic questions, like how you define a race, remain unanswered
Because nobody wants to be that guy who gets subjected to the storm for doing any. But work is being done:
http://spartanideas.msu.edu/2016/03/26/genetic-ancestry-and-brain-morphology/
I don't know what it means, but I think what you are actually saying is that we should all play a game of "let's pretend!"
ARM is in the free Charlie Manson camp!! LOL.
Taxonomy is always political. Especially where liberal shibboleths like race, or extinction is involved. The same people who say there is no such thing as race would be quick to condemn anybody who said that the polar bears are perfectly fine whatever happens since brown bears and polar bears can freely mate and produce offspring.
Taxonomy is always political, always.
Saint Croix:
Why are some people right-handed and other people are left-handed?
[...]
How many races are there?
And how do you define such a thing when a man from sub-Saharan Africa and a woman from Northern Europe can mate and have a baby and create a new "race" at any time?
Why do some people ask a lot of questions, pretend to be curious about a subject, and proclaim the definitive correctness of their opinions on it, but yet it is painfully obvious that they've never bothered to read so much as the most rudimentary "dummies" text on it?
Why do some people continue talking out of their asses on a subject, the exact same ignorant straw-manning and obtuse twaddle every time the subject comes up in a thread, and no matter how many times better-informed posters attempt to set them straight?
Environment, or heredity?
J. Farmer:
It depends on who is doing the discriminating and why.
Let's start with this premise as our moral good. There remains a need to discriminate with a selective context. Those bakers discriminate against transgender couplets, not individuals, not even couplets, really, in context. Furthermore, coupling is an elective behavior, not an incidental feature as is skin color. While there may be a correlation between skin color and character, the consensus is that the moral good does not make that assumption. Same thing for transgender orientations, which do not necessarily translate to realized behaviors, or require tolerance but not normalization.
@Dave Begley:
Some of the Chicago violence is Latino v Black drug gangs. MS-13 stuff because we have open borders.
Yes, some. But that does not bely the fact that overwhelmingly homicides tend to be within racial groups as opposed to between them,.
California wants to secede from the United States in case you didn't know.
That is not anything new. There has been secessionist talk for over a century. Scotland wants to secede from the UK. That is not the same thing as being in open armed revolute against the central government.
Identify politics will kill the this country.
Agree. I have been making that argument for nearly two decades now.
[Harvard Law School Dean of Students Marcia L.] Sells confirmed in her email to students Wednesday afternoon that the stickers at the Law School had already been removed.
If it's OK to be white, why would the stickers need to be removed?
If it's OK to be white, why would Sells feel it necessary to communicate to the students that the stickers had been taken down?
There's an open thread, ARM.
@n.n:
I am sorry, but I am not seeing your point. You asked a question, "When is it appropriate to discriminate between individuals based on their race, skin color, eye color, sexual orientation, gender, sex, etc.?" And I answered. If people wish to create ethnically-exclusive enclaves I am completely fine with that. I am fine if white people want to do it, and I am fine if blacks or East Asians want to do it. I do not think, for example, that an all-girl's school denies the dignity of males.
If it were just Harvard this crazy ideology would just be silly. Unfortunately, because it is Harvard (and all the other elite universities) this sewage drips down through the entire educational system, through lesser colleges and into K-12, where the real damage is done.
US education, in the sense of what education used to mean, is entirely gone. Technical training is doing much better, but the same evil culture is now threatening that too.
"Our obsession with race is far, far larger than its importance. DNA actually tells us something! Yet consider how much we prattle about race and how little we talk about DNA."
And looking at DNA is fascinating. Why do blacks excel at running and why do whites excel at swimming? Body type. Blacks have longer legs; whites have longer torsos. Michael Phelps, with his elongated middle and relatively short legs, is built for swimming; he would do terribly in the 100 yard dash.
And among blacks athletes, the sort of running ability they have is determined by their DNA. American blacks and West Indians are descended from West Africans, which has the highest rates of malarial illness in the world, as well as the greatest frequency of the sickle cell gene. They also have low average hemoglobin and a high proportion of "explosive" fast-twitch muscles. A sizable number of black American athletes carry the sickle cell gene. That means athletes descended from West Africans are excellent sprinters but are genetically disadvantaged for long-distance sports.Since 2000, 9 black college football players have died suddenly during lengthy training sessions and the NCAA now requires blacks athletes to be tested for the sickle cell gene.
At the other extreme, Kenya, which is not malarial and where the incidence of sickle cell anemia is extremely low, produces great long distance runners.
That's the sort of racial difference stuff that interests me.
They should post stickers around Hollywood saying 'it's okay to take the money.'
It's okay to be Anne Althouse.
Discuss.
J. Farmer:
If people wish to create ethnically-exclusive enclaves I am completely fine with that.
I don't mind this also. People tend to associate with others of likeness.
Still, is there any context where you would expect or demand integration?
Also, with respect to "diversity" as defined by the left, in an integrated society, what criteria would you use to discriminate between individuals, associations, behaviors?
That said, aside from other considerations, let's call it what it is. Diversity denies individual dignity. Diversity of color is racism. Diversity of sex is sexism.
ALTHOUSE says: "... there's an anodyne reaction: The Law School Dean of Students asserts that the stickers will not divide us and we believe in diversity." .........What in heaven is 'anodyne about that?! The Dean of Law makes a clearly condemnatory judgement and next thing is all the stickers are removed! Since when did they ever go around condemning the BLM slogan as 'divisive' and then take down signage? What a farce - from a 'Dean of Law' no less.
It's ok to be white, but you can't go all Whitey McWhiteface with your whiteness. Many of the white people around Harvard are WASPS and not the cool kind with cockney accents either. They're preppy whites, the most offensive, annoying types of white people. Did anyone see the movie Get Out. That movie showed you what is lurking under that thin veneer of good manners. You notice there weren't any Italians, Jews, or Slavs in that movie. That's because only WASPs are guilty of racial prejudice......It's ok to be white, but don't go all overboard and become a haute bourgeois WASP. That's not acceptable.
require tolerance but not normalization.
But usually push to celebration.
Gg6 is right. Althouse has an odd idea of anodyne : that which quietly strokes the prejudices of the regressive left.
Blogger AReasonableMan said...
Michael K said...
It's often the first thing to go.
It seems like your retirement savings were the first to go. People age differently.
Actually, intelligence may be the first. As in "what the fuck are you talking about ?"
You seemed intelligent but that dos not explain why you defend these idiots the Democrats are becoming.
The LA Times has a symposium on Trump featuring (in addition to Steve Hayward) Bernie Sanders and Maxine Waters.
Your heroes.
And yet Hawaii sues the makers of Plavix because it affects different races differently.
I don't subscribe to to Bloomberg, but people can read about that case here.
As I said, DNA is a very important and scientific concept. Everybody's DNA is unique to them. What this means is that medicine that might work very well for one person could be deadly for another person.
You can read about CYP2C19 here.
That's a very scientific conversation. Always helpful in science to talk about an individual's DNA!
The use of race in this discussion is a signifier of ignorance. The researchers don't know why this particular person had a heart attack and died, and this other person did not. It's statistical guesswork and hypothesis.
You notice that no one posted "it's okay to be Asian" signs around Harvard. Wonder why that is?
Dicks out for Harambe, Ms. Harvard Law School Dean.
Harvard is so diverse, everybody there agrees it is not OK to be white.
Fernananidinanide said...
Ms. Harvard Law School Dean.
I was gonna write "Mr.", then google's first result for "Harvard Law School Dean" was Martha Minow, complete with her picture. Verrryy interesting.
Still, "Ms." captures his spirit.
Genetics and white skin is an interesting connection. As humans moved out of Africa, they encountered cooler climates and the need for clothing, plus seasons, which do not exist at the Equator.
Vitamin D in humans requires sunlight on skin. As the sunlight exposure declined, the melanin level which screens out UV in sunlight, declined. White skin and northern habitat exists in both Asia and Europe.
I don't think they teach that in "Studies" courses.
And how do you define such a thing when a man from sub-Saharan Africa and a woman from Northern Europe can mate and have a baby and create a new "race" at any time?
I recently read that there was ofttimes difficulty with having offspring when an Australian of pallor mated with an Australian aborigine, thought it was BS, so I googled it. Turns out it isn't BS. Also turns out there is lower fertility in mixed race mating. Not that there aren't a lot successes, because there are. But sometimes both halves are fertile, but the two parts that need to mix to make kids just won't. That can also be the case with two of the same race, but is so rare that it becomes a medical oddity when discovered, if noticed at all.
Also turns out that medical personnel know of serious medical problems in dealing with mixed race offspring that don't exist in more closely matched pairings. Alas, the article I read didn't delve into what those problems might be, but for one. A mixed race person needing a transplant match is probably SOL
Now I'm wondering- have whites or Asians interbred with African pygmies? I'm afraid to google it. Perhaps someone else can answer that.
Ken B said...
It's okay to be Anne Althouse. Discuss.
You spelled it wrong.
Why do some people ask a lot of questions, pretend to be curious about a subject, and proclaim the definitive correctness of their opinions on it, but yet it is painfully obvious that they've never bothered to read so much as the most rudimentary "dummies" text on it?
Race for dummies! That's funny.
Why do some people continue talking out of their asses on a subject, the exact same ignorant straw-manning and obtuse twaddle every time the subject comes up in a thread, and no matter how many times better-informed posters attempt to set them straight?
You have never answered the question, A.D. Always ducked it. How many races are there? I ask you flat out.
Saint Croix said...
How many races are there?
How many colors are there?
And how do you define such a thing when a red from one end of the rainbow and a blue from the other end can combine and produce new "color" at any time? HOW? I ask you!
The whole subject is an attack on brain cells.
Are you pretending to be stupid?
Biologists are not in agreement that a new group of orangutans in Sumatra constitute a new species rather than a subspecies. So what?
Basques have also had problems with mixed-race breeding, due to RH-negative blood type. We are half-Basque. My sister had this problem (resolved by modern medicine, but in the past..). So in that sense they are not merely a race.
Saint Croix said...
How many races are there? I ask you flat out.
7.
Any more questions?
Hysterical reaction of the college administrators to a common sense message that it’s okay to be white proves why it is absolutely necessary to repeat it until we see all the racist anti-white fascist thugs show their faces.
The message acts as a litmus test and a powerful forcing function. The racists are not able to resist the urge to respond to this message and come out as anti-white bigots. It acts as a powerful spell, something from a fiction story about demons who have to identify themselves when called upon.
It’s okay to be white.
Now reveal yourself, racists. Who is angry at this message?
It’s okay to be white.... it’s okay to be white.... it’s okay to be white.
I object. All WASPS are not the same.
The Protestants by and large founded this country. I had an x-greats grandfather, Nathanial Chapman, who fought at Lexington and Concord, was in the Continental Army until 1781 and fathered Johnny Appleseed. WASP, WASP, WASP.
I am proud of this country that "my people" founded and then have let people from everywhere in the world move here. [Dragged some too, of course.] E Pluribus Unum.
St. Croix,
You could perhaps ask Razib Khan, who of all people would be best suited to answer this (he is a one man clearinghouse for everything population-genetics). However, even he no longer wants to speak on these topics because they are so personally expensive. Propose an answer and get professionally ostracized and become unemployable.
So I gather that, among professionals in the field, these things are now mainly in the form of anonymous samizdat.
Hyphen,
Thats an excellent analogy.
A magic spell to make demons reveal themselves.
“The use of race in this discussion is a signifier of ignorance. The researchers don't know why this particular person had a heart attack and died, and this other person did not. It's statistical guesswork and hypothesis.”
I always wonder at the plethora of articles from liberal “scientists” who proclaim that race is purely a social construct, that there is no such thing as race, that science proves that there is no such thing as a race, that scientifically, we cannot distinguish between races....
And then same people do studies and prove that a policeman who can barely read, can easily distinguish between races and will instantaniously find an African-American driving a car and will stop him. He has to make a decision in a split second, in a situation of limited visibility, and yet he can distinguish between a black skinned African-American, and an equally black- skinned Indian.
Can someone explain this paradox?
There is some interesting discussion here.
From the Virgina Postrel article: A longtime acquaintance perfectly captured the dominant Internet memes in an e-mail he sent me after my last column, which was on rising tuitions. “Many people that go to college lack the smarts and/or the tenacity to benefit in any real sense,” he wrote.
The longtime acquaintance was obviously drawing on personal experience. Does it take an Ivy League degree to not understand the usage of English pronouns, or can anybody play?
'provocations intended to divide us,'
Ha ha ha!
Fernananidinanide, your 1:00 and 1:01 comments need to have a beer summit and work out their differences.
Speaking of white people like Trump, Andrew McCarthy has some tuff love:
Third comment in, and this asshole can't keep it on subject.
Third. Comment.
Jim at said...
Third comment in, and this asshole can't keep it on subject.
Pretty sure Althouse said we weren't to speak ill of one other. Gotta follow the rules buddy.
I'd like to see a few pictures of the stickers, with backgrounds indicating locations.
A person might be concerned that we've built, and are building, a huge edifice of pretend knowledge, and that we're wasting many of our bright minds on that effort. What happens to such edifices? Remember all the false and highly detailed racial theories at the beginning of the twentieth century? We can take comfort in knowing that they are gone now, and that this new edifice will most likely be gone someday too, joining such past "sciences" as alchemy and phrenology.
Part of the problem is the insistence that professors publish. What perverse incentives! Of course you'll end up with heaps of nonsense.
The current hate white people assault has run into reality. Demanding surrender or else is stupid. We have lots of guns and Soros has not got enough money to buy us. And white guilt is gone with the wind.
buwaya: Basques have also had problems with mixed-race breeding, due to RH-negative blood type. We are half-Basque. My sister had this problem (resolved by modern medicine, but in the past..).
O-negative humans best humans.
Speaking of Basques, anybody have recs for good Basque grammar? (Preferably in English; French OK). There are a number available on Amazon that aren't absurdly overpriced academic texts. (Not that I'm planning on learning to speak Basque, I'm just interested in the structure.)
"Gotta follow the rules buddy."
You mean like "be responsive to the post"?
Would 'It's OK to be Black' have gone over any better ?
I don't have any links for Basque grammar, but there's this story about a Basque who walked into a bar. "What are you, a Basque?" "Shiver me timbers, I'm afraid of nothin'!"
There are plenty of them - in Spanish.
Such as "Euskera para Dummies"
No, really. On Amazon. $5.99 on Kindle.
Search for "Euskera"
Original Mike said...
You mean like "be responsive to the post"?
Yeah like that. If you're gunna be criticizing people for not following the rules, the least you can do is follow the rules.
I never criticize anyone. I'm a live and let live type of person. Sure, maybe I've made a
few comments about Michael K's ability to manage his finances, but that comes from a place of love. I'm worried about the guy, he's too old to be hauling his sorry ass off to work each day.
Would 'It's OK to be Black' have gone over any better ?
Would any white person have felt the need to, let alone had the balls to, tear that down?
Yeah, well there's an open thread available. Take what interests you over there. It's what they're for.
Would 'It's OK to be Black' have gone over any better ?
And had they been taken down, would Ms. Simms have felt the need to e-mail the student body to let them know the signs had been removed?
I cannot help with the Basque grammar, but I can attest to the warmth, and durability of a basque beret.
You could perhaps ask Razib Khan
Thanks for the heads up. Interesting article about him here.
buwaya:
There are plenty of them - in Spanish.
Such as "Euskera para Dummies"
No, really. On Amazon. $5.99 on Kindle.
Search for "Euskera"
No savvy hispanole. There is a selection of decently-priced possibilities in English and French at Amazon, though.
I saw that Razib Khan article long ago.
It is a hit job.
The writer is biased, and his happy quoting of hostile interviews/sources indicate just how locked down and suppressed the whole field is. In fact several admit it.
There are any number of modern Galileos, pursuing inconvenient knowledge. The writers smug conclusion that the truth must yield to politics is outright evil.
buwaya:
I saw that Razib Khan article long ago.
It is a hit job.
Yeah, I remember that one. Good grief.
Hey, Saint C. - I recommend you follow Dr. K's link over to Greg Cochran's joint. I think you'd enjoy reading and commenting over there.
How about, 'It's OK to be White, if you absolutely Must' ?
tcrosse: How about, 'It's OK to be White, if you absolutely Must' ?
"It's OK to be white, bless your heart."
@Saint Croix:
How many races are there?
And how do you define such a thing when a man from sub-Saharan Africa and a woman from Northern Europe can mate and have a baby and create a new "race" at any time?
How many dog breeds are there? The inability to answer that question does not mean that there are no such thing as dog breeds. Also, separate races does not suggest an inability to produce viable offspring. Nobody is suggesting that Africans and Europeans are different species. For example, it is widely known that the average African-American has about a 20% admixture of European ancestry.
"Subjects identified themselves as belonging to one of four major racial/ethnic groups (white, African American, East Asian, and Hispanic) and were recruited from 15 different geographic locales within the United States and Taiwan. Genetic cluster analysis of the microsatellite markers produced four major clusters, which showed near-perfect correspondence with the four self-reported race/ethnicity categories. Of 3,636 subjects of varying race/ethnicity, only 5 (0.14%) showed genetic cluster membership different from their self-identified race/ethnicity."
-Genetic Structure, Self-Identified Race/Ethnicity, and Confounding in Case-Control Association Studies, American Journal of Human Genetics
In time (and there isn't much time left) humanity will require a much deeper knowledge of human nature.
We will require the technology to enhance human intelligence.
Failure to do so will condemn a growing part of humanity to complete irrelevance, a permanent dead loss, unexploitable for any purpose, of much lower value than livestock.
This is worse than slavery. These will be pets, at best. And humans make poor pets.
Althousians can haz triggered. Whites, including white trash, are still on top of the world. The world culture is white, although whites are good at appropriating and assimilating the good parts of alien cultures, which makes whites even more resilient and successful. Non-white races have been subservient and worse can be a tad sensitive to expressions that hint of a rebirth or new normalization of white supremacy. Rather a natural reaction, although not ideal, now that they are feeling more empowered. Be a man, shrug it off. It doesn't mean a thing. As Freeman says, this too will likely pass into embarrassment. The good thing is that it won't explode into full blown eugenics experimentation ala Dr Mengele and Tuskegee.
How about, 'It's OK to be White, if you absolutely Must' ?
How about 'It's OK to be [non-white race], if you absolutely Must?'
Nope, that fails the "it's OK if you reverse it" test.
t's apparent that ARM is trying to rile up the righties to get Bergdahl killed. I think Soros pays him in Ruskie hooker piss, but that's a different discussion.
"It's OK to be white, bless your heart."
It's OK to be white, if that's the best you can do.
This is already causing terrible damage in K-12, I have seen it.
In anything but math standards of material have fallen an immense distance.
This business is killing your children's brains. They may as well be randomly jabbing them in the skull with ice picks.
You all absolutely should be freaking out.
Where would one get these stickers? Just curious.
How many dog breeds are there? The inability to answer that question does not mean that there are no such thing as dog breeds.
You have to control reproduction for their to be dog breeds. If dogs are allowed to breed willy-nilly, there are no dog breeds. They're all mutts.
If we deny the importance of race--if we mate with anybody--race disappears. The same way a Golden Retriever disappears if he mates with a German Shepherd.
Race, like breeding, is a human construct.
While sex is created by God!
I really want to see pictures and video. Not just a story in the craptastic Harvard Crimson. Nobody at Harvard reads it, BTW.
No, pics and video. Otherwise, it didn't happen.
buwaya: In anything but math standards of material have fallen an immense distance.
Oh, where I've lived the vandals gutted once-excellent math programs in the primary and secondary schools my kids attended, too. We got ours through just in time. (Well, the last I had to homeschool with the help of the Singapore Math program as the vandals started dismantling things in her last year of primary school.)
As I mentioned here before, we felt like characters in a disaster film, just making it out of the building and getting far enough away before the whole thing imploded.
These weren't "problem" schools with bottom-of-the-barrel teachers, either. (Though a good deal of the push for "fixing" the math programs came from rapidly changing demographics.) For the most part my kids had fine teachers, a good number of them excellent. Just demonstrates once again that civilized people start to believe that civilization is just the default condition, that they can screw around with passing it all on to the young any old way, and a stable political and high material culture will just keep rolling along automatically.
Historically human reproduction was controlled by difficulty of access between population pools.
In between you usually find fairly sparse populations of mixed peoples, such as Central Asians and the black-Berber Touareg and the black-Arab Northern Sudanese.
Large scale mixing of human populations across these widely separated groups is a modern development.
@Saint Croix:
Race, like breeding, is a human construct.
All language is a human construct. The boundaries between "blue" and "green" are infinite, and while "blue" and "green" are social constructs, they describe reality. From the American Journal of Human Genetics, which I linked to above and for which you apparently have no response:
"Genetic cluster analysis of the microsatellite markers produced four major clusters, which showed near-perfect correspondence with the four self-reported race/ethnicity categories."
Why do 25% of Ashkenazi Jews have a genetic disorder, if "Ashkenazi Jew" is simply a social construct that has no meaning at the genetic level? Do you deny that human beings become geographically isolated from each other, and the effect of their respective environments plus genetic drift explains the phenotypic variance in human beings?
I believe that it was Cavaliers-Sforza that came up with the concept of clines, that is the gradual shading of degrees of relatedness by distance. However, mapping genetic distance geographically still left highly related regional pools that were greatly different from other pools, in spite of there being sparse mixed populations between them.
Math has made something of a comeback.
Possibly related to the massive increase in Asians.
There has been good growth in the proportion taking Calculus APs.
Large scale mixing of human populations across these widely separated groups is a modern development.
Sure. I think race was once helpful in uniting societies. We're all Japanese. Let's unite, and call ourselves Japan.
Now, because of planes and trains and ships and the ease of travel, it's not at all helpful in uniting societies. It's positively divisive and unhelpful.
Can we have a few pics?
response by Concordia College President William Craft (one place these were posted): "it is indeed OK to be white — and to be black, to be brown, to be Christian, to be Muslim, to be straight, to be gay, to be conservative, to be liberal, and so on. We are stronger for this diversity of identities.”
Isn't this the best kind of response? And a response that does not provoke ridicule?
The researchers don't know why this particular person had a heart attack and died, and this other person did not. It's statistical guesswork and hypothesis.”
AKA, medical knowledge.
Why do 25% of Ashkenazi Jews have a genetic disorder
They need to get out more. Move to Brooklyn, meet some other people. That would be my suggestion.
Are the Ashkenazi Jews one of your big four races?
Or are they a little race? A racial subset?
Or are there five racial groups?
Also, I think you forgot the Sioux.
It doesn't matter if it's helpful or not, it is a fact.
Facts matter.
Now, one can assume that racial distinctions will disappear completely, eventually.
I'm not sure about that.
Even in openly race-mixing societies, Brazil say, genetic racial traits still lead to assortative mating, so social status is still racial.
The only big difference vs the US is that there is a large mestizo class between the blacks or Indians and the mostly-whites at the top.
Saint Croix is the rharden of race.
OMG! More than a DOZEN!
Saint Croix said...
If we deny the importance of race--if we mate with anybody--race disappears. The same way a Golden Retriever disappears if he mates with a German Shepherd.
Or the way a Shih Tzu disappears when she's bred with a St. Bernard. Or maybe that's different...
buwaya said...
However, mapping genetic distance geographically still left highly related regional pools that were greatly different from other pools, in spite of there being sparse mixed populations between them.
I couldn't quite parse that. But as evidenced by the Basque, they are very genetically different from the people surrounding them. And I read recently that in a genetic study in England, where the population is much more stationary then in the U.S. (They don't move around a lot, and haven't for generations) they expected to find a more homogeneous DNA grouping then they did. In one case, in Cornwall, there's a river. And DNA could tell with pretty good accuracy which side of the river you lived on. People hadn't crossed the river to find spouses for long enough for there to be significant genetic drift. And as often pointed out, the Brits can tell at a glance whether one is English, Irish, Scottish or Welsh. Whereas we don't have a clue. I can (normally) tell the difference between Korean, Chinese, and Japanese, but many or my acquaintances cannot.
But telling the difference between black, white, and Asian usually takes but a glance.
@Saint Croix:
They need to get out more. Move to Brooklyn, meet some other people. That would be my suggestion.
Translation: I have no response so I'll just fall back on snark.
Here's another question: if race is just a construct, why does searching within one's racial group significantly increase the odds of finding a viable bone marrow or stem cell donator? After all, if race is just a social construct, a person of sub-Saharan African ancestry should just as easily match a Dane or a Korean as they would another sub-Saharan African. But they don't. Why?
Why are African-Americans at such a greater risk of sickle-cell trait than someone from Northern Europe? How does the "race is just a construct" point of view grapple with this information?
But telling the difference between black, white, and Asian usually takes but a glance.
Right. If there is no scientific way to classify the obvious, it's a failure of science, not a fact of nature. But like I said, all taxonomy is political, all of it. It's all based on judgement, ultimately, and, as Lena Dunham said on another matter, "political calculations are made."
Judging by the official reaction, it's not okay to be white.
@tim in vermont:
Right. If there is no scientific way to classify the obvious, it's a failure of science, not a fact of nature.
Agree with this. It is part of the debate of modern biology and taxonomy. Lumpers versus splitters. There is a tiny part of the population (e.g. people suffering Klinefelter syndrome) who do not fit neatly into biological male or biological female categories. That does not mean that biological sex is just a "social construct."
But for the "race is a social construct" crowd, they have the burden to show that all group differences across a wide variety of measurements observed between races is 100% environmentally caused. I do not see the weight of evidence moving anywhere near that direction. In fact, it is moving in just the opposite.
"But race does convey some kind of meaning, does it not? After all, why are there races within the human species except for the effect of different environments on isolated populations of humans (e.g. sub-Saharan Africa, Northern Europe, and Northeast Asia)?"
LL Cavalli-Sforza found that a founder group which left Africa and which diminished at some point to about 2,000 people was the ancestor of Asians and Caucasians. So that an Mongolian and an Irishman were racially closer to each other than a Kikiyu and a Luo, members of two African tribes living in Kenya. This is why "race" doesn't tell us much scientifically; DNA race doesn't match 19C racial categories based on looks.
And in America it has been estimated that in the South 1 in 10 whites have some percentage of African ancestry while the average African-American is 25% white. Again, DNA doesn't match 19C racial categories.
So, anyhow, maybe the person at Harvard was trying to reassure African-Americans. You are 25% white but despite what you hear - It's OK to be white.
And when DNA race was shown to be quite different from 19C anthropological categories of race, the social "sciences" community deliberately decided to continue their "scientific" research based on the 19C anthropological categories. This was after the conclusion of the Human Genome Project in 2000. It is US law that "scientific" research on race such as that sponsored by NIH use 19C categories of race - which it is well understood have no real genetic meaning. And then this "research" claims credibility because it is "science" or anyhow uses genetics and statistics based on categories known to be false. And then "conclusions" are reached about race and behavior. And published. And believed. But "conclusions about race and behavior" are not known because the scientific method was not used. "Social science" well describes this type of science
Judging by the official reaction, it's not okay to be white.
But, I was Born That Way.
There could be groups which have some obvious single trait like red hair or fair skin or able to digest milk or even three traits or the opposite - dark hair, olive skin, unable to digest milk. But still when you looked at the whole DNA those two groups would have more in common with each other than two African tribes who lived near each other in Africa. So how could you reach any conclusion about behavior as related to genetics if you used categories that separated the close Caucasians and Asians while uniting the disparate Africans? Scientific conclusions, I mean?
In 1066 England was conquered by the Normans and French became the official language of the elite - used for government and law. But 500 years later English became the official language again because it showed the ability to absorb the official culture. The Greek and Latin classics were translated in that century into English as were the classics of the Italian Renaissance. English playwrights like Shakespeare were able to use all the devices of the plays of the Geek and Latin classic era to make exciting plays in English. In the next century, English mathematicians like Newton read Greek and Continental mathematicians and scientists like Galileo and advanced their thinking, writing in English or in Latin which was at once translated into English. Americans who read only English were able to use the knowledge in English to build rockets and be the first to land on the moon. In short despite being excluded from the culture for 500 years English maintained itself and was able to absorb the past and create the future. And so any other language excluded at some point from the culture can possibly do the same. Even after 500 years.
"It’s clear that liberals think it’s not okay being white. QED."
Clear how? What "liberals" do not think it's okay being white?
Or the way a Shih Tzu disappears when she's bred with a St. Bernard. Or maybe that's different…
LOL.
"Here's another question: if race is just a construct, why does searching within one's racial group significantly increase the odds of finding a viable bone marrow or stem cell donator? After all, if race is just a social construct, a person of sub-Saharan African ancestry should just as easily match a Dane or a Korean as they would another sub-Saharan African. But they don't. Why?
"Why are African-Americans at such a greater risk of sickle-cell trait than someone from Northern Europe? How does the 'race is just a construct' point of view grapple with this information?"
One word: In-breeding.
By encouraging mating across the ethnic divide, (which derives from geographical divides, forcing breeding within relatively closed communities),such concentrations of genetic diseases will be diffused, hopefully becoming ever rarer. Similarly, finding cell donors would become easier, as genes would be distributed farther and wider across the world.
It doesn't matter if it's helpful or not, it is a fact.
Facts matter.
What race is Barack Obama again?
Are we still going with the one drop rule?
Or is that bad science now?
I look forward to his new autobiography, Mom Is Irrelevant.
wildswan: LL Cavalli-Sforza found that a founder group which left Africa and which diminished at some point to about 2,000 people was the ancestor of Asians and Caucasians. So that an Mongolian and an Irishman were racially closer to each other than a Kikiyu and a Luo, members of two African tribes living in Kenya. This is why "race" doesn't tell us much scientifically...
That last sentence does not follow from the statements preceding it.
And as a matter of fact, that two populations living at the extremes of the Eurasian continent have more in common genetically than two populations on the African continent in far closer geographical proximity tells us a whole hell of a lot, scientifically. Do you really not understand what that means and why it's interesting? At any rate, it doesn't mean what you think it means - that racial categories are entirely socially constructed and have no correspondence to reality.
DNA race doesn't match 19C racial categories based on looks.
"DNA race" actually maps pretty well to racial "folk categories" from the 19th century and earlier. Not having modern methods of genetic analysis, they got it wrong at the margins sometimes (as in where to group, say, Australasians.) But the idea of the "five great continental races" that our great-grandparents carried around in their heads was a pretty accurate representation of genetic reality.
And contrary to your perennial straw-manning about "19th C racial ideas" nobody out there is desperately clinging to incorrect notions of lineages and relations that have been disproved by the more advanced methods of analysis available nowadays.
Btw, people didn't categorize "on looks" to start off with because they were stupid and racist and were desperately making up arbitrary categories to fit their vicious prejudices, and we don't do that now because we're not stupid and racist like they were. They looked because that's where you start to learn about things you want to understand - by looking. And there is a great deal of information in "looks".
And in America it has been estimated that in the South 1 in 10 whites have some percentage of African ancestry while the average African-American is 25% white. Again, DNA doesn't match 19C racial categories.
See if you can write what you just wrote here without using "19th century racial categories". You can't.
When you say, "1 in 10 whites in the South have some percentage of African ancestry", or "the average African-American is 25% white", you're saying that some people are mixes of distinct, identifiable genetic lineages, aka "whites" and "blacks", aka "separate populations that have distinct evolutionary histories that can be identified in individuals at the genetic level", aka...races.
These are simple facts of human evolutionary history. They have nothing to do with the nazis and the "19th Century" thinkers or racial essentialists or any of the other "racist" bogeyman haunting your dreams.
The one drop rule was always a weird American thing.
No, really, that's a true US peculiarity.
It is not "science".
@Saint Croix:
Perhaps you could try answering a question for a change. So let me again quote from the abstract of Genetic Structure, Self-Identified Race/Ethnicity, and Confounding in Case-Control Association Studies, published in the American Journal of Human Genetics:
"Subjects identified themselves as belonging to one of four major racial/ethnic groups (white, African American, East Asian, and Hispanic) and were recruited from 15 different geographic locales within the United States and Taiwan. Genetic cluster analysis of the microsatellite markers produced four major clusters, which showed near-perfect correspondence with the four self-reported race/ethnicity categories. Of 3,636 subjects of varying race/ethnicity, only 5 (0.14%) showed genetic cluster membership different from their self-identified race/ethnicity."
How does the race-is-a-social-construct argument make sense of these findings?
"Why are African-Americans at such a greater risk of sickle-cell trait than someone from Northern Europe? How does the 'race is just a construct' point of view grapple with this information?"
One word: In-breeding.
Wrong. Africa is a pretty big place for inbreeding. It's well known that being heterozygous for sickle cell makes a person much more malaria resistant than non-sickle cell (there are also a couple of other similar blood traits.
The advantage gained by the many heterozygotes in malaria ridden Africa is a greater benefit to fitness than the disadvantage to fewer homozygotes who get sickle cell. Evolution is ruthless that way.
Obama is a mulato.
That was actually a Spanish legal category.
And, note, there was no sanction against black men + white women.
There were rules for all sorts of categories of mixtures, being as they were realistic about humanity.
Not always benevolent, but realistic.
n.n said...
Diversitists can't help but show their true racist, sexist, "=" colors.
Baby Lives Matter
11/5/17, 10:24 AM
I like it, but in the best 4chan tradition, I think Fetal Lives Matter would be far more provocative.
Fritz,
I don't understand how your information makes my answer wrong. Please explain.
buwaya said...
The one drop rule was always a weird American thing.
No, really, that's a true US peculiarity.
So I guess that from 1933-1945 Germany was part of America... Then again, maybe not.
"So I guess that from 1933-1945 Germany was part of America... Then again, maybe not."
Hitler and the Nazis were influenced by America's race laws.
Dave Begley said...
Thank you progressives for turning us into a tribal society; like Iraq but only worse.
As Justice Clarence Thomas said the other day, "Where's our unum?" We have little that unites us or makes us one. It is all identity politics all the time. But maybe the global warming scam is what unites us. High electricity prices for all!
11/5/17, 11:12 AM
That was the plan, but stubborn skeptics (aka real scientists) held the line and now the polls show a big split in belief, although a remarkably low give-a-fuck across party identification.
"Hitler and the Nazis were influenced by America's race laws."
And they influenced the Stalinists Russia and also the Jewish concept of the "chosen People".
Always with the Hate America, anti-American Bullshit.
Blogger tim in vermont said...
But telling the difference between black, white, and Asian usually takes but a glance.
Right. If there is no scientific way to classify the obvious, it's a failure of science, not a fact of nature. But like I said, all taxonomy is political, all of it. It's all based on judgement, ultimately, and, as Lena Dunham said on another matter, "political calculations are made."
11/5/17, 4:01 PM
I think Linnaeus was more theological that political.
But the Great Chain of Being was political.
It seems to me you have an unhealthy attachment to the idea of America being the seat of all virtue
I don't know about seat of all virtue...but America is certainly the most virtuous nation and nation-state in History.
Hitler and the Nazis were influenced by America's race laws.
Close...
Hitler and the Nazis were influenced by American Progressive's and Democrat's race laws.
What race is Barack Obama again?
I spent much of the Obama administration pissing people off by calling Obama White. Things got worse when I pointed out that his family is as much Arabic as they are African. If we did a genetic test, i bet Obama is actually more White than anything else.
Gahrie said...
Hitler and the Nazis were influenced by America's race laws.
Close...
Hitler and the Nazis were influenced by American Progressive's and Democrat's race laws.
And Hillary's heroine Margaret Sanger.
Fritz,
I don't understand how your information makes my answer wrong. Please explain.
Because inbreeding has nothing to do with it. The affected population is huge. It's simple evolution towards population fitness.
OK, so it's OK to be white, but it's not OK to put up a sign that says so?
"In order to have in-breeding, you have to have breeds. In humans we call breeds races."
It's all rhetorical jargon. What we call, for shorthand, "races," are just the variants within the (one) human race caused by the isolation of various cohorts of the human race that left their land of origin and settled elsewhere. Over time, the limited genetic diversity within the original settlers and their descendants, combined with adaptations to local environment, led to the development of varying local features such as skin color, hair type, features (eye shape, etc.), and genetic concentrations such that we saw (and see) each other as different "races" when we are not.
Obama was the color diversitists' palliative. The left really believed that his election would compensate for their predisposition to judge people by the "color of their skin". They see the same black and white colors as everyone else, but then they they proceed to conflate color and character. Their crowning achievement is memorialized in the progressive constitution of South Africa, which is the first national constitution to establish diversity, or discrimination of individuals by class (e.g. color, sex), as the highest law of the land.
The Nazis did not have a one-drop rule.
The line was three Jewish grandparents; two were undesirable but passable. That is if they were not practicing Jews.
As for other nations/ethnicities, the Nazi rules were rather circumstantial. They had rules, but not a system.
Also, separate races does not suggest an inability to produce viable offspring. Nobody is suggesting that Africans and Europeans are different species.
Contrary to popular myth, being of different species does not necessarily imply inability to reproduce with viable offspring. A great many (albeit closely related species) in the world nevertheless can do so. Beyond a genus level relationship, that kind full, fertile-offspring reproduction is rarer, but within a genus it’s quite common. What makes for a separate species in that case typically isn’t that they can’t reproduce (with viable, fertile offspring) but simply that they don’t — and thus evolve independently of one another.
They might be physically isolated, for example. The two “species” might live on different continents, or different regions of a single continent, or even different altitudes (up a mountain vs. down in a valley), or even different altitudes in a forest (up in the canopy vs. down in the undergrowth) — or they might even just be active at different times of the day. But there’s something that keeps them apart and not reproducing, and very often it isn’t (pure) genetics. It might even just be that neither finds the other to be physically, sexually attractive (one might note that “attractiveness barriers” are oftentimes one of the first things which incipiently separating species evolve).
It’s true that eventually divergent species and groups of species become so different that successful reproduction is unlikely or impossible. It’s rather like trying to repair Chevy cars using Ford parts — it just ain’t a gonna work. But for closer relationships — barring the presence of a particular genetic barrier, such as the differing number of chromosomes which humans versus other apes possess (human chromosome 2 was formed by the fusion of what are two separate chromosomes [known as 2A and 2B] in apes) — reproduction per se between different species (when artificially brought together) can often work.
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