I despise “scientific” racism enormously for its willful fraudulence and ignorance, and this post kinda sums up all the things wrong with it. I don’t quite have the energy for a full on rebuttal of every single point here right now, but since they are dabbling in my specific fields (phylogeny and genomics for example), I feel the need to at least write a few things about this… disgusting mess. This might be a bit of a long text, so apologies for that:
1. That world “racial” map. I have no idea who pulled this out of their asses (and the OP doesn’t cite sources, how convenient), but it has no basis in reality, and is based mostly on outdated racial theories of the early 20th century. One of the things “race realists” claim is that there are discreet “clusters” of genotypes among humans, which they then (illegitimately) claim to overlap with their racial divisions.
There have been attempts to cluster humanity according to genetic variation, but this is both difficult exactly because no discreet lines between genotypes exist (and a researcher might fall for their own biases via incomplete or selective sampling to make it appear as if there were such lines) and the few attempts that were made didn’t show any clusters that would remotely overlap with races. Most genetic diversity in Africa, everywhere else the amount of genetic variation is extremely low. Oh and even those attempts NEVER looked like the map seen above.
2. Goddamn it, they really are trying to bring phrenology back, aren’t they? Yeah, no. Especially with these individuals, the biased sampling inherent in that pseudoscience is extremely obvious. It also doesn’t proof anything. I bet I could gather 5 “white” individuals with vastly differently structured skulls as well and create my own “pseudo-races” out of it. What you have to show is not that there are phenotypical differences between individuals. You need to show that race is a biologically worthwhile concept applicable to humans. It is not, and this doesn’t show that it is.
3. Well that’s both anger-inducing and laughable. Citing Cavalli-Sforza’s work in which he EXPLICITELY showed that humanity CAN’T be divided into races according to genetic markers as proof that it can. Freaking hilarious. It’s also pretty old work, genomics has developed by quite a bit since then.
First of all, what you are showing here is not really showing what you think it does. The data was already averaged before the phylogeny was created, meaning that this can’t and doesn’t show the alleged boundaries between human genotypes you so desperately need.
Secondly, the F(st) value (basically genetic variety between subpopulations) is usually not seen as significantly high until it reaches 0.15, which it only does for the “Africans” group. This is not at all strange and caused by the migration out of Africa by a small group of people and the following bottleneck effect.
At best you could argue that there are Africans and then there is everyone else, but even that falls flat if you look at African subpopulations (which has been done recently), which are all more different from each other than they are from EVERYONE else on average. Sooo… 50 african races and 1 non-african one? Doesn’t quite sound like the result you want. And it would still be fraudulent because there are still no genetic boundaries between these groups, no alleles only appearing in one but no other group.
4. Wow, finally something semi-true, skin color just doesn’t inform us about the existence of races at all. But neither does any other phenotypical aspect. Especially not the neural system, that claim has been long debunked. Ultimately it is racists who reduce race to skin-color, while any sane person simply rejects race as a biological concept applicable to humans.
5. Ah, my “favorite” argument for racism: The IQ of black people allegedly being lower than that of white people AND that difference being genetic. I don’t know how often you have to disproof this ugly, ignorant and really arrogant argument, but since it is still alive and well, especially in the US, and is brought up again and again and again, I will do so once again.
First of all, most of these graphs are redundant. They don’t give any additional information beyond “black people score lower in tests and their educational success is also lower than that of white people”, so why the constant repetition? More importantly, they need to show that this is caused by genetic and not environmental effects. And they don’t. Not a single one of them.
Sure, some of them try to be “clever”, by stating that even after taking into account socioeconomic status (SES), black people score lower, implying that a genetic factor has to be the cause then (the Bell Curve is especially guilty of this), but in fact what the graph actually shows is that higher SES DOES correlate with higher IQ.
Almost as if nutrition (rich people can buy better food), acceptance in society (rich people have less trouble in that regard) and better access to education (self-explanatory really) DO have a strong impact on the IQ of the children. So… you haven’t actually taken environmental factors out of the equation, you instead showed their strong impact.
“B-But the curve for white people still is far above that of black people! And what about the whole Kansas fiasco, doesn’t that show that black people are more stupid by nature even in an egalitarian society?” I hear racists scream. No. Simply because the US especially is NOT egalitarian. For generations black people were treated at best as second-class citizens, were prohibited from better education, nutrition, resources in general that were much more accessible to white people. That’s the origin of the gap. Even rich black people are not as accepted as rich white people, not to mention that many of them at the time of the creation of this data grew up in families were the discrimination against them were still very much felt. To shorten it up: None of these exclude environmental factors, and using them to show alleged genetic differences is horribly misleading and biased at best. Oh and I don’t even want to get into IQ and standardized tests and their cultural sensitivity, or how much they actually say about intelligence etc etc. And I doubt the data these tests are based on as well, the Bell Curve was notorious for comparing sample groups in such a way that the result was already obvious from the start. Ultimately this is a trite talking point for white supremacists to feel better about themselves.
6. There is no such thing as miscegenation. Races don’t exist in humans in a biological sense, so this is a moot point.
7. Well, yes, equality doesn’t come from nature. No one really says it does. But why would we want to go back to the natural state? It is not “better”. Also, again, races don’t exist in a biological sense. They do though (sadly) in a sociological-ethnical sense. And that is because of people like you OP. Racialists like you will try to force race as a biological concept on us so it stays one as a sociological one. But this is willful ignorance that has to be fought, not supported. We are one species and as such we can elevate each other, instead of going on and on about our own tribes somehow being the best. I can only hope people will get that at some point.
Again, sorry for that long text, but I needed to get that out of my system. Oh and I won’t even get into that last picture. It’s too stupid to comment on.
