Stock photo of social constructs socially constructing society.

Das rite!

“Race is a social construct” is back, now backed by Science.

Daily Mail:

Race is not a legitimate category to use in medicine, top scientists declared at the world’s biggest science conference this week.

In the US, African Americans are told to watch out for hypertension, white people for multiple sclerosis, Asians for heart disease, Hispanics for diabetes, and so on.

But on Friday, leading biologists said those general warnings are based on ‘bad science’ and do no more than fuel ‘racial prejudice’.

Among them, anthropologist Keith Hunley of the University of New Mexico presented a new map of genomes around the world, finding few differences between the clusters of racial groups that are often cited in medical research.

By lumping people into distinct broad categories, he and others warned, we risk ‘hyping’ certain inherited health risks for some and underestimating them for others – while sewing division, stereotypes and ignorance within society.

They’re calling science from 3, 4, or 5 decades ago “bad science” using current data, after 3, 4, or 5 decades of miscegenation and embrowning. Keep that in mind.

‘We have this notion that there are variants that are unique to certain groups, that there are genes that are unique to certain groups. And that’s almost never the case,’ Dr Hunley said as he described his presented his paper at the American Association for the Advancement of Science conference.

‘When you’re looking at a trait that all humans have they’re just variable in frequency. There’s also variation among groups in their ability to metabolize certain drugs.’

…

There are staunch critics of this view, including geneticist Professor David Reich, who says there are average genetic differences between racial groups that cannot be denied. What’s more, they argue, there’s not much we can do about it: in an ideal world we will all have access to our genetic profile to see our precise risks, but right now that’s not feasible.

However, fuel was added to the fire at this year’s AAAS conference in Washington, DC, which featured four new papers decrying race as a biological factor.

‘Race is not biological,’ said Dr Amelia Hubbard, a biological anthropologist with a new paper on how we teach race and genetics in schools.

…

‘It is tied to social and cultural norms.’

I’m going to go straight to the point here.

Social and cultural norms are made by humans and humans are biological, thus everything humans do is a consequence of biology.

Saying something is a “social construct” is saying that that something is a consequence of the biology of the humans that constructed it.

Society and culture are not random occurrences.

These “scientists” are saying that you having a statistically significant bigger chance of something for belonging to a group is not enough reason for them to take grouping in consideration because something about “sewing division” and “stereotypes.”

What are they even doing talking about “sewing division” and “stereotypes” in a science conference? Are they scientists or are they social engineers?

But Dr Joseph L Graves Jr, a firebrand evolutionary biologist and author of The Race Myth, said many of the differences we do see are not driven by genetics but by environmental factors – including distress from racial stereotyping.

…

He uses himself, an African American man at the top of his academic field, as an example of how society can affect health.  

…

‘Because people do not expect me to be there, I take home a much higher burden of stress every day.’

Sure you do Dr. Nigger, that’s why winners go home stressed, because people didn’t expect them to win. Right?

Science is our baby and it is getting sacrificed to Moloch.

We have to take back Science.

We have to take back Knowledge.

Scientific American Magazine calls for banning researching into racial differences and replacing actual science with conspiracy theories.

Scientific American Magazine author John Horgan says research concerning racial differences is too dangerous. He endorsed an anti-white conspiracy theory that non-whites are deliberately held back by white people. He said that anyone who wants to conduct actual research are “bullies.”

From Scientific American…

But another part of me wonders whether research on race and intelligence—given the persistence of racism in the U.S. and elsewhere–should simply be banned. I don’t say this lightly. For the most part, I am a hard-core defender of freedom of speech and science. But research on race and intelligence—no matter what its conclusions are—seems to me to have no redeeming value.

Far from it. The claims of researchers like Murray, Herrnstein and Richwine could easily become self-fulfilling, by bolstering the confirmation bias of racists and by convincing minority children, their parents and teachers that the children are innately, immutably inferior. (See Post-postscript below.)

Why, given all the world’s problems and needs, would someone choose to investigate this thesis? What good could come of it? Are we really going to base policies on immigration, education and other social programs on allegedly innate racial differences? Not even the Heritage Foundation advocates a return to such eugenicist policies.

Perhaps instead of arguing over the evidence for or against theories linking race and IQ we should see them as simply irrelevant to serious intellectual discourse. I’m sympathetic toward the position spelled out by Noam Chomsky in his usual blunt fashion in his 1987 book Language and Problems of Knowledge:

“Surely people differ in their biologically determined qualities. The world would be too horrible to contemplate if they did not. But discovery of a correlation between some of these qualities is of no scientific interest and of no social significance, except to racists, sexists and the like. Those who argue that there is a correlation between race and IQ and those who deny this claim are contributing to racism and other disorders, because what they are saying is based on the assumption that the answer to the question makes a difference; it does not, except to racists, sexists and the like.”

Scientists and pundits who insist on recycling racial theories of intelligence portray themselves as courageous defenders of scientific truth. I see them not as heroes but as bullies, picking on those who are already getting a raw deal in our society. It’s time to put these destructive theories to rest once and for all.