Racism among white Christians

[Politesse]

What the hell does any of the above have to do with the actual OP?

It's the same nonsense, whether you back it up with pseudoscience or woo. Perhaps Bomb#20 and Angra Mainyu are uncosnciously trying to demonstrate by example that white Christians do not have a monopoly on being unwilling to give up on Victorian era social dogmas.

A computer program found it. Was the computer program being unwilling to give up on Victorian era social dogmas? Clearly not. You would need a different explanation for the data. Or continue interpreting it improperly, of course.

You're obfuscating the actual results of the study you're quoting, as I noted. Hand-picking a single example, which superficially seems to correspond to your ideological beliefs, does not change the fact that the study as a whole found no solid evidence that humanity was divided into "races", or that such categories would be practically relevant in any case, since whatever differences lie between continental populations, they do not exceed the differences within those populations to a statistically meaningful degree.

And in any case, I think you are very confused as to what "the computer" was computing, and what it concluded.

 

[Politesse]

I admit I am having trouble wrapping my head around the question of whether race is or isn't a social construct. One minute I see how it is and the next....

That's perfectly natural -- race has both a socially constructed and a biological aspect.

The fact that you can download raw gene frequency data and plug it into a math formula and compute genetic distances between populations and run a tree-finding algorithm on them and your computer will independently rediscover the same natural subgroup of the human species that 1960s-era physical anthropologists called "Caucasoids" proves that the Caucasoids are not a social construct. Social constructs live in human minds and math formulas don't have ESP.

On the other hand, the fact that a person such as President Obama, who is genetically half Caucasoid and half Negroid, is commonly considered in the U.S. to be a black man and not a white man, well, that's a social construct. There's nothing in the math or the genetic data to support the American social custom of treating African ancestry as more important than European ancestry.

To add...

Would you think it fair to say that race is an arbitrary categorisation? We could argue about what arbitrary means I suppose, whether it implies a mere whim or lacks any reason, but what I mean is, for example, hair colour (or in one famous experiment, eye colour) could have been used, or height, or even biological sex. Men and women as different races, anyone? People with big noses? Those would not merely be social constructs, because the groups really would differ, and in biological, heritable ways.

This is correct. The differences are real, the categories are arbitrary, at least in the sense of not being naturally existing categories. I would not call them truly arbitrary, since politics, religion, economics, and many other factors can severely impact the way racial groups are seen and perceived. Consider how, for instance, Mexicans and Middle Easterners went from being undistinguishably "white" to being a separate racial group in the popular imagination of Americans between 1915-2015. This was not because their genetic pattern diverged, but it also wasn't entirely random or arbitrary; economic exploitation in the first case and a major global religio-political conflict in the second case drove those re-categorizations. We could do a similar analysis of how racial categories are constructed anywhere in time and history that has racialized identities. (Yes, they always differ)

 

[Angra Mainyu]

You're obfuscating the actual results of the study you're quoting, as I noted.

No, I am not. And no, you did not note it. You falsely claimed it.

First, C-S apparently was not using the word 'race' in its usual sense, but as jargon (see this post)

Second, assuming that that is not the case and C-S really believed there was no such thing as a Caucasian race, then the conclusion is that C-S was in error, as one can see by looking at C-S's own data. The point is that C-S's computer program measuring genetic distance managed to identify Caucasoids (incidentally, it is not the only thing it found. I suggest you take a look). Again, you cannot beat data with authority, even if the authority is on your side.

Hand-picking a single example, which superficially seems to correspond to your ideological beliefs, does not change the fact that the study as a whole found no solid evidence that humanity was divided into "races", or that such categories would be practically relevant in any case, since whatever differences lie between continental populations, they do not exceed the differences within those populations to a statistically meaningful degree.

And again, the computer found Caucasoids. How do you explain that? None of what you say above does anything to debunk the evidence that there is a biological basis for the Caucasoid race. You are the one denying the evidence.

If that were the only evidence, then still it would be an example of a race. But it is not. It is just a pretty good example. So, from another post you have not read:

https://frdbarchive.org/viewtopic.php?p=6787486#p6787486

From my 1963 Funk & Wagnalls Encyclopedia's entry on race:...Before the widespread migrations of Europeans during historic times, Caucasoid peoples were concentrated in Europe, western Asia, and North Africa. ...
Mongoloids can be divided into four subraces, the Classic Mongoloid, the Arctic Mongoloid, the Indonesian-Malay, and the American Indian. ...
Apart from inclusion of the "Indonesian-Malay subrace", Cavalli-Sforza's data on genes such as blood groups and metabolic processes coincides pretty darn neatly with groupings earlier physical anthropologists put forward. The fit is too good for the "more a social or mental construct" hypothesis to plausibly account for.

And more on the groupings:

https://frdbarchive.org/viewtopic.php?p=6787055#p6787055

By the way, it would be easier if you just read the exchange in the other thread. B20 has already replied to objections like yours. But for instance:

https://frdbarchive.org/viewtopic.php?p=6793407#p6793407

So is that your explanation for how classical anthropologists came up with a number of the same clusters as modern geneticists? Coincidence?

The question was not for you, but it applies just as much. Coincidence?

In short, the question is: you have not refuted the data. Authority does not cut it, even assuming the authority is on your side and C-S meant 'race' instead of 'subspecies'.

And in any case, I think you are very confused as to what "the computer" was computing, and what it concluded.

No, I am not. It was measuring genetic distance. And it came up with those groupings. You're not explaining any of the actual data. You are going with authority, on the face of evidence debunking your claim that races are just social institutions. In fact, even if I were mistaken about what the computer was computing, it surely was not computing a social institution, so your claim that races are just social institutions is debunked anyway.

However, here's another piece of evidence just to pile on.

https://frdbarchive.org/viewtopic.php?p=6783202#p6783202

After all, it's not obvious that Fixation Index is the best way to measure genetic distance. There are bound to be aspects of relationship between populations that aren't captured by that math formula. So maybe some other distance metric should have been used. Cavalli-Sforza also computed distances using a different standard formula for calculating genetic distances, the "Nei distance". This resulted in a different pairwise distance table, and a moderately different tree. However, the tree derived from Nei distances did contain a subtree consisting of exactly the same populations as the Caucasian subtree in the fixation index tree.

 

[laughing dog]

What the hell does any of the above have to do with the actual OP?

"Any of the above" was a rebuttal to a religious guy claiming it's racism to disagree with one of his own religion's religious doctrines. The actual OP was a report of an editorial by another believer in that same religion claiming that some other people were racist because they didn't accept another of his own religion's religious doctrines.

"Racism among white Christians is higher than among the nonreligious. That's no coincidence."

"In public opinion polls, a clear pattern has emerged: White Christians are consistently more likely than whites who are religiously unaffiliated to deny the existence of structural racism."​

Seems on-topic to me. YMMV.

In my view, offering data-driven evidence to either support or refute the empirical observation that White Christians are consistently more likely than white who are religiously unaffiliated to deny the existence of structural racism is on topic. In my view, anything else is pretty much off topic.

 

[ruby sparks]

The point is that C-S's computer program measuring genetic distance managed to identify Caucasoids...

Wouldn't the same computer also have found 'blue-eyed people' though?

 

[Angra Mainyu]

The point is that C-S's computer program measuring genetic distance managed to identify Caucasoids...

Wouldn't the same computer also have found 'blue-eyed people' though?

Well, it didn't, so I would say 'no'? Or do you mean the same computer with different software and inputs? I was talking about the whole thing, not just the hardware (and it's the software that makes the difference here, at least granting a distinction between the two). The point is that the computer was looking for genetic distance, using a certain metric. That was not designed to look for any specific races.

But this is not what I'm getting at though. My point (actually B20 did the hard work; I'm just taking advantage of it ) is that as the computer measuring genetic distance finds one or another group, then that group is not a social construct or a social institution, so the claims that it is are false.

ETA: if you're pointing out that there is also a genetic basis for eye color, sure, there is. Eye color is also not a social construct/social institution.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

So ice cream sales cause rape?

The connection betweeen the two can be easily explained.

You can see the problem in that case but you refuse the consider that it applies in other cases also.

 

[Politesse]

So ice cream sales cause rape?

The connection betweeen the two can be easily explained.

You can see the problem in that case but you refuse the consider that it applies in other cases also.

So, explain the connection between racism and poverty.

 

[lpetrich]

 Human genetic clustering,  Race and genetics How A Troublesome Inheritance gets human genetics wrong | The Genetic Structure and History of Africans and African Americans | Science Clustering of 770,000 genomes reveals post-colonial population structure of North America | Nature Communications Dienekes’ Anthropology Blog: Human genetic variation: the first ? components

In all this work, human populations are specified by region, not by traditional racial classifications. That's because location is actual data, as opposed to a hypothesis to be tested, like racial affiliation.

Dienekes's blog has a cluster analysis with increasing numbers of clusters.

At K=3, Sub-Saharan Africans, West, and East Eurasians are distinguishe
At K=4, Native Americans get their own cluster (dark green)
At K=5, Australoids (Papuans and Melanesians) get their own cluster (pink) which shows some affinity with populations from South Asia.
At K=6, the East Eurasian cluster is split into a North Eurasian/Central Asian (light blue) one and an East Asian (pink) one.
At K=7, a South Asian (light blue) cluster emerges.
At K=8, the Caucasoid cluster is split into European-centered (orange) and West Asian-centered (light blue) components
At K=9 the Mbuti, Biaka Pygmies, and San get their own cluster (Palaeofricans), with the Biaka showing some admixture with other Sub-Saharan Africans.
At K=10, a cluster (light green) centered on Koryak, Chukchi, Greenland emerges. Notice that this is also represented strongly among Athabask, much less in Pima and Maya from Mexico, and none at all in Karitiana and Surui, the southernmost Amerindian groups.
At K=11, the isolated Kalash of Pakistan get their own cluster, and this occurs at a high level in their neighbors
At K=12, a Southeast Asian cluster (red) emerges, highest in Malay and Cambodians, and well-represented in Chinese ethnic minorities such as Dai and Lahu. Notice also that the East Asian component in Melanesians also becomes "red", linking them to the Austronesians.
At K=13, a blue and a purple cluster supplant the previous West Asian cluster, with the blue one spilling to East Africa and the purple one to South Asia.
At K=14, the Karitiana, an Amerindian group from Brazil get their own cluster (pink), which spills into other Amerindian groups, but not substantially to the more northern Pima and Athabask.
At K=15 the Papuans and Melanesians are split into beige (?) and yellow population-specific clusters. Hence, the Melanesians, or at least the Nasioi from Bougainville where the HGDP sample is from, revealed in previous K to be associated with both Southeast Asians and Papuans, have actually acquired a genetic distinctiveness of their own.

Notice also that the Karitiana component that appeared at K=14 has "folded back" to the Amerindian component, while a "West Asian" and "Red Sea" component has appeared, the latter appearing on both Arabians and East Africans. As I've mentioned before, as K increases, ADMIXTURE has many roughly equiprobable choices in trying to represent the data.

Then some clustering done with "complete linkage" and "average linkage". The two methods give somewhat different results, but where they agree is interesting. Some traditional racial classifications emerge as clusters:

Mongoloid: ((Southeast Asian, East Asian), Siberian / Central Asian, Northeast Siberian)
Caucasoid: ((West Asian, North European), Mediterranean, Red Sea, (Asian) Indian, Kalash (in Pakistan))
Australoid: (Melanesian, Papuan)
Negroid: (Sub-Saharan, Paleoafrican (San, Pygmies))
All: (((Mongoloid, Caucasoid, Amerindian), Australoid), Negroid)

 

[Politesse]

Mongoloid: ((Southeast Asian, East Asian), Siberian / Central Asian, Northeast Siberian)
Caucasoid: ((West Asian, North European), Mediterranean, Red Sea, (Asian) Indian, Kalash (in Pakistan))
Australoid: (Melanesian, Papuan)
Negroid: (Sub-Saharan, Paleoafrican (San, Pygmies))
All: (((Mongoloid, Caucasoid, Amerindian), Australoid), Negroid)

???

This table is nonsensical, the distribution of the genetic clusters you describe doesn't at all correspond to the traditional racial classifications those words describe. By "traditional racial classifications emerge", do you mean "I can arbitrarily sort these clusters into traditional racial classifications, even thought the data does not support the idea that they have a special similarity of connection to the other clusters in the 'race' that is thus defined"? I'm baffled as to how you read that (very good) Jeremy Yoder article you have linked to, without apparently understanding any of it.

 

[lpetrich]

Tishkoff's paper has a diagram that's from a 3D principal component analysis.

• Sub-Saharan Africans form a big cluster near the origin toward -PC1 with the Hadza people off on +PC3
• Western Eurasians and Saharan Africans are together on +PC1, with Central/South Eurasians a bit farther on +PC1
• Outward along half-half +PC1 +PC2 are Oceanians, Eastern Asians, and Native Americans

Wikipedia's genetic-clustering article shows cluster membership by population.

• Orange: Sub-Saharan Africa
• Blue: Europe, Middle East
• Blue + Red: northern Indian subcontinent
• Red: southern Indian subcontinent
• Pink: eastern Asia
• Green: Melanesian (w/ some pink), Papuan
• Purple: Native American

Here also, Negroid (orange), Caucasoid (blue, red?), Mongoloid (pink), and Australoid (green) clusters are evident, with Native Americans being separate. I've seen Amerindoid for them as a separate race.

 

[ruby sparks]

The point is that C-S's computer program measuring genetic distance managed to identify Caucasoids...

Wouldn't the same computer also have found 'blue-eyed people' though?

Well, it didn't, so I would say 'no'? Or do you mean the same computer with different software and inputs? I was talking about the whole thing, not just the hardware (and it's the software that makes the difference here, at least granting a distinction between the two). The point is that the computer was looking for genetic distance, using a certain metric. That was not designed to look for any specific races.

But this is not what I'm getting at though. My point (actually B20 did the hard work; I'm just taking advantage of it ) is that as the computer measuring genetic distance finds one or another group, then that group is not a social construct or a social institution, so the claims that it is are false.

ETA: if you're pointing out that there is also a genetic basis for eye color, sure, there is. Eye color is also not a social construct/social institution.

I have no idea what your point is in relation to whether or how much race is a social construct, especially since Bomb#20 agrees it partly is.

 

[lpetrich]

As to what constitutes the "white race", that has changed over time. In the mid 19th cy., that was mainly Northern Europeans other than Irish.

Nineteenth-century Great-Britain people looking down on Irish as an inferior race has to a totally absurd spectacle, because of how close they are genetically. It ought to have been clear evidence for the importance of environmental effects like cultural differences and historical accidents, but it wasn't. It reminds me of how Stephen Jay Gould's "The Mismeasure Of Man" has some hilarious discussion of turn-of-the-20th-cy IQ hereditarians tying themselves in knots to avoid acceptance of environmental differences.

How the Irish Became White - Noel Ignatiev - Google Books

How The Irish Became White tells the story of how the Irish immigrant went from racially Oppressed to racial Oppressor, an American Story most of us haven't wanted to hear before. Utilizing newspaper chronicles, memoirs, biographies, and official accounts, Noel Ignatiev traces the tattered history of Irish and African-American relations, revealing how the Irish in America used unions, the Catholic Church and the Democratic party to help gain and secure their newly found place in the White Republic.

How The Irish Became White opens with the reactions of Irish America to the 1841 appeal made to them by Daniel O'Connell, "The Liberator," to join with anti-slavery forces in the new country. It then reviews the status of Catholics in Ireland and some of their ambiguous contacts with American race patterns after emigration.

Ignatiev carefully explores and challenges the Irish tradition of labor protest and the Irish role in the wave of anti-Negro violence that swept the country in the 1830s and 1840s. In addition, How The Irish Became Whiteprovides a provocative recounting of the roles of northeastern urban politicians in the Irish triumph over nativism, which allowed for their entry into the "white race."

This is the first book to focus not on how the Irish were assimilated but how they were assimilated as "whites." Ignatiev seeks out the roots of the well-known tension between Irish and African-Americans, and draws the connection between the embracing of white supremacy by the Irish and their "success" in America.

How The Irish Became White convincingly explodes a number of the most powerful myths surrounding race in our society. This bold and necessary intervention should be required reading for anyone interested in the history, theory and politics of racial identity and race relations in the United States.

Something similar happened to Italian and Eastern European and Jewish immigrants in the late 19th and early 20th cy. -- they all got accepted as "white" over that time.

Something similar may eventually happen for Hispanics with largely or mostly European ancestry -- many Hispanics are very "white" looking.

 

[Bomb#20]

Thanks. That helps. And it makes broad sense. I tend to think that most things in such spheres are rarely simply one thing or the other. I would even add that there are often more than two things they can be. And that all the relevant things are usually inter-related, typically in complicated ways.

So then we would face the trickier issue, of how much it is this or that. And my guess is that the proportions will vary enormously from situation to situation. To the point that it would be a mistake to claim that race (as a whole issue) is this or that proportion either way.

Exactly right.

To add...

Would you think it fair to say that race is an arbitrary categorisation? We could argue about what arbitrary means I suppose, whether it implies a mere whim or lacks any reason, but what I mean is, for example, hair colour (or in one famous experiment, eye colour) could have been used, or height, or even biological sex. Men and women as different races, anyone? People with big noses? Those would not merely be social constructs, because the groups really would differ, and in biological, heritable ways.

Well, as per your previous comment, it's complicated. Race is an arbitrary categorization in some ways and not others. The fact that many cultures treat it as important is pretty arbitrary; people could perfectly well ignore it if they wanted, and they'd probably all be better off if they did. But biological race has some properties that make it work differently from those other characteristics. It's different from nose size and hair and eye color in that it correlates with nearly all your genes rather than only a few. Also, if we categorized people by hair color or nose size then the categories themselves would be an invention rather than a discovery about preexisting nature; a math formula wouldn't be able to rediscover them. So biological racial categories aren't arbitrary the way nose size categories would be, even if they're arbitrary in the sense that we don't have to care about them.

But there is another sense in which races aren't arbitrary, which is that there's a biological reason most of us care about them. A race is a big somewhat inbred family; when a calculation of genetic distance and tree structure discovers one, it's measuring relatedness. For example, the average European is the Mth cousin of the average other European and the Nth cousin of the average East Asian, and M < N. And relatedness is something the human brain evolved to notice. There's a big chunk of our brain that's a hardwired face recognizer. It's so good at its job that it won't just tell you "Oh, you saw this guy before"; even if you've never seen this guy your face recognizer is liable to activate if you've seen his brother. And that makes good evolutionary sense -- in caveman times if somebody was your enemy it meant there was an elevated risk that his brother was your enemy too. Relatedness predicts a whole host of traits, and a whole host of traits are collectively a better predictor of an unknown trait than any one trait is. So if person A has property P, but you don't know whether person B does, person B being a relative of person A is usually a better predictor of whether person B also has property P than person B having a big nose or blue eyes is. So we're preprogrammed to care about relatedness. Caring what race somebody is is just what's predictably going to happen when cavemen are naturally selected to care whether a stranger is from the tribe of 150 people on this side of the river or from the subtly different-looking tribe of 150 people on that side of the river, and then those cavemen's children invent sailing ships and start seeing people from the other side of the world. We've entered a new environment where dialing down that instinct to care about family connections would probably serve us better than it would have served us in our ancestors' environment, but that's going to take some work.

 

[ruby sparks]

But biological race has some properties that make it work differently from those other characteristics. It's different from nose size and hair and eye color in that it correlates with nearly all your genes rather than only a few.

This is where I am out of my depth. I did not in fact know this was the case. I had read, for example, that there is greater (genetic) variation within 'race' groups than between them?

But there is another sense in which races aren't arbitrary, which is that there's a biological reason most of us care about them. A race is a big somewhat inbred family; when a calculation of genetic distance and tree structure discovers one, it's measuring relatedness. For example, the average European is the Mth cousin of the average other European and the Nth cousin of the average East Asian, and M < N. And relatedness is something the human brain evolved to notice. There's a big chunk of our brain that's a hardwired face recognizer. It's so good at its job that it won't just tell you "Oh, you saw this guy before"; even if you've never seen this guy your face recognizer is liable to activate if you've seen his brother. And that makes good evolutionary sense -- in caveman times if somebody was your enemy it meant there was an elevated risk that his brother was your enemy too. Relatedness predicts a whole host of traits, and a whole host of traits are collectively a better predictor of an unknown trait than any one trait is. So if person A has property P, but you don't know whether person B does, person B being a relative of person A is usually a better predictor of whether person B also has property P than person B having a big nose or blue eyes is. So we're preprogrammed to care about relatedness. Caring what race somebody is is just what's predictably going to happen when cavemen are naturally selected to care whether a stranger is from the tribe of 150 people on this side of the river or from the subtly different-looking tribe of 150 people on that side of the river, and then those cavemen's children invent sailing ships and start seeing people from the other side of the world. We've entered a new environment where dialing down that instinct to care about family connections would probably serve us better than it would have served us in our ancestors' environment, but that's going to take some work.

Yeah. Arbitrary wasn't a good choice of word for me to use.

 

[Politesse]

This is where I am out of my depth. I did not in fact know this was the case. I had read, for example, that there is greater (genetic) variation within 'race' groups than between them?

A fact first demonstrated by the very study that Bomb#20 is claiming supports his nonsense, interestingly enough.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

You can see the problem in that case but you refuse the consider that it applies in other cases also.

So, explain the connection between racism and poverty.

Historically blacks were held back and they developed cultural attitudes that perpetuate that. The ones without the problematic attitudes do fine.

 

[Politesse]

You can see the problem in that case but you refuse the consider that it applies in other cases also.

So, explain the connection between racism and poverty.

Historically blacks were held back and they developed cultural attitudes that perpetuate that. The ones without the problematic attitudes do fine.

See? You can't do it without falling into racist statements yourself.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Historically blacks were held back and they developed cultural attitudes that perpetuate that. The ones without the problematic attitudes do fine.

See? You can't do it without falling into racist statements yourself.

You consider reality racist.

 

[Politesse]

Historically blacks were held back and they developed cultural attitudes that perpetuate that. The ones without the problematic attitudes do fine.

See? You can't do it without falling into racist statements yourself.

You consider reality racist.

No, I consider baseless pejorative generalizations about racialized social classes racist. There is no extra-social existence of race in reality. Keep up with the bus.