Transcript September 14: Creating the Other

Creating the Other
• Why is it so important
to people that they
distinguish
themselves from
others?
The Social Importance of the
Group
• Familiarity
• Important Learning
Environment
• Support
• Defense
The Social Importance of the
Group
• Enjoyment of
privilege, status,
power
By what means are these
distinctions made?
1. Differences in:
• Rules governing behavior “manners”
• Language and Speech
• Ethnicity
• Religion
• Education
• Wealth
• and many other ways
By what means are these
distinctions made?
2. Gender
(social repesentation
of sex, distinct from
23rd chromosome)
By what means are these
distinctions made?
3. Race (based on phenotype)
Origins of race-based distinctions are:
• Political domination (be careful: slavery has a
long history unconnected with skin color
distinctions)
• Religious Explanations (the late medieval
Great Chain of Being)
• Colonialism (a comforting tale about how
indigenous peoples had to be saved from
eternal backwardness by the civilizing hand of
the conqueror)
Race and Intelligence
• the IQ debates get a lot of media attention,
but actually differences are correlated with
poverty and with educational opportunities,
not “race.”
• The WW I-era Army Alpha Test
http://www.holah.karoo.net/gouldstudy.htm
• Results correlate with per-capita spending
on education by states
What explains phenotypic variation
in populations?
• Selection:
evolutionary response
to environmental
variations
• Variation: mutation,
gene drift
Genetic Traits
• Most are clinal (expressed geographically,
as isobars of % of population with a trait)
• Most are non-concordant (height does not
predict skin or eye color or shoe size)
• Traits chosen to distinguish “race” are
arbitrary (Diamond’s article in PB about
resistance, digestion, fingerprints etc)
• Traits chosen to distinguish “race” are
visual (phenotype) for quick recognition
Lewontin’s Findings
His statistical study of
blood groups found
that 94% of the
variation in blood
forms occurred within
perceived races,
while only 6% could
be explained by
variations among
perceived races
Self-Assignment of Race
Why is a social assignment accepted?
• Social and political advantages for those
considered ‘superior’
• Defense, Solidarity, etc (see Social
Importance of the Group)
• Prejudice
• Racist laws (such as miscegnation)
• Ignorance of the biological truth about
“race”
Ethnocentrism
• The belief that one's
own race or ethnic
group is superior to
those of other groups.
Cultural Relativism
• The principle that an individual human's beliefs
and activities, in general, make sense in terms of
his or her own culture.
• The philosopher Immanuel Kant argued that
experience of the world is mediated through the
mind, which forms perceptions through learned
behavior.
• “race” is a cultural, not a biological construction.
• A child can be taught not to “see” race.
Teach the Children