[ExI] Race Biology

[Damien Broderick]

At 10:04 PM 3/20/2008 -0700, Lee wrote:
> > [Stuart:]
> >> Race is almost entirely cultural so it is more the
> >> purview of anthropologists, ethnographers, and
> >> other social scientists rather than of biologists.
> >>
> >>### Race is not in the least determined by culture. It is a property
> >>related to common descent.
> >
> > Oh, the innocence.
>
>Damien, they're discussing the *scientific*, oops, *biological* concept.

Oh, the innocence.

*They* were discussing the biological concept, Lee? Look at Stuart's 
sentence you just quoted:

"Race is almost entirely cultural... the purview of... social 
scientists rather than of biologists."

What Stuart and Rafal were disagreeing about was precisely the 
salience of the biological in the ideological construct called 
"race". Yes, of course it's an element; skin color and hair type is 
biological--but the *use* to which those markers are put has for 
hundreds or thousands of years been cultural.

Two hundred years ago, nobody was looking at major histocompatibility 
complexes when Europeans kidnapped Africans and enslaved them, or 
despised Asians as "lesser breeds without the law", or were despised 
in their turn. While that kind of (mis)use is made of characters 
irrelevant *except* for their value as politically-opportune 
identifiers for exclusion, exploitation, hatred or mistrust, it's 
absurd to act as if "race" is nothing but a biological concept of 
descent--"not in the least determined by culture."

Damien Broderick