The PC movement has been asking us for decades now to pretend we can’t see what’s right in front our faces, essentially demanding something tantamount to self-lobotomization. Academics have been making arguments along this line that are ultimately specious because they deny what we can see with our own eyes.
It’s clearly obvious that there are specific differences in hair, facial structure, stature, etc. that run together in ensembles, are hereditary, and vary according to geographic area. For example, people of African origin have dark skin and afro hair virtually without exception, and they also tend to have Nubian noses. As another example, people from Japan, China, Korea, etc. have jet black hair (“black hair” from anywhere else is actually dark brown) and monolid eyes, and they tend to be shorter in stature than other races.
One popular argument for the nonexistence of race is that there is more genetic variation within various populations than there is between them, but this argument ignores the obvious fact that those genes that vary less within a population have consistent, overarching, prominent physical expressions as explained above.
Another popular argument seems to be that that in all of the human race, there’s only a 0.1% variation in genome, but this is irrelevant for a similar reason as the above argument: some genes make a bigger difference in outward expression than others, and obviously some of that 0.1% difference is responsible for differences in race we observe.
Another argument I’ve seen is that that there would have to be hundreds of different races due to slight variations across the globe, but obviously these variations can easily be grouped into a few enveloping categories as shown above. A seemingly related issue is the pervasiveness of mixed races due to globalization (i.e., its facilitation of interracial breeding), thus creating continua of persons between all the various races, but that doesn’t invalidate the concept of race any more than the fact that you can mix milk with water means there is no such thing as either milk or water.
Another argument I saw from PBS is that there’s supposedly no way to measure race. But this is necessarily only a limitation in scientific knowledge, because the physical features I mentioned above and others can obviously be scientifically measured (for example, you can measure darkness of skin with a simple photoresistor and consistent lighting), and these differences are clearly congenital, so the limitation in measuring them must be a limitation in our current understanding of gene expression.
So, all the popular arguments for the nonexistence of race are relatively transparent sophistry, apparently motivated by the fundamental reasoning that “racism is bad, and perception of race can lead to racism, therefore the perception of race is bad.” It’s no better than arguing that a doctor telling a morbidly obese person they need to diet and exercise is fatphobic.
This is not to argue that some races are better than others—that would be a purely subjective judgment; the point is to defend truth and the people who speak it against cultural absurdity. And that brings me to an even stronger point…physical traits are not the only kind of traits that vary by race. They include mental traits, such as—probably among other things—yes, intelligence.
Of course intelligence varies from individual to individual, and may even vary more in this way than between races, but on a statistical level there is a difference between races. It makes no sense that people would vary in so many physical ways between races for genetic reasons but not in any mental ways, since we know that genes influence intelligence and other mental traits just as they do physical traits; for example, this is why hamsters don’t have an intelligence level anywhere close to that of humans, as well as having other major evolutionary-psychological differences (race obviously being a much more minor branching of the evolutionary tree than hamsters are from humans, but a branching nonetheless).
And there are measurable differences in IQ between different races. People reason that these differences have to be purely cultural, but that’s merely out of fear of appearing racist or supporting eugenics or something. Studies have even shown differences in IQ between certain races after ruling out all possible differences in culture, economic class, etc., but I won’t go into detail about such studies because it’s delicate a topic even for me…that and I no longer have the reference. :P
But the argument that different races have different inherent intelligence levels or other psychological differences is always shut down before it even starts because of the associations with things like racism and eugenics, while in the meantime nature is under no obligation to be politically correct or otherwise to cater to our collective (nor our individual) fears and preferences.
I knew someone who believed that there’s no point in arguing that different races have different intelligent levels for its own sake when it can cause so much harm, as if it’s just to be edgy at best, but the point here is to stand up to those poor souls who dare think or speak the truth, those independent thinkers who aren’t blinded by social trends, and also to fight the popular absurdity of basing one’s episteme on what’s politically correct, or even more generally on what’s socially acceptable.
One thing worth pointing out is that IQ is an extreme “reduction” of the totality of what makes a person (or even an ethnicity or nationality) who they are, in that, culturally, way too much emphasis is placed on a single variable in proportion to all the aspects of one’s character. So, not only are people wrong to assume average inherent IQ is the same across all races, they’re wrong to place so much importance on IQ in the first place, the latter fact having directly led to the former.
