Racism

Racism is a term used in many different ways, not all of them generally agreed-upon. But most generally and probably least uncontroversially, we can say that racism the attitude or belief that one race is superior to another race, or to all other races. Racism is generally held to be constituted not just by an attitude or belief, however, but also, or instead, by behaviors such as prejudice or discrimination based on beliefs of racial superiority.

Some of the difficulty in providing one definition of racism has to do with difficulties in defining race. Another source of confusion is the different ways racism has operated in different times and in different countries. Many also distinguish between racism as an individual or personal attitude, and "structural" racism, meaning a set of institutions that promote racial inequality, regardless of the feelings or beliefs of specific individuals who participate in the system.

In the United States, most "structural racism" was directed against slaves from Africa and their descendents, and Native Americans. Consequently, some users of the term equate racism with prejudice or discrimination against a minority group constitute racism. While Africa was under colonial occupation, mostly by France and England, on the other hand, structural racism was practiced by a minority against a majority.

Oftentimes victims of racism respond by hating the race of the oppressors. Some people identify this form of "personal" racism as reverse racism. Others argue that since such hatred is not institutionalized (i.e. not structural), it is not racism as such.

A vernacular use of racism extends to any form of discrimination based on characteristics which may be classified as racial, including skin color, cultural heritage, and religion. This is also known as racial discrimination. Some people use the term Reverse racism to indicate racism against a majority by a minority. Although the term racism applies to either, it often carries the connotation of racism by the majority against the minority.

Racism is and has been official policy in many countries. In the 1970s Uganda expelled tens of thousands of ethnic Indians. Malaysia has discriminatory laws limiting access to university education for the ethnic Chinese. Russia launched anti-semitic pogroms against Jews in 1905 and after.

Some forms of government-sponsored racism are less overt. For example, many police jurisdictions of the United States practice racial profiling, where members of certain racial minorities are the targets of closer police scrutiny.

One specific kind of racism is anti-semitism, racism against Jews, which has been common in many countries in Europe, North America, and the Middle East. In the United States and elsewhere (notably Germany), white racists are behind a closely-watched white supremacy movement.

Research on Race and Intelligence

There is some evidence to support claim that people who identify themselves as "white" are more intelligent than those who identify themselves as "black" and "Hispanic" in the United States, and this fits a general pattern in which socially dominant groups tend to score higher in IQ tests than socially marginalized groups.

In U.S. in IQ tests, "black" people got significantly worse results (average 85) than "white" people (average 100), with "Hispanics" somewhere in between. Early studies were (properly) flat-out rejected, as they did not control for the relationship between IQ and one's education level and income. Since higher intelligence certainly is a product of better education and higher income, the lack of a correction for these factors limited the use of earlier studies. However, some later studies have attempted to make corrections for this; these make the measured IQ gap only slightly smaller; a significant gap does seem to exist. No significant IQ gap was found between "white", "Jewish" and "Asian" people.

These studies have received an extremely skeptical reception in the scientific community, partly because of methodological problems in studies in the early 20th century which purported to show large IQ deficits in Irish and southern European immigrants to the United States.

Much of the controversial research has been summarized, in great detail, in The Bell Curve, published in 1994 by Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray. It immediately attracted much media attention, and was denounced by some as thinly veiled racism. The authors were once publicly denounced as Nazis. http://www.lrainc.com/swtaboo/taboos/hum_diff.html In response to the debate, a public statement was circulated by 52 internationally known scholars was published in The Wall Street Journal, 12/3/94. http://www.lrainc.com/swtaboo/taboos/wsj_main.html which summarized the mainstream views on race and IQ.

Since then, many scientists have disputed the evidence presented in The Bell Curve, and have found what they see as serious methodological flaws. A critique the book can be found in the revised and expanded edition of The Mismeasure of Man, by Stephen Jay Gould (1996, W. W. Norton and Co.) (what are those flaws ?) In the first edition of that book, published in 1981, Gould made a number of critical points concerning many of the studies Herrnstein and Murray were to draw on. Gould's larger point is that most scientific studies of the relationship btween race and human behavior have been heavily biased by the assumption that human behavior is best explained by heredity. He criticizes studies of the relationship between race and intelligence on several grounds. One thing he points out is that much of the data used by scientists was falsified (for example, in the case of a famous study of the IQs of twins separated at birth). But most of his criticisms pertain to cases where the data seems to be legitimate. Most of his arguments have to do with the value of statistical correlations (the measure of the co-ocurrence of two different things). Most arguments around IQ center on the issue of correlation -- the very claim that the test measures an actual thing requires that the kinds of answers to various questions will correlate highly; the claim that this thing is inherited requires that the scores of respondents who are closely related will correlate significantly higher than results of those distnatly related.

First, he points out that correlation is not the same as cause. As he puts it, measures of the changes, over time, in "my age, the population of Mexico, the price of swiss cheese, my pet turtle's weight, and the average distance between galaxies" will have a high positive correlation -- but that does not mean that Steven Jay Gould's age goes up "because" the population of Mexico goes up. Second, and more specifically, a high positive correlation between parents' IQ and children's IQ can be taken as evidence that IQ is inherited -- OR that IQ is determined by social and environmental factors. Since the same data can be used to argue either side of the case, the data in and of itself is not useful.

Furthermore, Gould makes the subtle and often ignored point that even if it were demonstrated that the correlations in IQ within a group were completely determined by heredity, this tells you nothing about the causes in differences in IQ between unrelated groups or whether those differences can be changed by environment. One example that Gould brings up is height which is known to be highly inherited. Knowing that differences in height within a single group are due to heredity tells you nothing at all about why there are height differences between different groups.

A good example of the confusion of heritability is found in the statement of international scholars published in the Wall Street Journal (see web-link above): "If all environments were to become equal for everyone, heritability would rise to 100% because all remaining differences in IQ would necessarily be genetic in origin." This claim is at best misleading and at worst, false. First, it is very hard to conceive of a world in which everyone grows up on the exact same environment; the very fact that people are spatially and temporally dispersed means that no one can be in exactly the same environment (a simple example will illustrate how complex social environments are: a husband and wife may share a house, but they do not live in identical environments because each is married to a different person). Second, even if people grew up in exactly the same environment, not all differences would be genetic in origin. This is because embryonic development involves chance molecular events and random cellular movements that alter the effects of genes. Third, even as far as genetics is involved, heritability is not a measure of phenotypic differences between groups, but rather differnces between genotype and phenotype within a population. Even within a group, if all members of the group grow up in exactly the same environment, it does not mean that heritability is 100%. All Americans (or New Yorkers, or upper-class New Yorkers -- one may define the population in question as narrowly as one likes) may eat exactly the same food, but their adult height will still be a result of both genetics and nutrition. In short, heritability is almost never 100%, and heritability tells us nothing about genetic differences between groups. This is true for height, which has a high degree of heritability; it is all the more true for intelligence. This is true for other reasons besides ones involving "heritability," as Gould goes on to discuss.

His most profound criticism is his rejection of the very thing that IQ is meant to measure, "general inteleligence" (or "g"). IQ tests, he points out, ask many different kinds of questions. Responses to different kinds of questions tend to form clusters. In other words, different kinds of questions can be given different scores -- which suggests that an IQ test is really a combination of a number of different tests that test a number of different things. Proponents of IQ tests assume that there is such a thing as general intelligence, and analyze the data so as to produce one number, which they then claim is a measure of general intelligence. Gould argues that this one number (and therefore, the implication that there is a real thing called "general intelligence" that this number measures) is in fact an artifact of the statistical operations psychologists apply to the raw data. He argues that one can analyze the same data more effectively and end up with a number of different scores (but valid, meaning they measure something) rather than one score.

Finally, Gould points out that he is not opposed to the notion of "biological variability" which is the premise that heredity influences intelligence. He does criticize the notion of "biological determinism" which is the idea that genes determine destiny and there is nothing we can or should do about this.

Assuming that this gap in IQ (and SAT scores) is real, even when corrected for social and financial differences, it is not clear what the origins of this gap are. Part of this gap may well be genetic; there is no a priori reason to believe that every ethnic group or race as precisely the same genes in all areas of neural development; a small amount of random variation early on may have later crystallized into such differences at later times. Also there might have been smaller evolutionary presure towards greater intelligence in some environments. However, the possibility that any differences are genetic do not explain why minorities in some societies show similar deficits in IQ even where the they are genetically identical to the majority population (such as Catholics in Northern Ireland, or Burakumin in Japan).

The reader should therefore be cautioned not to assume that all difference are genetic in origin. Scientists have firmly established that most genetic variations in individuals are only a part of the picture of how an individual develops. The environment that a person is brought up in is equally imporant. Further, there are painful social factors involved, such as the high rate of drinking, smoking, and illicit drug use during pregnancy of inner-city teenagers. These activities are known to cause measurable mental damage to children born to parents engaging in such activities. Thus, as cities and states work to reduce the amount of smoking, alcoholism and illicit drug use, this may significantly reduce much or all of the IQ and SAT score gaps that are currently being measured. In this case, the gap would be a symptom of a wider social problem, and not a statement about race at all.

Also see collectivism, hate crime, civil rights movement, race, white supremacy, black supremacy, apartheid,

race riot, white trash

/racial and ethnic slurs--a discussion moved from "white trash"

/Talk

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Here is an earlier version of this article:

Racism is the political or ideological application of the concept of race, especially in terms of racial superiority.

A vernacular use of racism extends to any form of discrimination based on characteristics which may be classified as racial, including skin color, cultural heritage, and religion. This is also known as "racial discrimination". Some people use the term Reverse racism to indicate racism against a majority by a minority. Although the term racism applies to either, it often carries the connotation of racism by the majority against the minority.

Racism is and has been official policy in many countries. In the 1970s Uganda expelled tens of thousands of ethnic Indians. Malaysia has discriminatory laws limiting access to university education for the ethnic Chinese. Russia launched anti-semitic pogroms against Jews in 1905 and after.

Some forms of government sponsored racism are less overt. For example, many police jurisdictions of the United States practice racial profiling, where members of certain racial minorities are the targets of closer police scrutiny.

One specific kind of racism is anti-semitism, racism against Jews, which has been common in many countries in Europe, North America, and the Middle East. In the United States and elsewhere (notably Germany), white racists are behind a closely-watched white supremacy movement.

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Here is yet an earlier version:

Racism is the belief, or more often the attitude, that one race is superior to another race or races--that is, that persons of a particular race are inherently superior to people of another race, or of all other races--because race determines important moral and personal character traits and capacities. Racists often believe that members of their own race are in need of protection from the allegedly inferior or superior race or races. Racism is sometimes seen as a type of xenophobia.

Closely related to racism is racial discrimination, which is discrimination based on racial grounds.

Racism is and has been official policy in many countries. In the 1970s Uganda expelled tens of thousands of Indians, merely because of their race. Malaysia has discriminatory laws limiting university access to the ethnic Chinese.

One specific kind of racism is anti-semitism, racism against Jews, which has been common in many countries in Europe, North America, and the Middle East. In the United States and elsewhere (notably Germany), white racists are behind a closely-watched white supremacy movement.

In 1994, a book called The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life, by Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray (New York: Free Press), created a huge controversy in the United States. (We're going to want to represent this controversy as fairly as possible...)

Also see collectivism, hate crime, civil rights movement, race, white supremacy, apartheid, race riot

/Talk