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Pretty Fly for a White-ified Guy

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Alan Goodman

Alan Goodman, former head of the American Anthropological Association when it struggled to persuade the public that race does not exist, weighs in:

The Problems with Nicholas Wade’s “A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race, and Human History: A Troublesome Racial Smog

by ALAN GOODMAN

Nicholas Wade’s book, A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race, and Human History, is what the title suggests: a troubling view of human history. A Troublesome Inheritance is troublesome, but not for the reason he proposes: his courageous telling of hard truths about genetic differences among races.

Rather, Wade’s lack of understanding of history, the social sciences, population genetics, and the scientific process is troublesome. Not getting the basics right leads to his linking of all manner of lived inequalities to genetic differences among races. His logical errors set the clock back more than a century on public understandings of human genetic variation.

Anti-immigration and White Supremacist websites are gobbling it up. The book will doubtlessly sell many copies. It will be harder to quantify the costs of its disinformation.mong races. His logical

errors set the clock back more than a century on public understandings of human genetic variation.

The fundamental errors of A Troublesome Inheritance are not even Wade’s geneticized and racialized speculations about wealth accumulation, governance, and cultural differences. Those are symptoms of faulty starting points and assumptions. These speculations follow from misunderstandings about most everything, including the idea of race, evolution and gene action, culture and institutions, and most fundamentally, the scientific process.

Ten years ago, Joel Achenbach wrote in the Washington Post:

Taking Off the Color Blinders
Geneticists and Historians Grapple With the Gray Areas of Race

It will take a long time for people to grasp the illusory nature of race at the biological level, Goodman said. It’s like understanding that the Earth isn’t flat. It looks flat when you’re walking around, but if you go up high enough in an airplane you can see the curvature. Someday, he said, people will no longer be flat-Earthers about race. They will see with different eyes.

He identifies himself, incidentally, as a white person.

“Culturally I’m white-ified,” he said. “People see me as white. That has something to do with how I look, but it has nothing to do with biological variation.”

You gotta admit he’s pretty fly (for a white-ified guy).

 

9 Comments to "Pretty Fly for a White-ified Guy"

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  1. says:
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    The “smog” of race.

    What about the smokescreen of “Race Doesn’t Exist!” — which somehow is to explain away any possibility that peoples with no common ancestor for thousands of years might just vary a little biologically inside their skulls.

    Will someone please explain to me why this isn’t so or can’t be so? I’m a reasonable man and can be persuaded.

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  2. you can remove the copy/paste error:

    “mong races. His logical

    errors set the clock back more than a century on public understandings of human genetic variation.”

    PS: what, no Preview?

  3. You’ll all enjoy this one. Especially the anti-Semites. ;)

    Yankovic is a Slav, BTW.

  4. “Culturally I’m white-ified,” he said. “People see me as white. That has something to do with how I look, but it has nothing to do with biological variation.”

    reminds me of one of Colbert’s best shticks (and an example of how he can mock liberals, too):

    “I don’t see race … People tell me I’m white, and I believe them, because [X]”

    where “because [X]” can be:

    …because police officers call me “sir”
    …because I own a lot of Jimmy Buffett albums
    …because I have my own late night talk show
    …because I can’t say the “N” word
    …because I think Barack Obama is black
    …because I shop at Eddie Bauer
    …because I belong to an all-white country club
    …because I just spent the last six minutes explaining how I’m not a racist. And that is about the whitest thing you can do
    …because I like Mitt Romney
    …because I think “the Chronic” refers to lower back pain
    …because I correctly pronounce the word “ask”
    …because I look both ways before talking about race

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Colbert_(character)#cite_ref-82

    http://www.quora.com/The-Colbert-Report/What-is-your-favorite-I-dont-see-race-People-tell-me-Im-white-and-I-believe-them-because-line

    So Alan Goodman’s version might be:

    “People tell me I’m white, and I believe them, because of how I look. (But it has nothing to do with biological variation.)”

    Hilarious.

  5. We are supposed to believe that there are inherent substantive differences between races that justify affirmative discrimination — “celebrate diversity!”.

    But we are not allowed to investigate the potential racial differences that ‘diversity’ posits because not all the differences would be flattering to minorities, and acknowledging actual differences conflicts with ‘unequal outcome’ complaints.

    So everyone should please staunch their curiosity about actual differences and restrict their comments to bland affirmations of the je ne se quoi benefits of diversity.

  6. Professor Goodman tells us that Nicolas Wade doesn’t understand history, social science, population genetics or the process of science in general. On wonders if Mr. Wade can manage to tie his shoes by himself.

    I looked Goodman up in Wikipedia – he is eminent. Not so eminent perhaps as Nicolas Wade but he has indeed made his mark. He is the author of website on race that has as a theme – we are all the same and/or race is an illusion. In that piece he refers to Jon Entine’s book ‘Taboo’ as controversial. He then tries to disabuse the public about racial differences in athletic accomplishment. He is only partly successful. He argues forcefully against the idea that blacks are good athletes but he has to hedge his position because so many people are familiar with the actual sports statistics.

    Goodman is one of those modern intellectuals like Derrida or Foucault who luxuriates in obfuscation. Every one over the age of three can distinguish the various races. But Professor Goodman tells us that they are unreal. We are being deceived. We see things that aren’t there. Only he and a few others have reliable eyesight.

    He uses the analogy of belief that the earth is flat. Goodman who has told us that he knows correct history while Wade doesn’t – seems to be a little foggy on this issue. In fact educated people have known that the earth wasn’t flat for a long, long time. Eratosthenes estimated the circumference of the earth in the third century BC. History only started with Herodotus a couple centuries earlier. So accurate knowledge of the earth’s shape has been around almost as long as history.

    Common people who never went to school might have believed that the world was flat , but educated people have always known the world is round. Just as everyone has always known that there are different races. They have known that since before Eratosthenes. But now Goodman has discovered that it’s all been a mistake – an illusion.

    Professor Goodman in any other walk of life except academia would be seen as a crank. He holds preposterous opinions that are out of step with common sense.

    Pat Boyle

  7. When asked for further clarification, Dr Goodman was unavailable for comment as he was recovering from a simultaneous bout of malaria, sickle-cell anemia, lactose intolerance and Tay-Sachs disease.

  8. Just say no to anthropologists. To most of them anyways.

    Augustin Fuentes was featured in a MOOC on human evolution that I took a few months ago.
    The guy seemed pretty competent when talking about the diversity of miocene apes.
    He did seem a good representative of that school of anthropology that is allergic to systematization, lumping and induction. People like that seem to want nature to make as little sense as possible because it’s more marvelous like that or something.

  9. In a sense I agree. Any thug from the hood could do his job as well as him.

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