Steele on White Guilt

Well I’m on the ground in Aspen now at the Atlantic Ideas Festival that Just Happens to be Taking Place in Aspen (it’s been renamed...) and it’s really beautiful though I kind of wish there was more oxygen in the air. But they didn’t bring me out here just to enjoy the view, I’m supposed to write about the ideas in play at the festival. So here goes.

Shelby Steele offered some interesting thoughts on the subject of “white guilt” observing that in post-white supremacist America it can be very damaging to a person or institution’s reputation to be labeled as a racist. Consequently, people and institutions put a lot of emphasis on avoiding having that happen. This, according to Steele, often crowds out pragmatic consideration of issues like “is this actually helping people.” He gives vintage AFDC and affirmative action as practiced at most institutions of higher education as examples -- practices aimed at shoring up the legitimacy of elite institutions rather than aimed at actually solving problems of poverty and structural inequities in education.

That all seemed pretty plausible to me, actually. Then I thought he went awry by alleging that we’ve been overly “sensitive” in our conduct of war recently for reasons of white guilt and that this is why we’re bogged down in Iraq -- too much focus on the legitimacy of our efforts, and not enough focus on “winning.” I think this mostly shows that Steele has a lot more background in social policy than in military policy. I’d say, as the counterinsurgency manual says that legitimacy is absolutely vital in a modern war-fighting situation.

Comments

Steele seems to be making a plausible argument to you? Why, for Christ's sake? He seems merely to be pulling out a dull, Rush-ish idea - use the term "elite" in a discrediting way - to advocate policies that will further freeze up social mobility in the U.S., advantaging the ever populist set of the richest - who, of course, are composed exclusively of people "you'd want to have a beer with." Oh, not more of this intolerable drivel!

It is distressing that you'd fall for this message. Obviously, you need to drain the inner Broder from your bloodstream to the last drop. Look at the tv talking heads, and resolve not to be like them - envision yourself, in a fat suit, thirty years from now, spouting lines that sound like Morton Kondrake. Do you really want that to happen to you? Do you want that life? So sad...

Posted by roger | June 30, 2008 8:26 PM

I think Steele suffers from 1960-1970's PTSD. As a young AA I see the racial issue from a different perspective. I know there are still "racial" problems but growing up in a school where there were people from all over the world and serving in the worlds finest Navy just recently I can tell you race is not the issue. People want healthcare, a good economy and a place to live. I think Mr. Steele is trying undermine Obama the candidate and his voters in a subtle way by just saying that people are voting for him out of "white" guilt. It is sad that some just can't acknowledge that the Dems just have a better candidate and platform. I see people of all kinds voting for Obama because he is just a better candidate.
Btw, there is only one race. The human race. Race is a silly, outdated and nonscientific social construct.

Posted by Ann | June 30, 2008 8:29 PM

" . . .affirmative action as practiced at most institutions of higher education as examples -- practices aimed at shoring up the legitimacy of elite institutions rather than aimed at actually solving problems of poverty and structural inequities in education."

WTF?

Affirmative action in higher education is not, nor was it ever intended to solve "problems of poverty and structural inequities in education." Affirmative action and higher education was intended to solve the problem of access for people who have the ability but don't possess the elite connectedness.

The problems of poverty can be addressed with jobs and job training. The problems of structural inequities in education can only be addressed by changing the balance between local and state control of primary education.

Please stop repeating the Republican talking points, Matt. It doesn't become you.

Posted by Joel | June 30, 2008 8:35 PM

I expect Steele to absolutely lose his mind if Obama wins. His whole schtick is all about what blacks need to do to win white approval....and Barrack Obama didn't do any of that bullshit and a non-insignificant number of Republicans will vote for him this year. Not only will Steele be absolutely without a job, he'll have watched someone win white approval and a presidency after he pissed his life away kissing ass and never came close.

Posted by Ed Marshall | June 30, 2008 8:36 PM

Everytime I read daily campaign news, I'm amused by the irony that McCain is the real "bound man" of this campaign --- bound by his need to please both the right wing of his party as well as appeal to independents.

Obama voters, on the other hand, are working for the same thing, rather than at cross-purposes.

Posted by goethean | June 30, 2008 8:43 PM

"though I kind of wish there was more oxygen in the air"

Suck it up, Matt. Some of us always get that amount of oxygen. Although we have more corpuscles in our blood. You won't be there long enough for that.

One piece of advice: for every pint of beer you drink, drink at least one of water. It'll help you cope with altitude sickness. Or, if you instead want to experience the worst headache of your life, drink lots of whiskey and go jogging.

Posted by fostert | June 30, 2008 8:47 PM

Btw, there is only one race. The human race. Race is a silly, outdated and nonscientific social construct.

No, there's only one human species (at the moment, as far as we know). But there are multiple human races, and race is certainly a coherent scientific classification.

Posted by Mixner | June 30, 2008 8:48 PM

Yes, we should have lynched more of those uppity Iraqis.

That would have shown them.

Shelby Steele has lost his mind over the years. He was a somwhat provacative thinker twenty years ago. Now he's a fucking minstrel show.

Posted by Sir Charles | June 30, 2008 8:49 PM

Affirmative action in higher education is not, nor was it ever intended to solve "problems of poverty and structural inequities in education." Affirmative action and higher education was intended to solve the problem of access for people who have the ability but don't possess the elite connectedness.

I have no idea what affirmative action in higher education was meant to do. I have my theories, but I can't read people's minds, and the stated rationales changed (originally it was supposed to be about compensation for years of oppression; later it changed to diversity).

But what I do know is that the effect of affirmative action in elite institutions is, for the most part, to allow middle class and wealthy members of minority groups in, without doing anything about the disparities in education that really screw over the poor. Because this is the program's effect, I can certainly see where Shelby Steele might be coming from in saying that it is more about assuaging white guilt and assuring that institutions don't get called racist than it is about addressing the oppression of minorities.

Posted by Dilan Esper | June 30, 2008 8:49 PM

Atlantic Ideas Festival that Just Happens to be Taking Place in Aspen (it’s been renamed...)

The "Ideas Are Insufficiently Attractive Of Themselves To Be Discussed In Sub-Aspen Locales Festival."

Posted by Delicious Pundit | June 30, 2008 8:50 PM

Yes, we should have lynched more of those uppity Iraqis.

That would have shown them.

Shelby Steele has lost his mind over the years. He was a somwhat provocative thinker twenty years ago. Now he's a fucking minstrel show.

Posted by Sir Charles | June 30, 2008 8:50 PM

When is Shelby Steele going to say something new? He has been peddling the same notion for twenty years.

Posted by Miande | June 30, 2008 9:04 PM

Steele seems to be making a plausible argument to you? Why, for Christ's sake?

Because Matt Yglesias is a moderate conservative white guy who made his reputation by positioning himself as a liberal who attacks other liberals from the right, and "let's destroy affirmative action for the good of liberalism" has always been a popular rallying cry among those types.

Posted by strasmangelo jones | June 30, 2008 9:08 PM

The moralistic Democracy Now argument for the Iraq War leaned heavily on anti-racism and its corollary, anti-nationalism. If the post-9/11 nationalistic fervor had been forced to honestly articulate national revenge as a reason for an anti-Arab war we wouldn't have jammed our asses so enthusiastically into a bear trap.

Posted by turkey | June 30, 2008 9:10 PM

That all seemed pretty plausible to me, actually. Then I thought he went awry by alleging that we’ve been overly “sensitive” in our conduct of war...

No, that was the moment that you snapped back to reality and realized that you had been listening to a raving conservative nutjob. It should have prompted you to reconsider the logic of everything Steele said up to then.

And to stasmangelo, you are liberal nutjob with poor reading comprehension. Nowhere did Matt say he wanted to destroy affirmative action. He simply entertained a sly conservative argument that pointed out a truth he agreed with (affirmative action does not do enough for minorities and often plays to the vanities of elites) without critically considering the motives of the proponent of that argument (Steele thinks we should abolish race-based affirmative action but does not want to replace it with any new policies to help minorities and other non-elites).

Posted by Philly | June 30, 2008 9:20 PM

Troll Mixner: "there's only one human species (at the moment, as far as we know)."

Don't count on that. The genetic variance between humans is greater than the variance between humans and chimps.

"But there are multiple human races, and race is certainly a coherent scientific classification."

Wrong. "Race" is a valid conceptual abstraction for certain purposes, but not a valid scientific classification. Genetic variation is a smooth curve and where you divide the lines is strictly optional based on your purpose.

To quote the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

The concept of race[1] signifies the grouping of individual humans by some set of perceived physical characteristics, often called “phenotypes,” which are thought to be inherited through some blood-borne factor. Which specific set of perceived, shared physical characteristics constitute a race varies historically, geographically, socially, and politically. Indeed, there is no biological or genetic foundation for the grouping of individual humans into a racial group. Instead, humans themselves choose (consciously or unconsciously) which physical characteristics constitute a racial group. Consequently, racial groups are presently thought to be social constructions, or a category created not by biological nature but by human invention. However, from its origins in the early modern era until the twentieth century, race was not considered a social construction but a real, biological distinction transmitted from one generation to the next. Thus, racial identity was thought to be something fixed and imposed genetically.

And to quote from the Wikipedia page on race:

The American Anthropological Association, drawing on biological research, currently holds that "The concept of race is a social and cultural construction... . Race simply cannot be tested or proven scientifically," and that, "It is clear that human populations are not unambiguous, clearly demarcated, biologically distinct groups. The concept of 'race' has no validity ... in the human species".

And don't bother doing your parsing bullshit with me, I don't fall for that crap like everyone else here.

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | June 30, 2008 9:38 PM

"Mr. Steele is trying undermine Obama the candidate and his voters in a subtle way by just saying that people are voting for him out of 'white' guilt."

White guilt is underrated as a force for good. At the same time it's an uncomfortable condition to live with. I'm glad I can get rid of some of mine and while voting for a good candidate for president.

Posted by Kyle | June 30, 2008 9:45 PM

Wrong. "Race" is a valid conceptual abstraction for certain purposes, but not a valid scientific classification. Genetic variation is a smooth curve and where you divide the lines is strictly optional based on your purpose.

Thank you! I was just about to feed a troll but you saved me the trouble. But here are some other sources to look at, each looking at that issue a different way: the Human Genome Project, which mentions race as part of the larger topic of DNA and human migration; the National Institutes of Health, which offers a teachers' guide for instructing students about human genetic variation, including race; the American Anthropological Association which issued a statement reflecting most, though not all, anthropologists' conclusions about the validity of races in our species; and the journal Nature Genetics, which discusses race and ethnicity as social categories and how they may influence human health.

Disparate sources, yes, but each echoes what you said. Just don't tell Andrew Sullivan that or he'll start whining about how this is all just liberal hogwash.

Posted by JDinBalt | June 30, 2008 9:51 PM

Steele has something of a point, but he wouldn't like the examples that support it, i.e. no way in hell would Clarence Thomas or Condi P.D.B Rice be where they are without "white guilt" in the Senate and the political media.

But the war? "Shock and Awe" is a politically correct phrasing of "Kill them all, God will know the innocent".

Posted by Jim | June 30, 2008 10:01 PM

RSH,

Wrong. "Race" is a valid conceptual abstraction for certain purposes, but not a valid scientific classification. Genetic variation is a smooth curve and where you divide the lines is strictly optional based on your purpose.

It's not wrong. You don't know what you're talking about. Races are not defined by quantities of genetic variation, but by combinations of particular types of genetic variation. Most obviously, those related to skin color, hair color and texture, and the shape of certain facial features. See this New York Times piece for a popular description of the phenomenon and this paper for a more technical one.

Anthropology is a social science. Philosophy isn't a science at all. The American Anthropological Association and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy are not qualified to comment on the genetic basis for racial classifications.

Posted by Mixner | June 30, 2008 10:02 PM

I seem to recall that we didn’t display much interest in “sensitivity” while bursting into thousands of Iraqi homes in the middle of the night, holding men, women, and children at gunpoint while screaming at them in a foreign language and often throwing the men into prison for months at a time on no individualized evidence of involvement in terrorism or the insurgency.

Then there’s our choice to decimate the public sector there and throw hundreds of thousands of Iraqis out of work during an already-difficult economic situation (itself exacerbated by the war), and to offer reconstruction contracts to western corporations to the exclusion of Iraqi firms. It appears that these economic policies weren’t particularly “sensitive” either.

These policies were plenty tough; they also failed dramatically, at the cost of many lives and much suffering.

It seems that many people enamored of vague notions of efficiency, merit, and rationality sometimes actually employ these ideas and related ideological constructs defensively, to ward off any acknowledgment of the reality of human interdependence—self-interest and humane policy considerations be damned.

Posted by jason | June 30, 2008 10:04 PM

JDinBalt,

You need to read your own sources more carefully. From your "Nature Genetics" link:

Well-intentioned statements over the past few years, some coming from geneticists, might lead one to believe there is no connection whatsoever between self-identified race or ethnicity and the frequency of particular genetic variants. Increasing scientific evidence, however, indicates that genetic variation can be used to make a reasonably accurate prediction of geographic origins of an individual, at least if that individual's grandparents all came from the same part of the world. As those ancestral origins in many cases have a correlation, albeit often imprecise, with self-identified race or ethnicity, it is not strictly true that race or ethnicity has no biological connection.

The "increasing scientific evidence" for the association between race, geography and genetics includes the study Leroi mentions in his Times piece:

a 2002 study by scientists at the University of Southern California and Stanford showed that if a sample of people from around the world are sorted by computer into five groups on the basis of genetic similarity, the groups that emerge are native to Europe, East Asia, Africa, America and Australasia - more or less the major races of traditional anthropology.

Posted by Mixner | June 30, 2008 10:14 PM

This is the most lackluster debate on the concept of race I've seen in years on any major blog.

Better trolls, please. Mixner, you should read this wikipedia article before making more uninformed comments.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_%28classification_of_human_beings%29

By the way, physical (biological) Anthropology is indeed a science; however the American Anthropological Association is dominated by non-scientific social anthropologists.

However, in a 1999 survey of physical anthropologists, about 70% agreed that race was not a useful construct. This is dispositive; these are people who do research on the genetics of populations, and who have never been especially concerned with political correctness.

Moreover, in the US population, concepts of race derived from clustering worldwide genetic data are even less useful, because our blacks, hispanics, whites, and native americans are so admixed.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miscegenation#Genetic_studies_of_racial_admixture

Posted by theo | June 30, 2008 10:46 PM

theo,

Better trolls, please.

Better liberals, please.

Mixner, you should read this wikipedia article before making more uninformed comments.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_%28classification_of_human_beings%29

What about it? If you think there is anything in that link, or the other one you gave, that refutes the facts and arguments in the material I cited, then state them clearly.

By the way, physical (biological) Anthropology is indeed a science; however the American Anthropological Association is dominated by non-scientific social anthropologists.

Social anthropology is a science, but it's a social science, not a natural one. The AAA has no particular expertise in genetics and is not qualified to comment on the scientific validity of race in that context. Or in the context of medicine, where race is also an important scientific classification.

Posted by Mixner | June 30, 2008 10:57 PM

theo,

Moreover, in the US population, concepts of race derived from clustering worldwide genetic data are even less useful, because our blacks, hispanics, whites, and native americans are so admixed.

It doesn't necessarily have to be "worldwide" genetic data to be meaningful and useful. From the New England Journal of Medicine paper The Importance of Race and Ethnic Background in Biomedical Research and Clinical Practice

There are racial and ethnic differences in the causes, expression, and prevalence of various diseases. The relative importance of bias, culture, socioeconomic status, access to care, and environmental and genetic influences on the development of disease is an empirical question that, in most cases, remains unanswered. Although there are potential social costs associated with linking race or ethnic background with genetics, we believe that these potential costs are outweighed by the benefits in terms of diagnosis and research. Ignoring racial and ethnic differences in medicine and biomedical research will not make them disappear. Rather than ignoring these differences, scientists should continue to use them as starting points for further research. Only by focusing attention on these issues can we hope to understand better the variations among racial and ethnic groups in the prevalence and severity of diseases and in responses to treatment. Such understanding provides the opportunity to develop strategies for the improvement of health outcomes for everyone.

Posted by Mixner | June 30, 2008 11:07 PM

Yes, we should had our troops behave like they did in Haditha and just slaughter thousands of Iraqis in stead of a couple of dozen and let God sort them out. That's winning isn't it for these authoritarian monsters. Shelby Steele, from his Hoover Institution biography (another bastion of Movement Conservativism)apparently fought the Vietnam war in the hollowed halls of the University. Another armchair general dispensing with the lives of other human beings as if they were just flies.

Sometimes, when I look around at what my country has become, I feel like I have woken up middle of the movie "V."

Posted by Rickstersherpa | June 30, 2008 11:09 PM

When I was last in India, I did an interesting experiment on race. I was traveling with a Tibetan friend of mine, and I'm as white as fresh snow (although my blond hair has darkened with age). We traveled to 18 of India's 28 states and I kept an account of which one of us looked more like the local population. Tibet is much closer to India than Europe is, but there's a huge natural barrier between them (Himalayas). So I thought the results might be close. They weren't. With the exception of Darjeeling (mostly Tibetans and Nepalese), I always looked a lot more like the locals than my friend. My friend always had the skin and hair of the locals. But I always had the facial features and body structure of the locals. In fact, I noticed that northern Indians basically look like Europeans, but with dark skin and dark hair. And many Europeans have that same dark hair. It's really only skin color that differentiates northern Indians from Europeans. Southern Indians have a slightly different look than Europeans (beyond the really dark skin), but they still look a lot more like me than my Tibetan friend. Linguistically, Northern Indians speak Indo-European languages (mostly Hindi) just like Europeans. In the south, they speak Dravidian languages that bear no relation to any European language. My Tibetan friend speaks many languages, but Tibetan is his first. That language also bears no relation to the Indo-European languages. What's interesting is that my Tibetan friend looks a lot like the people on the other side of the Himalayas, the Nepalese. Yet Nepali is an Indo-European language that's not too different from Hindi. So it seems the Himalayas weren't a barrier to genetic mixing, but they were a barrier to language. I guess that makes sense; I'll have sex with a women regardless of whether I can speak their language. I guess that's not really unusual.

Posted by fostert | June 30, 2008 11:12 PM

"Because Matt Yglesias is a moderate conservative white guy who made his reputation by positioning himself as a liberal who attacks other liberals from the right"

No, I don't think that is true. MY is a smart young guy. Unfortunately, during the last twenty some years, the older tradition of American contrarianism - suspicious of middle class verities, tinged with Marxism - was replaced by the new contrarianism, which matched the way the DC commentariat boys in their early thirties in the early 80s negotiated their radical youths and their increasingly pleasing bank accounts: clothe reactionary political views in liberal rhetoric. Hence, the use of elite - as in Mills Power Elite - to mean any move by the East coast establishment to do what they did in the New Deal and the early cold war period - use the state to advance a selected group of people. The target, then, was white men - but as the white men prospered, they became very morally indignant about using the same tools to help, say, blacks or women. The old contrarianism of Galbraith, or, say, Murray Kempton, gave way to the cleverness of Michael Kinsley and then to his many love children at Slate, from William "The kkk is right" Saletan to Mickey Kaus.

The war in Iraq has isolated those dudes. They were so spectacularly, idiotically wrong there that they lost an audience of the young and the Ivied. They will have to be content with James Kirchick and Peter Beinart as the bearers of the contrarian tradition into the future. Horrible as that thought is.

Posted by roger | June 30, 2008 11:34 PM

I know it will not diminish the lust for combat on the part of our race-yes/race-no friends but it seems that the rest of us might ponder this: both Shelby Steele and Barack Obama had mothers who were caucasian.

Posted by JohnMcC | June 30, 2008 11:45 PM

"Anthropology is a social science. . . . The American Anthropological Association . . . [is] not qualified to comment on the genetic basis for racial classifications."

---

"Founded in 1902, the American Anthropological Association (AAA) is the world’s largest professional organization of scholars and practitioners in the field of anthropology. With 11,000 members, the Arlington, Virginia-based association includes archaeologists, cultural anthropologists, biological (or physical) anthropologists, linguists and applied anthropologists" [wikipedia]

"The "increasing scientific evidence" for the association between race, geography and genetics "

This is where it gets kinda tricky. It doesn't seem immediately unreasonable - and there does seem to be some provisional support, if you sort the data the right way - that the human family has several major branches forged - as with individual wide-ranging families - by history, distance, and time, albeit with blurring, side branches, etc. However, the overlap between this bare idea and the ideas teeming under the historical concepts of "race" isn't all that large. It makes the term kinda problematical.

Indeed, in - for example - the more recent 2005 Stanford study, the evidence for 'race' is that people from a number of locations in the U.S. and Taiwan who self-identify the same racial classification from a short list (white, African-American, East Asian or Hispanic; rarely reporting recent mixed ancestry - that is, very few Barack Obamas or for that matter Shelby Steeles) will almost always cluster together in regard to specific patterns of variation re: a specific set of 326 genetic signpost regions whose total significance seems to be that they tend to vary between people. Besides being a somewhat odd result - what does this mean in terms of people identifying as Hispanic, given that quite a few of them, if traced back beyond the last few cm of the human history timeline, end up splitting off into two or three continents? - this simply isn't what's being talked about in many usages of the word 'race' (although it would be relevant to a certain very specific, '90s-era argument within academia).

Anyway, this issue isn't relevant to Steele's rightwhinging about race and welfare and AA, which is just as meaningful (or -less) whether race is a biological reality, a sociocultural construct, both, or whatever (and if Matt's suffering from oxygen deprivation, which does happen to cause cognitive difficulties including poor judgement, and could explain why Steele was seeming so plausible . . .)

" the effect of affirmative action in elite institutions is, for the most part, to allow middle class and wealthy members of minority groups in, without doing anything about the disparities in education that really screw over the poor. . . ., I can certainly see where Shelby Steele might be coming from in saying that it is more about assuaging white guilt and assuring that institutions don't get called racist than it is about addressing the oppression of minorities."

Well . . . so elite-institution AA allows middle class and wealthy minorities attend the same elite institutions as their middle class and wealthy white counterparts. That doesn't seem like an obviously bad thing. That this particular model of program is not radical enough to fix broader inequities that both intertwine with and go beyond race - well, true, but perhaps that has something to do with the reality that much of recent history, rather than building on previous (and certainly incomplete) accomplishments, has been wasted in exhausting rearguard struggles to prevent the rollback and dismantling of long-ago victories, in constant refighting of old battles desperately trying to preserve ever-more-modest measures of progress, and all thanks almost entirely to Steele's buddies. It's certainly not wrong to point out that construction has been halting and quite limited, but when the folks complaining are the ones who keep sending thugs to disrupt the work, steal or break tools, sabotage whatever progress has been accomplished, and keep trying to grab the controls of the crane in order to repeatedly swing a wrecking ball at the building, well . . .

Posted by Dan S. | July 1, 2008 12:00 AM

The bottom line on race remains the same. Mixner is wrong. Race is strictly a conceptual abstraction of various genetic characteristics which by themselves or in combination do not constitute a fixed division of the human species.

Socially, of course, the concept remains viable. Racists "know" a person of that race which they oppose "when they see one".

Scientifically, there is no such thing as "race", however. There are only genetic characteristics which cluster and overlap to such a degree that it is impossible to clearly differentiate one group of humans from others.

Neither point is terribly relevant to how chimps conduct themselves, however - as Mixner demonstrates.

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | July 1, 2008 12:41 AM

"This is where it gets kinda tricky."

It sure does. Consider the Thai and skin color. They can be just as white as southern Europeans if the stay out of the sun. But four days in the sun makes them darker than most Africans (but with a reddish hue). So what color are they?

Posted by fostert | July 1, 2008 12:59 AM

Picking up on a suggestion of Dan S., I'm going to regard this post of Matt's as a very subtle and clever piece of snark, to the effect that someone like Steele will seem plausible only if you are suffering the cognitive effects of oxygen deprivation. Nice job, Matt!

Posted by live | July 1, 2008 1:00 AM

i just finished reading Steele's book A BOUND MAN, and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in either obama or the politics of race. you don't have to agree with his conclusions, and i don't for the most part, but it's an original and insightful book. Very fast read as well.

Posted by raft | July 1, 2008 1:15 AM

".. .both Shelby Steele and Barack Obama had mothers who were caucasian."

And therefore, scientifically they are of the "black" race.

I think I've seen this method before:

BEDEVERE:
Exactly. So, logically...
VILLAGER #1:
If... she... weighs... the same as a duck,... she's made of wood.
BEDEVERE:
And therefore?
VILLAGER #2:
A witch!
http://www.mwscomp.com/movies/grail/grail-05.htm

Posted by Mike Furlan | July 1, 2008 1:20 AM

To echo what a few people have said earlier, Shelby Steele was a guy who had interesting (if often wrong) things to say 20 years ago. Back then, you could disagree with him but at least he had an argument. These days, he's just become the black guy that tells white racists what they want to hear. He lends a faux authenticity to white supremacist rants. He has basically moved into "blacks are just stupid and have naturally low IQs" territory. He hasn't said anything relevant to the current condition in over a decade. Whenever I read or hear someone bring out his ideas as a form of ideological backing, I get very suspicious.

Posted by Reality Man | July 1, 2008 2:16 AM

I think of race as being a bit like nationality. If history were a bit different, maybe the people currently known as Spanish and the people currently known as Portuguese would be of the same nationality. Or maybe if history were a bit different, Kerala and Arunachal Pradesh would be parts of different nations. However, history is what it is, so Spanish and Portuguese aren't the same, and Kerala and Arunachal Pradesh are both Indian.

Similarly, if history were different, maybe we'd consider all non-blacks to be of the same race, and most races would be variation within Africa -- nilotics, bantus, etc. Or maybe we'd consider blond whites to be of a different race than brown-haired whites. (I remember writings of "Nordics," "Alpines," and "Mediterraneans")

However, while the meaning of race may be dependent on contingent historical events and social constructions, that doesn't make it somehow a meaningless concept. Even though the difference between Spanish and Portuguese is socially constructed and based on contingent historical events, it's sometimes useful to make the distinction between them.

Moreover, while where one draws the line as far as race goes is somewhat arbitrary, some line-drawings look rather gerrymandered compared to others. If you sliced the distinctions very thinly, you might come up with a way to say that Antawn Jamison, Oleksiy Pecherov, and Brendan Haywood are all of three different races. If you used broad racial groupings, you might claim they're all of one race. Or, to be more conventional, you might claim that Antawn Jamison and Brendan Haywood are of one race and Oleksiy Pecherov is of another. I don't think, though, that you can claim with any real plausibility that Jamison and Pecherov are of one race and that Haywood is of another, or that Haywood and Pecherov are of one race and that Jamison is of another.

Posted by Julian Elson | July 1, 2008 2:54 AM

This is where it gets kinda tricky. It doesn't seem immediately unreasonable - and there does seem to be some provisional support, if you sort the data the right way - that the human family has several major branches forged - as with individual wide-ranging families - by history, distance, and time, albeit with blurring, side branches, etc. However, the overlap between this bare idea and the ideas teeming under the historical concepts of "race" isn't all that large. It makes the term kinda problematical.

The boundaries of racial groups are certainly fuzzy. That obviously doesn't mean the classification is meaningless or useless--as the growing importance of race in biomedical research and clinical medicine makes clear. Many important biological classifications are fuzzy--kin, gender, illess or disability, even species. In fact, since racial groups are essentially defined by the degree of shared ancestry, races can be thought of as very extended families within a species, reproductively isolated from one another for thousands or tens of thousands of years.

Race is of course also a fuzzy and problematic concept when used in social policy. How should one define racial groups for the purpose of racial preferences? Again, just because the boundaries are fuzzy doesn't mean the concept has no meaning. If it did, there would be no basis for race-based affirmative action, or claims of racial discrimination.

Posted by Mixner | July 1, 2008 3:39 AM

"Moreover, while where one draws the line as far as race goes is somewhat arbitrary. . ."

"One day in the Old Dominion, long after the fighting had ceased, a
young white girl paid a visit to John, an ex-slave who before the war
had been her favorite and now was a free man working his own plot of
ground, rightfully proud of his labor and freedom. She wanted to know
if he ever missed the "good old days" of slavery and the plantation
past. A long uncomfortable pause ensued before John responded not only
for himself but for every former slave: "Miss, there's such a thing as
feelings.'"

p. 154 Ervin L. Jordan, "Black Confederates and Afro-Yankees in Civil War Virginia"

Idle speculation about race in America, without any indication that one understands what was and is at stake, can make one seem to be unfeeling.

Race exists in our country to permanently label people with no regard to their personal attainment or the content of their soul.

It existed to justify the violent domination of a people for profit, or merely sadistic pleasure.

It was needed as an excuse to strip a people of their language, their culture, and even any right to a family.

And mainly it exists to dishonor people who differ from the majority in an arbitrary, but certainly not accidental basis.

Posted by Mike Furlan | July 1, 2008 3:44 AM

Reality Man,

[Shelby Steele] has basically moved into "blacks are just stupid and have naturally low IQs" territory.

If you aspire to ever be thought of as a morally and intellectually serious person, you really need to control that your urge of yours to say really, really dumb things.

Posted by Mixner | July 1, 2008 3:47 AM

"In fact, since racial groups are essentially defined by the degree of shared ancestry,"

Really?

So, Madison Hemings and Essie Mae Washington-Williams are "white" just like their daddies?

Rather, in this country, racial groups have been defined to obscure as much as possible the degree of shared ancestry.

Posted by Mike Furlan | July 1, 2008 4:00 AM

"If you aspire to ever be thought of as a morally and intellectually serious person, you really need to control that your urge of yours to say really, really dumb things.

Posted by Mixner | July 1, 2008 3:47 AM"

Coming from you, especially how you got smacked around like a little bitch in the Lieberman thread, that is just rich, anonymous internet commenter. You simply have never said anything to make me value your opinion enough to take critiques from you seriously. Look up an article Steele wrote for IIRC Harper's towards the beginning of this decade and tell me that he isn't veering off into that territory.

Posted by Reality Man | July 1, 2008 4:02 AM

Re-reading the above comment, I probably didn't make it clear that I meant that Steele has been basically moving into making the argument that black people have lower IQs and are naturally stupider (and thus lending credence to white supremacists), not that he is himself evidence as such. If anyone thought that I meant the latter, I apologize for wording it poorly and apologize for insulting Mixner in the resultant confusion for I didn't see how my lack of clarity could make it easy I was saying something very different.

Posted by Reality Man | July 1, 2008 4:06 AM

Steele has consistently been someone worth paying attention to, and Matt shows good instincts in accepting his plausibility.

This goes for his second point as much as his first. One can make a pretty good case that the administration put far too much emphasis on appearances in Iraq and not nearly enough on, in Steele's words, "...actually helping people". Trying to foist off a group of exiles, and "supervising" the operation with a bunch of FEMA-like College Republican hacks was a bad fit with General Sanchez using our best combat troops to roust Iraqis in the middle of the night on gun control exercises.

We all would be much better off if the CIA and Pentagon had been tasked with establishing contact with credible alternative leadership among Iraqis living in Iraq and enabling the kind of transition to legitimate Iraqi government now underway.

Posted by robert powell | July 1, 2008 4:43 AM

Juan Cole seems to support an Iraqi premature death toll of about one million from our efforts there. What would the toll be if we put more emphasis on "winning", as he suggests?

Steele is on record as saying Obama cannot win; presumably events will further confirm his foolishness.

Posted by bob h | July 1, 2008 6:10 AM

" That obviously doesn't mean the classification is meaningless or useless--as the growing importance of race in biomedical research and clinical medicine makes clear. "

Oh, I agree - at the very least, that's what recent research seems to be saying. I just think that [emerging concepts of major human population groups] and [traditional folk concepts of 'race'] are different enough that using one for the other is almost a mistranslation. It's a little like the question of whether the modern young earth creationist concept of baramin, created kind, is most akin to species, or genus, or family, or order, or etc.. . . they're superficially similar, and playing off some of the same facts-in-the-world, but ultimately just not really interchangeable.

Posted by Dan S. | July 1, 2008 7:16 AM

The Human Genome Project and new medical insights may redefine race from the old 18th Century "5 races only" concept to a few more in Africa and certain "protoraces" existing in small genetic islands outside Africa where a small band of East Africans leaving Africa multiplied & diversified into the rest of humanity.

As things stand though, the 5 race concept is a very good tool for doctors prescribing drugs, tracking childhood development progress (at different levels for each race), and the various bell curves that show races have physical, mental and behavioral differences. That there IS a bell curve overlap between races and "fuzziness" from race mixing as geographical separation has diminished doesn't diminish the usefulness of race as a tool for both good and bad decisions and policy.

The strident position of certain critical studies people and hard Leftists and 3rd Worlder dogmatists that there is no such thing as a scientific basis of race, no real differences, and anyone who says differently are fighting a losing battle against evidence. Most importantly, it is genetics that is sealing the case for race. The discussion has moved past the obvious disparities in performance always explained away by "lack of good schools, legacy of past racism,", "no swimming pools in the 'hood", and "white and Asian lack of roads and sneakers meaning they never had a fair shot to become great sprinters and leapers like the Congoloid subrace".

Btw, there is only one race. The human race. Race is a silly, outdated and nonscientific social construct.
Posted by Ann

More and more, people that take that position and get angry and make accusations of blasphemy, racism, insensitivity to those confronting them with solid statistical evidence, medical and genetic studies, forensic manuals that instruct how to determine race with 99.9% accuracy from a piece of tissue or a skeleton - are marginalizing themselves as new Flat-Earthers.

One big problem the Left has is while rejecting race as a reality, they have enshrined race as determinative in identity politics and AA selection for school and job positions. Worse, they compounded it by using fake race designations devised by two leftist economists starting up the EEO within the Nixon Administration in the 60s, determining who they thought should get preferences as they drafted up EEO Form 1 for applicants for Gov't contracts

Thus were created "the Pacific Islanders", the "Native Americans that magically weren't if born south of the Mexican Border", the new concoction of Hispanics. There are people with mixtures of white, black, Mongoloid stock - as well as pure-blooded exemplars of each race now lumped as "Hispanic". At the same time, those Hispanics with citizenship from the Iberian penninsula are NOT Hispanics and entitled to preferences unless they or one parent were born in "Latin America or certain Caribbean Islands".

Native Americans are Mongoloid in origin. So are most Pacific Islanders, but for benny points, only certain islands and certain people qualify for "Pacific Islander" diversity. Filipinos are out of luck unless they are Negrito origin, Aleutian Islanders are Pacific Islanders, not NAs like their genetically identical Athabaskan cousins on the Alaskan Mainland.

Posted by chris ford | July 1, 2008 8:36 AM

The big reason there's been so little emphasis on "winning" is that Bush is rather loath to define what it is he imagines "winning" to be. "Winning" is, of course, [wink, wink] "staying".

So, we're "winning".

Posted by Jeffrey Davis | July 1, 2008 8:38 AM

Yes, there's nothing more convincing than the idea that the people who really suffer from issues of race are white people.

Consequently, I can't help but notice that discussions of affirmative action on this blog never really diverge from the subject of college admissions. Too many coloreds at Harvard, huh?

Posted by yeahyeah | July 1, 2008 9:08 AM

I am shocked to find myself in agreement with RSH on "race". Dan S. is spot-on at 7:16 am.

It's not that "all people are the same". Obviously, they're not. But anyone with a remotely scientific bent should know to be extremely skeptical of attempts to be dogmatic about categories here.

The one thing we know for sure is that outside of the Olduvai Gorge, there is no such thing as a "homeland". The most consistent characteristic of our species is that we move around and interbreed.

Posted by robert powell | July 1, 2008 9:12 AM

Being a non-white person, it really pains me to see so many whites around me consumed by guilt over the fact that their forefathers were such racists. I can almost see them crying whenever I look deep into their eyes. This overwhelming feeling has paralyzed them into a state of complete despair, so much so that they are unable to function in a normal everyday environment and to bomb the brownies of Iraq into the middle ages.

Posted by gregor | July 1, 2008 12:19 PM

He gives vintage AFDC and affirmative action as practiced at most institutions of higher education as examples

Wow, this really is cutting edge social commentary circa 1992.

No, I don't think that is true. MY is a smart young guy. Unfortunately, during the last twenty some years, the older tradition of American contrarianism - suspicious of middle class verities, tinged with Marxism - was replaced by the new contrarianism, which matched the way the DC commentariat boys in their early thirties in the early 80s negotiated their radical youths and their increasingly pleasing bank accounts: clothe reactionary political views in liberal rhetoric.

Great summary/analysis in that comment, Roger.

Posted by mq | July 1, 2008 1:10 PM

I'm sick of Shelby Steele. I'm sick of all these people who consider themselves political leaders or intellectuals who are still stuck in the last century making reactionary, non-visionary, pompous and totally WRONG pronouncements and predictions and analyses of Obama, the reason for his success, the war, social realities, etc.

Obama's doing well for many reasons -- among them: the economy sucks, he's a brilliant politician both tactically and charismatically, he appears reasonable and sane, he's brilliant intellectually, he's not the Clintons, he's likeable, he's attractive. But one that consistently gets overlooked by Babyboomer Republicans still fighting the Cold War and reacting against affirmative action, the Civil RIghts movement, and FDR's social programs, and Democrats still protesting the Vietnam War, racism, and sexism ala 1968 -- Obama is partially succeeding because he's totally in tune with the 21st century; he's in tune with the technological realities (that have sent his financial and grassroots campaign soaring), the cable TV and Ipod post-racism post-9-11 reality that most of us 45 years old and younger are living in. And more of these people are going to actually go out and vote than the babyboomers realize.

Posted by cnnr | July 1, 2008 1:18 PM

But what I do know is that the effect of affirmative action in elite institutions is, for the most part, to allow middle class and wealthy members of minority groups in, without doing anything about the disparities in education that really screw over the poor.

FTW.

As you can see from this discussion, however, most discourse about AA usually revolves around simplistic judgements about whether it is "good" or "bad" in theory without much, if any, attention paid to the actual method by which it is carried out.

Posted by libarbarian | July 1, 2008 6:04 PM

REAL white guilt is lame.

Sadly the term has become debased through inappropriate over use.

Posted by libarbarian | July 1, 2008 6:09 PM

Blah blah blah. Plenty of independents will be voting for Obama (like myself). And I'd never in a million years vote for any candidate out of guilt. Lay a guilt trip on me and I'm libel to support the other candidate. Obama is just the stronger and more charismatic candidate. Period. McCain is too old, too outdated, too weak a candidate. He's the past, Obama is the future.

Posted by C-note | July 1, 2008 6:27 PM

Oh, I agree - at the very least, that's what recent research seems to be saying. I just think that [emerging concepts of major human population groups] and [traditional folk concepts of 'race'] are different enough that using one for the other is almost a mistranslation.

Whatever you mean by "traditional folk concepts of race," Leroi mentions in his Times piece that the racial categories that emerge from the USC/Stanford study of genetic similarity map quite well to the major races of traditional anthropology.

Again, if the fuzziness of racial categories is a problem, it's also a problem for race-based social policies like affirmative action. What minimum degree of African ancestry should be required for a candidate to qualify as "African-American" or "black" for the purpose of receiving a racial preference in college admissions? The fact that the answer to this question will necessarily be somewhat arbitrary doesn't mean that racial preferences are never justified.

Posted by Mixner | July 1, 2008 7:02 PM

"Whatever you mean by "traditional folk concepts of race," "

Um . . . just that? Concepts of "race" that are traditional and held by "the folk," - see for example wikipedia on folk science - although there's politics and power and a complex interplay between more formal science and popular imaginings . Take Nordic theory, for example - please, and very far away, if you can. That the biggest-picture, barest-boned, coarest-grained, and (sometimes) ideologically-drained conceptions of late 19thC. anthropology match up with certain (similarly coarse) genetic analyses really does suggest that they're both getting at the same something actual out in the world. But I think that the term race - esp. in popular conversation - is perhaps often not useful or good here; it risks helping collapse the faint and flickering filagree being revealed before (and within) us, crushing it beneath the weight of countless years of fumbling and sometimes very ugly baggage. Not that we should stop trying to understand, but that we should try to avoid unnecessary risks both to peace and decency as well as to our understanding of the astonishing complexity of the human story.

"Again, if the fuzziness of racial categories is a problem, it's also a problem for race-based social policies like affirmative action.

Oh, I dunno. The importance of racial categories in such social policies is a direct result of the prior sociocultural understanding and of course the use of these categories in racial discrimination. ("Socially constructed", to whatever degree, doesn't mean not real). Whether they're always perfectly aligned in such policies - and at what point trying to do so becomes more trouble than it's worth . . . {shrug}.

This is something chris ford fails to grasp, for example; also:
"Aleutian Islanders are Pacific Islanders, not NAs like their genetically identical Athabaskan cousins on the Alaskan Mainland."

This goes wrong on two counts. First off - though I'm certainly not conversant with current research on this topic, and at best, without a lot of careful handholding, can only struggle painfully & dimly through it - I'm pretty sure that "genetically identical" is just wrong; indeed, "cousins" seems a lot better (as opposed to even more distant branches(& when are we getting Google Human Family Tree, with convenient zooming?).

The other thing is that - at least according to recent U.S. censuses - Aleuts (Unangan/etc.)haven't been classified as Pacific Islanders. In 1990 they were part of the American Indian, Eskimo, or Aleut" grouping, and In 2000 they were folded into " American Indian or Alaska Native", which combined the 1990 categories of "American Indian," "Eskimo," and "Aleut" (which had generally been grouped together for most purposes, if I understand correctly.)

Now, in terms of traditional lifestyle, we are talking Pacific Islanders, albeit for the North Pacific, where you generally get driftwood instead of palm trees, and rather worse weather.

Posted by Dan S. | July 1, 2008 10:10 PM

Lay a guilt trip on me and I'm libel to support the other candidate.

interesting Freudian typo if you are a believer in the Bradley effect :D

Posted by Ed Marshall | July 1, 2008 10:16 PM

Um . . . just that?

Well, like I said, Leroi mentions in his Times piece that the racial categories that emerge from the USC/Stanford study of genetic similarity map quite well to the major races of traditional anthropology, which also broadly correspond to popular conceptions of race, having to do with ancestry from Europe, Africa, East Asia, etc.

Oh, I dunno. The importance of racial categories in such social policies is a direct result of the prior sociocultural understanding and of course the use of these categories in racial discrimination. ("Socially constructed", to whatever degree, doesn't mean not real). Whether they're always perfectly aligned in such policies - and at what point trying to do so becomes more trouble than it's worth . . . {shrug}.

They're obviously not ever, let alone always, "perfectly aligned." In fact, the correlation between the beneficiaries of AA-type racial preferences and the victims of racial discrimination is probably quite weak. And part of the reason for that is the necessarily somewhat arbitrary nature of racial classifications in affirmative action laws and policies.

Posted by Mixner | July 1, 2008 10:47 PM

" Leroi mentions in his Times piece that the racial categories that emerge from the USC/Stanford study of genetic similarity map quite well to the major races of traditional anthropology, which also broadly correspond to popular conceptions of race, having to do with ancestry from Europe, Africa, East Asia, etc."

Ok, but at this point we're looking at such a crudely sketched (and oddly naive) picture that it's just kinda silly (and suggesting a sort of conceptual tone-deafness or unconcern). Between historical popular conceptions of race and the ideas emerging from the (fascinating) kind of modern scientific research Leroi refers to - well, the few simplistic points of similarity are pretty much overwhelmed by countless vital differences, including on such topics as (depending on the specifics) the origin, composition, degree, and significance of human variation. A belief that the races represent separate creations (or divine separation) representing a God-given plan, or a sweaty fixation on the superiority of the great Nordic race now imperiled by hordes of stocky, swarthy Mediterraneans and Alpines (to say nothing of cunning Asiatics and subhuman Negroes), or a widespread and generally successful attempt to legally define mixed-race individuals with even with 'one drop' of 'black' 'blood' as 'black', or the more general obsession with the mystical qualities of 'blood', an idea apparently based in part on earlier ideas of nobility . . . . that's a bit of a far cry from research on different human lineages based on patterns of shared snippets of DNA .

Posted by Dan S. | July 1, 2008 11:55 PM

Dan S,

Ok, but at this point we're looking at such a crudely sketched (and oddly naive) picture that it's just kinda silly (and suggesting a sort of conceptual tone-deafness or unconcern).

No, we're not. We looking at a picture produced by a sophisticated genetic analysis of diverse human populations that basically confirms the scientific validity of the traditional anthropological (and popular) racial classifications.

Between historical popular conceptions of race and the ideas emerging from the (fascinating) kind of modern scientific research Leroi refers to - well, the few simplistic points of similarity are pretty much overwhelmed by countless vital differences, including on such topics as (depending on the specifics) the origin, composition, degree, and significance of human variation.

But I'm not talking about historical popular conceptions of the "origin" or "composition" of human variation. I'm talking about the basic equivalence between historical (and contemporary) popular conceptions of which race people belong to, and the results of a scientific investigation of the same question. As Leroi puts it:

Certain skin colors tend to go with certain kinds of eyes, noses, skulls and bodies. When we glance at a stranger's face we use those associations to infer what continent, or even what country, he or his ancestors came from - and we usually get it right. To put it more abstractly, human physical variation is correlated; and correlations contain information.

This is why the "race is just a social construction; it has no scientific validity" meme is such nonsense. Even before we knew about genes and evolution and other modern scientific ideas, we relied on physical, empirical characteristics for racial classifications.

Posted by Mixner | July 2, 2008 12:23 AM

"No, we're not. We looking at a picture produced by a sophisticated genetic analysis"

Arg. What I'm referring to is - well, I tend to think "traditional anthropological . . . racial classifications" are getting a bit oversimplified, but my big complaint (and what I'm saying is merely a crude sketch) is the picture of historical "popular conceptions of race" as being location, location, location (so to speak).

"ut I'm not talking about historical popular conceptions of the "origin" or "composition" of human variation. I'm talking about the basic equivalence between historical (and contemporary) popular conceptions of which race people belong to, and the results of a scientific investigation of the same question."

And while I think that this is oversimplifying (to be fair, I think everything is oversimplifying, including this parenthetical), what I'm saying is that this point is missing all the important stuff. Remember, I'm not arguing that there aren't major and 'biologically coherent' human population groups - some research seems to support that, after all, although I want to see more . I'm arguing that traditional popular conceptions of race, despite having sharing some superficial similarities to modern research, ultimately are so immensely different that they're ultimately distinct (and worryingly baggage-loaded) ideas, and that this difference is the salient thing to be looking at.

Posted by Dan S. | July 2, 2008 1:21 AM

As Leroi puts it:

Certain skin colors tend to go with certain kinds of eyes, noses, skulls and bodies. When we glance at a stranger's face we use those associations to infer what continent, or even what country, he or his ancestors came from - and we usually get it right. To put it more abstractly, human physical variation is correlated; and correlations contain information.

This is so pathetically irrelevant to the genetic studies that have demonstrated that every single characteristic and "correlation" Leroi talks about can be found to be based on local conditions and adaptations to disease and have nothing whatever to do with classical notions of race.

Leroi says "we usually get it right". Actually, if you read the posts here, you'll see that frequently we get it wrong.

Mixner's entire argument is based on this one "correlation study" which undoubtedly ignores every other study on the subject.

a 2002 study by scientists at the University of Southern California and Stanford showed that if a sample of people from around the world are sorted by computer into five groups on the basis of genetic similarity, the groups that emerge are native to Europe, East Asia, Africa, America and Australasia - more or less the major races of traditional anthropology.

Without seeing the computer program, the population sample, the nature of the "genetic similarity", etc. this quote is pretty much worthless at establishing anything.

In fact, who needs a computer program? I can pick a handful of "genetic characteristics" and match a sample of people up and probably get it "right" most of the time as to which country they come from. This is completely irrelevant as to whether these people constitute a "race". It merely means that there are correlations between certain genetic characteristics and the localities from which the sample population came from. This is already acknowledged by studies showing that most genetic characteristics are related to local conditions and adaptations to disease. None of that establishes a "race" because persons in other areas of the world may have the same genetic characteristics while still appearing to be completely different from the first set.

There's simply no comparing the two concepts. The bottom line is that "race" implies a fixed set of genetic characteristics that uniquely define a set of humans. And genetic studies have shown there are no fixed set of genetic characteristics or combinations of such that do that.

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | July 2, 2008 5:23 AM