"A lot of European countries let you claim citizenship if your parents or grandparents belonged to them."
Not always a positive thing for you.
When I was young, there was a friend of my father's who wanted to return to his native Italy after many years in Canada. His son was not enthusiastic because if he went, he would have ended up in the Italian army - they had conscription, and they would have considered him Italian even though he was born in Canada.
I knew a Russian lady who had gotten Russian citizenship for her daughter, but not her son. She said if she did and he set foot in Russia he could be drafted into the army. And, ah, you don't want to be in the Russian army, even before they invaded Ukraine.
Facing conscription is one risk of citizenship, another is taxation - especially if you are an American citizen, funnily enough. Most countries won't tax you if you are no longer a resident (regardless of citizenship), but if you are an American citizen you need to pay up wherever you go.
I suppose that little American peccadillo has to do with the government thinking there to be a strong possibility they will have to rescue citizens no matter where they are resident. And the Americans actually have a possibility of doing so.
Unlike say the Canadians (of which I am one), where the possible actions range from a diplomatic note, to a strongly worded diplomatic note.
I note that when you did have conscription (or rather the possibility of same), crossing a border certainly seemed to prevent that - otherwise we wouldn't have quite so many badly behaved Americans of a certain age here.
Yep, american citizenship can be an awful white-elephant if you're born in a developed country.
You may have never set foot in america, but you need to spend a non-trivial amount of money every year filing american taxes with fines if you don't. You often find you can't get a bank account because it's easier for many banks to just refuse american citizens than comply with american reporting requirements on banks with american citizens as customers.
In theory they don't tax you if you pay more in local taxes than what you would owe in federal taxes... but that ignores when local taxes are applied differently to american ones. For example if a country has very high sales taxes or property taxes but low income taxes then you'll get fucked on both because the american government will only look at the income taxes.
But say you want to give up that citizenship that has only ever harmed you and never in your life helped you? They demand you pay thousands of dollars to do so.
I guess I find this even harder to understand. Ancestry has no effect on me except through genes and lived experience. If you say someone's Native American, and this is supposed to have real world effects in things like how well they culturally mesh with other Native Americans, how does ancestry cause this except through genes or through lived experience?
Would something like eligiblity to inherit property count? Citizenship laws strike me as the same kind of thing, usually closely related to genes/"lived experience" but not necessarily. (Of course, the example for Jews would be Israel's right of return.)
Ownership-of-property is purely a legal construct rather than a physical one. It's only heritable along family lines because we choose for it to be so.
I suppose that if we choose to say that "race" is some sort of abstract legal token, like property ownership, and that it can be inherited along family lines, then that is at least internally consistent. But then the obvious follow-up question is: WHY would we choose that?
(If someone asked me the same question but for property rights, my answer would be "actually we allow the owner of property to give it to anyone they want, family is just the default option if they don't specify another choice, and we make it the default mostly because it is the most common choice." I doubt it would be popular to apply a similar answer to race.)
Good point! Come to think of it, occupations used to be (largely?) hereditary. I wonder if there were similar questions about inheritance of those? I'd guess some were entangled with property inheritance - the child inheriting the mill becoming the next miller, perhaps? And the transition to non-hereditary occupations must have been ... interesting.
So, we just need to find some elderly Mi'kmaq in a hospice who doesn't have any kids (or doesn't like the ones she does have because they never visit, or whatever), and have her write a will leaving her Social Mi'kmaqness to Elizabeth Hoover?
Well yeah, it's genes but we can't yet identify them exactly yet so ancestry is the best guess we have.
For a less controversial example - Family Ancestry: Genes sometimes skip a generation, and sometimes weird shit happens. If you are the first or the second person in your family to have a high IQ or not to be an alcoholic, there's a decent chance it was just a genetic fluke and your kids will be far far less bright than you are. Great grandpa was a serial killer is also pretty useful info to have.
Outside of family ancestry (for which one is likely to have records) there are certain things that seem to happen disproportionately in some large genetic groups and not as much in others even adjusted for IQ. I don't think I'm the first to notice that even highly progressive professional white women were far less likely to be wearing masks than their East Asian counterparts, even ones with no apparent cultural connections back home (as far as I could tell). Every Asian country had far more aggressive masking than every single western country; and the Japanese government actually struggled to get kids to take off masks during outdoors Gym Class.
And of course, If you notice this and wonder why it's so universal you might be interested in a study showing one of psychological research's most extreme gaps in the differing responses to having one's face covered between White and Asian babies at 48 hours post-birth: https://sci-hub.ru/10.1038/2241227a0 .
I think any alien with no social desirability bias would immediately (if maybe, weakly) conclude with these datapoints that covering half your face with a mask just genetically annoys Asians less. Who knows how many similar things there are, lurking under the surface or flat out in plain view with no one observing them. And so if you are unhappy in your existing society but don't know why, why wouldn't you take a gamble at the possibility that it's because it's normative behaviors are genetically alien to you? And check out one that might not be?
Through a bunch of people deciding that ancestry is what creates the identity. It has nothing to do with your subjective experience, or anything internal to you objectively. This is what Benedict Anderson called Imagined Community and it is very real despite being entirely socially constructed.
I have a hypothesis. It's a bit ad hoc, so feel free to shoot holes in it or tell me you've already covered the matter or that I'm two pounds of nonsense in a one pound bag.
Lets say that a person's *actual* goal is equality of outcomes on the group level.
When you say "Ancestry has no effect on me except through genes and lived experience" you are speaking on the individual level.
But what if "the group of people who falsely believed that they had Native American ancestry based on familial lineage" had different average inputs and outcomes across their group than "the group of people who truly had Native American familial lineage." This would be based on several generations worth of lived experiences and their resulting inheritance, not just one lifetime. The group averages could be disparate even if there were people with similar experiences and genetics from both groups. (A high performer from Group B is indistinguishable from a median performer from group A, lets say.) Genetics is a close enough correlate with 'generations of lived experiences' that it serves as an effective proxy.
If this was the case, then helping the first group of high-input-high-output people would fail to achieve your aims of equal outcomes, but helping the second group of low-average-input-low-average-output people would, presumably, promote equality between groups.
Of course, the follow up argument to this is that various programs to equalize outcomes should really be discriminating on some 'true' variable like the socioeconomic status of one's parents. Clarence Thomas made this type of argument explicitly at one point. It seemed very logical to me, but it didn't seem to politically resonate. Granted, for this theory to be relevant, discriminating on this actual underlying condition must be taboo or impractical or deemed unlikely to work. Or maybe discriminating on the underlying condition just takes us back to individualism, which people are opposed to for irrational reasons.
I suspect we do see a little bit of this notion playing out in the divide between recent African immigrants (who tend to be higher earners) and the descendants of American slaves. Obama had to struggle to shore up his rather weak connection to ancestral American slaves, since his more immediate African ancestry is post-slavery. In such a case, skin color and individual lived experience ceases to be the sum of all relevant criteria for group inclusion.
Very careful use of the passive voice there. "They should be helped", great, everybody should be helped. But you're sidestepping the question of who is going to do the helping.
Assume that someone has a Native American great-great-grandfather that they happen to inherit no genes from. I think this person could still claim to be Native American even if they had no Native American genes, especially if their family kept Native American culture. Imagine that such a person was mistakenly swapped at birth and raised as white, and is re-united with their biological family at 18 (by going back to the reservation where the bio-family lives and attending their first pow-wow with them, or whatever). I think this person could claim to be Native American even though they share neither genes or lived experience.
Ancestry is a proxy for culture/upbringing/lived experience—an imperfect proxy, but one that's hard to fake. Plus, for purposes like citizenship, there is that governments cater to their voters, and voters want their children to have the right to citizenship.
Ancestry does impact you, especially in your early years. Things like the wealth of your family, where your ancestors chose to live, the values they considered important in raising children have all had an impact on you. I can't separate who I am today from who my ancestors were, and from the choices they made or had forced upon them, and that goes well beyond genetics.
I'm unsure that "Native American" is a useful category for looking at behavior except in very broad categories. "Mesh well" is unlikely to be one; it's not like they didn't fight each other a few centuries ago.
How well do Russians and English get along? Depends.
>A lot of European countries let you claim citizenship if your parents or grandparents belonged to them.
Citizenship, trivially, isn't race.
The rules you described can apply to a person of any race. Someone with dark skin, kinky hair and 100% sub-saharan genetic history could have grandparents who lived in an particular European country and be granted citizenship. Nobody would say that this means they're the same race as the light skinned majority of this country.
>Another important factor is how society treats you.
This is exactly what Scott was just talking about. If everyone thinks you're native american and treats you accordingly, then the social constructivist perspective would seem to demand that you consider this person to be native american.
And what about a person with 50% aboriginal Australian ancestry who looks essentially 100% white european (a very common thing in Australia) and nobody knows of their aboriginal ancestry? Are they not aboriginal because nobody can be mistreating them on the basis of being aboriginal because they don't know they're aboriginal?
>But if someone is seen as black and is generally treated as such by society including facing the prejudices associated with black people, I would probably consider them black regardless of their genes or lived experience.
By "facing prejudices" you mean having elite universities discriminate against more intellectually capable students than you to help you gain admission?
"A lot of European countries let you claim citizenship if your parents ... belonged to them"
That's just called duel citizenship and most countries have it. It's not because of your race, it's because you have a strong enough connection with the country. Most countries don't allow this for grandparents because the connection is too weak (the one exception I know is my Jewish friend who's parents left Germany for obvious reasons and since Germany feels bad about it they gave him and others like him citizenship)
>They wouldn’t make you take a genetic test to determine if you were really Irish, they’d look at records to see if you could prove your parents or grandparents were Irish.
There was a neat analysis in one of the ACX comments (sorry - tried to google it and failed) that showed that the set of _genetic_ ancestors goes up more slowly than the 2^n (if there is no reconvergence) genealogical ancestors.
Ignoring genetic crossover for the moment, if chromosomes were passed entirely intact, one would have at most 46 genetic ancestors in any generation.
Including crossover, it turns out that the number goes up roughly _linearly_ - crossovers split one's genetic inheritance amongst more ancestors - but only by the number of crossovers that happened in the _sections_ of the chromosomes that ultimately wound up in the final inheritor, and the _total_ length of all those sections added together is one full genome. So the total number of crossovers in any generation of ancestors is roughly a constant.
( Eventually even this linear increase must top out at 3 billion, since crossovers can't split single base pairs )
Is anyone able to find the original comment contrasting genetic and genealogical ancestors?
It's not a new idea. It's generally paired with the observation that, counting all your ancestors once each (regardless of how many different ways you descend from them), about one third are men and the remaining two thirds are women.
You don't need to restrict yourself to ACX comments to read about it.
Many Thanks! One of the nice things about that particular ACX comment was that it pointed to a paper with nice graphs of the number of genetic ancestors vs. generation number and the assumptions behind the analysis and simulations (which I wish I'd saved...).
I’m definitely on team cultural appropriation is awesome, at least in most circumstances (the primary exception being if you are behaving disrespectfully, eg black face).
Black face can of course be disrespectful in certain contexts (just like dressing up as a caricature of any person or racial group could be disrespectful). But it seems to me at this point "black face" has just become a silly taboo, because the vast majority of people who get caught "wearing black face" are simply trying to look like a black person in a non-disrespectful manner.
Ehh sure, in almost exactly the same way that drag shows are disrespectful to women. But one of those is taboo and one of them is for some reason celebrated.
I think it's pretty different- people are generally not going to look at a drag show and think "yes, this is exactly what women are like." Since women are a group that cuts across all races, cultures, etc. and are also half the population, the maximum extent to which you can mislead people about them is less (though still quite significant). Also, the minstrel shows came from a time when black people were, socially and legally, not equal citizens, whereas women currently are, and I think the social justice movement has a point here in the sense that it's much harder to see how drag can be used to oppress women than to see how minstrelry can be used to oppress black people.
> people are generally not going to look at a drag show and think "yes, this is exactly what women are like."
So you’re arguing that minstrel shows are bad because people attending them will think they’re a documentary about black American culture?
If drag is good clean fun a women who are offended by it need to lighten up, then I’m afraid the same is true of black folks and black face. I’m not taking a position one way or the other, but the analogy is quite close and only someone fully brainwashed by woke religious ideology would think one is a mortal sin and the other is harmless.
Mortal sin vs harmless isn't really how I'm putting it, more offensive enough that you should not do it unless you want people to think you're a dick vs usually not offensive enough that it should be avoided.
Do you think people are generally going to look at blackface and think, "Yes, this is exactly what blacks are like"? Blackface and drag come from the early 20th century, when neither blacks nor women were socially or legally equal citizens. Your differences appear not to be different.
And blackface was popular at that time. Drag became popular much later, when women had become legally and (mostly) socially equal, and at its inception was liable to get you thrown in jail for crossdressing.
For that reason I think your argument that their histories are equally bad is not convincing. They were not both used by a group in power to mock a group they were oppressing; "gay men oppress women," if it has any claim to validity whatsoever, only acquired that claim in very, very recent memory.
To be clear, I don't think drag should be celebrated, nor that we should extend our social prohibition on minstrel shows to all instances of anybody darkening their skin to look like a different race. But I do think they are meaningfully different, and part of that is about the history.
Drag evolved as a form of self-expression, or venting, among femme gay men. These are guys with inclinations, mannerisms, ways of speaking, etc. that get them socially punished, harrassed, and isolated in mainstream society, such that they constantly feel repressed, right? And putting themselves in drag lets them escape that, lets them enter this hyper-femme alter ego where they can let loose and express all of the sassy and bossy and boisterous parts of themselves they repressed on a day to day basis. The specific form of the art was probably a joke about burlesque, how all the straight men would go to straight bars to watch these women dancers perform on stage, and gay men got together and said, wouldn't it be funny if we did that too, our way? Nobody involved, I think, hated women or was intentionally trying to make fun of women. The men who originated drag were derided for possessing all of the mannerisms that their drag personas encapsulate. It is reclamation and finding pride within the unique traits that society punishes you for - similar to how gay men adopted the pink triangle, the icon gay men were forced to wear in the concentration camps, as the international symbol for gay liberation.
I think you're talking about a specific form of drag art - Ru Paul drag if you will - which is distinct from drag that you see in Bugs Bunny, or Some Like it Hot, or Monty Python, or classical Shakespeare, or any number of other contexts in which people cross-dress for artistic purposes. That sort of diversity in what drag is should be a clue about how it might differ from the minstrel tradition.
Minstrelsy had two dominant subtypes, one of which was comic mocking of black people based on prevailing stereotypes and the other, more "respectable" version piggy-backing on that and trying to represent black people and art in a more respectful manner with those efforts often still being terribly racist from our vantage.
Drag doesn't have the same association. There certainly are forms of drag that are mocking towards women and forms of drag that poke fun at men for being in the humiliating predicament of being placed in a feminine role. Not surprisingly, most of the social conservative dislike of drag tends not to mind that form of drag as much, though that isn't always true. But there's other drag, lots of it, that really doesn't do this at at all.
Yes. Black-face minstrelry was indeed unpleasant and offensive. But I fear we have drawn the wrong lesson from this. The correct lesson is "it's bad to mock other people's appearance (perhaps especially people from a group that have already been treated very badly by society)". The lesson we seem to have actually drawn is "it is wrong ever to disguise oneself as a different race", which is absurd.
Mmmm, I think the point is being a little missed here. At this point, it is offensive _because_ it is a taboo. That does not change that it is offensive. Cultural performance is communication. Because wearing blackface is so universally recognized as racist towards black people, the decision to wear blackface implies "I don't care about the feelings of black people". One who chooses this is deciding that some benefit (minor amusement? unclear) to them is more important than the emotional shock it will (empirically) cause to a bunch of others.
Compare to swear words. There is nothing _inherently_ offensive about those sounds. They are offensive because they are accepted as offensive, so the decision to use implies intentional desire to ignore that taboo, which is, in fact, offensive. You cannot go to a room full of Mormons (that you know is full of mormons) and give a speech while cussing like a sailor for emphasis, and have it not be offensive. Communication is a burden on both the speaker and the listener, and this case is so obvious to most people, that it's silly to claim you intended no offence. (and if we believe your intention, the response is like, ok maybe we can forgive you, but now you know, so stop now) Communication with the world is FULL of symbolic gestures like this, and refusal to comply with symbolic standards is a refusal to to care about others that is, in fact, offensive.
I think purely symbolic things like this are different from cases where there is a clear benefit. For example, non-Indians practicing Yoga. The idea that this is offensive is far more disputed, there was _never_ any mockery involved historically, and Yoga is a tool for health and spiritual healing intended to benefit all humans that would be very good for the world to spread. I think there are things that matter more than some class of people being offended. But whatever unclear, minuscule, benefit blackface provides is not one of them. I think there is a place worth having a cultural battle over, and that is freedom to copy, spread, and share technology, ideas, and art. Not random symbolic nonsense.
Of course if a bunch of people decide to be offended by something, then by definition that thing is "offensive." That's what a "taboo" is, and that's why I called the current view of black face a "silly taboo." I would never personally wear black face, even though I think the taboo is "silly," because I don't want to be socially ostracized.
My point however was that it is a *silly* taboo, because at this point it is for the most part totally divorced from any actual connection with caricaturing black people. If society decided that it's offensive for white people to wear the color white (maybe because the KKK wore white), and everyone went along with it and it became a taboo like black face, then it might very well be offensive for a white person to wear white. That wouldn't make the taboo any less silly. So too here.
I also disagree that we should enforce a norm where people are expected to shoulder supposedly "minor" burdens whenever some group of people is sufficiently "offended," regardless of how irrational their offense is. Presumably lots of religious conservatives are offended when LGBTQ people paint pride flags on their face. And presumably the benefit from painting a pride flag on your face is just as minor as painting your face with black face. So should LGBTQ people stop painting pride flags on their faces in order not to offend religious conservatives?
For pride flags, I think offending religious conservatives is part of the message being communicated in much the same way that MAGA hats or BLM signs or molon labe stickers or etc etc are meant to send a confrontational message to the "speaker's" political opponents.
Aha, thanks for the peacemaking attempt Joshua, but I don't think we're quite agreeing. I don't think the "rationality" of a taboo is so relevant as its "universality". The Pride Flags is a bad example (well, a great example for dsicussion's sake, so thank you, but it is very different from blackface). Pride Flags are normalized in a very large subculture. It is plausibly believable that someone can paint a Pride Flag on their face without thinking anything mean about Christianity. Everyone (I think even religious people) understand that a Pride Flag means "I support being gay as a morally neutral way to be". If you are offended at that message then offense was intended, it's not irrational. It's a real conflict.
Wearing blackface signals that you don't care about the feelings of black people. (at a minimum) Black people understand this. White people understand this. You understand it. It's pretty universal, so it's not confusing, there's no plausible deniability, unless it's a little kid. (in which case, people will correct, but not be too mean, just like a swear word) Why is it silly? Wearing blackface is now just a word in our cultural vocabulary. Communication is all agreement reality, words don't arise from the void spontaneously. I don't see this taboo as particularly special versus other forms of communication.
Basically, I don't think taboos are silly, unless they cause some large practical inconvenience unrelated to their culturally-understood message, or if they are confusing because two cultures which have very different understood implications are colliding together. I think highly-specific aesthetic attire is as valid a way to communicate as words, and we shoudn't think about it particularly different from words. (again, unless there's some big practical externality, like if we all decided not wearing shoes meant something. But we won't.) I don't think blackface is a silly taboo, because not wearing blackface doesn't really inconvenience anyone or significantly get in the way of anyone's creative agency.
Hm, I guess I take it back that Pride Flags and Blackface are particularly different in this regard. Both wearing Pride Flags and Blackface are equally unambiguous messages. For Pride Flags, people are not bifurcated on what the message means ("I support being gay as morally neutral"). They are bifurcated on whether this is an offensive thing to think. A Christian does not have a gripe with my symbol, they have a gripe with my beliefs, and we should just acknowledge that we disagree. For Blackface, similarly, everyone agrees what it means "I don't care about the feelings of black people" (or worse). Everyone just also agrees that this is an offensive message.
As for norms? I simply support being an honest communicator. If you have offensive things to say, I'm not going to fault your communication abilities if you say them. (though I might fault your morals) I don't think that in either case there are "mistakes of offense" going on. (many people misunderstanding the intent of a signal)
Agreed. I like the phrase "adopting best practices" - use them, wherever they came from. It makes no sense to e.g. bar non-(asian)Indian chemists and physicists from using Raman scattering because Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman lived and worked in India.
Yes, fair, but how the hell do you figure out who fits into that category? Is it a one drop situation, where you can be Nerd Barack Obama with a single nerd parent and be considered full nerd? Is it like the woke paradigm for being trans, where you’re a disembodied nerd soul floating around in Limbo and then “born into a body” that may or may not be a nerd body? What if you’re the Rachel Dolezal of nerds? So many possibilities.
Cultural appropriation describes the phenomenon "academically", and then we have to add a moral layer on top when we consider the power dynamics involved. A white person in black face has different connotations than a black person in white face because power dynamics don't link two elements in a way that can be directly reversed. It's a Non-commutative operation like the cross product of two vectors in three dimensions.
This of course doesn't solve the problem of who's considered what. There's an episode from Atlanta where an African kid isn't considered "black" just for having dark skin. He only "becomes black" when he gets shot by the police, the blackest thing ever.
In any case and as with any text, the intentions of the author don't have to be considered when producing a reading. For example, a person can't get away with the "just joking" defense if they're on the more powerful side of the appropriation even if they're 100% honest.
How about East Asia? Japan markets its culture globally, and is actually dominant in some areas like video games and cartoons, not to mention areas like electronics and auto manufacturing. (I'm not complaining--whatever Toyota's flaws, their cars last a long time. They earned it!) China is a global military power and a peer competitor to the USA at this point, and having discovered the power of film is gleefully turning out nationalistic anti-American movies like 'Wolf Warrior 2'.
How about smaller European countries? Jokes about Eastern Europeans are still 'OK' even though many of these countries are relatively poor and have suffered greatly from fascism or communism (or both!) in the past hundred years.
It's power relations, but not exactly the way people think--it's whether there's an organized pressure group that can go after you. I'm nominally Jewish (halakhically) but don't go after people talking about 'globalists' or 'bankers' because I hate this crap, and because globalization and finance can be legitimately criticized. Heck, even 'cultural Marxism' describes a real thing. The Frankfurt School really was influential, and not everyone likes what they were up to.
> Jokes about Eastern Europeans are still 'OK' even though many of these countries are relatively poor and have suffered greatly from fascism or communism (or both!) in the past hundred years.
Try being from Kazakhstan and watching Borat. Sacha Cohen is engaging in western metropolitan superiority, and “exposing racism”, while clearly being racist. Which is good work if you can get it.
Dunno, I worked in Kazakhstan. No one seemed to care about Borat, as his "K" has obviously nothing to do with real "K" (which is a strange state, but in his own way). S. Cohen is actually just doing fun meta-anti-Americanism: Americans know far too little about the world outside the USofA, and about regions like Central Asia; "absolutely nothing! Say it again!" (In the case of "K", hardly anyone outside the former USSR knows zilch. ) 2: In 1960, Michael Ende (author of 'The neverending story') wrote a kid's story about a black kid; Jim Button, having crazy adventures in phantasmic places, one of them "China". Ende got a lot of flak and had the place's name changed into "Mandala". Now everyone was happy. Till they found an N-word. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Button_and_Luke_the_Engine_Driver esp. "Nazi symbols revisited"
Cohen gets invited to a fancy dinner, goes to the toilet, shits in a bag, gives it to the hostess ... consider if a Goyim had done this when invited to Seder.
I’ve heard these arguments before about power dynamics between individuals of different races and they all seem very… circular at best, and self-fulfilling at worst.
I would call them more dialectical than circular, since every exercise of power shifts the balance of power.
The position is easy to evaluate when the power differential is very large, like a colonizer and the colonized or a boss and an employee. The employee can make fun of the boss but the boss can't make fun of the employee.
When the relationship is murkier it can become really maddening really fast, particularly regarding individuals, who are always many things at once. There's an episode from Community where the characters try to out-minority each other to win an argument. I'm Black! But I'm a Jewish Woman! And I'm gay! Then we can't rely on a general heuristics and have to look at the concrete case.
I feel like the dynamic is actually about status, not power. The employee can make fun of the boss (within certain limits) and the boss laughs along because it's an acknowledgement that the boss's status is high enough that it won't be dented by this little joke.
I think many people get power and status confused, to their own peril. For example the power dynamic between me and my cleaner, and the power dynamic between me and my dentist, are the same. But the status dynamic is different.
Or when a policeman stops a Harvard professor -- the policeman has all the power but the professor has all the status. The professor should not make the mistake of thinking that his high status entitles him to more power in that interaction.
That’s an interesting framing, I need to think about it. Certainly class differences create real tensions between individuals in a way that is often confused for racial tensions.
In my ontology, there's lots of different kinds of power. firstly, you can divide power into the physics sense of throughput, or into the agentic sense of choosing between hypotheticals. Political power is a type of agentic power. Status is a type of political power. There's 2 types of status: admiration and domination. The type of power differential between a cleaner and a client is an economic type of power.
The way agentic power gets classified is by what quantity it's able to change, e.g. money. You can often imagine this quantity as "a theater of war", analogous to the way a military might hold air-superiority but might be vulnerable in cyberspace.
Status and power are context dependent. You meet people in nursing homes sometimes who talk nonstop about their past career or how high they got in the masons, yet they don't have that status and power anymore even though their group once treated them with great respect. It's temporary and changing all the time to a degree. I believe no one should ever allow themselves to get wrapped up their temporary status and/or power. In the end, its emptiness is revealed. Maybe if you are the president of the country, you get to keep your status to the end of your life. But few other people do.
Also, you can have a role of importance at your church or volunteer group and yet be powerless at your regular job. It's very fluid.
> In any case and as with any text, the intentions of the author don't have to be considered when producing a reading.
IMHO, that philosophy is one the root causes of why people have become so divided/violently tribalistic in the west nowadays. If you think about it, it's pretty much a longwinded way of saying "innocent until proven guilty but only if I like you".
And the whole "power dynamics" argument I also find quite dishonest as well. I might be inclined to accept it if in practice it wasn't just a self-awarded pass to be racist/sexist without feeling guilty about it.
It gets tribalistic if one's unable to accept multiple simultaneously valid readings, even if they contradict each other. Power dynamics appear when trying to impose a specific reading at the expense of another one. But being the author of the text doesn't grant any special privileges by itself. Meaning arises by an interaction between text and reader. Until that interaction occurs, there is no meaning. That's why it is always open: a reader can't read the same text twice ever since Heraclitus waterbended the static out of reality.
> But being the author of the text doesn't grant any special privileges by itself.
You just restated your previous statement, without addressing how @anonimoose was challenging it. Saying something again but using different words isn't a justification for it. I would venture to bet that @anonimoose, like myself, does not agree with your viewpoint that authorial intent does not matter.
Let's say I make a joke, and you don't find it funny. I say: why didn't you laugh? The joke was hilarious. And you say: no it was not.
Schopenhauer said that a joke is just putting something where it doesn't go. A joke presuposses a normative paradigm which determines where things go. If we don't share the same paradigm, then the joke doesn't work. My intention of being funny, or in a more general sense, of producing some effect on the reader, or even transmitting a piece of information doesn't mean I'm going to succeed. That's not just because I'm a bad writer, I'ts because each reader will bring their own set of rules of interpretation, their own framework with them.
To take one simple example: Jon tells an inoffensive joke. Jim takes offense because he didn't realize Jon was telling a joke.
Failing to understand the point of A Modest Proposal could result in one thinking the book was terrifyingly immoral. Sure, that person can take that meaning from it, and it is the meaning they have taken from the book. But failing to consider the author's intent when interpreting a writing -- when that intent is available, or legible within the text -- is probably foolish to ignore.
If you like, consider this an argument about where you're drawing the borders between Israel and Palestine.
I think @Andrew Wurzer makes a great point of how authorial intent can matter for jokes. I think also that what you're doing is some form of bait-and-switch, perhaps a motte and bailey, wherein you're retreating to a more defensible position of "authorial intent may not be everything that matters for specific types of communication, like jokes", and using that to justify (farming the bailey of) "authorial intent doesn't have to be considered at all".
> But being the author of the text doesn't grant any special privileges by itself.
Bad metaphor. Communication is premised on the idea that a plurality of minds want to share their contents with one another. The text is the vehicle, not the telos. An actual text, written in ink, should not be confused with an event in meatspace.
Nothing in these two links gives me the impression that "text" is defined according to your broader definition, which is non-standard except within a certain corner of the ivory tower.
In practice the semiotic song-and-dance appears to function mainly as a way of lowering the bar of proof. First you prove that your target said something "racist" according to your special academic definition which disclaims any attempt to judge their intentions-- then you swap in the commonplace definition so they can be attacked for their bad intentions.
Racism isn't about power dynamics though. Power dynamics change. But whether or not they hurt someone isn't contingent on the power dynamic itself, but on the persons morals. A racist without power is still a racist and will hurt people if he gains power. That's why we don't want any racists, regardless of their skin color, social status or profession.
Whether or not you have to consider the intentions of the author depends on what question you're trying to answer. Now, a claim of "cultural appropriation" is going to be generally understood (and you can't self-consistently complain about this) as leveling an accusation of bad intent against the author-- so considering their intentions is something you're not going to be able to dispense with.
Cultural appropriation is usually hurled as an accusation of bad behavior, not necessarily bad intent. A white person wearing a feather headband might be thinking Halloween costume, or calling attention to the plight of the natives, or that it looks cool or that it looks silly or nothing. By itself the act of cultural appropriation doesn't mean anything. It's used as an accusation when considering the nature and history of the relationship between the cultures (which is itself open to interpretation).
> Cultural appropriation describes the phenomenon "academically", and then we have to add a moral layer on top when we consider the power dynamics involved.
I agree. A poor white person doing black face is fine, but a rich black person doing white face is punching down and should be fired from their job and rendered unemployable forever.
My wife is Māori. I don't like French and German companies using Māori language and iconography to sell their stuff. Why aren't they appropriating their own culture?
No, I'm not going to elaborate, because doing it justice would take a hundred hours or more. By all means please engage in your own research programme, though.
Well, thanks for at least responding. I would have liked to have heard your point of view, but if you aren't going to explain it, I'm not going to wildly guess at what on the internet might be relevant.
I gave one of my comments on one aspect of cultural appropriation earlier in this subthread, in https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/how-should-we-think-about-race-and/comment/51164678 - but I gave an example of a technique developed in one culture that is useful ( more for research than for selling anything ) across many cultures - which I'm guessing is different from what you have in mind. I don't _know_ what you have in mind.
If Maori companies started using German language and iconography to sell their stuff, would Germans be offended? As far as I'm concerned they're welcome to it.
I didn't get the whole "cultural appropriation" thing until I visited Poland and saw "kosher -style" restaurants in cities whose Jews had all been murdered. It felt so shameless.
Yeah, there's a certain period of time required before history becomes ancient history and doesn't carry significant cultural power any longer. The length of that period varies depending on the current cultural hierarchy and the particulars of the history in question.
Plenty of Jewish people visit Poland every year, I think it's only appropriate to be able to serve them food in accordance to their religious practices. Not to mention that many of those restaurants are run by Jewish people themselves. Judging from your attitude I expect to now hear how Holocaust was actually perpetrated mostly by Polish people, because why else would you be commenting that.
I suspect you might be talking about Krakow or Warsaw specifically, in which case you need to seriously do your research first.
This is an insane take, and frankly a disgusting point of view. Should Jews not be allowed to do business--or eat--because other Jews were murdered by other people in the same place? This makes no sense.
It might be worth finding out what "Jewish style" means. Kosher? (I bet not). A serious effort at Jewish (probably Polish Jewish) cuisine? A vague attempt at Jewish food based on impressions?
I don't like that one and only Jewish restaurant in Lublin, they serve dry pierogi, but, as far as I know the owner has Jewish roots. Or maybe she doesn't? Maybe the restaurant is in memory of a friend of her grandmother, who was Jewish? Or a bit of both. A handful of Jews in Lublin survived the German occupation - the last woman who spoke Yiddish since childhood died of coronavirus. Her son speaks the language less well, but is as Jewish as it gets, while being a harsh critic of all cultural projects that commemorate Jews in his city. These projects are usually appreciated by Jews from outside, but he believes that if something has died then it should stay dead. I mention this because it is precisely this one restaurant that he never criticizes. I'm not surprised by this. I don't like their pierogi, because my grandmother used to make better ones - Jewish, Ukrainian, Polish cuisines intermingled so that half the dishes are interchangeable. What's more, a handful of the last Jews in my country mostly consider themselves Poles at the same time. And only the worst sort of anti-Semites deny them that. A Pole, by the way, can be anyone who wants to be one. Even individuals of the kind of German-speaking philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. Sometimes this gives rise to tragicomic results. If you're a black Jew and join a far-right party, there's a good chance they'll celebrate you and paste your picture in every discussion with the left. Polish identity, for all its limitations and idiocy, remains quite open. All in all, it is somewhat similar with Jewish identity in Poland. The more sensitive someone here is to history, to anti-Semitism, to the Holocaust, to identity, the more delicately they will deal with a person who, for example, is searching for his origins, because they suspect he may have some Jewish roots. For years I worked as a priest in Lublin, and in my diocese there were two exceptional priests: both were Holocaust survivors. One knew from childhood, consciously became a priest, and at the end of his life lived in Israel, although not as a citizen, because of his ordination and religion. The other learned of his identity in his fifties, from his dying mother, who confessed that she was only a foster mother. Knowing his real ancestry, this priest changed his religion and went to Israel, where he works at Yad Vashem. Great guy that one. At one time I had an A in anthropology with him in college, although he said that only the devil gets an A. On top of that, there were a few priests who had Jewish roots, but didn't pay much attention to it. My bishop, fascinated by Judaism, thought that I must have Jewish blood because I was a good student. He even questioned my parents about it. Naturally, they were surprised, amused and even slightly indignant about it, because they were raised in the tradition of humanism, where all people are first and foremost human beings, and questioning about genetic roots is in bad taste in a country that was ravaged by the Nazis. At the same time, this bishop remains (literally) a friend of Lublin's Jews, the Israeli ambassador and is generally involved in Polish-Jewish dialogue. As for me, I have the genes of Balts, Silesians, Jews, Gypsies, Ruthenians, Boykos and even Germans and god knows who else, my people fought against russian imperialism when the Sioux fought against US imperialism, in a similar way and spirit and with similar results. It makes me laugh, when it comes out that I am of the white race, that is, genetically perhaps, culturally just a little, my grandmother told me that the followers of the white race did not give us a certificate when such were given during the Second World War. I remain an alien population in Europe since leaving Africa, and I feel guilty, really! that of all the hominins only mine, and your lineage, survived. Ahoy!
They do that already. French and German companies use French and German culture all the time for their products. And French and German culture is actually produced, consumed and used world wide. And you know what: that's fine. A Chinese kid learning to play the piano and excelling at playing Beethoven doesn't hurt my. Quite the opposite: hearing him play fills my heart with joy. He has as much of a right to do so as I have.
I don't even get why "black face" would in itself be racist. Mocking people for their ancestry, visual appearance or other such innate properties would be racist. But how is a kid who really likes black panther and dresses up like him for a carnival racist?
If a black, latino or asian girl wants to be Anna or Elsa from Frozen, hopefully no one with good intentions would be stupid enough to call her racist for "white facing". How is a white girl who wants to look like Disney's new Arielle suddenly racist?
Intentions matter. Telling people: "you can't do that, you're white" is racist, just like mocking or mistreating people for any other skin color in other contexts is racist.
Steelmanning it, I think there are three arguments, which I find somewhat persuasive in certain cases but not universally applicable.
1) It reminds black people of the history of minstrel shows in America and of racism generally, and is therefore unpleasant to black people. Nice people try not to do easily avoidable things that cause other people unpleasant experience, so doing it is some Bayesian evidence that the wearer is a jerk or a racist.
2) Many of the people who do it also do unpleasant caricatures of the group, whether intentionally or unintentionally. (Compare dressing in a sombrero and serape on Cinco de Mayo or performing in a drag show.)
3) It's a privilege reserved for the group being imitated. Since you are not allowed to do it and you are doing it anyway, it's again Bayesian evidence suggesting that you may be a racist or a jerk. For example, Morgan Wallen got a lot of criticism when it was learned that he had called some of his white friends the n-word in a place where there were no minorities to be offended. Again, I think one way to look at that is that someone who would usurp that privilege anywhere is either being disrespectful or is reflecting or spreading taboo values.
A kid who want's to be Black Panther now is no longer a symbol of equality, but instead a jerk. I'm not sure that I want to live in a world which perceives this a progress. To me that's regression to 1960s racism ...
You don't do a Garona cosplay without the green skin. How is cosplaying black panther different?
But even if I did agree with you: What about face paintings imitating war markings of some tribes? What about henna tattoos? What about plastic mascs? If you even start going down that road, you can only end up in many ulgy, and effectively racist, discussions.
Intentions matter! Posing as your hero/role model isn't cultural appropriation, it's showing appreciation ...
"(Compare dressing in a sombrero and serape on Cinco de Mayo)"
It's funny because a guy did this exact thing and the results are about what you'd expect if you're not over-socialized to the concept of "cultural appropriation":
A lot of America's racial insanity (by no means all of it) is caused by extending the black experience to all nonwhite groups, with results that aren't always logical. The idea that minstrelsy being legitimately offensive means only Mexicans can wear sombreros is one such example.
I also think about the way affirmative action -- a program that was designed, rightly or wrongly, to address historic injustices experienced by slave-descended African Americans -- is unflinchingly applied to nonwhite (sometimes even white Hispanic) economic migrants who came to the US in the 21st century, without asking if this still makes sense.
>I also think about the way affirmative action [...] is unflinchingly applied to nonwhite >(sometimes even white Hispanic) economic migrants who came to the US in >the 21st century, without asking if this still makes sense.
This is at most partly true; it is not "unflinchingly" applied (broad categories of migrants and their descendants are excluded) but rather it is applied and not applied in ways that can seem a little bizarre.
- Asian migrants are often not just excluded from AA, but penalized so as to implement AA, to a larger extent than whites. (Overrepresented, hence evil.)
- Is a Latin American immigrant "Hispanic"? Or are only his children "Hispanic"? How difficult it is to migrate to the US, and how long and difficult the path to citizenship is (and whether there is one) depends much more on migrants' country of origin than on how qualified, hard-working or law-abiding they are. Here it is Latin Americans who are evil (because they are overrepresented - now in migration logic and populist logic, not in AA logic, but they all work similarly). It is very common and entirely normal for a Latin American to arrive legally to the US and live there legally for 10-20 years before finally getting a green card; during that period, it is not just legal to discriminate against that person - it is sometimes mandatory: if they are finalists in an academic job at a state university, say, and there is another candidate that is clearly less qualified but still qualified (according to the committee) then, at least in some states (perhaps all?), the university is obliged to offer the job to that other candidate. Now, if that person finally makes it and settles, after undergoing discrimination that is seen as legal and right and justified, it is usually their children or rather grandchildren, born in the land of plenty, who may have a chance of being qualified as Oppressed. (Their children may be out of luck if they were not born in the US; your mileage may vary.)
What would happen to an Asian Latin American? All sorts of interesting possibilities!
>Asian migrants are often not just excluded from AA, but penalized so as to implement AA, to a larger extent than whites. (Overrepresented, hence evil.)
Growl.
Personally, I think the "picking up overlooked diamonds" justification for AA was legitimate, but the "proportional representation" justification is not.
To oversimplify, and to focus on college admissions as a simplified case:
What I, personally, would like to see is tracking the academic success of the various groups in college, and the correlation of this with SAT scores, with the goal of setting the admission criteria for the groups at a level that, as nearly as possible, sets the same predicted academic success for each group.
In other words (and, again, to oversimplify), if an SAT score of N for group A predicts the same GPA as the GPA for group B with an SAT score of N+M, then set the admission criterion for group A at SAT score >= N and set the admission criterion for group B at SAT score >= N+M. Yes, there can be group membership perturbations to the admissions process, but, as nearly as possible, set to _cancel_ inaccuracies in predictions of academic success derived from the admissions criteria. The better the SAT is at acting as an unbiased predictor of academic success, the smaller such perturbations would be.
Unfortunately for your plan, the SAT is already a pretty unbiased predictor of academic success, and actually over-predicts college grades for poor and ethnic minority students (probably due to regression to the mean). Following your suggestion would result in even fewer of these students being accepted.
It does underpredict college grades for women, probably because women tend to avoid STEM courses in college, which are usually graded more strictly. But accepting more women would be undesirable, since they are already overrepresented in colleges and this tends to produce unpopular social consequences (not enough men to date).
A culture’s tolerance for appropriation appears to be predictably dependent on the egregiousness and the recency of any suffered oppression. If a culture hasn’t suffered a recent oppressor it welcomes appropriation. If a culture has, it strongly discourages it.
Maybe this is because oppressors encourage appropriation to facilitate ease of management and control (think Roman Empire), while recently oppressed people discourage it for fear of losing their claim as an independent and distinct people.
If no relationship of oppressor and oppressed exists I think everybody’s typically jacked to see someone from another culture adopting their customs. It’s validating.
I’m a white American and I personally love appropriating culture. But if you can’t see why a Native American doesn’t love the sight of a white kid running around Golden Corral with a plastic war bonnet whooping and slapping his hand over his mouth, I’m not sure you’re trying hard enough.
None of this justifies the way race-obsessed loonies try to leverage oppressor/oppressed dynamics to justify bad policy. But it can help explain people’s feelings.
The example with the white kid with a headdress whooping it up is offensive not because of the oppression of Native Americans per se, but because the kid is engaging in mocking behavior. If that same kid was super into Native American culture and wanted to participate in a ritual of some kind that he found meaningful, that would be 100% fine and I doubt any actual Native American would be bothered by it.
You make a good point, but I don’t agree that plenty of Native Americans wouldn’t be offended by watching a bunch of white Americans take a stab at traditional dress and performing a rain dance. It would be within the white people’s rights but it wouldn't go over great. If it’s sanctioned by Native Americans beforehand, it’s another story, but that’s not really what we’re talking about.
I think Native American’s see that Native American culture is increasingly and inevitably falling under the banner of American culture, which Native Americans associate with the white settlers who massacred their relatives. And they want to ensure the distinction between those two cultures remains clear as long as possible.
Like I said, I love to appropriate culture. I think it’s inevitable. But it’s not like I can’t see where people who aren’t crazy about it due to recent bad experiences are coming from.
The headdress is also an example of STOLEN VALOR, as I understand it - these things are EARNED, like military medals. It's not like wearing a traditional pair of Norwegian mittens, or any other kind of ordinary clothing. That's just cultural diffusion. That is actually valuable and necessary. If one culture figures out how to make a really good (read: well-adapted to its environment, or perhaps another environment) pair of shoes or educational institution or dwelling, and others copy it, they then have cool/awesome shoes or whatever it is they're copying.
An interesting example: mixing of Japanese and Korean pop culture. Older Koreans tend to dislike Japanese culture or Japanese singers performing K-pop, but younger ones are more OK with it. The cultural memory of oppression of Korean culture is changing.
I can think of many counter examples to that though.
Japanese culture in the US. Despite the US mass incarceration of Japanese Americans being egregious and recent, literally all Japanese Americans I've met in real life are happy when other Americans engage with any Japanese culture, from wearing traditional clothing to more recent fashion and cosplay, from learning Japanese calligraphy to drawing anime/manga-style art, etc.. If anything, one of the most distinct features about the outrage against cultural appropriation of Japanese culture in the US, is that it's perpetrated almost entirely by Chinese American and White American people.
The Japanese culture in the US case also applies more broadly to East/Southeast Asian cultures in the US, though the Japanese example is the most prominent, since Japanese culture is the most heavily appropriated one by White Americans.
Korean culture in Japan. Despite the Japanese colonization of Korea being egregious and recent, the Japanese people wearing Korean fashion, making Korean food, or making Korean-style music, is generally taken as a point of pride of Koreans living here, and even actively facilitated by Korean organizations.
Ainu culture in Japan. Despite the Japanese colonization of Hokkaido being egregious and recent, (Yamato) Japanese people learning Ainu traditions like dance and music is at least actively promoted by organizations that claim to represent Ainu people.
South Asian culture in the UK. Despite British colonization of India being egregious and recent, "Chicken Tikka Masala is the national food of the UK" with tons of white chefs in pubs and restaurants all across the nation serving Indian food, is generally taken as a point of pride for Indians.
If anything, I have a harder time thinking of cases where there is tons and tons of backlash against cultural appropriation that isn't related to Black and Native Americans. The one other case that comes to mind, White American cultural appropriation of East Asian cultures, is less outrage against cultural appropriation, but intra-East Asian racism and competition using the language of left activism to suppress other East Asian cultures... to facilitate more cultural appropriation of their own culture.
Thanks for the counter examples. I think the egregious part is where we might disagree. Japanese internment was a terrible temporary injustice, but it’s not quite the same as millions dying of genocide and slavery over many decades.
The Korea-Japan example is an interesting one I’m just starting to learn more about. It definitely stands out. Though Dictyranger’s post about it seems to indicate that some resentment of appropriation still exists.
And I’d also disagree about South Asian Indians being unconcerned about their culture being appropriated. There seems to be quite a bit of concern online, particularly over Hindu symbols like the bindi and commercialized yoga.
I wonder if it would be better to look at it as commercialization of non-commercial cultural assets, and/or secularization of spiritual cultural assets then?
I haven't met an Indian who took offense to White British people preferring British Indian cuisine to the indigenous White British cuisine, however I could definitely see the issue with the usage of Hindu symbolism in the yoga industry.
Food and modern entertainment are generally secular and commercial. Cultural appropriation of these cultural assets tends to attract the least outrage and the most support, and pro-cultural appropriation folk tend to cite food and entertainment examples heavily when making their case.
There is also a set of cultures that are extremely secular and commercial, e.g., White American, Western European, Japanese, and more recently other East Asian cultures. Within this set of cultures, cultural appropriation can be done pretty freely. Even when religious cultural assets like crosses or fox gods are appropriated for secular commercial use, the outrage is fairly limited and/or dishonest.
The people that get angry at Christian imagery in Evangelion would have been angry even if Evangelion was created by a white guy. The people that get angry at white people cosplaying anime characters mostly hate anime to begin with. Cultural appropriation outrage in these cases is like environmentalism outrage against improving public transit.
Cultural appropriation that respects non-commercial and/or spiritual lines is often pretty welcome. While I don't really know about Hindu, I can say that Thai Buddhist temples in the US I have been to have been very welcoming of white people who legitimately seem to care and want to be Buddhist. One of the prominent members of the Thai Student Association in my university was a white guy who was interested in Thai traditions, and most of us actual Thais/Thai Americans were if anything supportive and maybe impressed.
Part of the problem with cultural appropriation and Native Americans is that the only way for White Americans to engage with Native American culture is secular/commercial use of spiritual/non-commercial cultural assets. Thai Buddhism sees itself as a legitimate enough religion to a White American to honestly convert. Shintoism is sufficiently secularized and commercialized within Japanese culture that non-Japanese secular and commercial use is generally tolerated or encouraged. Native American religions have neither enough true believers within the Native American community to be engaged with by outsiders like Thai Buddhism, nor the secularized commercialized identity to be engaged with by outsiders like Shintoism.
From what I've gathered, Chicken Tikka Masala was actually invented by a South Asian chef to appeal to British tastes. Wikipedia seems to back this up:
What about black face in Dutch culture, which has a very different history, but is getting swept up in the moral panic about racism, by Dutch elites that heavily adopt US culture/norms?
Or the Iranian variant, which seems very different still, although it's safe for now, as they reject US globalism.
I get the feeling in the US the really strong social taboo around race and blackface function as an expensive signal of respect because of the uniquely horrible history. Similar with American Indians. Extending it to general race or non US contexts is bad
I go for (2) on the second trilemma, with some (1). Many things seen as cultural appropriation aren't wrong, and the things that are are **cultural** appropriation, not **racial** appropriation, so (2) definitely applies.
I had a similar reaction reading the article, but I think there's an additional dimension here. One of the things the article talks about is how she was always beading and wearing stereotypically native jewelry and dress. She's contrasted with a candidate for the Native American studies position she eventually got (which, BTW, is maybe not officially affirmative action, but I think it's likely she wouldn't have gotten that job if she were known to be white) who interviewed in a three piece suit, and was asked if his tie was a native pattern (it wasn't). There's an idea that the department preferred a white person who acted overtly native, and in particular, satisfied their stereotypes of what it means to be native, to an actual native who didn't. This arguably selects for people whose native identity is more tenuous; if you're undeniably native, you might not feel the need to overtly demonstrate it.
But of course, this is ultimately a critique not of Elizabeth Hoover, but of the people who hired her, which I think is fair.
A simple solution here would be not hiring on the basis of race or ethnicity. They shouldn't be trying to hire the "right" kind of Native person; they should be trying to hire the best Native American studies scholar (who of course would likely end up being Native in many, but not all, cases)
You can't actually separate the politics and culture from the implementation. Any decision to change the implementation will come from the political / cultural situation.
Of course, but “will political and cultural forces allow us to do this thing?” is a different and discrete question from “should we do this thing/are there practical problems with implementing this idea that make it a bad idea?”
> (who of course would likely end up being Native in many, but not all, cases)
Would they? It seems to me that ingroup bias is likely to affect their work too much.
The best qualified people to study Native Americans would be people who are neither Native American nor part of any of the groups that have historically had much contact with them. Asians, probably.
Well, rightly or wrongly, that's not at all where the current zeitgeist stands on this issue. And even if it was, have fun finding Asians (or whoever) who are motivated enough to get a doctorate in the field.
The last big history of American Indians, "Indigenous Continent," was published in 2022 by a Finnish professor named Pekka Hamalainen at Oxford. From the NYT:
"A Finnish Scholar Wants to Change How We See American History
"In “Indigenous Continent,” Pekka Hamalainen aims to upend the nation’s grand narrative, putting Native people and Native power at the center."
Ingroup bias is good as well as bad. You want some of each to study a culture from all sides. People who are familiar from the inside and people who come from the outside.
You can’t help but get biases though - anyone who studies something is biased about it as the thing that they personally think is worth spending their time on.
>She's contrasted with a candidate for the Native American studies position she eventually got (which, BTW, is maybe not officially affirmative action, but I think it's likely she wouldn't have gotten that job if she were known to be white) who interviewed in a three piece suit, and was asked if his tie was a native pattern (it wasn't).
Personally, I hope neither person got penalties or bonuses on their interview score for their address. Both stereotypical Native dress and a 3-piece suit sound like appropriate clothes for an interview for a Native American studies position to me. What matters more is who does an actual better job teaching and researching Native Americans.
Eh? If she has the lived experience of being native (despite genetically not being so) why should we assume she would not be hired if she wore white-people clothing? She has not ONLY the degrees but ALSO the lived experience, there's no reason to think that she doesn't have the expertise and qualifications needed for the job.
She is also getting lumped in by association with purposeful fakers like Rachel Dolezal by people who don’t actually read the story.
One element is that yes, it is cool and sometimes useful to take these labels today, but it isn’t cool to *say* that these labels are useful- after all, Native Americans are a repressed minority.
Another element here has to do with trans stuff- trilemma #1 comes dangerously close to acknowledging that people can in fact be valid “transracial”, which conservatives will pounce on for the absurdity and which transgender people don’t want to be analogized to.
Second, I think that one could also say that (the genetic part of) race has the same relationship to population genetics that color has to wavelengths of light. In both cases we draw some boundaries on some continuous thing. Population genetics and wavelengths of lights are continuous.
Africans are more genetically distinct, but what exactly is the boundary between the "Caucasian" and the "East Asian" race? What are Azeris? Russians? Kazakhs? Uighurs? Hui? It's rather continuous, no?
I think the point is that it's not perfectly smoothly continuous: even within the Eurasian area, people are more genetically similar to other people a given geographical distance away within areas of easy migration, than they are to people the same distance away across a significant (albeit partial) barrier to migration, such as a mountain range or desert. Thus human genetic variation is neither perfectly discrete, nor perfectly clinal.
Sure. But human perception of wavelengths of light, while at least continuous, is not totally smooth. You have 3 cones after all. So for some x, the colors x and x+5 nanometers might look more similar than x+5 and x+10 do. The fact that past blue it looks a bit red again even though that's the furthest thing away is maybe similar to how some of these Aboriginal PNG people look a bit like Africans again even though again that's the furthest thing away.
We should probably be careful of taking the color spectrum analogy too far. But if we are running with it, we can contrast the human visual system's response with the output of an instrument that measures the raw wavelengths of light, and note that the output of that machine shows that there is a smooth continuum of such wavelengths as measured in the real world (I assume; could be wrong about that), whereas the output of genetic sequencing and principal component analysis does show that the variation is clumpy, with most people belonging clearly to one cluster and not another.
It's a fair point. But in the real world, the colors we see aren't totally continuous across the spectrum, right? Aren't they clumpy? There's a reason we talk about blue and green, colors in between aren't as common in the natural environment.
Russians and Azeris are mostly "Causasian". There are of course some populations which are near halfway between "causain" and "East asian", like Kazakhs and Uyghurs, but they are small numerically.
Get them on PCA plot and this will answer your question.
If you read the paper, you can see the various mountain ranges, deserts, oceans, lakes, tundras, ice, and other unfriendly territories. These result in less gene transfer between the regions separated by these. So these natural barriers cause some extra genetic distances. Cultural distances can do the same thing, e.g. Slavic vs. Germanic in Europe.
What I thought was meant by "race is a social construct" is that there's some genetic reality to ethnicity, but that the way we categorize ethnic groups as belonging to various "races" is more arbitrary. So at various times Italians, Irish, and Ashkenazi Jews have been categorized as non-white, but now they're generally considered to be white.
Ethnicity still gets fuzzy around the edges, especially when trying to deal with a blood quantum, but there are clear clusters who mostly marry within the cluster and who have obvious phenotypic differences from other clusters.
I guess I still find this unconvincing. It's like saying "continents aren't geographically real, just a social construct" because it's hard to say whether Armenia is part of Europe or Asia, or because the ancients grouped North Africa together with the Mediterranean instead of sub-Saharan Africa.
This is . . . a point you could make, but if people then said "continents aren't geographically real" to mean there's no sense in which they form natural shapes, or that it's meaningless and impossible to say Europe is north of Africa, then the phrase would be causing more trouble than it solved in terms of confusion, even assuming it solves any real (as opposed to strawmanned) confusion at all.
Another possible example: "there's no such thing astronomically as day or night". It's true that there's no hard boundary by which you can say that 6:10 PM is in the day vs. the night (is it sunset? astronomical twilight? nautical twilight?), but if you jump from there to "it's meaningless and impossible to claim that night is darker than day", then you've taken it too far again.
But some (most) continents aren't "geographically real": the division between Europe and Asia is pretty arbitrary, and even thinking them as two different continents is basically an extrapolation of ancient Greek-Persian rivalries; the division between Africa and the rest of the Old World can also be pretty deceptive, not so much because they are actually connected by a bit of land, but because the Mediterranean was long a means of transport first and an obstacle second - the Sahara is arguably more of a natural division, though it also got and gets traversed. And so forth.
Yeah, I think the point I want to make is that things can be not real, yet still so meaningful to talk about that every argument that starts with their unreality is false.
For example, it's an objectively true statement to say "Europe is further west than Asia" even if neither Europe and Asia are continents.
As such, the fact that "Europe and Asia aren't real" is anti-helpful if you use it to argue about any particular point, like whether one is further west than the other, or colder than the other, or richer than the other, or whatever (including objective geographical points like which is further west)
But there are valid points to be made that hinge upon people recognizing that certain concepts are really idola fori. I just made one, by comparing the Mediterranean to the Sahara. What you are really bringing up is foolish arguments used by taking "race isn't real" as some sort of axiom, out of which wrong conclusions are derived by a succession of fallacies. I have never seen anybody other than online idiots argue in that fashion.
Ghosts aren't real, and, if some fool came and argued that then houses that are believed to be haunted can't correlate with houses that are derelict, as ghosts aren't real, and that thus even postulating such a correlation is a prejudice that is trivially rebuttable, my response would not be to defend the existence of ghosts.
Yeah, look how often people talk about "Africa" and forget that Egypt and Libya and Tunisia and Algeria and Morocco are all African countries, and contain 20% or so of the entire population of Africa.
Though again, in antiquity (and not only?), the two Africas (really "Egypt" and "Aethiopia") bled into each other through the Nile. These are concepts of limited applicability.
Most of Europe is further west than most of Asia, but parts of Europe are further east than parts of Asia. Because the dividing lines between continents are socially constructed, and we've decided that the Middle East is Asia, while Moscow is Europe.
Planets and stars are socially constructed. At one time Pluto was considered a planet, then it got the Hoover treatment.
I've never really thought of the Middle East as either Europe, Asia, or Africa. If you divide the Old World into those continents, sure, you have to put every part of the Middle East into one. But for the most part, such a division is an empty exercise. Continents are an example of arbitrary categorisation, since there is not even a formal basis for it as there might be with say a genetic model of race - and even the number of supposed continents can vary, or is at least defended with outrage rather than rigour, or acceptance that division into principle components is to some extent arbitrary.
Imprecise boundaries exist (or not) relative to what they're being used to implement. If there was about to be a huge war to expand the European Union to the edge of the European Continent, on that justification, that's when you'd bring up the idea that, "Europe doesn't actually exist." Likewise race doesn't exist relative to, you know, being racist, but not relative to explaining US history 1820-1920. It might sound inconsistent, but concepts in and of themselves don't literally exist, which leaves flexible, figurative existence.
I use the term "continental-scale races" to denote racial groupings that are roughly the same in number as the continents but don't correlate exactly with Herodotus's thinking about continents. (And note that Herodotus, who was from what's now Bodrum, Turkey, warned against taking his distinction between Europeans and Asians too literally.)
To say a category is socially constructed isn't to say those categories lack properties that can be discussed based on that shared social understanding. It just means when you talk about those properties, you are talking about the contours of the social reality. To pick a hopefully more clear example, I can say "100 dollars is worth more than 1 dollar" and this be a propositional claim while talking about a social construct. The case for anti-realism when it comes to continents is compelling - the lines represent interpersonal convention rather than an objective property of nature we can think of as "continentness" - but that doesn't mean you can't say Asia is generally east of Europe. It's just when you do, the primary referent of what you are talking about is mental states. Continents have no reality apart from what social agreement gives them. This isn't true of, say, electromagnetic waves. It isn't even true of tectonic plates.
When academics talk about race as a social construct, this is usually what they mean. It can get confusing because ethnic relatedness, which does have a basis in real biology, is part of what informs racial belonging through phenotypes associated with the different races, but "race" isn't that. It's more a collection of expectations about one's appearance and cultural identity, that correlates with, but is not the same as the genetic associations. But because people *want* that to be the same thing, you sometimes get internally incoherent ideas about who belongs to which group.
Isn't there a continental plate that runs through the Mediterranean? I know there's also the Somalian plate, but at a high level, it seems reasonable to me to regard Africa as its own continent.
What does it mean to be geographically real? Is it a stronger or weaker property than being real? Can something be geographically real but not real or vice versa?
"The division between Europe and Asia is pretty arbitrary therefore... they aren't (geographically) real" is a nonsensical statement to me and needs an explanation.
I think the distinction between "race" and "ethnicity" is pretty on-point though. Race is stuff like "Asian". Ethnicity is stuff like Vietnamese versus Japanese. As far as genetics goes they are different ethnicities, but the same "race" as constituted in America anyway. (Let's not even get started on "Hispanic" shall we?)
It's more sensible to think of ethnicity as cultural, while race is genetic. So if you're adopted into a family you aren't biologically related to, you will be raised as part of their ethnicity even if your race is entirely different. The US government defines in broad coarse terms like "Asian", but there's not really a sense in which South Asians naturally cluster with East Asians.
The US Census in recent decades has, in effect, treated "race" as meaning biological ancestry and "ethnicity" (i.e., Hispanic) as meaning cultural ancestry.
For example, the great Mexican boxer Canelo Alvarez would be considered racially white, but is culturally Hispanic. The Census made strong efforts to explain to respondents that Hispanics could be of any race.
My definition is that race is genetic while ethnicity in c. 2000 America referred to traits (such as surname, language, cuisine, religion, etc.) that are usually passed down within biological families but that don't have to be.
This just seems like the commonplace confusion between "social construct" and "not real". "Europe" obviously is a social construct, but the socially constructed place is definitely north of Africa.
Similarly, money is social construct, but you'll still be sent to prison for counterfeiting.
There’s a definite night. It’s after astronomical dusk, and is an exact position of the sun below the horizon - below 18°. However I suppose you could say that the exact percentage is arbitrary.
This is something that the social constructionists rarely grapple with. Sure a day, a year and and hour are social constructs in that humans have named them, but the hour is totally arbitrary and the other two have actual existence as orbits or rotations independent of human existence.
That would imply the UK has no night for a couple of months around midsummer. But people would laugh at you if you said so. The sun goes down and it gets dark, just not fully.
I too believe my own facts. Night is ambiguous in colloquial language - it doesn’t mean dark necessarily, depends on context and time of year.
That said if you told people it didn’t get fully dark in the U.K. in June they would accuse you of being captain obvious. If you then explained (as I did) that it wasn’t technically night they would, if of reasonable intelligence, thank you for the info.
It’s not just the edges though; races are not clades. The most recent common ancestor of all black people is also the most recent common ancestor of all humans. (Which is to say, black people can be divided up into subgroups, such that some subgroups are more closely related to white people than they are to the other groups of black people. NOT because of interbreeding, just because of splits within Africa that happened before the out-of-Africa migrations.)
Likewise, the MRCA of all Asian people is also an ancestor of all Native Americans, and thus presumably some Asian populations are more closely related to Native Americans than they are to other Asians.
(Not that this justifies “race isn’t real”; nobody is claiming that reptiles aren’t real just because birds exist. But it means the genetics are much less obvious than you’d assume based on physical appearance and geography.)
Yes, this seems right. Some socially-defined "races" match underlying genetic/historical breeding groups well; others don't. Scott argues that that there's a reasonable match between socially-defined Jewish people and genetically-defined Jewish people. Fair enough. But that is clearly not true for "black", which seems to be an essentially American social construction.
Yeah, this isn’t about “how Americans define blackness”. Even very obviously “black” 100% African ancestry people are not a single coherent group. They are multiple groups that we categorize as one group because of external similarities that do not always correspond to genetic similarity.
There is more genetic variation within sub-Saharan African people than within all the rest of humanity combined. They are not a genetic grouping in anything like the sense that Jews or Japanese people might be. It's chalk and cheese.
To such an extent that this variation affects patterns of settlement outside Africa (even though we are talking mostly about enslaved people, who had no choice). Sickle-cell condition was half-understood empirically before it was actually understood - "black people do not thrive in highlands" (OK, there's a much more colorful expression in Spanish, which used to be used by Black people in a certain part of South America, when speaking of themselves) - obviously untrue of Ethiopians, say.
And yet there are certain genetic traits common to sub-Saharan Africans which identify them as the social race "black." It's not an arbitrary social construction.
I gather that the vast majority of that diversity is contained within a handful of tiny hunter-gatherer and pastoralist populations in Africa, often referred to as the Pygmy and Bushman peoples, who contributed basically nothing to the ancestry of today's black diaspora outside of Africa, though those other Africans do have more diversity than Eurasian and Native American populations. See https://www.razibkhan.com/p/out-of-africas-midlife-crisis (Khan refers to the Pygmy and Bushman peoples are "very diverse", the other sub-saharan Africans as "not very diverse", and everyone else as "very not-diverse". I think the preferred term for the not-very-diverse Africans these days is "Niger-Congo"; you will sometimes hear "Bantu", but that more strictly refers only to the largest and most widespread branch of the Niger-Congo peoples). But that doesn't mean that the "not very diverse" Africans aren't still more genetically similar to each other than they are to any non-African populations.
That is to say, "black" does map on, to a large extent, to peoples sharing more common ancestry with each other than with any other groups - they just went through less of a population bottleneck than non-Africans did (even if it gets rather fuzzy as the proportion of Eurasian admixture increases as you travel north through East Africa towards Egypt).
There is also a claim that I'm not quite sure about where to dig up data on, but I seem to remember reading, that most of that genetic diversity isn't actually doing anything very interesting phenotypically - that it is mostly either in non-coding stretches of the genome, or synonymous alleles that don't affect how a gene is expressed, resulting in Niger-Congo Africans being no more phenotypically diverse (i.e. being less diverse in the traits that people tend to actually care about) than non-Africans. Maybe someone can point me to better information on that?
> The most recent common ancestor of all black people is also the most recent common ancestor of all humans
How does that fit in with the claim that all non-sub-Saharan-African humans have Neanderthal ancestors and sub-Saharan Africans don't?
If this is the case then the most recent common ancestor of all humans is prior to the sapiens-neanderthal split, while the most recent common ancestor of all sub-Saharan Africans is more recent. Right?
Technically, you're correct. But "Mitochondrial Eve" and "Y-chromosomal Adam" are the guideposts used to define the common ancestry of Homo sapiens sapiens. They both lived between 100,000 to 200,000 years ago in sub-Saharan Africa. Neither Neanderthal (nor Denisovan) Mitochondrial or Y-chromosomal DNA is present in modern human populations (AFAIK). Neanderthal and Denisovan alleles are found on chromosomes other than the Y. And even though they are admixed into modern human gene pools (except sub-Saharan Africans—until recently) they don't make good guideposts for when H. sapiens sapiens diverged.
This is actually outdated. They recently (2013) identified a Y haplogroup that split from the main clade far earlier, which pushes Adam back to 338kya or so. See https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3591855/
Thanks for flagging this paper! Looks like it may upset several tidy assumptions that have been made about human origins. Wow! From the abstract...
> "We report the discovery of an African American Y chromosome that carries the ancestral state of all SNPs that defined the basal portion of the Y chromosome phylogenetic tree. We sequenced ∼240 kb of this chromosome to identify private, derived mutations on this lineage, which we named A00. We then estimated the time to the most recent common ancestor (TMRCA) for the Y tree as 338 thousand years ago (kya) (95% confidence interval = 237–581 kya). Remarkably, this exceeds current estimates of the mtDNA TMRCA, as well as those of the age of the oldest anatomically modern human fossils. The extremely ancient age combined with the rarity of the A00 lineage, which we also find at very low frequency in central Africa, point to the importance of considering more complex models for the origin of Y chromosome diversity. These models include ancient population structure and the possibility of archaic introgression of Y chromosomes into anatomically modern humans. The A00 lineage was discovered in a large database of consumer samples of African Americans and has not been identified in traditional hunter-gatherer populations from sub-Saharan Africa. This underscores how the stochastic nature of the genealogical process can affect inference from a single locus and warrants caution during the interpretation of the geographic location of divergent branches of the Y chromosome phylogenetic tree for the elucidation of human origins."
I don't think this is right. What happened (AIUI) is that some hominins left Africa and became neanderthals, while other hominins in Africa became h sapiens. Some subset of h sapiens left Africa (and this group were the ancestors of all non-black humans) and interbred (to a quite limited extent) with the neanderthal population, before driving them to extinction.
Neanderthal and modern human populations diverged about 300Kya. IIRC I believe that modern non-African humans left Africa around 70Kya (?), and it was a small group of between several hundred or several tens of thousands of individuals (I think there are still arguments about the size of migration). Thus non-African populations are much less genetically diverse than modern African populations due to the founder effect and inbreeding among that small population of humans.
FYI, there were several previous migrations of modern humans from Africa, but all of them seem to have died out and not left any genetic signature in modern non-African populations. The ancestors of Neanderthals and Denisovans left Africa much earlier. I don't know if they were two separate migrations or whether they diverged once they were out of Africa. Interesting lecture on how the genomic comparisons are done, and what they have concluded so far, here...
I have absolutely seen people claim that reptiles and fish are not a thing on the base of cladistic taxonomy. But to be fair to this argument, the traditional conception of races, even in biology (e.g. Cuvier, Haeckel, Carleton Coon) did treat races as clades (branching early in human evolution and persisting in separation, with relatively 'pure' cores despite some mixing at the edges), so it may be fair to say that races as traditionally interpreted do not exist.
All of these groups are real. What feels arbitrary is that, as a Jew, if I have to enter my race in a form, I'm expected to enter "white" and not "Jewish". This expectation changes relatively rapidly across time and region. But people tend to think of white and black as obvious and immutable races. Saying it's arbitrary is trying to point out that the racial categories we use today are more mutable and less fundamental than people think.
I have a different analogy. Imagine an alternate universe where males are divided into men and manlets who are males shorter than 6 feet (and everyone's height is
measured in feet).
Historically, men held positions of power, while manlets weren't allowed to dire in the front of the bus in the living memory. "All men were created equal" was written in one country which enslaved manlets until a bit over 100 years ago.
Nowadays, most cultured people accept that manlets shouldn't be discriminated against. Where they draw the line are the crazy radicals who claim there is no such thing as a "manlet". After all, they argue, there are clear correlations between the height and intelligence, attractiveness to women, penis size, etc. The claimed "tall privilege" is obviously a bogus, as there are rich manlets and poor men.
Now, as a denizen of our universe you might think "huh, manlet as a category sounds awesome"! But you might also understand where the people arguing against that category are coming from. It's not that there is no difference between 6 foot 6 and 5 foot nothing. It's that an arbitrary category which was used to perpetrated discrimination is just not useful enough to justify its continued existence. After all, categories were made for Man (not for Man and Manlets).
Does the distribution of height have two distinct peaks, one for men and one for manlets, like if you'd have a society consisting of half Norwegians and half Pygmies?
Do you mean that race as a concept will become obsolete once we have enough mixed ancestry people to smoothen the distribution? Wouldn't that make an interracial relationship a moral imperative?
I don't think that e.g. pure-blood Chinese are going to disappear any time soon, so I expect the current racial clusters to endure for quite some time. Why would it be a moral imperative to do something about that?
I've long assumed the answer to the first is "yes" and to the second is "not imperative, but tiny small bonus". But I'm beginning to suspect the actual answer is "yes, but people will come up with some other, equally hurtful, social division in its place".
It might be a worthwhile goal for an individual country, encouraging its citizens of various races to interbreed, as long as they close their borders and stop importing more racial diversity. But for the world as a whole, we would want to have very, very good reasons to be confident that the human biodiversity hypothesis about the partly-genetic origins of race differences in average intelligence is false, before taking a gamble on such a project - or at least, not seek to implement it until we are very comfortable with, and capable at, reprogenetic techniques for increasing intelligence.
Otherwise, the sort of global homogenization project you have in mind would rely on the maintenance of modern transport infrastructure, and if you need a certain fraction of people above a certain IQ to be able to maintain that infrastructure (as well as the modern industrial and agricultural tech that provides food in such abundance), and that IQ level is significantly above the global average, and if the HBD claim is true, then you could maybe, at best, achieve your homogenization goal once, then modern industrial society would break down, billions would starve, and we'd be back to being relatively reproductively isolated on our respective continents and eventually diversify into a new bunch of races, who would squabble among themselves at their meeting points just as much as the current ones do.
Mike Judge's animated sit-com "King of the Hill" has an interesting example of the potential complexities: It never occurs to conspiracy theorist Dale Gribble that his tawny son Joseph is obviously the biological offspring of Dale's wife and his American Indian acquaintance John Redcorn. Hank and his son Bobby Hill never notice either that Joseph looks and acts more like John Redcorn than like Dale Gribble.
I looked this up on Google, which provided a helpful (if hallucinatory) AI summary:
"Generative AI is experimental. Learn more
"In the Fox series King of the Hill, Dale Gribble has a sexual relationship with John Redcorn, and Joseph Gribble is their biological son."
>So at various times Italians, Irish, and Ashkenazi Jews have been categorized as non-white, but now they're generally considered to be white.
When? You mean when men of these groups had the right to vote during the time period where only white men had the right to vote?
A lot of people point to a cartoon depicting the irish as a different race to europeans, but they do not understand that this came from a satirical magazine and was not an official statement of the racial identity of the Irish. Not sure if you had this in mind, but please avoid this error if you did.
>Ethnicity still gets fuzzy around the edges,
So what? Almost everything in the real world is fuzzy. This is exactly why it's an isolated demand for rigor.
There's no dollar amount where a person goes from being not-rich to rich, so by this logic the existence of rich people is extremely dubious (if having a million dollars makes you rich, does one fewer dollar make you not rich? How about one dollar fewer than that?)
The only question that matters in this situation is: "Does using the concept of biological race allow us to make better empirical predictions about the world than not using it?"
And the answer to that question is a resounding "YES".
In general when thinking about social construction the structuralists shy away from defining as social constructions those things, like money, which are fully constructs and instead apply it to race or ethnicity which, as Scott pointed out, have biological markers overlaid with cultural markers although it’s never quite an exact fit.
Italians, Irish, and Ashkenazim have always been considered "white" in the United States. This isn't some vague question like figuring out who counts as "white" today - many places in the United States had vigorously enforced laws about who counted as white, and Italians, Irish, and Ashkenazim counted as white. They were often thought of as lesser kinds of white people, but this had nowhere near the same legal or social consequences that actually being considered nonwhite had.
One thing I've always found fascinating is Lucy and Ricky Ricardo. Interracial marriages were super controversial in the 1950s, and yet the most popular TV couple in the 1950s was what would today be considered an interracial couple. And it's never once mentioned, he's just a wacky foreigner with a funny accent.
There's some ways in which the US has got less racist since the 1950s but there's definitely some examples in the opposite direction.
Hispanics were considered white back then. The federal government invented the Hispanic category later. There's some video by Hanania and Bernstein about this.
True, but Arnaz as Cuban was still considered different enough that CBS did not want to cast him opposite Ball. It took some convincing for them to accept the idea.
It's probably fair to say that Italians were considered to be their own ambiguous, non-Black category (similar to Latin Americans nowadays) and that the Irish were once thought of as their own inferior white sub-race, at least if they were poor.
It's not the only distinction that *matters* - in what was to some extent an Ango-supremacist country, being a non-Anglo white, with sort of de-facto second-class citizen status, is obviously less than ideal, but that's obviously not the same thing as being classed as non-white where non-whites are de facto, or even de jure non-citizens.
One thing I find consistent in these exchanges is the "race is a social construct" people using a stricter, turn-of-the-20th-century academic definition of "race" and race theory, and the "race is describing genetic groups" side using a more general, colloquial definition. Genetic clustering clearly shows different human groups -- these groups vaguely-but-not-perfectly correlate with the old "scientific" races.
Social consequences of racism have been based mostly on the older definitions, which got enshrined in law and cultural systems. So it makes sense that people approaching from that angle would zero in on the "social construct" side of things. On the other side, the scientists who came up with the original races, when presented with modern genetic data, would likely modify their account to better match the data, same as we have as we learn more about animal species. You don't hear "species is a social construct" nearly as often, you hear "scientists incorrectly assigned these species to the wrong clade."
I think this is where people end up talking past each other. Does the genetic diversity in Africa mean that Race as a concept is scientifically meaningless, or that really we should add 2-3 races to Africa to properly describe the different populations?
Look at something like Duda and Zrzavý "Human population history revealed by a supertree approach" (2016) for what that might look like. So far as I can tell, the clades are something like:
- Bushman
- Pygmy
- Bantu/East African supergroup which contains everyone else
You really have to push into the tree, and make a nonsense of any concept of similar levels of difference, to get anything like an 19th century racial taxonomy.
And if you try to retain that level of distinction, then you get categories like the Pygmy-West-African-Anuak-Hazda-Sandawe-Maasai-Iraqw-Aari-Dogon-Somali-Beja-Egyptian-Bedouin-Palestinian-Druze-Kurd-Turk-Greek-German family that includes Germans, English, Italians, Spanish, Poles, Russians and Finns.
That's the motte. The bailey is, I think, that if you make an argument involving race people dislike, people can say "didn't you know race was an obsolete, racist, pseudo-scientific concept?" even if the argument isn't made less valid by that races are arbitrarily delineated categories on a continuous spectrum, all the while the same people are at other times perfectly willing to discuss race.
“I would feel pretty bad telling her she couldn’t and she was a poser and an imperialist and the tribe should refuse to interact with her.1
I guess this means that maybe I sort of kind of grudgingly accept (3)”
I take this (and the inverted/parallel case of the “white” guy raised on the reservation) more as meaning you don’t like telling people they can’t be part of something they want to be a part of, and likewise object to others doing that. This preference cuts across rationales, hence the apparent inconsistency of saying (in the case of the guy) “lived experience trumps genetics” and (in the case of the girl) “genetics (kind of sort of) trumps lived experience.” In both cases the real trump card seems more to be something like “Who am I (or the tribal elders or whoever) to call for this person to be expelled?”
My comment here is sort of tangential, and is mostly on the idea/value of "race" as a concept. On the one hand, race is certainly just as "real" as dozens of other concepts that no one questions the validity of, but I think I have been convinced that it isn't (or maybe shouldn't be, I'm not denying reality, but rather make an aspirational statement) be _important_. This stems mostly from my views on individualism. You can say lots of things about groups of people, but almost every single thing you can say about those groups is a thing that, in any specific instance, am not going to care about the group trait and instead am going to care about the specific individual in question.
About the only reason why these kinds of group/colelctive traits might matter is that there are (or at least could be), policies whose goal is either greatly obstructed or maybe even made entirely impossible by group realities (since the policy is targeting those groups). This is true, but I'm almost always against those policies for reasons completely unrelated to their efficacy or lack thereof.
TO make a more direct comment on the article: when it comes to this particular situation, I personally think that genetic doors to cultural groups are generally a bad idea. I understand the reasons (which you point out) that they get implemented, but they are, in my opinion, bad reasons, or at least reasons that aren't justified by the harms caused.
Take your specific example about native americans being swamped by the hordes of white people who would want to adopt their culture. It seems to me like this is a non-problem. White people can do what they want, try to join the culture, and they will either do so well enough that existing members of the culture will accept them as assimilated or not. In other words, the principle of free-associate renders this concern moot. If there is some big group of "fake" native americans, the "real" ones don't have to associate with them. And the culture will only actually get diluted to whatever extent it's members don't care enough about preserving to it maintain it, at which point the problem is not the "fakes" but rather the lack of caring of the "real" members. And that problem doesn't seem impacted by the existence of poor-imitators.
>You can say lots of things about groups of people, but almost every single thing you can say about those groups is a thing that, in any specific instance, am not going to care about the group trait and instead am going to care about the specific individual in question.
Oh? So you have some sort of fast, efficient way of testing each individual prospective african or arab immigrant to europe to know whether they're going to commit crime or anti-social behavior? Whether they're going to culturally assimilate or not? Whether they're going to be a net fiscal burden?
Or is the sensible thing to look at how they behave as a group, and realize that it's more efficient to reject virtually all of them who aren't doctors or engineers of something, even if that means we lose a few diamonds in the rough?
And does this only apply to race? Are women discriminatory for demanding women's only spaces instead of judging the actions of each individual man first?
Do you have a way of working out the behavior of each individual student at a prospective school for your children? Or do you see that the school is full of low income black kids and you know to stay away?
>This is true, but I'm almost always against those policies for reasons completely unrelated to their efficacy or lack thereof.
Bully for you. But DEI is a monumental political force and has significant normie support (or at least, tolerance) precisely because they believe that group outcome differences matter and are not caused by biological group differences.
> But if you’re going to say individual Arabs and Africans should be discriminated against because on average they are poor, how is that different from saying white people should be discriminated against because on average they had privileges they didn’t earn?
This is actually a nice way of putting it, and one I haven't heard before.
>"But if you’re going to say individual Arabs and Africans should be discriminated against because on average they are poor, how is that different from saying white people should be discriminated against because on average they had privileges they didn’t earn?"
If a characteristic is predictive of future behavior and members of an identifiable group share a different value of that characteristic than that of the population as a whole, then in circumstances where you cannot feasibly determine a the value of the characteristic for each individual member of the group you get a better prediction of the future behavior of each individual by imputing the characteristic value as that of the group than you would if you used the wider population's.
That's a different kind of being "discriminated against" than being penalized because other members of your group received benefits in the past.
I don't think this is accurate. The internet skews towards nut-picking and confirmation. This means that people who are pro-DEI will only see examples of the weakest anti-DEI arguments. "anti-DEI people actually believed in individualism/colorblindness and also spoke out against statistical discrimination against members of “bad” demographics" exist in spades, however their arguments will never be shown to anyone who's pro-DEI due to how the incentives of the internet work.
> But if you’re going to say individual Arabs and Africans should be discriminated against because on average they are poor, how is that different from saying white people should be discriminated against because on average they had privileges they didn’t earn?
Discriminating against someone because they're on average poor is using predictive factors to determine something about the individual. In this case, people don't want individuals with certain negative effects, use "being poor" as an imprecise predictor about those effects, and the fact that they're Arab/African is coincidental.
Discriminating against someone because they might have privileges they didn't earn is entirely unconcerned with anything related to the individual. It's a type of discrimination that necessarily ignores anything that could be relevant to the individual being a good/bad fit for whatever you are discriminating for.
The former seems like a bad implementation of a potentially-correct selection process. The latter can't be logical in any selection process where you are trying to find individuals that fit certain characteristics. (It's also immoral in my opinion, but the other commenter proposed a good case for that argument).
I'll be honest, I'm not super interested in an extensive back and forth on this topic. That really should have meant I didn't make my first comment, but I did, so I'll give you a response here. I don't expect (nor am I trying) to change your mind, but maybe you will see the points where my values are different than yours.
I think that rejecting individuals for group characteristics is morally wrong and I think that negative impacts that Europe is seeing from immigration are not results of inherent characteristics of those groups, but rather the _terrible_ specifics of immigration policy in Europe. America is an amazing machine of assimilation (or we used to be, we are trying our hardest to stop being and I worry every day that we will succeed), and that is a result of dealing with immigration intelligently. I think Europe is (and always has been) worse at this and therefore gets bad outcomes. Thats Europe's fault, not the immigrants. Although to be fair, I don't know how to fix Europe's problems, so I don't reallly have a solution to the very real problems that they have with immigration, and I can't deny that just blanket rejecting groups wouldn't fix the problem, assuming that was the only thing one cared about. Luckily I'm not European so It's not my problem (although, if I was, "fixing the problem" would very much not be the only thing I cared about). Either way, I won't tell Europe what to do.
As for schools, I have a whole tone of problems with the public schooling system and blame most of the issues we have on systemic issues that have, again, nothing to do with race (this will be a theme of my answers: almost any case you can think of to present, I'm pretty sure is due more to underlying systemic failures rather than race).
And finally, DEI: again, there are a whole _host_ of reasons to be anti DEI that do not rely on or presuppose _any_ beliefs around race. My reasons to be anti-dei are entirely race-agnostic and would be true no matter what facts were or were not true of any other race.
Feel free to respond to this if you want, but I'm not trying to have a conversation here and won't reply again. Like I said, I don't expect to convince you and I know you won't convince me, because my values and morals result in these beliefs and _do not depend_ on what the "realities" of race is. They are not outcome-driven, they are values-driven.
"rejecting individuals for group characteristics is morally wrong"
So do think it's morally wrong that people prefer to hire women/girls as babysitters? As a man, I don't feel that being discriminated against in this way is an injustice; even if it is inconvenient for me, they are only behaving prudently.
It's all about opportunity cost; getting individuating information is often costly and sometimes impossible.
I have no problem admitting that as a general rule, I would prefer to live in a white neighborhood. I think the vast majority of white people who pretend to find this shocking and deny that they feel the same are delusional hypocrites. But as it happens, I actually do live in a black neighborhood. For all I know, my Mexican wife and I are the only non-blacks on the block. And it's a fine neighborhood and the neighbors seem lovely. Just chatted with one today. I can tell from other cues that it's not the kind of black neighborhood to be worried about. Have I learned the errors of my racist ways? No... I know the statistics. I know that there are very substantial differences in crime rates on average...but that the black people I am (justifiably) worried about are a minority of black people.
The idea that it could be wrong to take accurate information into account is just weird to me. The question is: are you drawing reasonable conclusions, ie the issues above about immigrants, and we could argue about that; the devil is in the details etc.
But I don't get what's so hard about this. It's like people think the only two options must be "each and every black person is a dangerous criminal" OR "differences in crime rates are a racist fiction, they are just jailed more crimes they didn't commit; if you take personal safety precautions, you're a bad person, etc".
As for judging individuals... You obviously should, and I think most people do, use individuating information as much as possible, but the amount of information you have is always limited, sometimes you're unable to get more...
Even if you judge someone based on their past behavior... You're just using the "stereotype" (ie statistically true generalization) that people who commited crimes in the past are more likely to commit crimes in the future.
And sometimes people are legally prevented from getting or using that information, as when it's illegal to require a background check, ironically and perversely on the grounds that using that individuating information is "racist" because of "disparate impact"...which then causes employers to (rationally) discriminate on the basis of race, when they would not have done so otherwise.
> Oh? So you have some sort of fast, efficient way of testing each individual prospective african or arab immigrant to europe to know whether they're going to commit crime or anti-social behavior? Whether they're going to culturally assimilate or not? Whether they're going to be a net fiscal burden?
> Or is the sensible thing to look at how they behave as a group, and realize that it's more efficient to reject virtually all of them who aren't doctors or engineers of something, even if that means we lose a few diamonds in the rough?
It seems to me that the sensible thing to do is realise that they *don't* "behave as a group", and simply not make policy on the basis of group membership.
> The consensus says "biological race doesn't exist".
Open offer to any expert believe`n gamblers out there; we test if races exist by finding 1000 claiming to be Russians from born in Russia, who are as white as snow; and we test if they have sickle cell if none of them have sickle cell you give me a million dollars, if there is sickle cell at 1/10th the global rate ill give you 10$, and I'll tell all my racist family, racist friends, and racist community that race doesn't exist
Once in a life time opportunity; you can fight racism today.
I think maybe you're missing the word "million" when you offer to pay out $10 if you lose? If you are really offering only ten dollars then this is a terrible offer even in worlds where you are wrong, since that won't even cover the cost of the experiment. (And also you would be asking for 100000:1 betting odds in your favor, which is hardly a sign of confidence.)
That sort of proves the uselessness of race, doesn't it? You can test for sickle cell and get answers that have meaning. You can't just directly test for Russian-ness. Because it's a construct that's pretty amorphous.
At best, we can say that your results are close to other people in Russia. If we wanted to, we could go further and separate out people from the north of Russia from those in the south. Heck, we could even isolate individual religious groups - same way that the Amish in America are genetically distinct from other "White" people. You can ethnically separate Russian Old Believers from those who accepted the reforms of the 17th century.
Are the Russian Old Believers a separate race/ethnicity from the rest of the Russians?
Biology is often fractal, fractals maybe hard to enumerate a count of features or get the fight frame of reference for viewing what you want, but I'm going to insist that you measure coastlines and vaguely know how to handle the concept of a 3 legged dog dispite a dog being defined as 4 legged
If there's a measurable difference between the old believers and the rust of Russia there's a millions of small real reasons for them "demity parents were party insiders because his grandparents were from Lenin hometown" and you can expect a slightly flatten bell curve if you have some errors with race but even with my complete pure racist process of "Russia white, Russia won't have sickle cell" no one instantly wanted to bet that Russia had >1/10th the base rate
I agree with you that Russians won't have sickle cell. Let's do the same thing with Russians and Tay-Sachs disease. Take 10,000 ethnic Russians and if none of them have Tay-Sachs you give me a million dollars. If they have rates 1/10th that of the Old Order Amish, I agree that there's no racial difference between the Old Order Amish and the Russians.
Because I'm pretty sure that currently, Old Order Amish and Russians check the same box - White - on the American census. Why do you think that is? After all, we know they're genetically distinct.
Could it have something to do with social kinship and history? Perhaps Europeans are socially close, even if they're genetically distinguishable. So a European will be socially closer to a genetically distinct European than to an equally distinct African. Does that sound so crazy?
literally moving the goal post, I dont know what a taysacks disease is and your clearly accepting the premise biological race is real but want to make it about only skin color.
Ethnicity and race are ways to group genetics together. For lack of a better analogy, consider Crayola crayons. They sell 8 packs, 64 packs, 256 packs - what's the "real" number of colors?
The answer is that is an infinitely divisible spectrum that we group together based on our needs - not based on anything inherent and unchanging.
That's the same as grouping Old Order Amish and Russian people together as White. They're genetically distinguishable - I hope we can agree on that - but since we're trying to have a low number of races, we'll call them "White". "White" is itself a collection of genetics that can be further broken down, or could instead be increased to a higher level of generality, e.g., say White is just part of the Eurasian genetic identity, etc.
using your own analogy, theres some small number of simple colors, a very large list of named colors and a well defined space of 255^3 colors, and then a very very very small minority who want to break down color with math I dont even understand.
The consensus says "biological race doesn't exist" but why isn’t Elizabeth Warren Native? - It’s easier to degrade people if you give them an opportunity to save face and pretend that’s not what’s happening. Most people are actually perfectly willing to be degraded provided there’s some theoretical limit to how far they think it’ll go.
If race doesn’t literally exist, the victim thinks then maybe someday the social construct will fade away, and they’ll stop demanding I atone. Maybe one day I will suffer enough degradation to atone and they’ll stop telling me that I’m terrible.
Surprise, surprise! They actually do just hate you. It’ll never end. And you deserve what you tolerate.
It's possible that *everyone* resents the affirmative action, but it is suppressed when a person fits into the category.
When that person is revealed not to be in the category, the suppressed resentment is released and boils to the surface, causing reaction that is surprisingly large.
This is magnified when there is significant amounts of money at stake.
Culture is meant for sharing, that’s one of the best things about it. 90% of the time, complaints about cultural appropriation are just veiled hatred of the majority group, using weaponized vocabulary to gain status and play power games.
People shouldn’t be limited to making art, food, clothing, or events from only their race, however race is defined. It’s absolutely silly and needs to be mocked as a concept.
I mostly agree, but it's unfortunate when people who aren't in a cultural group make, say, "native jewelry" and 1.) customers think they're getting actual native jewelry and 2.) a native artisan can't feed his or her family because the outsider has greater means for promotion and production. It's not really fair that a Navaho artisan should have to compete for market share for authentic native products against Macy's.
If the "cultural appropriator" is lying about the provenance of their product, then I agree with you that is troubling, but no more than a company saying something is organic when it isn't. But if your complaint is that Macy's can make sufficiently authentic/high-quality native jewelry more efficiently than a Navaho artisan, why is this any more of a problem than capitalism generally? Why should I care more about this Navaho artisan being put out of business by a more efficient competitor than I do about a family burger joint being put of business by McDonald's?
Yes, I'm specifically referring to cases where the products' provenance is misrepresented or when a design is stolen from a small creator (which is more common). Anthropologie and other brands have been accused of stealing designs from native artisans (I just used Macy's as an example), when a simple fix would be carrying the small businesses' pieces in-store/offering them a design contract. It's not illegal to copy and duplicate, but it's...unseemly in some circumstances. This isn't specifically a native artist thing; big brands do this all the time and then pretend they had no idea some popular etsy store had these very unique and original earrings first.
Isn't this what copyright and patents are for? This has nothing to do with appropriation. Native Americans do not "own" the culture of their ancestors. Nobody does.
There are a bunch of things you can't copyright or patent, or which are disproportionately expensive to do so; for instance, the design of a piece of jewellery is very unlikely to be sufficiently original for any IP to accrue, and that would require registration as a design patent, which would need lawyers, not just filing fees.
And if it's a one-off original? Then it would need to be priced in seven figures to pay for the lawyers. So an individual artist creates an original piece of jewellery in the Native American tradition; this is then copied and mass-produced. There really isn't much they can do about that. If it was a painting, then it's copyright, but similar design protections don't work for a lot of craft-art.
>So an individual artist creates an original piece of jewellery in the Native American tradition; this is then copied and mass-produced.
This almost seems closest to trademark law. If a particular tribe has a tradition, it sounds like the most natural match to IP law (caution: I've only dealt with software patents, and only as an inventor, interacting with the IP lawyers). If the tribe was a corporation, it could be the repository for ownership of the copyright.
As valerista wrote, one class of these cases is where
>products' provenance is misrepresented
and that is exactly what trademarks are supposed to combat
That's the thing. It's not really illegal, but creating awareness around the ethics of copying or, if you like, "appropriation" is all some of these makers can do. It's really down to the person's conscience. Anybody can buy a dupe or cheap copy of things that are rare or authentic, but YOU know whether it's a copy or not.
Usually it works like this: Emmental valley cheese gets famous, everybody starts copying it (and cheese lovers around the world rejoice), but the official "real Emmental cheese" trademark is reserved for the stuff proved to be made in the actual Emmental valley, which sells at much higher price. Similarly, any factory can make cheap wood icons in Congo style (sometimes made of plastic), but the real ones straight from Congo are the ones that sell with highest price. This way everyone can get good things that they like cheaply, the gourmets get the real stuff for higher price, and anyone who tries to fake a real thing gets punished. Looks like everyone gets to be happy, what's the problem?
I agree with that point. I would call that cultural commoditization rather than appropriation.
But, however, if two white women are so inspired by the cooking they learned in Mexico, and decide to start a taco food truck, they shouldn’t be told they are doing something wrong. What do you think?
Isn't that mostly because most Chinese restaurants run on very slim margins, so nobody sees it as an opportunity? Also there aren't that many westerners yet who would be well enough established in Chinese culture to do so.
What I do see all the time are restaurants who offer "asian cuisine". They tend to have Thai, Vietnamese, Chinese and Indian food on the same menu. And I really doubt that the owners all happen to have heritage in all those regions at the same time ...
You'd be surprised - the refugees from southeast Asia are slightly more likely to be mixed or diaspora because of policies of various dictators in the 60s - 80s (e.g, Khmer Rouge very specifically targeting Cambodian-Chinese).
It's actually not unrealistic to know someone who is Cambodian-Thai-Chinese or Vietnamese-Thai-Chinese in some cities, and even if their ancestors aren't strictly that ethnicity, they've lived in at least one of these countries for a while too, which I'd count. Southeast Asian cuisine is strongly influenced by all the diaspora.
So your restaurant with Thai, Chinese, and Vietnamese food is probably the outcome of a Thai-Chinese who lived in Vietnam for a while or some combination of the above. I can count at least 3 people in Melbourne, Australia that I know with this kind of background!
I remember this case, and honestly...if they would have just let the food speak for itself, nobody would have really noticed. They had to give interviews and mention how they badgered a bunch of tortilla-making abuelas in Mexico for their secrets.
Is that unfair? Is it also unfair when Yo Yo Ma sells more records than a slightly less talented cellist who happens to be full-blood German?
No, neither is unfair. Navajo designs belong to the common cultural heritage of mankind, just like Bach. Given that the European cultural artefacts adopted by the Navajo include literacy, hygeine, medicine, and about five thousand years of technology (and Bach!) and the Navajo cultural artefacts adopted by Europeans are limited to zigzaggy patterns and the occasional scalping, I don't think the Navajo can complain that they're getting the raw end of this cultural exchange.
Okay, design a video game or write a symphony (or whatever it is you create, if anything) and let a giant corporation somewhere in the world copy and sell it. It's the common cultural heritage of mankind, after all. All that matters is that whomever has more power, money and resources makes a profit. Don't expect consumers to care; they got the thing, right?
I mean, this is why we have intellectual property laws, so that people can have a period where they exclusively benefit from their cultural contributions before they become the common cultural heritage of mankind.
Bach and zigzaggy patterns have long since passed that period of exclusivity.
I see your point, and I agree. But I really hate making arguments where a subtext is, "if we'd killed them all when we'd had the chance, we wouldn't have this problem now". I think it sets a bad precedent for the future.
Conversely, you could also "steal" the ideas of the large corporation. That's why large corporations such as Disney and Microsoft are so protective of their IP rights.
This is a good point as far as it goes, but I'm not sure that "cultural appropriation" is the right name for the real complaint. Even after we get rid of one group of appropiators (the makers and sellers of the replicas), the non-natives who buy the genuine stuff are still culturally appropriating as enthusiastically as ever.
No, it's not. It's meant for the people within that group, and this is especially true for anything with religious significance (which most traditional culture has to some degree). Without any kind of cultural gatekeeping you get big homogenous monoculture.
The only reason most of the cultures of the world that people admire exist is precisely because they were separate from other people. Even modern cultures like hip-hop, these were existed in culturally secluded communities, and having everybody make hip-hops leads to a dilution in the essential character of hip-hop.
>People shouldn’t be limited to making art, food, clothing, or events from only their race, however race is defined. It’s absolutely silly and needs to be mocked as a concept.
Do you think a mix between chinese opera and rap music would be anything other than obscene? Then you probably have terrible taste in art and your views are informed by this.
You seriously can't claim other people have terrible taste in art when you reject any advances in culture. Do you seriously want all these cultures insulated from each other and stagnate forever? The breadth of human experience is limited. Novel art cannot be created without incorporating aspects from different cultures.
> Without any kind of cultural gatekeeping you get big homogenous monoculture.
I agree this is a problem but it's what we're heading for anyway. The solution to global monoculture is rapid cultural innovation -- inventing new cultural artefacts faster than they can diffuse across the world.
Monoculture won't happen until everyone speaks the same first language, which is not happening.
Food and action movies cross oceans easily, because they are not bound by language. Other forms of culture, not so much. For example, everyone finds jokes in their own language funnier than translated jokes. So comedy movies don't cross borders as easily as action movies. Poetry? It is not translatable at all. In France, Moliere is bigger than Shakespeare. In the UK, Shakespeare is bigger than Moliere. Will that ever change? I don't think so. Rap is also poetry, and even if the Chinese come up with their own rap, it will always be Chinese rap, and not the same thing as American rap, just like Moliere is not Shakespeare. The language barrier is immense.
I'm a little bit into metal, not enough I can say I'm a conoisseur, but just enough I can see national and continental pattern. For example, thrash metal and other genres derived from thrash are popular in the US, while power metal is popular here in Europe. There are many power metal bands that can fill arenas in Europe and Latin America, but hardly ever tour the US because nobody over there shows up for them. This state of things won't change anytime soon and probably ever. I don't think time is a factor. Power metal will never be as popular in the US as it is in Europe. American ears are just wired differently from European ears and I suspect it's because they grow up hearing a an American accent which has a specific musicality to it.
I also notice that different flavors of metal are typical of different European countries, even within power which is only one of the many genres of metal. If you have subtle ears you can try to guess which European country a band is from. I think that this is because everyone grows up hearing a different accent, therefore is drawn to different sounding music, and that is not changing.
Not to mention the fact that here in Italy, the masses mostly listen to Italian language pop, for the simple reason that people like to sing along, and can't do so in a foreign language!
I think that the language you grow up speaking affects you in countless ways. Combine that statement with the fact that human naturally segregate by language (this is the English language Internet; keep in mind every major language community has its own Internet, and obviously the offline world is even more divided by language) and I don't see how a monoculture is possible.
Very well argued. And you did well by staying without "as white as it comes" culture to drive home your point. If the argument of monoculture had any merit, it would have happened in central and western Europe centuries ago.
And then you can mix this rap opera with some throat-singing/electronics mixture. And human art and culture continues, as it always has. And no one has to give a fuck about race or the rules around it while we just enjoy ourselves and that silly new music gen-æ is making.
I don't know if it would have to be obscene or at the very least terrible art. Not sure that it would work well at all, but people have every right to try it, and these guys might actually be worth listening to.
I think a lot of complaints about cultural appropriation are about someone white taking a cultural product from a minority group, watering it down (making it less distinctive) and then mass producing it for a white audience.
My view is that as long as they don't pretend it's original and they signpost and credit the people they've copied from (and pay them if that's correct in IP terms), then that's fine.
The problem is that the history of cultural appropriation is full of people taking original creations from minority communities, giving them neither credit nor money, and then reproducing them in a way that waters down their distinctiveness. You can go listen to Pat Boone and Little Richard's versions of the same song and you can see why people are annoyed that the only one they had access to is Pat Boone (though, to be fair, Boone credited black songwriters and made sure they got paid. His many imitators, though, not so much).
Similarly if the only Italian food available is Olive Garden, or the only Mexican is Taco Bell.
But, in this much more connected world, as long as the cheaper, mass-produced mainstream version isn't pretending to be the real thing, who really cares? The real thing isn't hard to find any more (I mean, yes, there isn't decent Mexican food in Britain, but that's because there aren't any Mexicans here to cook it).
I think we ought to start to see the full-on prohibition on cultural appropriation as being path-dependent on a world with very limited media. That doesn't mean that lying is OK, of course, but if a white person wants to run a taco truck, why not? Just don't pretend to be Mexican or authentic. Just stick up the word "Fusion" and you're safe.
>My view is that as long as they don't pretend it's original and they signpost and credit the people they've copied from (and pay them if that's correct in IP terms), then that's fine.
The way I view it, cultural appropriation is two abstraction levels away from theft, and one abstraction level away from copyright infringement. It essentially inherits the cultural meaning of sampling and remixing (in the maximally-extended sense), with all of their benefits and pitfalls, but without clearly definable and enforceable borders.
Cultural appropriation is basically the name given to a failure mode of one of the main tenets of a liberal society. It's contentious because arguments for and against it can be interpreted* as arguments in favor of the failure mode and against liberal society respectively.
It's not just silly. It's simply racism plain and simple.
My pet theory is that some people want to be racist but have to suppress that urge due to their social peer group not accepting it. "Cultural appropriation" gives them a somewhat socially accepted way of living their racist tendencies without having to openly admit their racism. I'd even argue that the hatred for racism is internalized so much, that people doing it don't even realize it ...
I read posts like this and laugh, thinking with half of my brain that it must be satire. "Surely Scott understands perfectly well what's going on. Surely he isn't actually puzzled and asking these questions sincerely." Then the other half of my brain kicks in.
The chief driver of race discourse in the U.S. is the social and political advantage of particular groups (tendentiously called "disadvantaged.") There is little interest in descriptive accuracy or logical consistency in that discourse, because such would not serve said advantage. Simple as.
One can talk about genetic factors or whatever, but that only irritates people because it impedes the purpose of the exercise.
I mean, some *are* disadvantaged. You get to East and South Asians and Jews and it starts getting blurrier.
It gets a little sillier when excessively left-wing Jewish people complain about non-Jewish actors playing Jewish people. Like, come on, people, we own the industry, enough already. I think they realize they're slipping down the intersectionality stack and don't like it.
It is so beside the point to begin litigating who is or is not disadvantaged, as if that has any relevance to the question Scott was raising about the groupings.
The point is that the discourse serves a purpose (I didn't say a *good* purpose) that explains perfectly well why there is little interest in descriptive accuracy or logical consistency.
They're not systematically disadvantaged as they so desperately claim. Black Americans are extraordinarily privileged. No other group in history could expect to behave the way they do while enjoying such an objectively high standard of living. Their disadvantage is primarily genetic, but nothing would ever convince them of this.
Agreed: for many reasons people do not want to discuss the idea that some cultures are poorly adapted to their environment in the same way that camels are poorly adapted to the Siberian taiga. There is also the idea of cultural "authenticity", which elides the fact that every culture has aspects that work well for it and others that work poorly for it.
Isn't Jewish control of the industry on its way out because of diversity initiatives? Overlap between disadvantaged groups and Jews is low, so if you have to be disadvantaged to do well, Jews don't get to keep joining.
This is where the fad for epigenetic transmission of ancestral trauma pays off. There is no limit to how far into the future the Holocaust counts as a disadvantage.
But if you accept that “the Holocaust” can’t be used to justify Israel’s indifference to Palestinian casualties, then you have to accept that “slavery” equally can’t be used to justify violent crime and gangs in Black communities. There’s a reason Israel/Palestine is the issue tearing the left apart right now.
Yeah, 100% agree, there are numerous, serious philosophical and scientific problems with "wokeism" that the left likes to paper over because it doesn't serve their narrative. For example, the concept that race is immutable but gender is mutable - this is a really fascinating concept! After all there are many, many more people out there of mixed race than there are of mixed gender.
Anyway, my point is: Why can't we all just respect Elizabeth Hoover's transition? Stand up against bullies who mis-racialise.
No, I believe that it is very easy for people to sincerely convince themselves of perspectives that serve their own advantage, whether materially or psychologically.
I find myself reminded strongly of an argument Coleman Hughes made in "The End of Race Politics." Hughes claims that most people who say they believe that race is a social construct are lying or self-deceived. If they really believed that race was a social construct then they would take it less seriously, not more. Most "woke" types treat race with deadly seriousness, which indicates that they are actually extreme racial essentialists. (I've heard a similar argument made about TERFs, they claim to believe that gender is a social construct, but they act like extreme gender essentialists who believe that men have evil essences).
This also has given me a new perspective on a conversation I've had before with other people about the race of various alien characters. Under the "lived experience" view, Superman would be white, even though he is a space alien, because he has grown up raised by white people and is perceived as white by most people he knows. The Martian Manhunter, a shapeshifting superhero who has taken various human forms over the years, would vary based on continuity. In the "Supergirl" TV series he has spent many years in a civilian identity in the form of an African American man, Hank Henshaw, so you could argue that he is black in that continuity. In the Post Crisis DC comic universe by contrast, he has created the identity of a white private detective named John Jones, so I suppose he might be considered white after living on Earth for a long time. In the "Justice League" cartoon, where he has no secret identity, he is not any human race at all (although he might eventually be considered Asian since he assumes the identity of a Chinese man near the end of the series).
People who say "X is a social construct" don't necessarily think that social constructs are weak phenomena that can be easily changed. On the contrary, they think social constructs are the strongest fabrics of social realities, and the principal defining aspects of a person's social and political standing. In that sense, it doesn't matter if they're arbitrary and contingent inventions, they're still supremely consequential.
They're not being hypocritical by saying "this is made up" and then treating it as essential in a political context - that's what strategic essentialism is, and there are strong arguments that beliefs about essentialness are self-fulfilling, which cuts both ways. Where this school of thought is weakest is in imagining and proposing alternatives, or theories of social change, which we know is possible, but treated as an afterthought compared to critiquing the status quo.
I think there’s a motte and bailey going on. When people say, “X is socially constructed” they mean to imply that it’s culturally malleable and to undermine the reality of X. Of course, when you push back by saying, “and how exactly would you socially construct X” they retreat and say “social construction doesn’t necessarily imply malleability”
>(I've heard a similar argument made about TERFs, they claim to believe that gender is a social construct, but they act like extreme gender essentialists who believe that men have evil essences).
I think this is likely true of a lot of TERFs. But there's been a widespread move to paint TERFs as a sort of aberrant offshoot of feminist ideology, when the reality is that TERFs are more like the mainline of feminist ideology that non-TERF feminists branched off from. That is, most of the philosophical framework of feminism was actually developed around ideas of gender non-essentialism, and gender being built around socialized experiences. Earlier waves of feminists may or may not have wanted an excuse to malign or discount trans people, but the academic framework that they built definitely lent itself to that. Non-TERF feminists have rejected the conclusion that trans people are dishonest or blameworthy, so by extension, they reject the notion that gender is a purely socialized phenomenon, but by and large they haven't grappled with the fact that this more or less one of the foundational assumptions of the philosophical framework they've inherited.
I also think this is something of a straw man of their position. I would say that they aren't big fans of gender roles at all, but do consider biological sex important. Abolition of gender roles has long been a radfem idea ... but they do still want the option of having separate spaces for females (among other things).
Yeah, but if someone has greater awareness of different ways other countries construct their governments, they will likely treat the office more practically and with a bit less reverence.
I don't think I've ever heard a TERF asser that "gender is a social construct" (and I know plenty of TERFs). I think literally every person I've heard express that slogan uncritically endorsed gender ideology as generally understood.
"...I've heard a similar argument made about TERFs, they claim to believe that gender is a social construct, but they act like extreme gender essentialists who believe that men have evil essences..."
They believe the gender is a social construct, but sex isn't. Confusing the two things is what causes all the problems with gender ideology. TERFs are sex essentiallists, and that's a fairly strong position to hold.
Terfs (hi) believe sex is a biological reality, that "woman" is a term to refer to humans of the female sex, and that "gender" aka the magical feeling of being a woman despite having a y chromosome in every cell of your body, is a "social construct". They also believe women are oppressed based on sex. Marxist radical feminism literally talks about how men try to control the means of reproduction, which no trans identified male has.
And yes they also believe that biological sex includes actual differences, like men being stronger, more aggressive, and more sexually and physically coercive and violent. They think denying this endangers women.
It looks like she's receiving harsh treatment not because of an innocent mistake about ancestry, but because she was found to have concealed the truth for some time, and in doing so misrepresented herself in a fashion she ought to have known would engender outrage among that community. I think you might be underrating how much that perceived breach of trust, as a social matter, transforms her story from what might have been dealt with as good faith mistake, into a story of bad faith deception, rendering her untrustworthy, and anathema based on the violation of taboo.
Clearly the people in favor of shunning her are choosing to take an uncharitable view of the circumstances, but that may be the appropriate stance if their priority is to avoid weaking the taboo.
I think it's a fair point that her own dishonesty casts her in a significantly different light than if she'd admitted to the revelation of her ancestry as soon as she found out. But, if her social standing and career actually depended on other people acknowledging her as Native American, and she would no longer have been acknowledged as such if she admitted that she lacked native ancestry, even if she wouldn't have been ostracized to the same degree, I think that many of her detractors would probably have done the same thing in her place.
Sure, she was dishonest...but this presumes an objective standard of race to be dishonest about! That's the whole point - if race is just lived experience, then it's absolutely incoherent to say she was dishonest about her race because of where her genes are from. You can't have things both ways.
I think Scott's piece nicely demonstrates that there isn't one consistent standard that's universally applicable - each group has its own "rules". So, inconsistency across groups is normal - it's internal contradictions within a group's own set of rules that ought to raise questions.
> Sure, she was dishonest...but this presumes an objective standard of race to be dishonest about!
No it doesn't, because the allegation isn't simply that she falsely identified as Native American, but that she lied and/or intentionally misled people about her ancestry. The former involves presuppositions about what race means, but the latter doesn't.
She got nuked from orbit when the truth came out, and “not having blood ties” was a big part of it. This was predictable, so really she can hardly be faulted for trying to prevent it.
When you have a true crisis of faith, the easiest path forward for the time-being is inertia. most normies will never understand this because they're not introspective enough to have ever recognized a buddha on the road.
This is a brave post, given that it seems bound to attract both scorn from the Hoover-vilifying crowd *and* uncomfortable snide comments from people who care entirely too much about race science. You deserve credit for writing it honestly and earnestly.
>snide comments from people who care entirely too much about race science.
yeah, gee, I mean, it's not as if RACE is one of if not the single biggest politico-cultural issue of the modern era that influences the actions and policies of every major institution in the country. I just simply don't understand why anyone would care so much?
Now, if you excuse me, I have to drop my kids off at school to be taught they they have white privilege.
"Race science", I said; not "race". Evidently, whichever side or awkward middle-of-the-aisle one occupies, "race" as a political issue is worth thinking about; nobody sane would or does deny *that*, least of all the woke crowd, who, as you unsubtly complain, do make quite a big deal out of race to say the least. I was instead referring to the crankier side of the HBD crowd — people who'd zero in on Scott's forays into the DNA side of the question and deliver treatises on how that's what it's Really All About.
There is, I've observed, a pattern in Scott's comment section where he'll contradict the 'woke party line' on some issue in a measured, moderate way, and the most extreme right-wing contingent will pop up with, basically, their best impression of the Dark Lord trying to tempt the wavering hero further into the dark side, delivered in a kind of unpleasant patronising tone. "Ah, I see Scott is finally starting to understand that [etc.] — took long enough…".
I will be surprised (though happy for him) if we get none of that today; such comments achieve nothing save make cancel mobs' points for them that the mildest acnowledgement that maybe Hoover doesn't deserve lifelong scorn is a slippery slope to actual Nazism.
Well, yes. I considered answering with simply "Thank you for proving my point"… But I thought an actual explanation would be more in keeping with the discourse rules that this comment section is *meant* to uphold, albeit more for the benefit of other readers than of the person being replied to.
Well, yes. I said "the crankier side of the HBD crowd", which is to say that I believe that there is also a non-cranky (or at any rate significantly less cranky) side, Scott is on it, and that's another, broader example of the pattern of "Scott expresses partial disagreement with the politically-correct party-line, extremist cranks assume that means he's this close to agreeing with them".
It's funny how many people who read him don't realize SA is an HBD lib. Have you read his Kolmogorov and the Lightning piece? What did you think it was about (hint: it's his own race science beliefs). I don't think it's possible to have the sort of autistic truth-seeking decoupling personality that you'd expect to be overrepresented in rationalists and post-rats without being at the very least unsure of HBD/"race science" being true.
I think a lot of people here, myself included, have the critical thinking skills required to not blindly trust the consensus position, the dominance of which is clearly fuelled by motivated reasoning, but are very leery of both HBD as a movement (because it's overwhelmingly dominated by equally-or-more motivated racists looking for an excuse) or attempts to steer any conversation in its direction (because it's an in for the aforementioned racists, has a near-zero chance of yielding any constructive fruits, and is also terrible optics). Scott has a large body of work demonstrating that he is (at least in general) a thoughtful, pro-human and open-minded person. In this context I have to read his support of HBD as him being (perhaps to some extent unwittingly) one of the 'three principled libertarians among seven zillion witches', to use the dynamic he himself described when discussing anti-censorship enclaves more broadly.
"because it's overwhelmingly dominated by equally-or-more motivated racists looking for an excuse"
I think that depends on what you mean by "dominated". Most of the prominent spokespeople that I can think of - off the top of my head, Charles Murray, Emil Kirkegaard, Bo Winegard, Nathan Cofnas, Noah Carl come to mind - do not seem to be motivated by looking for an excuse to harm people of other races. I'd throw Steve Sailer in there too, on the strength of everything I've actually read of his works, though the fact that he blogs at Unz alongside a bunch of people who do seem more likely to fit the category of racists looking for an excuse is kinda bad optics - I guess a paid gig is a paid gig, and people are going to call him a Nazi no matter who he shares column inches with.
Numerically, sure, it wouldn't surprise me if the "racists looking for an excuse" types outnumbered the "stats nerds who drew a radioactive ticket in the lotter of fascinations" among the broader HBD fandom. But I don't get the impression that they actually dominate the intellectual elite of the movement.
If you'll read my message again, I said "the crankier side of the HBD crowd", which is to say that I believe that there is also a non-cranky (or at any rate significantly less cranky) side, Scott is on it, this doesn't especially decrease my opinion of him, but neither does it significantly increase my opinion of the cranks.
Well, now, I didn't say the scorn would definitely be within this comment section. Could just happen on Twitter or whatever. (I'm one of the standard-bearers for leftism around here, when I bother to comment, but *not* of the crowd inclined to vilify Hoover with maximum severity, so not particularly in a position to offer a counter-argument given I largely agree. I could quibble about the blanket yay-cultural-appropriation bit, or reheat arguments about the meaningfulness of the DNA clusters, but none of this is particularly relevant to the main point.)
I think this is a mistake — from what I've seen of Scott, I think, right or wrong (and do not mistake my post for an endorsement all his conclusions), this reads to me as him giving a genuine account of his thought process on a thorny issue, without obfuscation or editorialising.
But there is a certain amount of careful editing and presentation, which I think obscure his thought process. To be critical, he's not saying everything he thinks, and so it's hard to tell if he knew his answer before he started coming up with his arguments. (There's something in the rationalist sequences about this, something about writing the answer on the bottom of the page before listing your arguments for the answer.)
Specifically, there's one of those "dog in the night" effects, where the strings "sex", "gender", and "trans" never appear in the text of his post. And to be clear, I do pretty much agree with his conclusions here. But if I were going to be as uncharitable as possible for me, it's that he already views race-essentialists as his outgroup, so it's not even "tossing them under the bus" in order to buttress a future argument against sex-essentialists.
It had honestly not occurred to me that anyone would read the post as a proxy/prelude to a discussion about gender stuff. Of course, the same kind of logic *can be applied* (in any direction) to gender stuff. But discussions of the genetic basis of race (!!) seem to be one of the few things that are no less fraught and controversial than gender stuff; so it doesn't really make sense to me that you'd use one *just* to talk about the other, as some kind of attempt to dodge out of controversy!
(Also, one of the things which complicate this conversation for Scott is that, as discussed elsewhere in this threat, he's entirely more sympathetic to the "races are genetically real and important" than progressive consensus would want him to be. Or that I would want him to be, honestly. It's less than trivial that he would view race-essentialism as his outgroup in the general case, even though he thinks it leads to bad community norms in cases like Hoover's. Articulating this complexity, without performatively denying his cautious belief in HBD stuff *or* letting it cloud his judgement, is precisely the intellectual effort I was praising him for.)
(To be clear, that was just an example of being uncharitable. I think it's a completely valid choice to look at a chain of logic, decide that it's too big and too controversial to fit into a single post, and thus to break up parts of it into independent pieces. It can also be a useful tool to approach a tricky subject rationally - if we take one isolated example, or one class of examples, and figure out what the dynamics are in that example, then we can try to apply the same logic to the dynamics of a different situation. It's the start of the old "compare and contrast" routine, where we list the ways that two situations are similar and are different, and see whether the sum total weighs in favor of similar conclusions or different conclusions.)
Using Jews as the "good" example here (for several meanings of "good") is a bit insane.
1. Exposing other people (who observe some form of Judaism or consider themselves culturally Jewish - whatever that means by now - or have close family members who suffered from antisemitism, or have suffered from it themselves in some fashion) as fake Jews because of their lack of maternal Jewish ancestry is, at least, *a* Jewish national sport, to about the same extent that football (aka soccer) is the national sport of Mexico. It's probably more popular than an earnest belief in God; you don't need to believe in God deep down to believe that He set down the true rule on who is a Jew (or that he gave the land of Israel to the Jews, etc.).
This actually shows that AA or land rights are something of a distraction; people will engage in this sort of behavior even if the reward in keeping others from the group because of who their parents were is purely psychological.
2. There has been a growing divergence between different "Jewish clouds" since at least the end of the 19th century. The number of people that would be at least somewhat Jewish according to hard-core antisemites (or if they got a Nobel Prize) is probably about thrice the number that are counted as part of the "core population" of Jews in population surveys. In the US, isn't that core population again about twice the number of people who are actually affiliated with a synagogue, say? (These are old proportions; they may have increased.)
3. Even more to the point, the different meanings of "Jew" really do correspond to different ways of seeing oneself and existing in the world. That is true even for a single meaning: a hundred years ago, "culturally Jewish" meant being engaged in Yiddish literature or theatre, say; nowadays, it seems to mean next to nothing, just a "next to nothing" that, however easily learned (a few phrases picked from The Joy of Yiddish, say), only some people, having the right ancestry, can indulge in (but most don't).
Huh, 1 isn't my experience at all. My experience is the opposite - "Look, King so-and-so had an ancestor five generations back with a vaguely Jewish name, that means the king was Jewish! Let's add him to the list of famous Jews alongside Einstein and Freud!"
Right: there is a different, informal rule for the very famous - at least when it comes to making Lists of Jews (especially on Wikipedia); I don't think that it would carry over to daily life.
All I can say is that in my experience in the Jewish community it is very welcoming to outsiders. Perhaps it’s different in Israel in certain segments of the ultra-Orthodox, but I think this is the rule in most places
Again, 1. this is a common mistake: attitudes in the periphery are not the beliefs of the core, and what gets commonly imputed to "ultra-Orthodoxy" is common not just to Orthodoxy (the default, or often only, variety of Judaism in most countries, Israel included) but to all those who take Orthodoxy as their reference, without belief or the hard work involved; 2. the issue here is not really attitudes towards strangers (who do not claim to be anything other than strangers), but "who is a stranger?".
I mean you’re making extremely bold claims about Jewish culture and community.
I don’t really want to get drawn into these claims, I only note that in my lived experience within the Jewish community it does not conform to your stereotypes.
This is my experience too. Jewish pride as “the chosen people” (whatever that means) is closely linked to their statistical over representation in Nobel Prize winners etc. And like any religion, the Jewish faith is inclusive - if you want to be a Jew, great! Welcome!
I have a fun theory: they are the most powerful meme, and if humanity can find a way to overcome it, we may be able to finally realize something like Heaven on Earth.
As a bit of releavent anecdotal experience. I’m 1/4 Jew (24.9% 23andme). When I joked about having become a Jew after getting my israeli passport, a proper Jew friend from a good family in the US laughed and corrected me: “israeli, not jew”. So on your hypersphere this definitely doesn’t seem to be enough. I myself definitely don’t consider myself a proper Jew. I’m thinking of myself as “Jew-ish” haha.
PS: Thanks for the insightful article, you are my favorite author these days. Your story about prime numbers in a dmt trip made me found a very interesting meditation advice in the comments section a couple days ago (a link to selfdefinition).
As to #1, the idea that only a Jewish mother could make you Jewish ended with the Nuremberg Laws. Once the Nazis decided that 1/4th Jewish ancestry would make you no longer fully German, most Jews decided to adopt the same standard. As I heard it said growing up, "if you're Jewish enough for the Nazis, you're Jewish enough for me."
If you look at the State of Israel, they allow Jews to make aliyah on the same terms. 1/4th Jewish ancestry, either side of your family.
It's a perfect example for how race/religion are socially constructed.
Would you really say that some sizeable fraction of the people in Auschwitz wearing yellow stars weren't *really* Jewish?
>As to #1, the idea that only a Jewish mother could make you Jewish ended with the >Nuremberg Laws.
Would have been nice, but...
>Once the Nazis decided that 1/4th Jewish ancestry would make you no longer fully >German, most Jews decided to adopt the same standard. As I heard it said growing up, >"if you're Jewish enough for the Nazis, you're Jewish enough for me."
Then you came from a very nice family that gave you a deficient Jewish education (note: a good Reform education counts by definition as an extremely deficient Jewish education according to Conservative and Orthodox standards). Let's not confuse "most Jews" with "most Jews who are my friends and who think like me".
>Would you really say that some sizeable fraction of the people in Auschwitz wearing >yellow stars weren't *really* Jewish?
*I* wouldn't say that, but, for many people who put their Jewish affiliations up and forefront, it's one of their all-time favorite things to say - "Hitler is not my halakhic authority" or words to that effect. Actually, I just did a search and, to my partial surprise, one of the first hits was that a *Reform* rabbi saying exactly that:
As for the state of Israel, you can currently emigrate with 1/4th Jewish ancestry, but you will be classified as a non-Jew on your official documents. The permission to emigrate is just immigration law, and Israeli politicians have tried to forbid such people from immigrate several times (religious Israelis feel strongly about it, and secular people either agree or don't care, unless they are Russian or perhaps Polish). That can change at any moment - it's not (to the extent that this can be said in a system without a written constitution) constitutionally protected, as Jews' right to immigrate is. See, e.g.,
My definition of Judaism is the same that the State of Israel uses. If you want to say that the State of Israel doesn't know who or isn't Jewish, fair enough. Scotland, after all, has no true Scotsmen.
Regardless, I hope we can agree that the most impactful definition of Jewishness - from a practical standpoint of dollars and cents - is the definition for immigration to Israel.
If I'm not religious enough for an Orthodox rabbi, then I can go to a different shul. Not like that makes a huge financial difference.
But the difference between immigrating to Israel or remaining, say, in Yemen, Iraq or Syria? Incalculable.
And it's inarguable that the definition of Jewishness employed by the State of Israel is based, not on Halakha, but instead on the Nuremberg Laws. Showing *ta da* the social construction of Jewish identity.
Look, I don't want to start a fight on what other people (not you or me) believe, or engage in a recreation of the Parrot Sketch. But no, the definition of the State of Israel is completely unambiguous: it is the traditional, matrilineal definition (with a caveat: a convert to another religion cannot avail himself of the Law of Return, whereas, for Orthodoxy, that person is still a Jew, just an extremely bad one that one should sit shiva for). This has been the case since at least Golda Meir's times. (Well, it was still the case before, but she made it unambiguous, by leaving it to a committee of Rabbis, knowing perfectly well what they would say.)
I don't doubt your good faith, in part because this is a common misconception (in the US, not elsewhere). The Law of Return does not imply that non-Jews (according the traditional definition) are Jews: it just implies that the Gentile grandchild of a Jew can immigrate, just like the Gentile spouse of a Jew can immigrate. Of course that can change at any moment (and in fact it almost did a few months ago - an Israeli Facebook friend was very upset about this, having married out of the group); it is only Jews who have a constitutional right to immigrate to Israel.
At any rate, *of course* Jewish identity is socially constructed, as is what other people find meaningful.
Bonus track, or rather homework, if you speak German: people arguing (in mainstream secular publications, sometimes with an academic imprimatur) that it is obscene for Gentile children of Jews to claim to be Jews in Germany, *because* Nürnberg (as in, "how dare they, in the country of the Nuremberg laws, to claim..."). What the logic there is, I cannot tell, but maybe you can figure it out.
Alright, so I'll concede the semantic argument. Those who are grandchildren of Jews on their father's side are not Jewish.
Would you agree that they belong to a class of people entitled "close enough to Jews to be treated similarly to Jews, rather than as non-Jews". That category is what the Law of Return and Nuremberg laws share in common. Of course, that category could change at any moment, showing how social definitions of this category - which I will scrupulously avoid calling Judaism, but we might instead call "proximity to Judaism", are malleable.
In the same way, the American South used to use the one-drop rule for assessing whether a person was White or Black. If a Black person with mixed ancestry moved from the American South to Brazil, they'd find that the Brazilians used a completely different system to determine race. They even had a racial categorization (Mixed race or Pardo) that the United States lacked.
If they moved to Malaysia, they'd find that the racial categorizations change again. To "Malay", "Chinese", "Indian" and "Other". That means that the Jews of Israel and the Blacks of Brazil would check the same box on the census in Malaysia.
Meanwhile, the Malay, Chinese and Indians all check the "Asian" box on the census in America.
These categories change as you move around and as time passes. They aren't written on the back of the Ten Commandments or anything.
I completely agree, but the point is that no Orthodox Jew, and no person in vague proximity of Orthodoxy (including most Israelis) agrees: they see the definition as set in stone. A friend of mine who moved to Israel and served in its army was not treated similarly to Jews by plenty of people, though admittedly he was treated similarly in the sense that he was drafted. See also some of the links I gave: a grandchild of a Jew who identifies as a Jew will be explicitly compared in mainstream German media to outright frauds; leaders of the mainstream local Jewish community encourage this, and people outside it are delighted to follow and add to it with glee (why exactly, well, I have a conjecture).
My understanding is that the allowance for intermediate categories is something that existed in an informal sort of way before Nuremberg (you can find "mishling" in Yiddish dictionaries) but it's something that very many Jews strenously deny: if you and I had a dollar for every time that someone has said "there's no such thing as a half-Jew", we wouldn't just be millionaires, we'd be really, really rich.
That is not actually the definition the state of Israel uses.
While you are correct that people with a Jewish grand parent are allowed to emigrate to Israel under the law of return, they can not be designated as Jewish on their government issues ID unless they have a Jewish mother.
This also means that such people can not legally get married in Israel because Israeli only recognizes religious marriages and these people are officially considered to have no religion.
I presume that the people who are vilifying Hoover would claim that either she factually was insufficiently careful about verifying she was native American or, like strict liability crimes like sex with a minor, truly justified epistemic error is sufficiently rare and falsely claimed error common enough that it makes sense to punish people simply for being wrong.
I think this approach is wrong and it's implicitly saying: people who look white need to reach a higher level of proof before making these claims but it's at least worth steelmaning.
This assumes race is genetic! That's the whole point
If you claim, as many on the left do, that genes have nothing to do with race, then it's absolutely incoherent to claim that she actually "isn't" native american. If "lived experience" is what makes race, then she's necessarily more "native american" than many people with bona fide native ancestry.
That's not what they claim. What they claim if you pushed them is that the way genes map to races is determined by social facts not scientific ones -- ie it's not the best (or even highly) way to divide genetic space for thr purpose of scientific explanation .
They then try to use this to argue that somehow this means that therefore race can't explain phenotypic differences by reference to genetics but that's fallacious.
A world in which Ms Hoover got no advantages from thinking she was native, she'd have decided to 'pass' as white. She had a mirror. She knew she wasn't supposed to be very -much- native, but it was more fun for her to pretend. Meanwhile, I'm 100% western european and have to carefully mouth shibboleths about cultural appropriation in order to speak in public about some of my interests, (which you might call applied anthropology). I was told growing up that I was a very small amount mohawk. My hair and eyes are darker than Ms Hoover's, and for one long moment while applying for college I thought about checking a different box. But I did what I regard as the honorable thing. She took the easy path, and is now paying the price.
So, I feel like the stories we read about are people like Ms. Hoover who derived at least some career benefit from being pretendians, but for each of these there's like thousands of people who take intense pride in being maybe microscopically Native without any tangible advantage. I think for the vast majority of these people (and probably at least initially for Ms Hoover) the advantage is that people really want to be part of some culture or tradition beyond "American". I don't blame them really. Pride in being American isn't cool, and if you are too deracinated to glom onto a concrete ethnic identity (like Irish or Norwegian) this is one way to go. Not sure what the solution is.
Poor kids these days get it shoved down their throats so hard though that it's hard _not_ to. My kid started kindergarten a few weeks ago and one of the first things they did was make every kid discuss their "identity" in terms of what countries they or their ancestors came from.
"Tangible" is doing the heavy lifting, here. There are clear social advantages to being nonwhite in some circles -- not coincidentally the circles in which we find white folk making a big deal of being 'one eighth cherokee'.
A decision theory counterargument: ideally, you want your system of justice to ban people from profiting from doing bad things.
Now, if you accept the narrative that white people robbed the indians of their land and did various bad things to them, then indians aren't just a different group, they're one that was actively victimized by white people, which means white people shouldn't be allowed to benefit from it. Now clearly you can't just kick out all the white people to give indians back their land (whatever fringe leftists may want), but you can have various social status or AA benefits going to native Americans to sorta compensate. Let's assume those make it roughly even.
if the white people who stole the indian's lands knew their great grandkids would have to owe reparations, maybe they wouldn't have taken the land. But in a world where some of their great grandkids just end up claiming to be indians and get those benefits themselves, they don't worry about it.
So the implication here is that it's wrong to claim to be a race (a set of people claiming continuous identity through generations) if the earlier generations wouldn't have claimed you, especially if their ancestral enemies would have.
I think this model of race is consistent and some people go by it. I don't actually think it's a good idea though, since even if you accept the premiselst people just don't think about the effects on their great grandkids when making plans. But that's a general argument for statutes of limitations on cultural grievances.
Interesting! So under this model, we aren't trying to incentivize certain behaviors from Ms. Hoover herself, but rather from her ancestors?
I'm trying to construct an analogy that uses individuals instead of groups. Suppose Alice robs Beth, and doesn't get caught (at first). When Alice dies, the money is split between her kids. Later on, the robbery is solved. Normally you'd take the money back from Alice and return it to Beth, but Alice and Beth are both dead, so in order to do this you have to "rewind" Alice's inheritance (take the money from her kids that she shouldn't have been able to give them) and then "replay" Beth's inheritance (give Beth's kids the money that would have been part of the inheritance if it hadn't been stolen). Claiming false ancestry to try to get a more advantageous position in this transaction would be wrong.
Close?
I think that, legally, it would matter whether you claimed false ancestry with the *goal* of manipulating the reparations or for some unrelated reason (i.e. what is your mens rea). Also you need to apply a LOT of fuzzy logic to decide that affirmative action is the same as returning stolen money, especially when not every single white ancestor was a thief and not every single nonwhite ancestor was a victim and many people are descended from both. But I guess I can kind of see the shape of this logic.
Yeah I think that's right. I think the model of beth stealing for her kids vs white people stealing from indians also has the assumption that "race" as a group is continuous - that it's the component of Beth's identity that lasts across generations. So "race x steals from race y" would have an older statute of limitations than "person x steals from person y", because races keep up grievances longer (Jews are still upset over Egyptian slavery).
Is this true?? I know we talk about it at Passover but it seems to me of the same tenor as “Christians are still mad at Pontius Pilate.” I have no strong feelings about el-Sisi
I don't think it's really true in practice, but then I also don't think most American Indians are very upset over the woman in this article. There's probably some hardcore religious people who are though.
> “When people talk about the “planet of cops”, they mean that people import some the norms of law - zero tolerance, inability to consider extenuating circumstances, social unity in enforcing brutal punishments - into the sphere of morality”
One of the issues I have about the current culture (planet of cops / cancel culture / whatever) is precisely that it *doesn’t* import an important norm of law: the concept of mens rea has been jettisoned.
Arguably, this culture is far less likely to consider intent or extenuating circumstances than the average court.
We could keep the concepts "cultural X" and "ethnic (biological) X" more separate in our minds - there's a lot of overlap between the two, but we don't have to lump them together into some kind of "*really* X".
Identity is important otherwise people wouldn't kill over it. Identity politics being stupid has other things like legalistic definitions (either "one drop", o committys, or dna test; all shit) on something fractal; dei; affirmative action; racism effecting practical and objective considerations; etc.
I have a deeply complicated relationship with my childhood cult; man has a god shaped hole in his heart that doesn't make god real or any of the cultural behaviors someone may pick up rational but that hole needs to be filled (and theres nothing more irrational then modern person who doesn't realize they filled it with science or something else vapid)
Woke/racist identities airnt bad because they are identities; but because they are unstable and shallow
Was it Chesterton who said if men don't believe in God they don't believe in nothing, they believe in anything?
I think one of the problems we have grappling with this here is most rationalists (or rat-adjacent people like me) have relatively weak religious impulses. You tell us there's no God, we're like, 'Cool'. But normies go looking for something else to believe in. The similarities between social justice ideology and Christianity (sacred victimhood, confession, ritual submission) have been commented on by others.
> Was it Chesterton who said if men don't believe in God they don't believe in nothing, they believe in anything?
That more extreme then what im claiming here, you could fill the god shaped hole with "america", "democracy", "science"; while I have negative opinions about such things its fairly workable; a nationality will happily give you a moral debate framework(legal/illegal, political parties) and songs and symbols for handling crisises
> I think one of the problems we have grappling with this here is most rationalists (or rat-adjacent people like me) have relatively weak religious impulses.
Rationality(in circles were you can assume lesswrong in invoked) is also an identity; including a dooms day myths and moral system.
> But normies go looking for something else to believe in.
Just the opposite the normies had god's to spare; several sports ball teams, holidays, maybe 2 ethenicities, 3 nationality's.
>man has a god shaped hole in his heart that doesn't make god real
Well, by definition, nothing that is not God can "make" God real. But the God-shaped hole is certainly *evidence* that God is real. Explaining bee behaviour as the product of an evolved instinct to search for flowers wouldn't be plausible if flowers didn't actually exist.
Adjacent to the specific content in this post, I am frustrated that, years into widespread obsession with race and gender, it seems we still haven't had any constructive discourse on establishing norms for these issues.
I genuinely wish I had a better framework to understand what the appropriate norms should be on meta-questions like treating all people the same vs when to provide specific accommodation; when it's okay or problematic for there to be demographic discrepancies in various environments; when something that is notionally neutral is actually inequitable and warrants intervention etc.
It was surreal for me, developing questions about gender in 2019/2020 and watching as race was treated as an inviolable, objective fact, while gender (read: sex) was suddenly treated as purely fluid and subjective.
Hoping you’re not being facetious, because it certainly seemed wild to me at the time and ever since.
The case for sex being immutable and objectively, materially salient is a lot simpler than the case for the salience of race, however someone defines it.
I wasn't being in the least facetious. Of course there's been a lot of talk on here about gender fluidity, but I've never seen thoughts about gender fluidity compared to the issue of how real and fixed race is or isn't.
Nope, TGGP, I haven't. It's probably because I'm not as highly evolved as you. In any case, I'm not sure how relevant what's in Wiki is to my exchange with Jean. She described being struck in 2019/2020 by the contrast between how much gender fluidity was discussed, and how little the equivalent take on race was. Seems perfectly plausible to me that she noticed the contrast on her own, as she said she did, without the benefit of Wiki. It also seems perfectly plausible to me that others had also had the same thought she had, a couple years before she did, and had a big fight about it. When I said it was an original idea, I did not mean that I doubted that it had ever occurred to any other members of our species. I meant that it had a refreshing sound, to my ears anyhow, compared to the other comments I had read. It didn't sound like it came from somebody's entrenched position on various related matters, as many posts did, it sounded like a fresh thought.
...Because race dysphoria is not a common medical condition, assuming it even exists. Not that I'm against transracialism, mind you, but at that point you may as well just skip past it and go full transhumanism.
I don't know, it's certainly real for those white nationalists mentioned in Footnote 2, who had to comfort themselves about being "white in spirit" or whatever after getting back those genetic results. More generally speaking, there's a very long history of people trying to switch races, and an even longer history of other people trying to stop them, even to the point of causing significant distress to those trying to express themselves in their own way. Where else did the likes of the "One Drop Rule" and the like come from, if not that struggle?
I have it on good authority that the assertion "you must have gender dysphoria to be considered an authentic trans person" marks you out as a gatekeeping truscum.
If gender dysphoria isn't a rule-in criterion for transgenderism, why should racial dysphoria be a rule-in criterion for transracialism?
If it weren't for all the taboos around it, I would absolutely expect to see a lot of race dysphoria. First, though, we'd need a transracial acceptance movement to gain sway in a political faction.
The answers to those questions are a negotiation of power politics and will always be fluid. Narratives are used as coordination mechanisms and cover stories for power.
Take the SAT. Eliminating it makes it easier to practice affirmitive action (which in theory provides benefits to some groups) while harming others. It also takes away a tool institutions use to gather information about applicants that they traditionally find useful.
Before 2020 this was fine. From 2020-2023 it was not fine. Now it’s fine again. Who knows going forward.
In the 1970s school busing was just a thing we had to do to fight racism. Then it wasn’t because people kept electing politicians that were against busing. But we still see it come back sometimes and race is used in setting attendance boundaries.
"Dudes on here be like, "I'm racist", and then their friend group looks like this:" (https://9gag.com/gag/aKmxEv1)
EDIT: Upon further thinking about it, I guess it just goes to show that the opponents of racism have won. Their definition of "White", where you can become white by acting & thinking white (e.g. the phenomenon of "Talking White", "You ain't black!", or more simply "Being a race traitor"), has been accepted by *their* opponents (the Racism community). It's just that the Racism community has decided to go, "Actually, that's a good thing."
And so when a white supremacist gets genetically tested and finds out that they're not genetically white (or at least genetically pure), the response is a flood of support & "As long as you're white in spirit, you're one of us." (the whole "if you are truly committed to being a white nationalist" thing mentioned in Footnote 2). Transracialism as transcendance: whiteness as something open to everyone, transcending flesh & bone. Kinda like the philosophy of "La raza cósmica"/The Cosmic Race, an extremely odd episode of history that more people should hear about. (Basically, it was the belief that *mandatory* miscegeneation would lead to the creation of "The Cosmic Race" and unite humanity in one, a harmonious utopia where everyone was the same race... just by different means than the usual.)
It's not that: most people who get called "racist" aren't actually racist in any meaningful sense (they just oppose things like affirmative action), and the vast majority of those who adopt the term do so merely to distinguish themselves from their enemies, who happen to call themselves "anti-racists" (their name is meant to deceive stupid people; don't fall for it!).
But to address the broader point you make in your update, it's not true in the slightest: the opponents of pro-White racism have won, yes, but the overwhelmingly dominant institutional position is staunchly racist.
The most interesting thing to me isn't that, but the fact that they've won so thoroughly that even their opponents accept their ideas & use their language. Their power is so great no one even realizes that there are other words & other ideas... or more simply put, that they've already won, and we're just fighting over the world they created. It must be an intoxicating amount of power to hold, no wonder they behave the way they do.
(I.e. there will never be a post-Woke world. There can be a Woke future, and an Anti-Woke future, but no "What is Woke?" future. It's their world, we're just living in it.)
I mean, the Romans and the Pagans and the like are still waiting for Christian morality to fall... but as Nietzsche would point out, we're *still* ruled by Slave Morality even ~2000 years later. The Church itself may be politically irrelevant, but the ethos of that religion of slaves & prostitutes, of the weak & meek, is still alive & kicking today.
In fact, depending upon how you look at it, it's *the* dominant force today. Everything must be justified in terms of victimhood, oppression, suffering, the immortal soul (where else do gender identities come from? And what else could they represent?), etc. etc. Even conquerors & tyrants have to justify their actions as actually being a form of liberating victims from oppression. Even those criticizing "The Great Awokening" do so by claiming to be the greatest victims of all, almost "50 Stalins" style (https://sanerthanlasagna.wordpress.com/2016/02/01/50-stalins/). People have talked about how Woke is a religion. I don't think they quite grasp what that really means: it means that empires never really fall. Just mutate & come back anew.
It's the End of History in the Fukuyaman sense: it's not that nothing ever happens... it's just that nothing we ever do will be as important as the fact that they won, & locked in history. Everything thereafter is just what winning looks like: becoming the water in which people have to swim, until even your worst critics are breathing in your thoughts like air, and even your defeats are victories because there's no one left to oppose you. Just people who *are* you, because they can't imagine being anything else. Not anymore.
(Incidentally, this is sort of what people talk about when they're discussing "Values Lock-In" regarding AI & the next century. Empires may no longer fall at all if they're made of biologically immortal machines instead of squishy humans -- "Society advances one funeral at a time." and all that -- so whoever is the empire of today, and in particular gets to align the AIs of today, may get the final say in the story of human history. With all that entails.)
In Russian YouTube, there is an extremely popular public speaker anthropologist Stanislav Drobyshevsky. He often says that race exists, just any studies of it were suppressed worldwide because of the current political climate. If I understand him correctly, race is similar to the term population (as in a community of interbreeding beings), but wider. So, race is something like population of populations.
I am not sure how useful race is scientifically, but when he describes studies of races, it all seems reasonable to me. People, including scientists, love to categorize and group stuff, and it is indeed weird to only demand isolated rigour here, but not in many other areas.
P.S. just to clarify, he is no racist, as far as I can judge, and never expressed any views that one race can be better then other somehow. However, he many times described how terrible some human cultures can be, but I guess we all already know that.
I can't be the only one to find the oversized role of academia in the drama remarkable; almost everyone involved, and in particular everyone attacking Hoover, either works in academia or has academic background (usually not of the STEM variety). Shouldn't a conflict about who does or doesn't belong to a community be played out in the overall community rather than in universities? I can't imagine a group of students at a non-religious college demanding the resignation of a professor who has falsely claimed to be a Jew, or for that matter an American or a Ukrainian.
The article even comes close to noticing this:
> De Master asked Hoover if there had ever been questions about her Native heritage before she arrived at Berkeley, and Hoover emphatically said no. (Hoover denies saying no.)
The version of Nativeness that is at play here seems to be rooted in American universities much more than on any reservation; I don't know of any other ethnoculture that is so academia-centered. The boundaries between tribal and academic work are porous here in a way I haven't seen anywhere else:
> For a long time, Hoover continued to show up to every department meeting, even to parties and retreats where her presence wasn’t mandatory. Some of her former students and faculty friends began to dread running into her. Eventually, the chair of her department announced via e-mail that Hoover would stop attending these events; the department’s administration also quietly tried to make sure that Hoover no longer worked in Native communities, as she had promised in her statement of accountability. (Hoover says she has upheld her promise without any administrative intervention.)
>
> Almost immediately, however, rumors circulated that Hoover was breaking that promise, taking part in cultural burns—the lighting of controlled fires to manage Native land—and posting photos of herself at these events on Facebook. Hoover denies that the burns are part of her scholarly work and says that she had been invited by the tribal chairperson who hosted the burns. (The tribal chairperson did not respond to a request for comment.)
Why should her university have any part in deciding what tribal rituals she partakes in? Some heavy "the real Indians are us" energy here.
> One day last fall, the Native grad student who had paused her community work was feeling overwhelmed by the turmoil in her new department and went to a cultural burn up north. She wanted to be around people who weren’t embroiled in the drama surrounding Hoover, she told me. When she got to the burn, which was crowded, Hoover was there. The tribal chairperson acknowledged Hoover, announcing that she had given him a beaded medallion a year or two before. “And then she was at the campfires, laughing really loud, like how Native women usually laugh,” the grad student said. “It’s weird she laughs like that.”
So the tribe doesn't care, perhaps even appreciating someone from the outside keeping the flame going. But academics are not so easily fooled! Isn't there somebody you forgot to ask?
I mean, it's a politically negotiated category whose boundaries shift depend on who's talking and how much political clout they have. It seems especially heinous with blacks and Native Americans because they're groups seen as being done badly by (with justification) historically to the white majority and who are still doing badly now.
Conversely, few people would look that hard at your Italian or Irish ancestry if you wanted to open an Italian restaurant or Irish pub. Jewish people will occasionally go after non-Jewish people trying to write about Jewish subjects, but I don't hear about it that much.
Then you get the white girl who decided to wear a Chinese dress to prom, was attacked by a Chinese-American guy for cultural appropriation, and then defended by Chinese people in China who found it flattering. It was a while ago but Avril Lavigne got in trouble for making a stereotypically Japanese video for her Japanese fans--she was big in Japan long after she had ceased to be big in America.
Why can you appropriate Irish culture freely, but not Japanese? Both were discriminated against. And back home, the Japanese have no problem with cultural appropriation; they copied large amounts of Western culture as part of industrialization, and it worked out pretty well for them. Anime shows pretty heavy influences from America's Disney films, samurai movies were influenced by cowboy movies, and so on. They are able to market their culture--revenue from Crunchyroll subscriptions and Square Enix games presumably goes back to Japanese companies that then pay Japanese people. Heck, Japan is actually culturally dominant in some areas at this point when it comes to cartoons--look at all the anime avatars on Twitter. (I think it probably is a way to get unwoke stories--your best chance to get a strong male protagonist on a traditional hero's journey is a shonen anime at this point.)
So it's more about whether the culture in question has a organized pressure group that can go after you.
I completely agree with your claim that "race doesn't exist" is a phrase suited mostly for deliberate confusion and deception. When I read a biologist or anthropologist make this claim, they are usually defining "race" as this straw man in which races share no common traits and have no common ancestor. No educated person comes close to believing something like that.
While I appreciate pointing out these subtle tensions between these various claims about race I think it's really important we make a broadside attack on the claim that "race is socially constructed" as used in conversation. Not only is it wrong I think people don't appreciate how much getting the feeling that the accepted truth is built on bullshit pushes people toward unjustified extremism.
Yes, of course race is socially constructed (as you observe) in the sense that our racial categories aren't mapped to the maximally scientifically explanatory divisions (eg it's not what you get by running a classifier on the genetic/phenotypic data). But the reason it's used is so people who don't have the scientific chops to deal with arguments that the reason black people do worse on Y task is clearly genetic can reject them out of hand.
Obviously this is fallacious reasoning. All that needs to be true for claims about genetics explaining differences in some group phenotype to be true is for those groups to have non-zero correlation with genes affecting said phenotype (and maybe a tad more if you want it to be robust across generations). You don't need to pick the maximally scientifically informative split for the explanation to work. Same way you can say the reason anvils tend to fall faster in air than feathers is anvils tend to have greater weight per cross-sectional area (even if occasional anvils are made out of some super low density substance) even though anvil/feather is hardly a principled division into categories for mechanics based explanations.
I've got advanced degrees so I've got no problem pushing back on this using the right language but I think everyone who is at all skeptical senses they are being played. Indeed, I think it's that sense which helps create the crisis of expert trust in this country -- the feeling you know you are being fed crap (agree or not there are much stronger non-fallacious arguments for the claim that the large majority of variation in things like educational attainment between races isn't genetic...but it's uncomfortable for many people to talk about this in less than totally certain terms).
Thankfully I've seen geneticists like David Reich implicitly call out this reasoning but not everyone goes and reads what the actual scientists say or what their reasoning is. That's why I've also seen people who are smart enough to realize something is bullshit here get dragged into the opposite kind of race essentialism because those are the only people who take their criticisms seriously.
Look, I get it that it's hard rhetorically/emotionally for people on the left to have to treat this issue as even a legitimate topic of scientific debate thar evidence needs to be cited for but you don't have to actually be able to make every argument yourself or even engage in that debate -- but doing so badly just makes everything worse .
I couldn't find the angry commentary tweetstorm that must have happened in this situation, but this letter from Hoover's former friend makes clear that she's angry about Hoover's deliberate lying, not about genuine mistaken identity: https://nativeappropriations.com/2023/05/a-letter-to-elizabeth-hoover.html
She writes:
> The thing that is hard for me is you could have done all of this good work as a white woman. You could have stood in solidarity with Native people, been a true accomplice, a co-conspirator, without having to claim identity. The work needs to be done, and communities need people to do it with them. You could have had the same career and do the same work as a white woman, and folks would have welcomed it. But now you’ve broken all of the trust and called into question all of the work, because you started it with a lie.
Exactly lol no they wouldnt have. Universities hire and give grants based on minority group status. Furthermore “accomplice” “co-conspirator”? What silly language, leftists academians are obsessed with pretending their subversive shadow agents fighting the man, when in fact theyre bloated, subsidized, power-wielding tyrants and sycophantic fools
1. The "no biological basis" and "genetic affilnity" arguments address two different problems. "No basis" was coined to invalidate the assertions of Black genetic inferiority that cropped up several decades ago. "Genetic affinity" is one means for a group to define its own members. While the two concepts conflict, they coexist in enlightened society.
2. The 1979 Steve Martin movie, "The Jerk," perfectly limns the genetic affinity argument. Steve Martin is adopted as a baby by Black Mississippi sharecroppers. By his teens he has an almost perfect Black cultural repertoire and sees himself as Black; his one deficiency is that he doesn't have rhythm. He goes out into the world and no matter how hard he identifies as Black, he's treated as white. Result: fish out of water. His misery is finally resolved when his adoptive family (which he has adventitiously enriched) takes him back to the farm and to a much improved sharecropper's shack. Miraculously, he gets rhythm. While the happy ending endorses lived experience as the criterion, the bulk of the movie shows that skin color and genetics (no nappy hair!) are the determinants.
> 1. Either you stop worrying about cultural appropriation.
> 2. Or you stop using a genetic component in whatever definition of race you use to define cultural appropriation.
> 3. Or you accept that some well-intentioned people who tried to build art around their identity group will retroactively be vilified as colonizers, through no fault of their own, after their 23andMe results come back.
I'm gonna take a hard-line #1 here. Not only is "cultural appropriation" not something we should worry about, it's not something that *exists.* The proper term for the thing that it is referring to is simply "culture;" cultural appropriation is a made-up nonsense term used by cultural arsonists to try to problematize the way cultural development has always worked since the dawn of time. The first and most fundamental rule of culture has always been, "everyone appropriates from everyone around them."
These days, the steel guitar is commonly associated with country music. But it was originally developed in the late 19th century by Hawaiian musician Joseph Kekuku, for use in traditional Hawaiian music, and it features prominently in the "island style" sound commonly associated with Hawaii. Country artists using steel guitars are a clear-cut case of cultural appropriation then, right?
Not so fast. Kekuku took the guitar — a Spanish instrument which evolved from the lute, an ancient design whose origins are lost to history — and added a playing bar made of steel (a metal unknown to the Hawaiians until Europeans introduced it!) to produce a specific sound quality. Later artists continued to tinker with the design, adding a resonator, then electric pickups, then pedals. (Fun fact: the electric pickup was first invented for the steel guitar, and was later adapted to more standard guitars. Were it not for steel player George Beauchamp tinkering with speakers and magnetic fields to get a louder sound out of his instrument, rock 'n' roll might have never existed!)
At every step along the way, be it Kekuku and his fellow Hawaiian guitarists who developed the distinctive Hawaiian style, those before them, and those after them, people took things that already existed, added something of their own to it, and built something (marginally) new out of it. This is the way culture has always worked. "Appropriation" is the natural process of cultural development, nothing more, and no one has the right to make anyone feel ashamed of it.
Just in case someone doesn't ( https://xkcd.com/1053/ applies here! ) the distinctive "anime look" of people with big heads, big, wide eyes, and no nose, was heavily influenced by manga superstar artist Osamu Tezuka, sometimes referred to as "the father of manga." He, in turn, copied the look wholesale from Donald Duck comics (big eyes, no nose...) which he was introduced to by an American soldier during the postwar occupation of Japan.
Looking at really old school manga, from the 1960s or so, is kind of like looking at a Cambrian era fossil bed. You can see specimens with familiar elements, things whose line of descent made it down to modern day media. But some of it is just weird and unfamiliar, because the creators were making forays into territory which never ended up being settled. It's one of those things which makes me viscerally *feel* the similarity between cultural evolution and biological evolution.
The cultural exchange back-and-forth between America and Japan is a fascinating thing. Here's a non-anime example: Have you ever heard of Japanese Spider-Man? Decades ago, Marvel Comics licensed the rights to a Japanese TV studio to produce a live-action Spider-Man series. It was... different.
This iteration of Spider-Man is a hero empowered with mystical spider-powers by a benevolent alien, who has to fight an invasion of aliens attacking his city. But whenever he defeated the monster of the week, it would magically grow to giant size, so Spider-Man would summon his leopard-themed giant robot to fight them again and finish them off.
If that monoplot sounds suspiciously familiar, it's because once the series wrapped, the studio took the formula and grafted it onto their relatively new hero-team series called "Super Sentai," which became wildly successful and eventually caught the eye of some American TV people, who licensed it and produced an adaptation called Power Rangers. (You might have heard of that one.)
The whole thing came full circle in an amusing way several years later when Sony produced the first Spider-Man movie and Weird Al Yankovic made a song about it, in which he described the villain as wearing a "dumb Power Rangers mask." I doubt Al knew just how right he was!
I mean, I think the real answer is (4) the consensus, which you described accurately at the start of the post, is messy, with many exceptions that prove the rule.
In this case, the key element that you left out of the summary is that there has been some level of deception. People interviewed in that article told the author that they received obfuscatory answers about her ancestral connections to her tribe for many years; and over that same period she benefited from her Native identity by getting a good academic position. Compare and contrast Elizabeth Warren, who apparently had approximately the same thing happen to her, but pretty much as soon as her ancestry was questioned, discovered the truth and admitted it; nor did she benefit from her Native identity.
This is still messy, because you're right that as a young person, she seems to have had many formative experiences that would normally be associated with being Native; and under any other circumstances that might have been enough for her to count as Native for social purposes. But as you note, any definition of race is in fact a messy superposition of several different things. If you want to make a claim on tribal property, you have to go through certain proofs which are different from just social identity; and if you want to present yourself as Native for professional purposes, the social proofs are different again. And she seems to have deliberately concealed the truth during some of these processes.
Oh, this is basically the same as your conclusion at the end there. Sorry, I hadn't read to the end.
You say, "Elizabeth Hoover's ex-friends who have turned against her..." I may have gotten bored before the end of the article. Have her friends turned against her? I remember a couple of aquaintances turning against her, but not friends.
"They can legitimately be angry with her for not admitting she was biologically white the moment she figured it out, and for making up fake facts about her tribal heritage after that point. But they should be clear that they're angry at her for lying, not for "being a fake Indian"." Yep, that seems right.
Being white is considered low-status among Critical Social Justice advocates and even many progressives. The backlash is used to penalize white people that may seek status or benefits of being a minority by making false claims. The CSJ worldview appears inconsistent because it's not truly egalitarian. CSJ advocates like things that benefit groups they consider historically oppressed, despite rhetoric about equality/equity. I think for your trilemma, you say "vilify intentional deceivers but not those who make a simple mistake" and the worldview is consistent.
I read the article as much more damning of white allies than of Hoover. There are several mentions of her (depending on your interpretation) playing up/embracing her heritage by wearing A LOT of Native beaded goods/beading in meetings. And then there’s this:
“Annette Rodriguez was a graduate fellow at the center toward the end of this period. She told me about a Native scholar who gave a job talk wearing a three-piece suit with a distinctively patterned tie. Someone asked him about the pattern, expecting that the design had come from his tribal community. The scholar said it was from Barneys. “He wasn’t going to fuel the fantasies of the white imagination of what an authentic Native person was,” Rodriguez said. “Liz was very happy to do that.””
A big part of the anger I see in the article from Native people is that there’s more room for Pretendians who flatter the assumptions of white peoples than the full range of actual Native experience.
I think this is probably similar to the phenomenon of trans people behaving in ways that seem more conspicuously gender essentialist than most cis people. They feel a pressure to do so, both to impress their gender identity on other people out of fear that they won't "pass," and to justify themselves their own investment in their transitions.
A person who can't be visually identified as plausibly-Native-American is only likely to be taken as a representative of a Native American social group if they make it a conspicuous part of their social performance. Since a white person who doesn't make a conspicuous social performance of being Native American won't be identified by others as being Native American, people who appear to be white who're identified as being Native American will almost exclusively be those who make a social performance of it.
I think though, that cases like this are also driven to a great extent by the cultural value that if you have membership in a minority group, it's valuable and praiseworthy to participate in its cultural practices, and treat your membership as essential to your identity. If other people can visually identify you as a member of a group, you can plausibly claim that your membership in it is essential to your experiences, and important to your identity. But if other people can't identify you as a member of that group, you pretty much *have* to actively engage in cultural practices associated with it in order to claim that your membership is meaningful. When we praise investment in minority identities, we're effectively encouraging people to do that.
Cultural appropriation is a fundamentally insane concept that misunderstands how culture works at the most basic level. Race, in the genetic sense, obviously exists and is obviously distinct from (but correlated with) ethnicity in the cultural sense; however, in most cases it's ethnicity that people care about, not race, and race gets used as a proxy for ethnicity.
...But that doesn't actually resolve the issue. People caught between different ethnic identities, or other identities, without fully belonging is a thing. And when you add material incentives (like affirmative action) in, built on an assumption of clean lines that don't exist in reality, things can get ugly.
My impression from the story was that Hoover was the type to cancel others caught in this sort of situation, and so I didn't feel too bad for her being hoist on her own petard. But I don't think that was actually said, so that was uncharitable of me. She definitely thought her voice was more important because of her Native identity, and used that to her advantage, but maybe this always was based in culture rather than blood. I don't know - the specific case doesn't matter that much, but the general problem is not straightforward.
There's definitely also the issue of social-justice types declaring belief in constructivism and fluid borders between identities, but proposing policies and social norms that rely on an underlying assumption of sharp and immutable lines.
In the case of Native Americans, there is another option for deciding if someone is really a member of the group--whether or not they're legally a member of one of the tribes. Each federally recognized Native American tribe has their own rules for who can become a member based on ancestry, residency, and other factors. Whether these rules are reasonable or not, I think most people would agree that its their prerogative to define membership however they want. Universities (which seem to be the main place these controversies happen) probably aren't going to demand genetic tests of potential Native American faculty, but they could just ask whether they're a member of a legally recognized tribe and accept that tribe's decision on whether they're 'really' Native American.
CTRL + F "legal tribal membership" and "claim membership in any tribe" in the post.
The reason I didn't harp on this as The One Solution is that everyone knew when they were hiring her that Hoover wasn't a legal tribal member, which means that everyone was willing to acknowledge her as culturally native even if not legally. For the reasons I discuss in the last part, I think it's good to have a legal/social distinction like this.
I am really confused about why the section on race in part II was included; the part that includes: "I'm against the claim that "there is no such thing as biological race" - it's one of those isolated demands for rigor that we don’t stand for around here."
Which is a pretty strong opener...but then you pivot away. If you replace "race" with "genetic ancestry", nothing changes, the essay and arguments still flow identically. The core argument, that genetics/biological race is a morally bad category to draw for group affiliation, does not require biological race. Am I missing a subtle point here? Is it just the 23andMe thing?
That seems like a spicy topic to touch and then drop and argue against almost immediately.
I thought this piece was clear enough about this but based on comments I guess not.
NO pretty much no one on the left is really going to say race has nothing to do with genes (or ancestry which I'll use equivalently since there is sufficient genetic variation to infer ancestry from it). I mean there are always idiots but in general no.
The claim that they tend to make is that race is socially constructed, i.e, that the way we divide up genetic space into races isn't even close to how you would do it if you were picking scientific concepts, e.g, if you tried to break up the genetic space into ancestral groups based on degree of interbreeding and genetic similarity etc it wouldn't come up with a group that tracks, eg, the us cultural concept of black under the one drop rule.
And while one can argue this point on its own it's reasonable enough. People, except the deeply confused, aren't making an argument that's totally stupidly dumb.
The error in this approach is when it's used to try and suggest that therefore you can't possibly explain observed differences in statistical outcomes by race by reference to genetics. Of fucking course you can. Sure, maybe being black under the us cultural definition isn't the ideal scientific concept but it doesn't change the fact that conditional on an American being black there chance of having sickle cell increases drastically.
As I said I thought this was all basically clear from the discussion in the post but apparently some comments seem to think liberals are really suggesting the extreme view that genes have literally nothing to do with it view. And sure I guess you can always find some idiots but despite spending my life in academia I haven't met someone who said that (tho large numbers prob means there are a few).
> The claim that they tend to make is that race is socially constructed, i.e, that the way we divide up genetic space into races isn't even close to how you would do it if you were picking scientific concepts, e.g, if you tried to break up the genetic space into ancestral groups based on degree of interbreeding and genetic similarity etc it wouldn't come up with a group that tracks, eg, the us cultural concept of black under the one drop rule.
That sounds like a good argument for doing a better job of coming up with racial categories, then. Obviously it's nonsense to say that Lewis Hamilton or Barack Obama is "black" when they're clearly no more black than they are white; they need to be put in a racial category of "half black half white" if you insist on classifying them.
I don't think it's even a good argument for that. It's totally reasonable and appropriate to divide things up based on social role.
I mean look at dog breeds. They aren't the most joint carving way of dividing up dog genetic space. For instance, border collies were only closed as a breed a few years ago meaning that the sire of your registered border collie could have even been another breed. We defined that group in a way that didn't ignore genes (you weren't going to be allowed to register your blonde labradoodle) but was choosen in large part based on the role the dogs played in our society.
And that's a good way to classify dogs into breeds bc we care about those roles but it doesn't stop us from saying things like border collies are more likely to have seizures in response to some heart worm meds than other breeds.
It might be, if it were true, but it isn't. The way we divide genetic space into races is a nearly exact match to the way you would do it by pure statistical clustering of raw DNA information, as you can easily learn from any of the many scientific papers comparing the two methods.
When edge cases become common enough to cause problems for the divisions in current use, those divisions are adjusted to accommodate the new reality. Barack Obama is "black" today for at least decently good reasons, but when finer distinctions were more significant, he would have been "mulatto". There are two primary reasons we don't use that category today: first, it's not large enough to be worth worrying about; second, it used to have superior status to "black", and was a status that an otherwise "black" person could force acknowledgement of, whereas today, "black" is the superior status, and people are already willing to grant that superior status to mulattoes. Why would they insist on a voluntary downgrade?
> And while one can argue this point on its own it's reasonable enough. People, except the deeply confused, aren't making an argument that's totally stupidly dumb.
Ok, I grant that's not true generally but I haven't seen it on this point (they will make a totally stupid arg if there isn't one that fits there desired outcomes that's nearby and better).
> We've probably said it a hundred times on Code Switch — biological race is not a real thing. So why is race still used to help diagnose certain conditions, like keloids or cystic fibrosis?
Look that's a fucked up but I think it supports my charitable analysis. They obviously don't literally mean there is nothing that they refer to by race so what do they mean when they say bio race isn't a real thing.
I think best interpretation is they think that race doesn't track a scientifically principled concept.
What they get wrong and fuck up is when they infer from that to the conclusion that therefore it can't correlate with any outcome. But that's just how I diagnosed it on the OP.
On the first part = bio race isn't real there is a non-stupid thing to say that suits all their purposes as well as the really dumb thing.
When it comes to wanting to reject the ability to predict phenotype/disease from race they just directly want to reject the idea that race can explain these things so stupid is all they got.
No it's not. Taste isn't a principled scientific way to divide up the space of chemicals (something like chemical formula is) or but that doesn't mean that there isn't any correlation between bitter tasting chemical compounds encountered in, say plants in the Amazon, and poisonous compounds.
I mean yes there are always some people who will say something crazy but that's not usually how we deal with belief ascriptions.
If I say something like: democrats believe in reducing CO2 emissions we don't count it as wrong because 5% of them think CO2 is really a name for a kind of bird or whatever. There is always a certain implied deference to authority and disregard of lizardman constant.
I believe that these claims that 'races are not at all biological/genetical' comes from the fact that 'race' is a poor word to accurately describe the concept of 'ethnicity', given that the word 'race' originally describes a purely genetic concept. In the human species, the so-called 'races' have a greater genetic diversity among themselves than between themselves. . It is just an exaggerated version of the more correct take 'races make no sense on a pure biological perspective and are a blurry social construct'.
I think that most of these issues would fade away if in English 'ethnicity' was preferred to 'race' in this specific context, as it is the case in many European languages. I think everyone would agree that 'ethinicity' has some biological component to it, as it is clear that groups that recognize themselves as a particular ethnicity partly do so in the basis of ascendance and appearance
When it comes to Elizabeth Hoover, I guess it's fair to not recognize her as Mi'kmaq base on her lack of ascendance (although I couldn't care less), but I find it completely unfair that all these people criticize her while her actions and her lying (even if bad) seem clearly humane and understandable.
I've asked my Chinese students how they define Chineseness.
Is it the ability to read, write, and speak Chinese fluently? Then what about ABCs, adopted Chinese Children, and American Born Chinese who generally lose this ability. And what about foreign children and mixed children who attend local schools in China? Or the small numbers of foreigners who do become extremely proficient? Are they Chinese?
Does one have to "look" Chinese? Then what about Tibetans and Uyghurs and other visible minorities? Koreans and Japanese can blend into China better.
Does one have to "think" like a Chinese person? ABCs and Chinese from the Mainland, Hong Kong, or Taiwan, all "think" differently.
Who is more Chinese? The third generation Chinese-Canadian who doesn't speak a word of Chinese? Or the Ghanaian kid who grew up in China and only speaks Chinese? Half the taxi drivers in China would admit they don't speak "proper Chinese".
What's interesting about China is that you can earn genuine respect in the degree to which you can appropriate Chinese culture and language. And I feel that language and culture are far more significant in shaping who you are than your appearance, though that of course can impact you too. Beautiful people and obese people and white people and black people and Chinese people and so on, will all internalize their experiences differently. But it would be nice to have a way for anyone to deemphasize their embodied experience, in a Chinese kind of way, or a Jewish conversion kind of way.
The general consensus is that this is not an easily resolvable problem but I also get this sense that there is a bias to racial categories.
I imagine you would be more uncomfortable trying to fit into China today with the additional problem of others assuming you can speak the language. I think the term “Asian” has become associated more with East Asians than say other groups like Pakistanis or Indians, but then Asia is so massive that it’s hard to have a term that can meaningfully describe everyone.
How we physically present to others can have an impact on our sense of identity, but I feel that language and culture will serve everyone better in the long run. Kind of like your comment about not feeling so much solidarity simply because someone is Chinese.
Perhaps in the US there is more hair splitting because of greater overlap in language and culture so the focus is more often on racial identity.
You’re right, but it’s more a quibble. I’d still argue that the phrase Asian or Asian-American suggests more that someone is East-Asian than South-Asian let alone Arab. As Michael Watts points out, Asian in England is more likely to mean Pakistani or Indian.
“共同的血脉” but as so many things in China are it’s hard to say how separate that view is from government influence. Much easier to get accepted as a foreigner in China than in Japan or Korea. And south China is different from the north with greater linguistic and ethnic diversity. Something they’d be proud of.
There's an excellent Saturday Night Live sketch, "Bank Breakers", where the joke is that there are two contestants on a game show, a relatively unsympathetic guy who wants to have fun, talk smack, and spend his winnings on entertainment, and a sympathetic mother who wants to fund hearing restoration surgery for her daughter. This ruins the guy's otherwise appropriate fun.
As the guy blunders deeper and deeper into involuntary villainhood, he tries to play for sympathy himself by noting that it's difficult for an immigrant, like him, to adjust to American culture. Prompted by the host, he's forced to reveal that he immigrated from Pakistan at the age of 15... weeks. His opponent turns out to be a veteran who was stationed in Pakistan for two years, causing the host to remark "That's crazy! So Gretchen's spent more time in Pakistan than you have!"
But I think the obvious message of the joke is actually incorrect in many ways. Suppose the two contestants were to both immigrate to Pakistan and attempt to make their life there. Who would fit in more effectively? Who would be more accepted by the locals? Who would be more familiar with the culture? I submit that the answer to all of these questions is "the guy who left when he was 15 weeks old". Since his parents left Pakistan after he was born, there's even a decent chance that he can understand Urdu, which would give him a practically unbridgeable advantage.
If your skin colour matches the skin colour of the majority in your society, I think you’ll have some initial advantages. But if you acquire the culture and language of the other country - like Chinese children adopted by white Americans - you’ll probably do alright. If I wanted to become “Chinese” I’d rather become Chinese by growing up in China and thus acquire it’s language and culture than be born into a “Chinese” body but not have access to the language and culture.
I’m white but have spent the majority of my life in Asia. My second generation immigrant friends from high school in Canada a who spent their entire lives there, are way more culturally Canadian than I am. The fact that most of them aren’t white isn’t an issue for me.
There is also so much more intercultural marriage these days, so racial classifications are increasingly absurd.
“there’s a missing step here, something like 1.5: maybe people should stop caring about their cultural identity”
I surprised there’s little validation for this point in the comments as of yet. It’s definitely where I land, at least the modified version of “people should stop caring *so much* about their cultural identity”.
I do understand the emotional and political strength that especially disadvantaged groups can draw from coming together under a shared identity but let us also acknowledge the huge dividends of assuming a more cosmopolitan or even an animalian identity < insert picture of furless ape contemplating a brilliant Milky Way against the deepest darkness >
I feel like I can steelman the idea of "cultural appropriation" as the idea of "profaning things that others find sacred". I remember one time in the US I saw some hipster wearing what appeared to be an Australian Army slouch hat complete with rising sun badge and I did feel a certain amount of personal offence -- that's a sacred object (of a sort) in my culture, and he's just wearing it with no regard to its context. And I understood how people from certain Native American cultures might feel about certain varieties of feathered headdress.
Of course the fact that somebody is offended by something doesn't make it immoral, it makes it impolite. I feel like one of the big effects of the death of ettiquette in the West is that we've taken many things that used to just be "impolite" and labelled them as immoral. But we _need_ that grey area between good behaviour and immorality, that wearing-shorts-to-a-wedding regime of behaviours that (a) can make people think less of you, but (b) nobody needs to get morally outraged about.
Is it a unique Scott feature to decry isolated demands for rigor... then respond will all the rigor demanded and more?
I have a less rigorous take
1. Common sense dictates she gets a pass given it was an honest mistake of family history and she has enough lived experience to cover the gap.
2. The community that denounced her did not do so upon sober consideration of all the facts.
3. Instead they were primed to call out white people in academia claiming to have native ancestry because of prominent cases and general belief where some do so cynically with 0 lived experience
4. She basically got caught in the cross fire
5. Toxic woke environment caused friends to turn on her out of fear of their own careers and reputation who otherwise would have been capable of that sober minded consideration of the facts.
Just an Nteenth warning of the terrible-ness of cancel culture, not *necessarily* proof that our models of race+culture have to be rewritten.
I read this post as Scott attempting to point out a piece of nonsense in leftist ideology by stretching for a topical event that he can present as related. The points he wants to make aren't really related to the issue he wants to tie them to, but he's too genteel to make them honestly.
We're 155 comments in so this is going to get buried, but you all are missing it. Elizabeth Hoover is being burned at the stake because NOBODY READ THE ARTICLE.
There isn't a general principle to tease out of the condemnation issuing from all quarters because nobody read the article. There's no innate genetic component to race that can be understood through the lens of her persecution because nobody read the article. There aren't any fundamental, nuanced Native American social dynamics to her being ostracized from that community because nobody read the article.
Until now I had no idea there was a another side to this story because I didn't read the article. I only know about Elizabeth Hoover because I read "Let's Talk About Pretendians" at the Make More Pie substack (https://nancyrommelmann.substack.com/p/lets-talk-about-pretendians?utm_source=%2Finbox%2Fsaved&utm_medium=reader2) and it never occurred to me to doubt that the source material was anything other than a scathing indictment. I found Nancy Rommelmann's take interesting and thought provoking, but now that I know she was bulshitting I hate her for lying to me.
Then again maybe Scott is lying to me. I wouldn't know, because I still haven't read the article, and I never will because my subscription to the New Yorker expired 25 years ago, I've already used up my free articles for the month, and this issue will be forgotten by April. Jesus.
Wow! There's a lot of material here, and lots of logic branches to follow. Following my Business Writing training, I'll put the Bottom Line Up Front: None of it should matter. In general. For most purposes. Okay, it's not that simple.
I'm tempted to write a book to try to capture all my thoughts on this, but I doubt anyone would want to read it.
I'll summarize: none of this would matter much if there weren't legal rights, privileges, and considerations attached. Elizabeth Hoover says she knew she wasn't eligible for enrolled citizenship in the Mi'kmaq nation, but there'd be no reason I can see to argue about her status except for the US rules that make it important. Scott says she never "officially claimed" affirmative action benefits, but there is no procedure for "claiming" these benefits - they are given by organizations that choose to do so. Both Harvard and Elizabeth Warren loudly claimed that her (disputed) status as a Native American was irrelevant to her hiring at Harvard Law School, but this makes no sense. Before she was hired, Harvard had publicly announced a commitment to hiring more Native American faculty. When she was hired, Harvard proudly claimed her as the first Native American woman on the Law School faculty. So, either Harvard was lying about a commitment to hiring more Native Americans, or it lied when it claimed it didn't consider her status. The same holds with Elizabeth Hoover - she was mentored by people who believed in her Native heritage, and hired because of her Native status.
A personal example: My maternal grandmother spent a fair amount of time and effort establishing her descent from 4 people who sailed on the Mayflower. She had her membership certificate in the Society of Mayflower Descendants hanging on the wall of her living room. I later found that she was approved by the North Carolina chapter, which was not her first attempt. Later, the national organization determined that her lineage could not be used to establish descent for anyone else (including her children) - presumably there were some weak links in her documentation. This situation would matter to relatives who want to be Mayflower descendants, or to the genealogists who guard the purity of the membership rolls, but to no one else. If being a Mayflower descendant conferred legal advantages, it would be a different story.
My college recently used its LinkedIn presence to highlight an "Indigenous" undergraduate student, who was photographed wearing clothes and jewelry from her culture. She grew up in New Jersey, and was indigenous to eastern Algeria, but still counts as "Indigenous". She certainly has every right to study, practice, and take pride in her parents' culture, but there'd be no particular reason for the University to take notice, and highlight her status, except that they earn Lefty Cred by having Indigenous students. Even students whose parents voluntarily emigrated from their homeland to a new country on a new continent.
The concept of Cultural Appropriation should be dropped. This is a process previously referred to by sociologists as "syncretism", where people freely borrow from other societies, and enrich themselves in the process. Of course, it could be done in an offensive way - drag queen nuns, say, or it could be questionable taste - say, boy scouts demonstrating sacred Indian dances. In a pluralistic society, there's really no way to prevent this. Low-key discussion and education could stop the offense by well-meaning people, but provocateurs will provoke, even if they're criticized for it.
Then there's the case of Buffy St. Marie, a very talented artist who identified as Native American but turned out probably wasn't and CBC outed her last year. It seemed that some of her relatives had tried to out her and at one point she threatened them with legal action, which may have caused them to back off. There was an uproar amongst various Native American activist groups, demanding that her awards as a Native American singer be rescinded, apparently on cultural appropriation grounds. But whether or not she had any native blood, she'd been adopted by the chief of the Piapot First Nation. According to Wikipedia, the chief's descendants said the attacks on St. Marie were "hurtful, ignorant, colonial — and racist" They explained ""We claim her as a member of our family and all of our family members are from the Piapot First Nation. To us, that holds far more weight than any paper documentation or colonial record keeping ever could."
So people are very divided about St. Marie. I for one think her story shows how these concepts of race and "lived experience" are concepts that aren't well defined, so they mean different things to different people. Scott's piece does an excellent job of teasing out this point, but I think his analytic framework is a little limited. This is an area where opposites can easily be true, that is, race can be something that exists or doesn't exist, because it's an ambiguous term. The law of the excluded middle excludes ambiguity, which makes it a very weak foundation for any logic that's supposed to apply to the real world, which is full of ambiguities and uncertain quantities. So, it's possible to believe that lived experience is more important than genetic markers of race, or the other way around, not just be on one side or other of the point, but both at the same time. Because both have some truth in them and some falseness, if you want to look at it on that axis, but maybe a better way to look at it is, both beliefs are useful in addressing situations.
So it seems like St. Marie and Hoover were in a very similar situation with regard to their "lived experience" and genetic status, though St. Marie has refused to take a DNA test, but St. Marie has some very deep and loving support from the First Nation family she was part of. When I read what they said, my feeling was, what's anyone complaining about? Do Native Americans not have the right to adopt someone? I'm also influenced by my appreciation for St. Marie's music and her advocacy of Native American causes. Perhaps the real issue in Hoover's case is that she was an academic rather than an artist? Or that she didn't have similar connections to the Native American community she claimed to be part of? Or are the two situations more similar than I'm perceiving them to be?
At any rate, I don't see why we should need to choose between the various inconsistent views of genetics and lived experience Scott's posting talks about. They aren't completely inconsistent, unless you're of the view that when it comes to race, genetics is everything or nothing, and likewise for lived experience. Both, or either, of these positions seems absurd to me, like arguments by someone who actually believes concepts have to be definite and are not allowed to be ambiguous or even fuzzy. Yet, the amount of argument over these points, and the obsessive insistance that one or other belief about race is "true" or "false" does seem to take up a rather large part of our political and academic discussions about this subject, which for me only goes to show how emotional rather than rational the discussion continues to be.
We must start by acknowledging that the very racial categories we discuss, like "black" and "white," are socially constructed concepts that were actively created and enforced through oppressive colonial policies and violence. As the sources highlighted, there was no monolithic "white race" in early 17th century Virginia - that was a divide purposefully manufactured and inscribed into law to uphold certain power structures.
Barbara J. Fields, author of "Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life," illuminates how "racecraft" was a political process "of ascribing racial meanings to relationships that were indubitably social," rather than reflecting any true biological distinctions.
Perhaps take Theodore W. Allen's work, " The Invention of the White Race," that delves into how the "white race" was invented as a ruling class social control formation to protect agrarian capitalist interests. So when we discuss racial identity today, we must first recognize we are operating within an invented system designed for economic exploitation and domination of certain groups. These categories did not arise organically from genetic data or some natural order.
The Limitations of Genetics
Speaking of genetics, the references you provided rightly cautioned against using it as the prime determinant of racial identity or lived experience. As one source noted, genetic expressions and similarities between populations often simply indicate proximity over time - they do not inherently equate to meaningful categorical racial differences.
Citing genetics as the basis for something like Native American identity or belonging would be particularly fraught given how these were diaspora communities forcibly removed and fragmented from ancestral lands. Using genetics as the gatekeeper risks further dispossessing them from their heritage.
Moreover, the example you provided of "black children raised in black communities" as the representation of a racialized experience was overly reductive. The African diaspora encompasses a vast range of cultures, experiences, and socialization processes that should not be flattened into a singular narrative.
Racialization vs. Genetics
It is the social process of racialization, rather than genetic variants, that plays the primary role in constructing racial experience and identity. As your references highlighted, "black" and "white" were racial constructs enforced through brutality, laws, and ingrained social hierarchies - not natural outcomes.
So in many ways, lived experience and the socialization of racialized experience may be more relevant factors than ancestry or genetics when discussing racial identity. This provides important context as we evaluate controversies like the Elizabeth Hoover case through the lens of oppressed groups reclaiming their sovereignty over identities and belonging.
The Dangers of Appropriation
We need to more directly reckon with the insidious harms of cultural appropriation and dispossession that marginalized groups have faced. Simply focusing the debate on representation and inclusion does not go far enough.
There are legitimate fears that enshrining an individualistic "lived experience" basis for racial identity could open the door to further extraction, decontextualization and erasure of precious cultural elements and narratives. As your reader stated, it is one thing to appreciate and experience aspects of a culture - it is another to arrogate and redefine that culture devoid of its original context and stakeholder community.
This resonates strongly with the colonial histories and persistent traumas that Native American tribes have endured around land dispossession, forced assimilation, and attempted cultural genocide at the hands of settler colonialism. Their staunch defense of belonging and identity boundaries, while perhaps severe in Hoover's case, emanates from a justified desire to protect what has been systemically attacked for centuries.
Belonging vs. Heritage
One distinction that merits further exploration is the difference between belonging and heritage as it relates to racial/ethnic identity. I would invitee you to think about how belonging is more about acceptance and inclusion within a particular group, while heritage refers to provable ancestral connections that can be measured to some degree.
In the case of Elizabeth Hoover and her contested Native identity, it seems the Native American community drew a line suggesting her lived experiences facilitated a sense of belonging, but did not constitute a heritage claim to tribal membership. This points to the complexity of these two interrelated but distinct concepts.
For many Native nations, protecting legal/cultural belonging boundaries is an act of defending sovereignty and preventing further encroachment after centuries of having lands, identities and very existence forcibly undermined. While harsh in Hoover's case, it represents an assertion of self-determination over who gets to be a stakeholder.
At the same time, one could argue that Hoover's individual pursuit of Native cultural enlightenment and embodiment, even if based on inaccurate ancestral beliefs, represented an attempt to cultivate personal heritage connections, regardless of criteria for official tribal belonging.
Exploring where the boundaries around belonging and heritage should be drawn for different communities, and according to what parameters, is an important part of this larger dialogue. It forces us to wrestle with complex questions of identity, continuity and "authenticity" without resorting to rigid policing.
The Journey of Other Colonized Groups
We should all seek to explore the perspective on these nuances of belonging and heritage that may come from other global communities who have been shaped by colonial identity formulations and ethnic supremacy ideologies.
For many across the Indian subcontinent or Iraqi/Iranian plateau for instance, conceptions of ethnic and national identity have had to be reconstructed and reclaimed in the wake of British colonial boundaries and categorizations designed to divide and conquer. Defining belonging vs ancestry becomes highly situational and fraught.
Many immigrants arriving in North America in recent decades have also had to navigate questions of how ancestry, phenotype, lived experience, and outside perceptions interact to shape their racial/ethnic identity and sense of cultural continuity or belonging. Their journeys of self-definition provide relevant touchpoints.
Within various Latinx communities, there arelong-standing debates around indigeneity, mixed ancestry and complex relationships to Spanish colonial heritages and categorizations. Who gets to claim belonging to certain indigenous identities is fraught with generational trauma.
And among the diversity of Black communities, questions of ancestral heritage vs. culturally cultivated forms of ethnic belonging allow for nuanced conversations. Caribbean nationals, mixed-race individuals, and various African diasporic subcultures have had to navigate these identity terrains in complex ways.
So while the Native American example provides a particularly charged case study, we must resist treating it as an isolated experience. Looking across diasporas can reveal common human themes around heritage, belonging, cultural resilience and the lingering impacts of colonial rhetorics - all of which feed into our greater understanding.
Decolonizing Conceptions of Identity
At the core, this examination reveals how modern conceptions and boundaries of racial/ethnic identity are still deeply caged by colonial logics and power structures inherited from past oppressors. Our language, assumptions, and measures of legitimacy remain constrained by the very supremacist ideologies that dehumanized entire communities to begin with.
True decolonization of how we understand identity may require a more radical self-determination - where impacted groups themselves can engage openly in the spiritual, cultural and social labor of defining their own terms for heritage and belonging freed from external impositions.
This is perhaps why discussions of "lived experience" as the key determinant feel so fraught. While potentially democratic in a liberal individualistic sense, they open new vulnerabilities for extraction, misrepresentation and dispossession of what are profound collective identities and liberatory projects.
There are no easy solutions. But continually centering the voices and perspectives of those most impacted by colonial identity formulations is crucial as we explore this territory. Their epistemologies and first-hand embodied experiences must be our primary guides if we are to map a journey towards more holistic, democratic and reparative ways of facilitating identity.
> So in many ways, lived experience and the socialization of racialized experience may be more relevant factors than ancestry or genetics when discussing racial identity.
Studies on racial self-identification and cluster analysis of DNA have shown a more than 99.9% match. It would be quite tough for the lived experience of, say, adoptees, to top that.
I've gotten heartily sick of hearing "colonial" treated as a term of disparagement. My nation, the United States, was founded as thirteen colonies. It has had many accomplishments over the years, including landing men on the Moon. As far as I'm concerned, any grievances over colonial practices are minor footnotes.
As far as I'm concerned, colonial practices seem to have evolved but conversation around identity, place, and belonging did not. I'm certainly glad American children don't work in factories any more but I also I don't think it's fair to say a nation's advancement and accomplishments make it perfect. There's still some kinks to work out and America will be in constant conflict with itself and origin story while people will bicker about one set of experiences being authentic and true and another complaining that they were here first. Why can't we all get along? Is America still the land of the free home of the brave for some or all? I haven't quite understood if pride in colonial identities extends to our societal conditions today. Is the answer for everyone to be proud of their American heritage and nothing else? Do we want to forget the ancestry that came before and say this is a new race, the race of the Americans? That's probably the easiest way to wipe the slate clean, and I think there are a lot of rules for who can be defined in that pool of American.
>I don't think it's fair to say a nation's advancement and accomplishments make it perfect.
That's fair. Personally, I'm simply putting the emphasis on the accomplishments. The USA _is_ a first world, industrialized nation. Our electrical grid _does_ function. We _did_ put men on the Moon. Enrico Fermi _did_ demonstrate the first chain reaction here.
>Is the answer for everyone to be proud of their American heritage and nothing else?
FWIW, I view myself as a retired programmer and hobby chemist, part of the traditions of the STEMM fields.
In any case the only way to be anti colonial in the US is to dismantle the US. Not the white structure whatever that is, but the nation as a whole if you believe that colonialism is bad.
Many Thanks! Yup. And that is not going to happen (or, at least, not for that reason or by that mechanism - dismantling via nuclear reactions would be a quite different event).
The discourse around racial identity, lived experience, ancestral heritage, and the like is highly complex terrain to navigate, fraught with deep histories and personal resonances. As we reflect on the perspectives and contexts explored here, I would encourage you to critically engage with the following thought-provoking questions:
What assumptions or unexamined narratives around racial categories and ethnic identities have you internalized from dominant culture? How might deconstructing and understanding the manufactured, colonial roots of these concepts shift your viewpoint?
In what ways has your own lived experience of race been shaped by socialization, systems of oppression, and perceived belonging irrespective of genetic ancestry? How do you disentangle the two?
What does authentically cultivating one's heritage and a sense of ethnic/cultural belonging look like, particularly for communities impacted by diaspora, displacement and colonial identity formulations?
How can this be pursued with sensitivity?
How do you navigate the tensions between an individualistic conception of racial identity based on personal narrative, and a more collective sense of ethnic/tribal belonging defined by specific group stakeholders? Where is the balance struck?
Are there problematic assumptions or blind spots in how you may be equating or distinguishing the nuances between race, ethnicity, nationality and other identity markers? How can you better parse those distinctions?
What does it mean to decolonize your own perceptions and languages around racial identity? How can an anti-racist, anti-colonial lens be more fully embodied in these dialogues?
Whose voices and first-hand perspectives have you prioritized in shaping your current understandings of heritage, belonging and racial identity politics? Which perspectives are missing or need greater centering?
How can spaces be created for marginalized groups to engage in the open-ended work of redefining their own identity concepts and belonging-criteria freed from external constraints? What would that liberated process look like?
These are just some of the critical questions we must contend with as we strive to develop a more intersectional, historically-grounded and decolonized understanding of racial identity. The answers will be different for each of us based on our individual contexts.
I encourage you to lean into this exploration with openness, humility and care. Embrace the complexity and nuances rather than looking for convenient resolutions. Be wakeful to blind spots and power dynamics that may constrain your current perspectives. Most importantly, seek out and elevate the first-hand narratives of those most impacted by these issues as primary guides.
Interrogating our assumptions and unlearning internalized patterns around race and identity is crucial inner work. It requires vulnerability, a willingness to make purposeful repairs, and an acceptance that this decolonization process will be an ongoing, iterative journey. But it is a journey well worth embarking on as we seed more holistic ways of recognizing our common humanity beyond imposed categorizations. I wish you clarity and courage as you navigate your own identity evolution.
Here are some books, documentaries and other resources I would highly recommend:
Books:
"Racecraft" by Barbara J. Fields and Karen E. Fields - A seminal work deconstructing how race is a modern idea manufactured through social, political and economic motives.
"The Invention of the White Race" by Theodore W. Allen - Provides a historical materialist analysis of how the "white race" was created as a ruling class social control formation.
"How the Irish Became White" by Noel Ignatiev - Explores the process of how Irish immigrants to the U.S. were initially racialized as non-white, and the politics of their assimilation into the "white" identity.
"Black Skin, White Masks" by Frantz Fanon - A foundational text examining the psychological dimensions of racism and the politics of decolonizing the mind.
"The History of White People" by Nell Irvin Painter - Chronicles how the concept of a "white race" developed over time through acts of oppression, immigration and social construction.
Documentaries/Films:
"Race: The Power of An Illusion" (2003) - A powerful PBS documentary series interrogating the social, historical and pseudo-scientific underpinnings of modern racial categories.
"Ethnic Notions" (1987) - Marlon Riggs' essential film deconstructing how racist images and stereotypes about Black people were perpetuated through popular culture.
"Awake: A Dream from Standing Rock" (2017) - Powerful indigenous voices and perspectives from the Standing Rock movement against the Dakota Access Pipeline.
"Daughters of the Dust" (1991) - A poetic film exploring the Gullah/Geechee culture of the African diaspora and themes of ancestry, belonging and cultural preservation.
"I Am Not Your Negro" (2016) - Brings James Baldwin's works to life, dissecting the persistent realities of racism and struggles for belonging in America.
Other Resources:
Teachings and writings from Indigenous scholars like Vine Deloria Jr., Lee Maracle, Linda Tuhiwai Te Rina and others.
The "Seeing White" podcast series from Scene on Radio examining the social construction of white racial identity.
Works by Black feminist scholars like bell hooks, Patricia Hill Collins, Audre Lorde and others on intersectional identity.
The "All My Relations" podcast exploring the diversity of Native cultures, stories and communities.
Sources from ethnic studies departments, local community-based organizations and museums focused on first-voice cultural narratives.
Claude is probably the best one out there but I am concerned about alignment theory. No one has solved it. The human race has so many different histories and beliefs, how will control the LLMs and steer them to be accessible to certain groups while taking the path of least resistance to not inflaming culture wars with others. I think if anyone wanted to get rich today, that would be the problem to solve. Make it work like electricity.
Many Thanks! I've been playing with GPT4 (and, to a lesser extent, Bard/Gemini). I'm _mostly_ concerned about hallucinations and other reliability failures. I generally keep asking them chemistry questions, and they keep getting them wrong. E.g. here was a simple discussion of cerium chemistry https://chat.openai.com/share/7faacb6b-a487-494f-b0b7-4a071798fb1c . Amongst other things, GPT4 came up with this equation:
2CeCl4(aq)+H2(g)→2CeCl3(aq)+2HCl(aq)+Cl2(g)
which isn't even balanced. It pulls two chlorine atoms out of thin air.
I _do_ want the LLMs to faithfully follow their users' requests - but, first, they need to be more reliable. I want _factually_ correct answers, not _politically_ correct answers.
Re: AI Reliability - I honestly think that the accuracy issue will be solved in 24 months to be because they'll (e.g., AI manufacturers) feed it chemistry textbooks to help it stay grounded and ensure it double check its answers that it can verify not just generate an answer. My hot take, is that I wouldn't worry as much there.
On hallucinations, I think that will never be solved because we want these algorithms to hallucinate but only if it leads to clear answers. This is converse of giving AI something like digital ayahuasca where it goes off in search of larger answers like humans. So heck, sometimes hallucination is intentional. We that with people who take things to hallucinate, bottom line is I don't think it necessarily something you want to get rid of but rather have controls that keep it within bounds of our intentionality.
Anywho, highly recommend exploring and trying that equation on Claude, I don't mess with the other LLMs anymore unless they're local.
Ignatiev is completely wrong. Irish were always legally white in the US, just like all other European immigrants. https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/2013/02/24/pathetic-that-this-even-has-to-be-pointed-out/ There were boundary cases like a south asian Sikh who argued he was Caucasian per modern race science (SCOTUS ruled the founding fathers were ignorant of race science, and thus he wasn't "white" by common sense definitions).
The color of law is a good book if you're interested in how they actually defined the categories legally, because to be honest, it was all loosey-goosey back then and it kinda still is, that's all I'm saying, it's not as "black and white" as it seems.
I would argue that whiteness as a property controlled by ruling class, has always been a moving target. Ever since its codification into law in 1670s. Laws need to be updated. Before 1670s, it’s a very dodgy idea. Did you know you could purchase whiteness at one point in time? https://repository.law.umich.edu/mjrl/vol3/iss2/4/
It makes me wonder if these examples we use need to be contextual to the time period they are presented in.
I think the specific example you use ignores that whiteness, at the time was congruent with status, and those European immigrants that you mentioned lacked that privilege and resource. Therefore they were unable to benefit from the systems that were in place at the time. So the way I interpret the reference is not referring to their physical appearance but their status. So while by popular definition our time they may have fit the criteria of what we now call, “white”, I would believe their lived experiences would have made them feel not white. Just a hunch.
Not just "by popular definition of our time", by the law of THEIR TIME. Racial discrimination is now illegal, but it was mandatory back then, and they were classified as white.
Your link is about Venezuela, and has nothing to do with Irish people.
You were somewhere in the vicinity of an accurate point about "status". It's often related to race, but it's a different concept. You are simply wrong that European immigrants were "unable to benefit from the systems in place at the time". Being legally naturalized was a benefit Dred Scott wished he had!
> I would believe their lived experiences would have made them feel not white. Just a hunch.
You don't know what it would mean for them to "feel not white". You weren't alive back then, and weren't in their shoes. They were officially white, and there weren't jokers like Ignatiev whose BS was lapped up by credulous ignorami back then, because everyone back then knew European immigrants were officially white. Did they feel different from other white people? Probably. People feel different from other members of larger groups they belong to all the time!
It's well known that the way they articulated whiteness back then was based on class/status, I'm pretty sure it wasn't as cut and dry . You didn't get free stuff, if you were poor and even if you were so-called white aka a new American, you'd still get the bottom of the barrel. I'm just pointing out some of those practices where you talk about Venezuela (and also Spain and Catholicism) most likely influence modern concepts and usage about race and status. I think they are still used incorrectly but that is its own discussion.
Just read about Irish American or Italian American history, you don't need to read Ignatiev, to know what it was like to be an "American" in the early days, and who benefited the most.
Library of Congress has some good resources about the Irish struggle.
If you went back then and told those immigrants about "articulated whiteness" they would be confused.
Latin America didn't have the one-drop rule. It's one of those things which is entirely socially constructed, but once done so has real effects.
Your LOC link oddly devotes most of its text to the Scotch-Irish. I don't know what your point was in linking to it. I didn't read the NYT one because of the paywall.
"I think the specific example you use ignores that whiteness, at the time was congruent with status, and those European immigrants that you mentioned lacked that privilege and resource. Therefore they were unable to benefit from the systems that were in place at the time. So the way I interpret the reference is not referring to their physical appearance but their status. So while by popular definition our time they may have fit the criteria of what we now call, “white”, I would believe their lived experiences would have made them feel not white. Just a hunch."
It seems like we need a conceptual category for people who don't have much money but can be of any race. Perhaps something like "poor people." But nobody cares much for class anymore, even self-identified Marxists. In all the discussion of race and privilege and disadvantage in Hoover's case, nobody has remarked on Hoover's own lower-class white background. From the NYMag article:
"Elizabeth Hoover, who is now forty-five years old, describes her childhood as “broke”—her father worked odd construction jobs and was periodically unemployed"
Honestly, I have no issue with Elizabeth Hoover. I’ve often wondered what does it take to become accepted in the different nuances of human societies. This practice of line drawing must be an exhausting exercise to keep up with.
I feel like just have issues with the larger conceptualization of categorical mistakes of race, class, privilege, wealth, etc., and how often they’re used interchangeably when they represent different arguments. It’s almost as if we all talk in ways as if these complex topics can be neatly linked into a simple equation. Yet, in active setting, people do tend to zero in on a single vector of a larger pattern, just as you rightly pointed out that nobody remarks on her class. How do we encourage more whole depictions of people? How do we prevent the great flattening of identity? I tend lose sleep over these questions..thanks for indulging my rants.
This is blurring two related concepts. Race is shorthand for shared ancestry. This is crystal clear when dealing with non-humans, and is commonly used with breeding domesticated animals and plants. Ethnicity is shorthand for a persistent (multigenerational) group of humans having certain attributes, some heritable perhaps, some not, like language, religion, traditions, lifestyle, clothing.
I agree with your judgement of Elizabeth Hoover and her erstwhile friends. The right course for her, once she found out her ancestry, was to cease to be a spokesperson or representative for the group in any way, and just live quietly in the background. Her "friends" have contributed to the weakening of social bonds all around.
As to the question of genetic clusters and "biological race," are the clusters "natural kinds?" If not, what is the significance?
An interesting example of lived experience is Barrack Obama, who had no connection to mainland American racial categories as a child and whose native culture is "international," according to his friends from Honolulu, Occidental, and Columbia, but adopted a black cultural identity after moving to Chicago and working as a community organizer on the Far South Side. Is Barrack Obama black?
There is a Pan-African ideology, but I don't think it actually has much to do with African-Americans. Moammar Ghadaffi dabbled in it (after turning away from Pan-Arabism), but would legally be lumped in with whites in the US.
Black people are people with black skin. ...I don't know why people think it's more complicated than that. A person of Caucasian heritage who was melanistic due to a mutation would be designated as black by pretty much everyone (except African Americans, ironically).
The people with the darkest skin aren't Africans but Melanesians like Solomon Islanders. But they don't really have much uniting them with Africans and we already use the term "black" for the latter. Similarly, if we discovered a long-uncontacted population with paler skins than Europeans, we wouldn't grant them the term "white" regardless of how logical that would be.
The term "black" is also used for Australian Aborigines, who are unrelated to Africans but just as dark-skinned. If you talk about "blacks" in Australia then it needs to be clear from context which kind you're talking about.
Solomon Islanders or Papuans are closely related, and just as dark, but I've never heard of anyone calling them "black".
Another fun fact: in the early days of the Australian colonies the Aborigines were referred to as "Indians". The term "Aborigine" doesn't seem to have come along until the 19th century.
Perhaps they do talk that way in Australia, since there have been relatively few people of African descent historically. In the US "Asian" used to mean East Asian, while in the UK it still typically means "South Asian", whom they distinguish from, say, "Chinese".
Nobody regards them as black, but they certainly can get confused as black. In college I TA'd for a professor who was a Sri Lankan immigrant that was multiple times referred to as African American. Certainly he had darker skin then many American blacks (who often have a fair degree of mixed race in their background).
On the contrary, I think that very few would consider a melanistic member of the white race to be black or an albino member of the black race to be white.
As usual, I enjoyed reading this article, and agreed with most of what was written. I was initially sympathetic toward the plight of Elizabeth Hoover, until I realized she was a professor of anthropology, and in particular has an interest in critical medical anthropology. A quick survey of her publications suggests that she would probably be in the camp that is opposed to “cultural appropriation“ and believes in much of the nonsense of critical race theory. I wonder if she would be as sympathetic to somebody else in her situation if this hadn’t happened to her. I suppose, live by the sword die by the sword.
All this cancel culture reminds me the Third Reich. I once read a letter which some German officer wrote, which was like this:
"I learnt the terrible, previously unknown fact that half of my relatives on my father's side were Jews. I know that this does not disqualify me from serving in the Wehrmacht, but what about my membership in the NSDAP?"
> if somebody told me that somehow I wasn’t Jewish, I would need to re-evaluate my self-identity at least a little
The difference is that Jewish ethnicity is infinitely more welcoming than native American ethnicity because *anyone can convert*. Sure we don't *evangelize* - you don't *have* to convert. But if you feel like you're really meant to be Jewish, and you convert, then you're Jewish, end of question, no matter your DNA.
There's nothing like that for native Americans. You can live on the reservation and marry a native American and at most, that would make your kids native Americans. But not you. You would always be an outside colonizer.
End of question if you convert under the auspices of ultra-Orthodoxy, and that of course means a commitment to ultra-Orthodox belief (or to lying about it) and to ultra-Orthodox practice. Anything else, and you and your descendants (if you are a woman) will be liable to being presented as frauds, not just by ultra-Orthodoxy, but by anybody who does not bother to observe but sees halakhah as normative (e.g., most Israelis).
(I was of two minds about including "ultra-" in the above. The fact remains that US modern Orthodoxy is seen in Israel as being basically Reform, and hence invalid. (Secular) Israelis I've talked to don't really see Trump's daughter conversion as valid, for instance - in fact they consider it pretty ridiculous. OTOH, Trump is a useful enough ally of the Israeli Right that people don't comment on that openly all of the time (as they would if it had been a liberal president's daughter).
Do we really need to see proof that she benefited from affirmative action? Native American is hot hot hot, in the oppression Olympics. Also, it’s woke academia. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. She knew what she signed up for.
> There are some people who are genetically 100% Jewish whose families converted to Christianity centuries ago and don’t even know they have any Jewish connection.
This isn't plausible; without internal awareness of Jewish background, there is essentially zero chance that the families would have continued marrying only each other over the course of multiple centuries. Once they forget that they're Jews, they're going to start marrying Christians.
100% isn't possible, right. Relatively high percentages? There are stories about that in some Spanish islands - probably the one place where you would expect that to be marginally possible.
> I definitely support 1 here. I think cultural appropriation is great. It produced a bunch of great works of art and nearly all good food. But I can understand why Native Americans don’t agree with this, and I don’t expect to be able to convince everyone of my position today.
It's not exactly an unusual position. Everyone who wants to project cultural power is aware that this is accomplished by getting other people to adopt your culture, not by getting them not to.
Ah but the epitome of cultural power is when you force people to adopt your culture and then still get to tell them they're doing it wrong. Force us to rename Fraser Island to "K'gari" and then tell us we're pronouncing it wrong.
That isn't cultural power. It's a different kind of power. Cultural power is when you call the island K'gari and other people admire you so much that it makes them try to say K'gari too.
Meanwhile, Buffy Saint-Marie has spent her whole life consciously lying about having Indian heritage. None of her Indian community care, since they already accepted her as being part of their tribe, genetic testing does not overrule that, and they all lived happily ever after.
I think it's important to make it clear that the "consensus" you're referring to in this post is the consensus of Westerners on Twitter. Even the same Westerners are likely to express very different feelings in real life.
Just a very small query: is there some confusion when talking about "real" Jews speaking or not speaking Yiddish? I believe Yiddish is a Hebrew/German mishmash now mostly spoken in Brooklyn and not to be confused with the ancient and revived in modern times Jewish language of Hebrew. (I started to say Ben-Yehuda "resurrected" Hebrew but then thought better of it.)
What Scott said - and, while Yiddish stemmed from Middle High German ("High" meaning "Upper", including Bavarian) with Hebrew and some Slavic admixture, it had a healthy literary culture for about a hundred years; I doubt that poets writing in it would have appreciated its being called a "mishmash". Then there's the entire falsche Nostalgie thing, starting in the 70s, i.e., when native speakers started to die out; it encourages people to learn a couple of Yiddish phrases, and presents Yiddish as a bit of a humorous language - of course readers of Yiddish literature (there are still a few around - Hassidim are not in that group) resent that, for excellent and obvious reasons.
I'm white, but I've had many social interactions with Tlingit people, so I'll try to think about this from their perspective.
Tlingit society is matrilineal. I've seen Tlingit people claim that the United States government imposing its blood quanta system on them is racist because it's different from their own rules. If someone is 1/128 Tlingit by blood quantum, but they have an unbroken chain of Tlingit matrilineal descent, according to Tlingit tradition, they're obviously Tlingit.
I met a Tlingit guy who married an Athabascan woman. He wanted his children to be Tlingit. He couldn't have his own clan adopt his wife because Tlingit tradition doesn't allow intra-clan marriage, so he had to persuade another clan to adopt her. Their children will belong to the clan that adopted her, not his clan. According to tradition, his children will be obligated to treat members of his clan with special respect.
I've heard Tlingits talk about how proud they are of their Irish ancestors. Apparently, this is the appropriate way for Tlingits to talk about their fathers' clans, whether those clans are Tlingit or not.
Clan membership is a huge part of Tlingit culture. Each clan has its own traditions not found in other clans. In my opinion, it's not possible to be culturally Tlingit or have 'lived experience' as a Tlingit without belonging to a specific clan.
I don't see how an Elizabeth Hoover situation could happen with Tlingits. They pay a lot of attention to which girls/women are born or adopted into the clan. Generally, they should be aware of whether a woman belongs to their clan or not. I suppose there could be weird situations such as babies getting mixed up in a hospital at birth. My guess is that the tribal elders of the clan involved would decide such a case, and the elders of one clan might make a different decision than the elders of another clan.
By the way, in Tlingit culture regards cultural appropriation as an act of violence. If Tlingit Clan A wrongs Tlingit Clan B, Clan B might steal a tradition from Clan A. The Unangans once fought a war against the Sitka Tlingit, so they pirated some Unangan songs, which they still sing to this day to spite the Unangans. In the 19th century, after some white Americans did something wrong to some Tlingits (I think they broke a promise or treaty, I don't remember the details) the Tlingits appropriated some white American culture as an act of vengeance. By now, the Tlingits have figured out this isn't an effective way to retaliate against white Americans.
If someone wants to take a Tlingit tradition without offending them, the process is to get permission from the clan elders. I've talked to young Tlingits who are frustrated about their elders not being willing to share clan traditions more widely with outsiders, since they think it would help preserve their culture. Maybe when they grow old and become clan elders themselves they will be more open to outsiders borrowing their culture.
>The Unangans once fought a war against the Sitka Tlingit, so they pirated some Unangan songs, which they still sing to this day to spite the Unangans. In the 19th century, after some white Americans did something wrong to some Tlingits (I think they broke a promise or treaty, I don't remember the details) the Tlingits appropriated some white American culture as an act of vengeance.
From what I've experienced myself and heard from others, the groups normally decried as intolerant--such as 4chan's /pol/, toxic gamers, and now white nationalists--are surprisingly tolerant: "I don't care who or what you are, as long as you also bash on ******s."
I’ve always found it funny that the consensus is pro transgenderism but anti transracialism.
But then again, I’m someone who is “racially ambiguous”. People have assumed I’m Moroccan, Yemeni, Brazilian, Indian, etc.
My mom is Jamaican — mostly of African descent but also part “Pakistani” (it wasn’t Pakistan back then, of course) — and my dad is Jewish, his mom was German, and his dad Russian.
My “lived experience” is that race is both biologically informed and socially constructed. For instance, in America I’m “black”, but in Jamaica I’m “coloured”.
The one-drop rule in American culture is a rather interesting thing. On one hand, it mitigates the prevalence of colorism as seen in Latin America and the Caribbean. On the other hand, it limits Americans’ ability to think about race in a grounded, genetically-informed way.
I think it took the transgender movement for society to get more serious about the innate differences between men and women (on average). A decade ago, it was common to hear progressive types deny biological differences in the sexes — among the most consequential and obvious facts of social life.
The feminist movement found talk of biological differences counterproductive, and it took transgenderism to break that hold on the discourse.
Perhaps a transracial movement can break the hold that antiracists have on the discourse; the party line of racial blank-slate-ism is clearly not helping “black and brown communities”. Time to try something else.
If this happened to an Orthodox (and Conservative?) Jew they would just be asked to go through a technical conversion and then they'd go on with their Jewish lives. Interestingly, the way this would be most likely to go wrong is that this hypothetical person, might take offense at the notion that something external to them could define their identity for them and then refuse to convert.
Yeah exactly. You can convert to Judaism. Depending on who you want to be accepted by - if you only care about reform Jews accepting you, you can do an easier reform conversion. If you want all Jews to accept you, you can do the slightly tougher orthodox conversion.
If you're already practicing Judaism, then the conversion isn't difficult because it's mostly just studying to practice Judaism.
There is no equivalent for ethnicities like native Americans, otherwise Elizabeth Hoover could just "convert" to native American and that would be the end of the issue. Instead she is being pushed out because ultimately, native Americans are a closed tribe and you can only be one by inheriting that status from at least one parent.
Interesting how one decides where the line is drawn within around an ethnicity. One parent? One grandparent? One great-grandparent? How much is enough?
I forget, did Scott talk about the "one-drop rule" in this piece....
I just want to point out that I don't think it's proper to say "halakhically Jewish according to Reform rabbis" as the Reform movement holds that Halakha is not binding and therefore as far as I'm aware their Rabbis don't make Halakhic rulings. This is not the case for the Conservative movement.
There are Reform responsa (as I found out when I came across a volume of them in a library), but they are advisory, not binding. "Fully" or "officially" would have been a happier choice of words than "halakhically". https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/reform-halakhic-texts/
Stop caring so much about heritage, racial and/or cultural.
Just stop it.
I'm not kidding.
It's irrational that Scott cares so much about his family identity that he refuses to seriously embrace 1.5 merely because he enjoys caring about being Jewish.
I think you have reinvented the concept of “ethnicity”, and explained why (at least in Europe) we tend to talk about “ethnicity” rather than “race”. “Race” is usually taken as implying an acceptance of racial theories of how it all works (which are, of course, different in different cultures, but are entirely about the genetically-inherited idea), whereas “ethnicity” is usually taken as working in the complicated multi-dimensional way you describe.
Her friends were strongly incentiviced not to be "white person supporting native american colonial impostor". The transitivity of cancel culture reinforces it by skewing the experience of consensus reality
Conceivably you could have a Native American great-grandparent—or possibly even a grandparent who was Native American—but your genetic markers wouldn't show it.
Think of it this way. Each parent passes half of their DNA to you. This means that there’s half of your mom and dad's DNA that you did *not* inherit. And Inheriting half of your parent’s DNA does *not* mean you're inheriting half of each of your parent's ethnicity marker genes. The DNA you inherit is random. One or both parents may have ethnic marker genes that they didn’t end up passing down to you.
So, say one of your great-grandparents is Mi’kmaq and your other seven great-grandparents are of Western European origin—theoretically, you're 1/8th Mi’kmaq. But your Native American gene markers may have gotten lost in the shuffle. This would be less likely if there were dozens of Native American gene markers, but I suspect that genetic tests like 23andMe only use a few.
Hi, just chiming in that the 23ane test uses more than 600000 SNPs distributed across all chromosomes, it's not not really possible to lose those markers through random chance that quickly!
Yes, but how many of those markers uniquely define a Native American let alone a Mi'kmaq? There was a thread a few years back on Twitter about why 23andMe would show ethnic percentages that didn't match peoples' actual ancestry percentages. A 23andMe-er chimed in and explained it that way.
OTOH, this blog post suggests that it's at about seven generations back when we start having ancestors whom we share no DNA with...
Enough markers that you can definitely tell if your grandparent was Native American, although I don't think 23andMe do specific tribes. 7th generation (as in the blog post) I can agree that you can _start_ seeing some "loss" but you've got heaps of signal from your grandparent, even if they weren't fully Native American themselves.
Sorry, I don't mean to be snarky, I work in genetics and I just want to counter that stuff doesn't disappear that quickly!
I agree. You'd think that would be case, but this is the official line from 23andMe...
"It is important to note that even if an individual in your family tree was considered to be Indigenous American, your own DNA may not reveal the Indigenous American ancestry because each parent only passes down a random half of their DNA each generation."
That suggests to me that they're saving money and only looking for a few SNPs. But they also claim that they can distinguish between different subgroups within Native American populations. I'll have to shrug my shoulders at this point.
Maybe a bit unlikely quite that quickly, but much more likely then implied above. You don't inherit 600,000 SNPs independently, you get 23 chromosomes from each parent. That it is a much smaller set to be cleaving in half each generation. While recombination is a thing, it's not that common so you're still inheriting a rather small set of chunks, much closer to 23 then 600,000.
Nice post. The only way for the woke SJWs to complain about this case REQUIRES that they subjugate any “lived experience” BELOW genetic reality. I don’t have strong feeling either way about that….but the point is these idiots need to pick a lane. The fact that they have to, is great. The fact that they have done so speaks of a principle that carries over into other parts of their reality. Now…I’m assuming these folks have principles….and can perceive reality…and that may be where I am mistaken.
I've long argued that many of the things we criticize as "cultural appropriation" are in fact bad! But they are bad for reasons aside from "one person taking cultural practices from a culture they aren't a part of".
Examples:
- Dressing up as a native american in costume. This is not bad because you're stealing the idea of a head-dress or whatever. It's bad because it's mockery. It's drawing a portrait of a real set of people as some kind of cartoonish thing, alongside dragons and wizards.
- Selling a spiritual practice you aren't educated in. This is basically lying. A word, like "guru" has specific meaning, and there is perceived, but difficult-to-the-uninitiated-to-identify value.
But when we're talking about artistic themes, styles of cooking, music, dress, whatever, I see it the same way I see remixing music. The original artist might not like it if you take their heartfelt love song and turn it into a techno bop. But in the abstract, I absolutely support your right to do so, and think the world is richer for it. All culture is copied. Just don't lie about the origins, don't try to confuse people, and don't mock people. And we already have words for these things: deception and mockery. There's nothing worse about "cultural appropriation" beyond that, because nobody "owns" culture.
"Dressing up as a native american in costume. This is not bad because you're stealing the idea of a head-dress or whatever. It's bad because it's mockery. It's drawing a portrait of a real set of people as some kind of cartoonish thing, alongside dragons and wizards."
I think I disagree with this. It shouldn't be different from (say) dressing up in a lab coat as a scientist.
It's true that there is an archetypal conception of "scientist" as a brilliant man with frazzled white hair who holds a bubbling test tube and shouts "Eureka!" which is a very exaggerated version of real scientists. But I think the archetypal conception has value. If we weren't allowed to think of scientists like this - or of forests with big primeval trees and wolves in them, or of businessmen with top hats and monocles, or of a mythical California full of beautiful beaches and tanned celebrities, or of a mythical library full of dusty old tomes and tweed-coated professors - then I think we'd be removing romance from the human experience in a tragic way. I don't know how to balance that with some people not wanting to be romanticized, but it doesn't seem obvious to me that the desire not to be romanticized should always win out.
In the sphere of children’s books, which is to say the only books most Americans will ever read in their lives, it has meant a shift toward dreary PSAs and Marxist-style tomes. Which I don’t think even Marxists really went in for? - from the few 20th century Russian children’s books I’ve ever seen. So yay us.
It's important to note that although Critical Race Theory uses Marxist dialectics and terminology, traditional Marxists don't get along with the CRT people. There have been some hilarious flame wars on the WSWS.org comment threads between the Fourth International Marxists (Trotskyites) and CRT people. The Trotties want to boil all history down to class conflict and oppression. While the CRT people boil history down to colonialization and racial oppression. The CRT people always end up calling the Marxists racists, and the Trotties get all defensive and huffy because their theory is color-blind (so they can't be racists!).
It should be easy for doctrinaire Marxists, or even soft left socialists, to win that argument. If capital is on your side (see DEI) then maybe you are on the side of capital.
Well, clearly this breaks down at some stage. A 16th century English playwright (say) might argue that this extends to the beloved theatrical archetype of the evil Jewish miser with a gag nose, a bright red wig, and devilish mannerisms. A blackface minstrel-show comedian might say the same thing about a comic black layabout with enormous lips. I don't think you would endorse perpetuating those costumes in the name of keeping romance in the world; so, surely, you have to grant that *some* silly costumes are racist/mean/offensive enough to be worth banning, despite the cost to our library of cultural archetypes. Reasonable minds can disagree on which side of the boundary Indian costumes sit, but the principle seems hard to deny.
Yes, very much so. It's a recurring element of the medieval iconography of Judas, and thus of the archetypal "evil Jew", and was stronger than ever in the Elizabethan era. As a quick pull from the Wikipedia page on Shakespeare's Shylock,…
> English Jews had been expelled in 1290; Jews were not allowed to return until the rule of Oliver Cromwell. In the 16th and early 17th centuries, Jews were often presented on the Elizabethan stage in hideous caricature, with hooked noses and bright red wigs.
Hmmm, yea, I'll take the point that "mockery" is a bit of a shallow description of what's going on. But I do think there is an important difference between varieties of the things we call "cultural appropriation", and I am quite sympathetic to the "dressing up as Indians" one. Perhaps you can help me describe the boundary. Returning to basic psychology for why people might feel bad about this sort of thing:
- People don't like to be disliked or looked-down on. Mockery is this, and I agree that not everyone dressing up as a Native American is doing this. (and it can be reasonably inferred by observers that they are not, etc.) So, bad example. Blackface may be much closer to "mockery".
- People do not like to be misunderstood. If the "archetype" is simply inaccurate not just in its shallowness, but directionally, then there's something that stings more about it. The archetype of scientist (which I am, professionally) is interesting, because while it is clearly an ideal (aside from the fairly flexible "man" part), it more or less matches what those who identify as scientists hope for themselves. I wouldn't hold a test tube undergoing an active reaction, but I'd totally shout "Eureka" if I had a breakthrough, and hope to have breakthroughs. The question of whether we _care_ if I feel bad about it aside, I don't feel at all bad about being associated with the romanticized Scientist, and I think most scientists don't either. I can contrast this to the experience of finding an "SF-style" cafe in Denmark. They seemed to think SF food was some combination of strange sandwiches, and burritos that was nothing like anything I've had in SF. I'm not THAT strongly identified with being an "SF person" so it didn't sting much, but it was vaguely off-putting. Perhaps the image we portray of natives in pop culture is in some way directionally different from how most natives today perceive themselves.
- People (sometimes) do not like to be essentialized, boxed-in, or trapped in an identity. I think this relates a whole lot to the content of your article. If I want to be an individual person, free to be unique in whatever way, it feels bad to see messages advertising me as some way, for a label I can't particularly escape. I get to choose whether I think of myself as a "Scientist". But the world and society and everyone tells me I can't choose whether I'm a "Native American". This relates to other people's comments about "branding". You're gonna care a whole lot about a brand, if you aren't allowed to not be that brand.
For whatever reason, I am sympathetic to all of the psychological discomforts surrounding identity above, but I am not at all sympathetic to "we own this art because it is from our culture, and it feels bad to see other people copy and change it".
Another framing could, as you do above, draw a metaphor to law. Law is concerned with ownership of cultural artifacts, but we feel different about them depending on what they are. Content and ideas are only protected for a relatively short amount of time. (copyright) or a very short amount of time (patents) However, brands (trademarks) are protected in perpetuity. Perhaps I feel that raw aesthetics (creating native-theme inspired jewelry) is more like an idea, whereas a costume is more like a trademark.
I think "mockery" should be generalized to "diluting the brand". People in a subculture often have an incentive to gatekeep to keep the posers out. The posers may benefit from adopting certain aspects of the subculture. But if they don't go all-in, the extant members shoulder negative externalities, regardless of the poser's intent.
That's only true if the brand is weak in the first place. Nobody cares if somebody dresses up like a posh Brit, because posh Brits are still the upper class of a first world country. Whereas the sorts of cultures that are always in "appropriation" dramas are barely hanging on has-beens at best, clinging to their mostly imaginary dignity for all they are worth.
Well, the restriction to punching-up seems specific to id pol. But I think of brand dilution as a wider phenomenon. One example I had in mind was Nintendo's notorious litigation against artwork, emulators, and Smash tourneys. It's clearly a case where a successful company with a strong brand is punching-down in order to protect its IP. Another example where the adherents are more involved might be how some Christians don't consider Mormons to be "real" Christians. Christianity is on the decline, but idk if I'd call it weak. And the word "poseur" per se is something I associate with the punk-rock scene when it was still emerging.
Right, I suppose I should amend, either weak or overwhelmingly strong. Nintendo (and Disney) can crush anybody who dares touch their IP in ways they don't like. Christianity, and posh Brits for that matter, also could at the peak of their respective powers.
I agree that "diluting the brand" is part of what's going on. The fact that some people are essentially forced to be part of the brand is very relevant as well. I care a lot more about perception of a brand if I don't get a choice in being identified with it in the eyes of others.
And whether an "appropriation" is more like a brand infringement versus a repurposing of an idea strikes me as quite an important. There's a big difference between "This IS native art" and "This is inspired by native art".
As the frontier closed, even as the final conflicts with the Indians were playing out - Americans (and *even some old Indian fighters*) were filled with nostalgia for it.
A few short decades further this became the most popular single subject for the new movie industry.
Children dressed up as cowboys, which they were not, and as Indians, which they were not. Schools chose mascots not out of mockery but affection for these figures that had passed into legend almost instantly. These were caricatures by their nature as all mascots are. There was no mockery in it. There was, obviously, no very deep knowledge in it either.
It’s fine to hate it more for this reason, if you like. The very small but influential activist Indian fringe obviously does.
I'm getting a little bit annoyed at Scott talking about "the consensus view" or something similar to mean the popular view among progressives (and/or in San Fransisco). It seems pretty clear that the importance of "lived experience" and of affirmative action is definitely not widely accepted among people generally, and (based on the record of public votes on AA) not even by a majority (almost anywhere). Statements like this just seem to be erasing the existence of conservatives, moderates, and everyone outside your left-wing bubble. I don't think that's the intention, but it seems to be the effect.
It's also arguably even unfair to progressives, a kind of weasel wording that just says "your group believes this" without any clarification on who that actually is, and without being supported by evidence or even being falsifiable. Even when it's clearly true, it seems like bad epistemology to me. There's, shockingly, a *lot* of these "everyone knows" statements around here ("progressives believe", "conservatives believe" even absurd things like "nerds believe") in an otherwise very data-focused and logic-focused community.
I think "the view of the Biden Adninistration", "the view of x% of people according to this poll", or even "the view of most of my Bay Area friends" would work a lot better here.
Separately, I find this post too accepting of this quasi-religious notion of "cultural appropriation". I have no clue what cultural appropriation actually is or why it's harmful. Every definition I've seen seems absurdly vague (unspecified and untestable references to "cultural practices", "power differentials" and God knows what else), and even vaguer about what's supposed to be bad about it. It harms an Indian person to see white people wearing Indian dress (in a non-mocking way) because...? I have no sensible answer to that question.
I'd rather people not give respect to this term, or use it without quotation marks as if it's a coherent thing, without providing or linking to a well-defined definition.
While I generally agree with the sentiment behind this post, I think there is a dimension particular to the native culture that needs to be addressed.
The initial investigation into Hoover’s background seems to have come from a colleague, who wrote her an email about the breach of trust with this snippet:
“This is what I was always told, this is how I was raised, I never thought to question it?
You are a professor of Native studies. You make your entire living and career off of being Native. You have a responsibility to know your own family story. Every Native community I have entered into folks immediately ask who my family is and where I’m from by way of greeting. If it’s true you never questioned your parents, I wonder how you’ve been asked who your family is and where you’re from throughout your whole life and never stopped to wonder who your family actually is. Where they are actually from.
There are also signs that show you did know the story wasn’t true. You’ve slowly erased your tribal affiliation from your bios online through the years, the parenthetical after your name stating Elizabeth Hoover (Mohawk/Mi’kmaq) has disappeared, you didn’t offer any kind of deep positionality in your book”
It seems to me, based on this reading, that the communities she interacts with takes lineage and family names/history very seriously - to the point of using family lineage as part of casual identification.
I can’t help but assign a bit more culpability to Hoover’s situation. If the cultural norms were in fact clear enough that she “knew she fucked up” when she found out and still tried to hide it - I can understand the feeling of betrayal that her colleagues and community may feel as a result.
All the other commentary about race and identity being a hard to define fractal object that falls apart in the toxic space of cancel culture parlance is correct though, and I find it interesting to note that the emailer actually concurs:
“The pretendian hunts of the current moment are a mess. They are harmful to those of us, like me, who are actual Indigenous people who code as white and have grown up disconnected because of settler colonialism. They are harmful to folks with complicated family stories and adoptions and estranged family and force many of us to share things about our families that we shouldn’t have to.”
It is so surreal seeing Scott Alexander mess up and accidentally write a post criticizing a straw man, because he spends the entire time *continuing to ask the right questions at the exact same rate he normally does*
> You can do cluster analysis on a bunch of genomes and circle the nice, legible shapes representing Europeans, Africans, etc.
Yes, but the genetic distance between sub-Saharan African populations such as the Bantu and San is roughly the same as between Europeans and Asians. But we lump Bantu and San together as one race, while we split Asians and Europeans into two races. And if you look at the tree of genetic groupings that Cavelli-Sforza mapped out, there are actually *eight* distinct genetic clusters in modern Homo sapiens: African, Caucasoid, Northeast Asian, Arctic, American, Southeast Asian, Pacific Islanders, and Oceanian. So contemporary racial terms *are* sort of arbitrary. It would be more accurate to define humans into eight races.
AFAIK, there has only been extra splitting within the eight basic C-S groups since then, and the C-S population cladogram has held up as our knowledge of the human genome has become more detailed. For instance, we now know that Oceanian populations have up to 8% Denisovan genome, while no other non-Oceanian groups (except maybe Tibetans?) have any Denisovan alleles.
If you have links that refute the C-S cladogram, I'd love to see them. I've followed human genetics pretty closely since I left grad school in the 80s, but I admit that some of what I learned may be confounded by more recent research.
I don't have any links, but consider e.g. what we now know about South Asians being a hybrid of a West Eurasian and an East Eurasian population, where Cavalli–Sforza described them as being a part of a West Eurasian clade.
Do "we" really do that? I'm pretty sure that Africans themselves are more than aware of such differences, whereas those who never even heard about them clearly wouldn't have much reason to care one way or the other.
For once, I broadly agree with most of what's said. Except the problems that start from here.
"But I place a decent amount of value on being Jewish..."
Then why did it take only a paragraph before Scott called himself "white"?
Well, I know the reason, it's because neo-liberal bubble heads consider Jewish to be some kind of weird subset of white, the Ur-Schrödinger's-minority. When you want to signal status as a minority, you're Jewish. When you want to signal status as an ally, or deflect blame, you're white. This tendency has been pretty catastrophic for real Jews, of which I count myself. It reads as political and racial subterfuge, and looks to be clear evidence of the "dual loyalty" charge that anti-semites use, along with dual citizenship.
To me, Scott's white. To be Jewish is to believe the things that Jews believe. The law is a consequence of that. To act out Jewishness without the belief would be acceptable, right up until you start following another religion, which I accuse Scott of doing. Then you're being deceitful, and after a while most people won't consider you Jewish regardless. If you do it, and then waver on this identity when it suites you rhetorically, then I think you're actively malicious. To rhetorically act as if your Jewishness is some kind of precursor to your new religion that has literally nothing to do with it, then you're also blasphemous.
But what do I know? I'm just a Karaite, and thus I am so non-Jewish to the normal person as to be unworthy of mention by everyone who ever brings up the question.
It's not just "neo-liberal bubble heads" who consider Jews (*) to be "white"; I think that's been pretty much the consensus view of pretty much everyone who ever cared about who was or was not white. The Confederate States of America, who cared more about whiteness than just about everyone, had an openly Jewish Secretary of State. The Apartheid-era government of South Africa, with its extensive body of law as to who was "white" or "colored" or "black", classified the Jews as "white".
It is also true that non-Jewish white people have at times discriminated against Jews, sometimes very harshly. Just as non-Irish white people have discriminated against the Irish, or non-Italian white people against Italians, though usually not as persistently. This is only confusing to people who think "ethnic discrimination" is defined as something that can never be done to white people.
Scott is correct to call himself both "white" and "Jewish" in the sense that those words are used by most of the English-speaking population. If you want to say that his Jewishness is insufficiently pure for your tastes, that says more about you than it does about Scott.
The historical analysis is true, but the what I said still holds. I am aware of Judah P Benjamin. You might recall General Order no. 11. We can agree, historically, what counts as an "other" has varied in time and place and circumstance.
But I am speaking of the now, in this political circumstance we live in, as determined by anti-semites who are the people I actually worry about. If I sit down and listen to say, Ryan Faulk, and I were to ask him his thoughts on this, he would probably say that when Jews do this equivocation between White and Jewish, it is precisely because they are as a group, stoking hatred against White people in order to deflect blame from themselves, as Jews are not White and as I pointed out, and what in fact actually happened, the switch to "White" as a descriptor only happened once Scott had to take on a potential criticism. He did not say after all, "...I as a Jewish person, have no right to criticize the Mi’kmaq Indians’ membership policies."
All this is a separate argument from the "is Scott insufficiently pure for my taste?" question. When I see Jews do things that could feed into my problems as a Jew, obviously I might point it out if relevant, the same way I've seen black people criticise other black people for, to use a more allowable phrase, acting too ghetto. When I talk about how others view Jewishness and Whiteness, that is a racial argument I see made by other people.
The "Jewish purity" question, as you put it, is mainly the typical fighting regarding levels of liberalness and orthodoxy, rather than a racial question. Hence I started off talking about it by saying "To me". When Ethan Klein commented that Ben Shapiro should be first in the gas chambers in the next holocaust, my own first thought was of course Ethan Klein would say something like that, he's not really Jewish, he's only a "cultural Jew". Ben Shapiro himself would give a fairly mushy answer on this question, but he has accused Bernie Sanders of mostly the same things I'm accusing Scott of (minus the argument that Anti-semites notice this and use it as evidence of Jewish treachery).
It is the case that you can still count as Jewish and be off the path as they say. The only reason Scott slips past being a Jew altogether in my eyes is my accusation of apostasy. Hence it is even more irritating to see him "do the thing".
Scott is a Rationalist. Rationalism is a cult. Not all cults are bad, and as far as cults go, Rationalism is relatively benign, if still incoherent.
I am perfectly aware of Scott's defence strategy here. He claims that Rationality is only a religion insofar as everything is a religion. Unfortunately for Scott, this argument is based on a very Rationalist (and generally Liberal) understanding of what a religion is. A religion is not a wicker basket of beliefs and actions. Not even a wicker basket of certain kinds of beliefs (on the afterlife, on the soul) and actions (rituals, festivals, clothing). Scott doesn't understand religion as a concept. You can see this when he says baffling things like, paraphrased, "The Shia Sunni split is over something that doesn't matter," when it is in fact the second most important thing in all of Islam, right under the createdness of the Koran. He doesn't understand this because he thinks religions are just wicker baskets. A wicker basket can hold any number of arbitrary things, and so the difference between Shia and Sunni is merely a choice in leadership over a society, rather than who is to lead people towards Allah's command after the death of the literal final prophet of Allah. So to Scott, what does it matter, what leader you pick? It could be anybody, the choice is arbitrary.
And in totality, this is why Rationality itself is a religion. Religions are all encompassing transcendent systems. Religions start off with extremely fundamental assumptions that then trickle down and encompass absolutely everything about one's worldview. Rationality is incoherent, but it still has base assumptions about what Rationality is and why it is valuable and what it applies to, and these assumptions colour absolutely everything about how a Rationalist not only sees the world, but acts within it.
For example, why does Scott defend Polyamory so stringently? Because as a Rationalist, he thinks "rationally" about it and believes others are behaving irrationally towards it. Or possibly that he's missing their rational argument (itself another belief that extends from Rationality). Rationalists don't have a good grasp of what things are or why, (Have you noticed how often lately in blogs, Scott laments his confusion about something everybody normal finds completely obvious, like in this post?), because a fundamental Rationalist assumption is that there is no foundational objective viewpoint, there is only what follows "rationally", and rationality is defined as only Instrumental and Epistemic, with no regards (or probably knowledge of) to the fact that this definition is itself instrumental and not epistemic. And so what ends up happening is they make really bad arguments in support of polyamory, and have really strange beliefs about it and a host of other things.
This is how any religion works. You start with some very small handful of base assumptions and they cascade into informing almost everything about an entire culture. Comparatively few things end up being arbitrary. And I doubt even Scott would deny that the Rationalist Community is a community with a culture. He'll just say that Rationalism is more like bowling than Islam, because he literally can't tell the difference between a game with a fairly arbitrary set of rules, and a religion.
>Not even a wicker basket of certain kinds of beliefs (on the afterlife, on the soul) and actions (rituals, festivals, clothing).
Hmm... That is kind-of how I view religions. ( And it is the absence of these _kinds_ of beliefs within rationalism that makes me, like Scott, view it as not a religion. )
I see your point about
>Religions start off with extremely fundamental assumptions that then trickle down and encompass absolutely everything about one's worldview.
and am sympathetic to the attempt to consistently derive consequences from a small set of starting beliefs?/axioms?/commandments? , though I tend to see religions as usually having inconsistencies internally.
But "encompass absolutely everything about one's worldview" sounds like an overreach. Did any religion say anything that either predicts or contradicts Maxwell's equations? Most knowledge is empirical. Aren't religions typically silent on most such questions?
Are you aware of the Mu'tazilism/Ash'arism split? These two groups asked the question, "Is the Koran created?" The Mu'tazilites said yes, the Ash'arites said no. As I said in my last post, this is the most important question in Islam.
Why? Actually think about it for a second. The Koran exists. If the Koran was not created, it is eternal. If it is eternal, it is not separate from Allah. Which makes sense, we already assume the Koran is Allah's Word, and how can His Word be separate from Him? That means the Koran is in fact a direct physical extension of the one true God. And God is perfect and eternal and singular and has a will, and all these things are God, and the Koran is now a physical expression of that that was dictated by the final prophet, Muhammad, so that us created beings could know God and His commands, which are the most important thing to know.
And if all that is the case, what good is your so called "empiricism"? It's good for nothing is what it is. Far from being silent on the issue, the Ash'arites say that philosophical, empirical, and reasoned observation of the world is at best, a waste of time, and at worst, outright Haram. Everything important about how to live life is in the Koran, because obviously God would not neglect something important from His Word. Even more, Ash'arites say that all physical laws are direct extensions of Allah's will, as this is what the Koran says, and we've already stated philosophy is probably Haram. There is no such thing as "Maxwell's equations" outside of Allah's direct will, which He may change at any moment. You learning them is pointless in the light of this, or hubris and thus a sin against God.
The Mu'tazilites thought differently. For them, the Koran is an object in time, and thus not eternal. Not being eternal, it is not a direct extension of Allah. Not being a direct extension of Allah, we are free to assume that not everything is in the Koran, that there is more to life than Kalam and Fiqh. And so we may include philosophy, which then includes reason and what we now call science. Like the Koran, the world is created and a thing in time, and exists outside of the direct Will of God (a position that Ash'arites view as a denial of Allah's Power and Will). And so your Maxwell's equations have a place.
Except the Mu'tazilites never got that far. For hundreds of years early on in Islam, Mu'tazilites were the more populous. But then the Ash'arites came, and have long since won the argument. Mu'tazilism is equivalent to Satanism in the eyes of contemporary Islam. Where do you think that Islamic Golden Age went, and why are Muslims like they are now? Because one answer to the question on the Createdness of the Koran won out, and it trickled down into denying the usefulness of science.
Do you think that this pathway was itself somewhat arbitrary, that it could have been otherwise? I would say you'd be wrong on that. As I said, religions don't put things into the wicker basket. Everything follows from their original assumptions, because given X assumptions, only certain things logically follow.
The broadly Liberal view of religion is of the wicker basket, like I said. But this is just not what religions are, and were never considered to be until roughly the 17th century. The modern concept of Science and its accompanying Empiricism is an outgrowth of Christianity specifically, it is not an object to put in or out of the wicker basket. There is an ideological reason why Science came from the West, because in Christianity, the study of nature, God's "hidden book", was considered an explicitly active good thing and an avenue to understand God better.
This is also why Rationalism, and Liberalism, and Modernism, and all the modern little cults and religions that people don't realise are religions, are all incoherent and collapsing all around us. Remember what Nietzsche tells us. Which is pretty much exactly what I've said. Concepts like equality, freedom, actual reason, and science, are all direct products of Christianity, for they followed from the ideas that there is a God, that this God created the world, that the world is good, and through study of that world we may know Him better. And so Nietzsche then tells us that through science, born of Christianity, we killed God and reject Christianity, and now God is dead, and your Maxwell's equations have no foundation because you don't realise you've killed the source of those assumptions which bore them. It is the exact opposite of religions being "typically silent on most such questions."
>Except the Mu'tazilites never got that far. For hundreds of years early on in Islam, Mu'tazilites were the more populous. But then the Ash'arites came, and have long since won the argument. Mu'tazilism is equivalent to Satanism in the eyes of contemporary Islam. Where do you think that Islamic Golden Age went, and why are Muslims like they are now? Because one answer to the question on the Createdness of the Koran won out, and it trickled down into denying the usefulness of science.
Ah! I had not remembered the names of the two factions, but I had remembered that there had been a rift in Islam where basically the good guys lost, and they shafted themselves, ending their golden age.
Actually, a whole bunch of deductions in their reasoning are wrong, but I'll note one particular one.
>And God is perfect and eternal and singular and has a will, and all these things are God, and the Koran is now a physical expression of that that was dictated by the final prophet, Muhammad, so that us created beings could know God and His commands, which are the most important thing to know.
Even if there _were_ an intelligent creator, and it had preferences, we are mortal neural nets. What we see is what we get, and what we see is a world structured by physics, at most extremely indirectly influenced by any hypothetical creator. Even if it _had_ preferences, they _don't_ _matter_. They don't affect how the world works. If there were a god, and it issued commands, the world looks like a structure where those commands are not enforced, so they are dead letter laws. There is no point in even _looking_ at them, save to note that reality doesn't follow them, while there _is_ a point in looking at physics. Not only are they not the most important thing to know, they have _zero_ importance, in and of themselves. ( Now, due to religions and ideologies having followers, it can be necessary to try to predict how the followers will act, but that is orthogonal to the accuracy of their religion or ideology. )
>The modern concept of Science and its accompanying Empiricism is an outgrowth of Christianity specifically, it is not an object to put in or out of the wicker basket. There is an ideological reason why Science came from the West, because in Christianity, the study of nature, God's "hidden book", was considered an explicitly active good thing and an avenue to understand God better.
Yes, that is part of the historical path to the sciences. IIRC, this is also why we call what we discover in the sciences "laws", when they could just as well have been called "patterns" or "regularities".
But historical paths do not constrain what the sciences can predict, or can be applied to. Electric circuits work for everyone who builds them, not just for the Christian civilization that was (mostly) responsible for finding the equations that predict their behavior. If all religions went extinct tomorrow, people would still study electrical engineering, and still find it valuable. It is _real_.
Deleted previous comment because for some reason, they posted double. If it happens again I'll just leave them up.
"Even if there _were_ an intelligent creator, and it had preferences, we are mortal neural nets"
Everything from here doesn't make any sense at all. What does "neural nets" add to this conversation? Ancient peoples didn't know what a neural net was, you could just stop at the word "mortal". You don't actually find a "neural net" in the realm of direct experience. "Neural net" is a metaphor, the way that things like "energy field" are metaphors that have only the barest similarity with fields of direct experience, like fish nets and grain fields.
Beyond that, I want to ask about one thing you say here.
"There is no point in even _looking_ at them, save to note that reality doesn't follow them, while there _is_ a point in looking at physics."
How does reality not follow them? What is the point in looking at physics? How did you find that out, and what is the argument that supports these claims?
The real question is, how did you write all that without realising that, far from showing deductions in Ash'arite (or my presentation of it) logic being wrong, you didn't make an argument at all? You just said a bunch of stuff that sounds absurd on its face.
"Yes, that is part of the historical path to the sciences. IIRC, this is also why we call what we discover in the sciences "laws", when they could just as well have been called "patterns" or "regularities"."
You seem to have missed the point entirely here. To mention, and this time quote, Nietzsche.
“Regularity” in succession is only a metaphorical expression, as if a rule were being followed here; not a fact. In the same way “conformity with a law.” We discover a formula by which to express an ever-recurring kind of result: we have therewith discovered no “law,” even less a force that is the cause of the recurrence of a succession of results. That something always happens thus and thus is here interpreted as if a creature always acted thus and thus as a result of obedience to a law or lawgiver, while it would be free to act otherwise were it not for the “law.”
In other words, you can rename it all you want, the name doesn't change the thing you're talking about, and what you're talking about stands as nothing once you jettisoned the assumptions that supported it in the first place. It is irrelevant that you can make baubles consistently. Everybody at every time period could make baubles consistently, it is no proof or evidence of anything to note that baubles have gotten more clever as time goes on. Nor is it evidence that you're learned anything, much less that this is important in the first place. To quote Nietsche again.
"'The mechanical interpretation': recognises only quantities: but the real energy is in the quality. Mechanics can therefore only describe processes; it cannot explain them."
The Ash'arites at least had an explanation! The processes are result of the direct and constant Will of God, literally Willing them to be so at all times. We know this because the world continues to exist rather than blink out of existence. We don't expect the world to blink out of existence because God is consistent, and also He is Just, and thus won't abandon or deceive us. Should the world end, we have Faith there was a reason for it, and for the same reason, Faith supports the continuity of the processes. And also the Koran says so. And we know the Koran is trustworthy because it is the direct Word of God, uncreated and eternal.
Obviously you don't agree, and I don't agree either, but if you are to disagree so strenuously, you might want to at least understand the kind of the thing we're talking about here in the first place.
> Even if there were an intelligent creator, and it had preferences, we are mortal neural nets. What we see is what we get, and what we see is a world structured by physics, at most extremely indirectly influenced by any hypothetical creator. Even if it had preferences, they don't matter. They don't affect how the world works.
Huh? I'm pretty sure I get this, and I'm not even religious. To try and translate, it's a question of alignment. We need to self-modify our neural nets to align with the will of our creator, and the book (whichever it is) is a tool that our creator provided to us for this purpose. (There may be other means, depending on the religion. And some religions put an emphasis on practice, but "we are what we do".) There's more to the universe than the physical world we can touch, and in particular, there's life after death. And what happens after our death to the patterns of our neural nets - our souls - depends on how closely they are aligned with God.
This is the type of cases that make non-Americans like me feel that in some sense, the US has gone to a very... weird... place. The claims that Scott builds across the article are extremely intuitive to basically everyone living here (Israel) and were obvious to me the moment I read the summary of the story. Just a sort-of FYI to Americans.
Israel probably has a natural immunity to woke-ism, by virtue of being populated largely by HATEFUL COLONIAL OPPRESSORS. I’m joking, but I’m not joking. Seriously, it’s alarming to those of us in the West who have sympathy for Israel to see the condemnation of Israel, sympathy for terrorist groups, and spread of bizarro thinking in our countries. There’s a reason Scott chooses his words carefully in his meticulous dismantling of it (he’s been burned before)
I agree with you, but I think about this in different terms. Living here is, in a sense, a constant reality check. As a country, it is common for us to have to choose between the lesser of two evils; and have a plethora of concrete problems to solve, so there is no need to imagine new ones for ourselves.
It also helps that Israelis are very straightforward and upfront (e.g., sometimes to the point of rudeness). If you don't walk around eggshells around everyone and it is completely okay to discuss politics in the workplace (or at least in some, if not most), I think it's hard to develop the negative attributes of wokeness.
Honestly, as someone watching kind of from afar, not being American, I'm puzzled by the discussion you seem to have over there (which also start to happen more and more where I live). But the more I read about this, the more I get convinced that "cultural appropriation", as a concept, is just thinly veiled racism. It's as if some people would like to be racist, but happened to grow up in a context where racism was frowned upon. And now they finally found a way to live their preference without having to deal with the push back ...
I have yet to hear just one good argument for the "cultural appropriation" concept. Let alone one which isn't inherently racist ...
Maybe, but I think the other side of this is that people are viewing culture -- or perhaps shallow signifiers of culture -- as collectively held intellectual property. When I spent a lot of time in the Bay Area, decades ago, I was amused to notice that most Japanese restaurants and sushi stands were run by people from, or whose ancestors were from, Guangdong province in China and were speaking Cantonese among themselves. I haven't heard that Bay Area Japanese restaurants went bankrupt in large numbers as people rejected that cultural appropriation. Did nobody notice? Or is it only appropriation when white people do it? Does the fact that the sushi was really good matter? If there are no 'california rolls' in Japan, is it considered wrong to make or eat them?
I can certainly see this kind of gatekeeping being the root of the sentiment. But any way to actually determine who gets to use this intellectual property, and who doesn't, is necessarily racist at its core ...
My impression is that it's still only a small minority who get worked up over cultural appropriation - even among liberals - but it's one of those things where the people who care, CARE A LOT and make a fuss about it while their opponents just shake their damn heads.
I think the cheongsam dress incident was a good example. Even most Chinese people didn't think celebrating Chinese culture was a crime.
At about the same time that happened, I came to England to visit relatives and they took me to a Mexican restaurant where they made us all wear sombreros. It was fun! In America, we would all be afraid that someone, somewhere would get angry even though we all thought it was fine.
I may be off-topic, but I wanted to share a kind-of external point of view. I'm from France, and as an independent observer, the USA has a really weird relationship with "race" (I put this in quotation marks because the french literal translation is incredibly racist). I know it's because of the history of the United States, which is very loaded on this topic to say the least. But it really is weird to see every American obsessing over it, dissecting what it means to be or not to be from a certain group, all the policy and culture around it... Like this post, or a lot of the comments. It feels weird to see a topic that's almost absent (or at least really different) from my point of view take so much importance on your side of the Atlantic.
Of course, France has a huge problem with racism, with the police, employment, access to a good education and equal opportunities, poverty, ... Also, we don't have the same deep ties with slavery but we have a pretty deep history with colonization. But the concept of categorizing people into "race" is really outlandish for most of us, we talk more about country of origin, social class, etc. In no formal interaction with the institutions you will see a question about race. (I think it's even illegal to do so, but I'm not sure).
Anyway, I'm rambling a little, but the main point is : the whole "race" concept as seen from an American doesn't exist in a big part of the world.
(Side-note : as USA is a huge cultural influence, this concept is starting to popping up more and more in France. It has its advantages, as putting a spotlight on racism, but also drawbacks, as the cultural differences between our two countries are really strong on this topic)
I disagree. If you removed the color information in those PCA pictures, what you really would see is two elongated orthogonal blobs that are not even disjoint. In other words, it is a continuum. In panel A it is especially egregious, the switch from AA colored circles to unspecified circles is abrupt and looks like an arbitrary result from availability of labeling, not a legible cluster that the reader would be able to identify without access to the labels. Even with label information, most of the blobs appear to overlap.
Perhaps there is other analysis that would support the point better (am not a geneticist, maybe there are phylogenetic trees), but these analysis would support better an interpretation like, there is variation and structure (that presumably reflects the evolutionary past) but the point where the line is drawn _between groups_ appears arbitrary.
Correct, and furthermore, this article misunderstands the consensus objection to treating “race” as a biological fact in Homo sapiens. No one denies the grouping of certain phenotypical clusters (which would be akin to denying common skin/eye colors, etc). The problem arises when these phenotypical groups are used as proxies for “races,” which has a specific meaning in biology that is not met by these groups within our species. The recognition that race is not real (in humans) - but phenotypical groups are - may sound like semantics, but this is a good faith argument, not an attempt to confuse anyone. Might be a good subject for another article.
Also worth noting is that native Americans practicex assimilative raiding. Raising white, or other, kids as part of your tribe was 100% a thing. They were accepted as full members.
How many people would you guys say still view "cultural appropriation as a bad thing? I've lived outside of the US since 2008, when the idea was still new, and most people thought it was fine, and I watched as the consensus turned against it. But it seems like I hear about it less often now. What's the current trend?
I cannot find the article, but I read about what happened to one poor young woman in the USA. Part of the story begins when her Black middle class parents went to the adoption agency and picked out a healthy brown baby girl and brought her home and raised her. This is the part of the story that worked out well -- she is the 'apple of their eyes' and they couldn't be prouder or happier with her. And she loves her parents. When the time came, she went to university, and her university gave a certain amount of money to Black students who applied for it for being Black. It was probably dressed up a bit more, but that is what it amounted to. And she applied and got some. One can argue that handing money out to the middle class is not the most effective way to spend the revenue, but that's the way the system works, and nothing she did was underhanded in any way. All was well and good until she got interested in her genetics, and took a test -- I think from 23 and me -- which indicated that her ancestry was most likely from the Dominican Republic with a recent infusion of Spaniard-from-Spain. People from the DR, no matter how dark skinned, mostly insist that they are not Black, but Dominican. She made the mistake of telling some friends about her surprising result, and one of them decided to tell the university, and the university decided that she had defrauded them and needed to return the money. That still didn't satisfy many people who wanted her expelled from the university even though there was no one claiming that there ever was any intent to deceive or defraud. And who would be guilty in such a case of the fraud? Her parents, who also didn't know about her genetic background? The adoption agency, which may not have known much either?
Her conclusion -- besides being really glad that she is majoring in one of the hard sciences -- was that a substantial part of the population really, really, really like being cruel and nasty to other people. They absolutely look for opportunities to be as nasty as they want to be. Some of them only want to be a little cruel. Some of them want to be as cruel as they possibly can -- as long as society supports them in their right to be cruel. And this, she concludes, is the real reason that real racism persists -- they provide socially acceptable people to be cruel to for the cohort that wants permission to be cruel, in such a way that the bullied cannot escape.
She found it interesting that she faced anti-Black sentiment 'just another Black grifter' as well as anti-DR sentiment from Blacks who didn't want to accept her 'fraud! fraud!'. Meanwhile people from the DR said that genetics are not everything -- she's not Dominican. If she had tried to assert that she was Dominican she thinks that the pushback would have reached cruel levels there as well. Because the commonalty is the cruelty. And she thinks that we should do away with the concept of race, to the greatest extent possible, because no matter what other considerations there are, the primary purpose is to provide an outlet for people to be cruel to and scapegoat others.
In the meantime she has transferred to a different university.
This reminds me of "A Light in the Forest", a book I had to read in middle school. In the story, a white infant was kidnapped and raised as an native american, but is "rescued" (against his will) as a teen. In the middle, he's still resisting the white man. But he also ends up assimilating certain aspects of white man's culture without realizing it. At the end, he gets excommunicated from both societies.
I think I was a little too young to engage with the book intellectually, at the time.
"...a substantial part of the population really, really, really like being cruel and nasty to other people. They absolutely look for opportunities to be as nasty as they want to be. Some of them only want to be a little cruel. Some of them want to be as cruel as they possibly can as long as society supports them in their right to be cruel."
Very true. And a main reason why it matters who gets to be Head of State in a country. The people a Head of State hates, are the people it is risk-free for others to hate.
It's interesting that you bring up "Planet of Cops", given that Freddie gets very angry and dismissive whenever people point out the extremely hard-to-miss analogies between transracialism and transgenderism.
The Saami people lives in the northern parts of the Scandinavian peninsula (including in parts of Northern Finland and nearby Russia). There is a reasonably close resemblence between Saami and Native American situations so maybe the Swedish legal definitions of who is Saami can be of interest.
To be able to register as a Saami under Swedish law requires two conditions:
1. You need to see yourself as a Saami.
2. You need to speak or have spoken the Saami language in your home. Or be a (legal, adoptions are fine) decendent of the first or second generation of someone who has spoken Saami in their home or is or have been registered as a Saami.
So the legal definition is a combination of a cultural one and a genetic one and as a non-Saami without a Saami genetical relationship you can become a Saami but it is quite burdensome. (And in that respect a bit like converting to judaism, not something done on a whim).
Sounds more like a linguistic one than a genetic one. Presumably there are a fair few people who are genetically Saami, and who consider themselves Saami, but whose parents or grandparents switched over to speaking Swedish, so the person didn't grow up speaking any of the Saami languages and may not have managed to learn in adulthood, but as long as there are enough other Saami around who have become monolingual Swedish speakers but still maintain a distinctive culture, the average person would think of them as Saami even if the Swedish state doesn't.
There is a simple explanation as to why the White Nationalists are more tolerant than other groups: There is nothing to be gained by being White. You only give up any chance at getting Affirmative Action benefits as well as the amorphous social benefits that come with being part of a minority. In fact, the more Whites there are, the more the burdens of affirmative action are spread, whereas more minorities means that the benefits of AA are spread more thinly. The incentives to have strong or weak barriers to entry are obvious.
So there is a simple option to solve this whole issue: Stop discriminating against and debasing Whites. Stop giving tangible and intangible benefits to non-Whites. If there is nothing to be gained from being non-White, there is no point in having "hard-and-fast rules" and we can go back to "letting communities make decisions".
Also, a minor point:
"An 18.001 year old has a relationship with a 17.999 year old (who claimed to be 18) and is prosecuted for statutory rape."
There is a solution to that called Romeo and Juliet laws. They allow some age difference if both parties are close to the cutoff point.
I think this is your best post regarding current cultural mores and the nature of "race". It really did explore with great wit and insight the current ....how shall we put it .... "intricacies" (which are mostly to do with fabricated outrage concerning perceived slights against particular cultural groups which have been granted "special protection against criticism", for the purpose of political and financial leverage) of cultural identity and membership. This site really is a beacon of intellectual exploration. Thankyou.
>This is weirdly tolerant (okay, aside from the Jewish conspiracy thing) compared to anyone in the Hoover story. In Bizarro-America, the only people who don’t think people’s value as human beings depends on their genetically-determined race are the white nationalists!
Seems weird not to offer the most obvious explanation: white nationalists are losing and can't afford to be picky about allies, various minority groups are winning in the relevant sense and must gatekeep against people who are unambiguously allies but threaten to dilute the spoils of victory.
"Or you accept that some well-intentioned people who tried to build art around their identity group will retroactively be vilified as colonizers, through no fault of their own, after their 23andMe results come back."
This isn't such a problem if people recognize that this is in fact the rule. It was harder to do in the 20th century but these days, hospitals can run a genetic test on every baby delivered, and then like some kind of young adult fiction dystopia, inform the parents what cultural group their child has been assigned to based on its immutable characteristics. No one has to be surprised any more, we can carefully study and record everyone's race, noting it in a database that controls which jobs people are allowed to access, and this will be progressive somehow.
Descent is not especially important to many Native communities, because they have strong traditions of adoption. But personal connections are important. If you read the Hoover story closely you see that people keep asking, who are your Native connections? Who are your kin? Where are your relatives? In this sense tribal identity is not some vague category like "American," but a matter of personally knowing people within the community; in this model, community is not imposed by above via rules, but built up via personal ties between people. Hoover had none and never tried to build any. That is the "lived experience" she is missing.
There is no question that groupings exist on the basis of shared genes that are more likely to be found together within such a group, and given the relative isolation before international travel became easy, this is in no way surprising. We can call those groups races or use some other term. So far we have simply described what is, and that cannot be wrong. The problem comes when you use that knowledge in an unkind way - to denigrate or lessen a particular group. I see those who say races do not exist as being against that kind of usage, and they mean well. But there are circumstances where the facts must be acknowledged eg when a particular group is relatively resistant to the effects of a drug, such as ACE inhibitors in those of recent African ancestry. Life gets a lot trickier when we see differences between the groups, such as the well-documented IQ differences. We must not make assumptions about individuals, who may be outliers within their group, but shall we even mention that the differences are known to exist? I am uncomfortable mentioning it, and some will say I should not do so. But it is hard to pretend that something discovered does not exist, even in a good cause, such as promoting social cohesion and harmony. I have no answer to that.
OK but this post would be stronger if the author acknowledged the overwhelming force of "Who, Whom?" in these discussions: That the motivating forces are almost entirely white guilt and anti-white resentment, and if you take "hatred of white people and whiteness" out of the equation, the whole thing collapses.
"The fact is, we live according to Kendi's formula: Kto–kogo?: will we knock them, the white supremacists, flat and give them (as Kendi expresses it) the final, decisive battle, or will they knock us flat?"
> Natives don’t want other people competing for the limited number of good affirmative action jobs reserved for them, of which “professor of Native American studies” is an especially clear example.
Reading this, I came up with an heuristic hot take: if your academic job is restricted to people who are themselves instances of the field it claims to study, it is a bullshit field.
It works quite well:
There are male gynecologists, so gynecology is not bullshit.
Nobody cares if the worlds leading expert on the Neanderthals has herself Neanderthal ancestry, so the study of early hominids is not bullshit.
Biologists would probably not reject an AGI as a professor, so biology is not bullshit.
There are computer scientists which are not cpmputers, CS is fine.
Open minded theology, which is fine with having atheist professors, is fine.
Narrow-minded theology, which rejects atheist professors, is bullshit.
Sport science, which fails couch potato students, is bullshit (at least as an academic subject).
Feminist studies is bullshit to the degree to which it rejects cis-male professors, which I would guess is rather high.
Same for $MINORITY studies.
Medieval English literature does not expect its practitioners to be Englishmen/women living in the Middle Ages, thus it is real.
There are some corner cases: I would expect that there are few deaf students who succeed in studying music theory, and few blind people who care for art history. Either would be more disadvantaged than a history professor specializing in the Roman empire who can't read Latin. I am willing to bite that bullet: studying music safely contained in a sheet, or with an oscilloscope is academic (though it does not sound fun), taking advantage of the fact that you have ears and a brain which can be emotionally moved by music is not academic. The latter would of course also apply to literature.
Heh. I'm going to tell an entomologist friend of mine that their work is inherently appropriative and oppressive because they're not an insect themselves. Let's see if I survive. :-)
> I kind of imagine each of these definitions - religion, culture, genetics, etc - as an axis in concept space, and the category “Jew” as a hypersphere drawn around the exact typical Jewish person, whoever that is.
I think we can be more precise here. We have a pretty good understanding of how artificial neural network based classifiers work (beautiful example here: https://playground.tensorflow.org). It seems reasonable that our brains do something similar when it comes to organizing visual inputs in hyper dimensional feature space. This would also remove the need for a platonically ideal Jew.
This also seems like a better metaphor than the tails coming apart for diverging political views. Our parents give us training data by pointing at things and saying "good" or "bad" and we build complicated classifiers to predict this. Most people receive similar training data, but if you extrapolate the classifiers to areas where data is sparse or nonexistent, they diverge.
I haven't read all the comments, but I've seen talk elsewhere about some indigenous Americans disliking the idea that tribe membership is determined by DNA rather than by connection to the community.
"Connection to the community" is vague, but membership by DNA ignores human relations, and the latter might be more important.
I wonder how many of the people who signed that letter were Mi'kmaq Indians.
Yeah I'm betting no Mi'kmaq. I couldn't read the New Yorker article, but the summary sounds like cancelling from academia. Which has stopped surprising me any more.
Both the far-Left and the far-Right are racist and sexist, just towards different groups. Both want to use violent means to achieve their goals and have little respect for the idea of judging each person as an individual. If you're an 'associate professor researching Native American food sovereignty', your social circle consists entirely of the far-Left, so you shouldn't be surprised you're sent to the guillotines at the first opportunity, just like millions of people got sent to the Gulags back in the USSR. Luckily we still have a Constitution and a court system, so Professor Hoover will get to keep her head on her shoulders, but the far-Left will do everything in their power to make her suffer for her non-existent crimes.
While I do have sympathy towards Professor Hoover, I feel like she's the victim of her own choice to associate with people who's ideology is evil and corrupt. I can likewise be sympathetic to the wife of a gangster who gets beaten up as retribution for her husband's misgivings, while at the same time acknowledging that maybe she should've avoided that kind of company in the first place.
"Someone does their surveying wrong and builds their casino two feet over the California/Nevada border, and has to demolish it and start over because gambling is illegal in California."
This is very close to the actual story of the Pheasant Lane Mall in Nashua, New Hampshire where a surveying error caused the builders to have the mall extend 6 feet in to the state of Massachusetts thus subjecting the entire building to Massachusetts sales tax negating the advantage of building in tax-free NH. I tweeted about it here: https://twitter.com/corey_lanum/status/1620798517748068352
Instead of demolishing and starting from scratch, they just hired a construction crew to lop off the offending bit of the JC Penney that had crossed state lines.
I suggest you stop using the word race. In Norwegian we don't use it in relation to humans anymore. Though we still use it for dog breeds. At the same time most Norwegians acknowledges that there are average genetic differences between populations. Though we could plausibly redefine the word with the recent advances in genetics, doing so would be challenging. It just has too much baggage
My ego is definitively more on Simplicio's side. However when these silly word fights lead to real loss then I'd rather avoid them. These are not good faith rational actors we are dealing with
"In Bizarro-America, the only people who don’t think people’s value as human beings depends on their genetically-determined race are the white nationalists!"
Actually ... there are many more groups living the bizarro 'your type doesn't belong.'
You look to see there are White Nationalists, yet fail to see there are Mexican Nationalists ... Mexican Nationalists living in America pining for the restoration of Atzlan, the legendary Aztec homeland in the north. This group in California is called La Raza (The Race), they are Mexican Supremacists. Then there are Black supremacists, French Supremacists, and even Jewish Supremacists.
Think about your thought processes that require you to have a racial enemy that you can look down your nose and wag your finger at.
When there's a nebulous category boundary and we want to know which side a data point lies, the question is: what is the disguised query? If we want to know if something is really a blegg [1], why do we want to know that?
ACX readers and Freddie deBoer readers are also categories with a strong overlap, so I think this take [2] isn't news to some of us: Henry George once said (as far as I remember) "if ten men are chasing every nine jobs, the result is misery". Academia relies on ten people chasing every one tenure-track post, so that the other nine can be turned into adjuncts. Claiming to be more Native than you really are gets you an unfair advantage in that race - quite apart from the fact that no self-respecting college these days would hire a white person as a professor of native studies in the first place.
No-one seems to stop and ask whether the whole adjunct system is a dumpster fire (except people like Brett Deveraux [3]). After all, it keeps the money flowing. So I'm definitely on "at least 95% point 2." in section IV - point 1. is valid elsewhere, but as far as the struggle for limited tenure-track posts goes, point 2. all the way. Most things about academia in the anglohypersphere these days, and all things relating to wokeness in academia, are downstream from economic incentives.
However, for the bit at the ende of section III, I would like to offer an alternative 4th explanation. Woke is many things, but one of them is a Kegan stage 3 affair through and through - at least the way that Chapman [4] uses the stages. It's there in the text: "'who I am' is 'how people feel about me'". You are native if the native community feels that you belong there (which also suggests there's an implicit path to conversion - if enough people feel you're in, then you're in).
And from Chapman's footnote 11: "[stage 3] mostly doesn't even notice logical contradictions, and isn't bothered by them when it does". Pointing out the contradiction, as this article does, is at least stage 4 thinking!
Chapman's post contains a few more quotes that, to me, perfectly describe the problem space here - "Living up to what other members expect from you is good by definition", or "Fulfilling the role consists largely in having the correct feelings." or "In practice, you choose on the basis of whose feelings you feel most strongly at the moment you are forced to decide. This is often whoever happens to be there at the time, or whoever is best at displaying intense feelings. "
Hoover went from the native community feeling she belonged, to feeling she didn't. Genetics and lived experience only matter insofar as they might or might not sway the community's feelings. There's no need for logic anywhere in this process.
Jews (at least Zionists) are colonizers. Native Americans are colonized. The comparison doesn’t fit. One part of colonization is some portion of the colonizers appropriate colonized identities for their own personal benefit. It’s a deep topic that isn’t addressed in this post.
Is there a reason you said "Jews (at least Zionists)", rather than just "Zionists"? Because I think it's going to be a hard sell that non-Zionist Jews are, as a class, colonizers. But you really seem to want to make that connection, as if you believed that "Jews" and "Zionists" were basically synonyms (but didn't want to get called out on it).
Who have American Jews colonized? American white people generally have colonized, well, America, which caused no small amount of harm to the Native population. But American Jews specifically, have generally shown up after the fact, when colonization is over and done with.
Or is this the lame definition of "colonize" where all land is rightfully owned by the last nonwhite group to have occupied it, no matter how much brutal violence they used making their claim, and any white person who ever lives on that land is a "colonizer" even if they came there peacefully many generations after anything the rest of us would regard as colonization?
Colonization didn’t just happen in the Americas, and a version of it is still ongoing today. It doesn’t even always involve total displacement of native populations- the Americas are the exception.
Take a look at a map of us military bases and us regime changes. Some Jews alongside many other ethnicities have been involved in the ongoing process of colonization.
If there were no affirmative action, there would be a lot less incentives for people to fake their ethnicity. Why does a country has quotas for people? Look where it got Lebanon.
I think there's two issues I see with this post and the conclusions that follow.
I don't think it's clear at all that people did/would have no problem with someone of ⅛ indigenous ancestry claiming to be indigenous, benefiting from that claim, doing academic work speaking for indigenous people, and wearing traditional clothing. Especially when it had no influence on the conditions of her upbringing other than being brought to some cultural events etc. I think this controversy would have probably happened in a pretty similar way eventually either way, and the fact that she lied about it probably just added to it.
The other issue I would take with the reasoning of this post is that it equivocates being exposed to some indigenous culture/friends with what is typically fully meant by the idea of "lived experience". Lived experience would typically emphasize things like being treated in a bigoted way by others due to how she's perceived, potentially being subjected to intergenerational traumas and economic hardships due to treatment of indigenous peoples. There's no exact criteria but I don't think her experience would typically qualify In the ways that typically matter to people making those distinctions.
You use as an example, "An 18.001 year old has a relationship with a 17.999 year old (who claimed to be 18) and is prosecuted for statutory rape." I find this hilarious because I've always lived in states where the age of consent is 16, and so I've been vaguely aware that because the age of consent is 18 in New York and California, *lots* of writers assume that it is 18 "everywhere". A sort of cultural myopia of the most urban areas.
Racists may say ‘If you see a Jew in the mirror looking back at you, that’s a problem; if you don’t, you’re fine.', but having grown up in Iowa, where Jews look white, I'm emotionally incapable of considering Jews to be non-white. Indeed, US Jews who emotionally distinguish themselves from other Americans, or at least other US whites, cause me to smile and nod to humor their delusion. (This is ignorance of the full complexity of ethnic distinctions on my part, but it also makes me incapable of being a true anti-Semite, so I'm careful to not try to straighten it out.)
> Um. I think if she was trying to “reconnect with her roots”, and felt some kind of deep spiritual attachment to Mi’kmaq culture on that basis, I would feel pretty bad telling her she couldn’t and she was a poser and an imperialist and the tribe should refuse to interact with her.
I feel like, if a completely random white person decides they want to "connect to native american roots" and goes and attends some Pow-wow's, that's fine actually. Making friends with people from different cultures, and sharing that culture, is absolutely ok.
Now if someone comes along to oggle at the quaint and curious customs of the natives like they are some sort of zoo, that is bad and impolite.
But ultimately, it's the decision of individual natives for who they want to be friends with.
Even if she was being blatantly condescending and imperialist, it's not your place to tell the tribe not to interact with her. I would predict that the tribe wouldn't want to interact with her. But if they do, it's not a problem.
If Alice and Bob want to be friends, the situations where anyone else should intervene to stop them are rare and special. And "Cultural appropriation" isn't a good reason.
Libertarianism. You are welcome to appropriate any culture you feel like.
Scott rightly points out the incoherence of Hoover’s detractors and ex-friends. The whole conversation is much more driven by vibe than anything else and rests upon a foundation of shifting sands.
I’m a racial elimintavist, not because it’s impossible to rigorously defend a genetic concept of race, but because the baggage and brand saturation of the *word* “race” is unsalvageable on any timescale worth talking about. And attempting to cleanse it of its cancerous associations would be so much wasted effort, because most people use the word in a totally ad hoc way: they say “race” and then immediately change the subject to culture, ethnicity, class, region, nationality (etc.) to suit their argumentative needs, without realizing they are doing it. Hence the incoherence.
I also like that Scott invokes Yudkowsky’s “cluster structure of thingspace,” which reminds me of “Race As A Bundle Of Sticks,” a framework and methodology for designing studies of race proposed by Maya Sen and Omar Wasow in 2016. Instead of a set of “immutable characteristics,” it explodes the bundle (thingspace-cluster) into a disaggregated list that includes traditional things like genes, region of ancestry, skin color, and social status/power relations; but also less common ones such as dialect, wealth, neighborhood, religion, diet, class, and [social] norms. The fact that a little monosyllable even CAN house all of that inside of it is exactly the problem, and it’s why I think people should just be as specific as they can when they talk about this stuff, even genetically—e.g. hundreds of haplogroups vs. 5-to-7 big out-of-Africa clusters.
I understand—though don’t often feel—the desire to police the borders of social categories based on a shared “something.” Especially for instrumental purposes. Spivak coined her term “strategic essentialism" to describe intentionally brushing aside differences and diversity within a group for the purpose of promoting shared goals via a shared identity. That makes sense to me pragmatically as a political technique. I can see it as a useful way of forming political coalitions, which don’t need overall conceptual coherence to achieve specific material goals. But I wish, very naively, that people would just get off the ride there and return to normal civic life once the coalition has had its tractable demands met.
I think the "Jewish hypersphere" (which already sounds like its own conspiracy theory) idea is a good way to think about this sort of thing, but an additional factor was just touched on: in a lot of fields you can gain status by taking someone else down.
Wow, what a horrible story. Honestly I would find it hard to blame her for lying either, considering what happened to her once the truth came out. Why is this so high-stakes?
W/r/t to the main topic, I find myself feeling a little bad for the professor, having their identity and culture ripped away from them. She's actually giving away things that brought her joy and meant a lot to her because she feels she has no right to keep them, and that's just crazy. I'd like to say you should define yourself by what you do and not the group characteristics of people who do it, but in cases like this the activities are meaningful in large part because of the group that performs them, so there's no easy answer here. In a hypothetical world where only Irishmen were rugby coaches, and you made coaching rugby your life, then found out you weren't really Irish, it would seem crazy to be expected to hang up your whistle and give up the thing that drove your entire life -- but in the world where that was true, there almost certainly would be historical reasons that only Irishmen did that, a different character to the fraternity of coaching, uniquely Irish rituals around the sport linked to their shared history etc..
On a later topic, I want to note my disagreement with your assessment that "it’s more important to have hard-and-fast rules enforced by the government in a supposedly unbiased way; in others, it’s more important to let communities make judgments using their own vague social norms." You rightly point out that juries and judges are supposed to act as the common sense bulwark against strict rule enforcement, but in 20 years of crimlaw practice as an attorney I can tell you that prosecutors and cops have to make a dozen judgment calls every day that are no different. Sheriffs and prosecutors are elected, and have to reflect community social norms when they enforce the law, and I wouldn't have it any other way. People complain about prosecutorial discretion, but that discretion is the reason the 18.001 y/o having consensual sex on a date with the 17.364 y/o isn't getting charged with stat rape when somehow a cop finds out (although another reason is that under your hypo you gave him an affirmative defense of mistake of age, that would be applicable usually for victims over the age of 14 or 15.) None of the people who claim to want totally unbiased mechanical application of the law by the government's cops and prosecutors would actually like the world that results from that, even assuming that judges and juries still apply local norms and common sense at the end of the process.
> People complain about prosecutorial discretion, but that discretion is the reason the 18.001 y/o having consensual sex on a date with the 17.364 y/o isn't getting charged with stat rape when somehow a cop finds out
Well there was Genarlow Wilson, but I guess you're always going to get a few outliers.
I think what's missing from this discussion is that a large part of modern Native American identity is opposing or contrasting White identity in some way, although it may be implicit in most circumstances. That's why most people see an entirely racially White person claiming to be Native as inauthentic. There are Native American tribes in some parts of the US whose members have intermarried over the years with Black descendants of slaves, and as a result appear very similar to Blacks. What would the reaction be if a person believed themselves to be a member of one of these tribes, under similar circumstances to those described above, but was later revealed to be 100% Black, with no Native ancestry? I suspect the reaction would be different, as Black and Native identities are not seen as so opposed.
I'm not a part of the Native American community, but I can't recall a single instance in modern times of two different tribes signaling that they were opposed to each other. You are correct of course that that was not historically the case. I have also never heard anyone object that it is not politically correct to refer to the group as a whole as 'Native Americans' rather than by their individual tribes. I will stand by my conclusion that in the modern US, Native Americans have a common identity, at least as far as how they interact with the non-Native population, and that identity includes contrasting themselves with White identity.
Many Thanks! And I'm not objecting to the cohesion, just mildly amused. Uniting in the face of a common opponent is a pervasive theme in human history. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3j20voPS0gI
Nice thanks. Re: footnote 2, one could make the argument, that the white supremacists are coming closer to Dr. Kings dictum, 'of judging a person by the content of their character, and not the coding in their genes.'
While there are many white people who think they are some low fraction native, there are few who also have Hoovers level of childhood involvement. Yet out this very select group, a prominent activist arose. The same happened with Rachel Dolezal and the even smaller group of wtb-"transracial" people. This level of success is strong evidence that the universe considers them white; who are we to disagree?
It's orthogonal to the points you are making, but "lived experience" also does not do (IMHO) what its proponents want it to do...
Let's switch to a different case, one with which almost all of us are familiar, namely gender, romance, and the confusions of teen (and post-teen) years.
So I go to a party and meet Alice who, as is her way, holds forth about how much men suck and how, for example, "none of them want to date her because her boobs aren't big enough". I hold my tongue, even as I am thinking "I've only known you ten minutes and already I hate you; maybe the issue here is not your boobs?"
So we have here a situation where
- no male wants to date Alice because she is a whiny complainer,
but
- she has built up this story in her mind that it's all because of shallow men who care only about boob-size.
She is impervious to logic on this point – we can point out that plenty of other women with small boobs (but decent personalities) get married; we can point out that plenty of women with large boobs (but awful personalities) remain single.
But, apparently, Alice prefers the claim that it's all about boob size, ?presumably? because this doesn't require any work whatsoever on her part.
Now repeat this story in various other contexts: Leroy who didn't make the Glee Club, Andrea who didn't make Science Club, etc etc.
It's extremely easy to claim that you didn't achieve X because of <ism>, especially when you're egged on by family and friends to this interpretation.
Is this a *lived experience* of <ism>?
It's a lived experience of treating <ism> as the reason for all your problems, sure, but is it actually evidence of <ism>?
And of course this is going to become a self-reinforcing cycle. The people who insist on <ism> as the sole cause of their issues are going to gravitate to complaining about <ism> rather than working on becoming a better singer, or learning more physics, or asking people what said people find most grating about their personality and trying to fix that. And are going to, as a result, find more and more rejection as they advance in life because they never work as hard (or at all) on the actual issue of whatever it is they care about, compared to people who don't gravitate to an easy excuse.
It's easy to live in a prison of your own construction – god knows I have family members who are doing this right now.
I don't know what we do about this, once we have pointed out to these people the inconsistencies and self-serving biases in how they analyze the world and their interactions with it. But I no longer consider especially strong evidence about "the world" as opposed to evidence about the person.
I’m pleasantly surprised that Scott is able and willing to articulate the batshit insane, incoherent, cruel racial doctrine of woke religious ideology. Will he be able or willing to bring the same clear-sighted analysis to bear on the cult’s even more insane, incoherent and cruel doctrine of “gender identity” and the non-existence of biological sex categories? Only time will tell.
As for Dr. Hoover: judging from the titles of the publications on her c.v., she sounds pretty woke. Which is to say: all of the papers appear to be premised on the mystical nature of “racial” (in this case, “native”) identity and its magical ability to cause oppression even in the absence of any demonstrable disadvantage experienced by those who hold the identity. Thus, Dr. Hoover appears to be a member of the elite who used her position to actively advance the mystical religious doctrine that those who hold the “native” identity (including, she would have us believe, herself) are oppressed simply by virtue of holding this identity. And that those who do not hold this identity (including, as it turns out, herself) are, perforce, oppressors. One can’t help but recall the words of another religious mystic about what happens to those who live by the sword.
Associating yourself with anything related to cultural identity is like walking a tightrope between the Twin Towers, that's why the people who do it are considered great performers.
I feel like edge cases are a lot more common than people think. For example, one time I met an East Asian-looking guy who was from Réunion and a native French speaker. Depending on which criteria you look at, he could be considered "French", "African", or "Asian". (Or "American", I guess, since he moved to the US).
Another time I met someone who identified as "mixed race" due to being half Jewish, half Iranian, even though both halves are classified as "white" in the American racial system. Then again, they're also both non-central examples of "white", and he presumably had a different cultural upbringing than the modal "white" person.
I actually never thought of that point before. In real life, everything we deal with is 2d or 3d, so it's easy to forget that our physical intuition doesn't apply the same way to higher dimensional data.
I think the most salient aspect of this series of events is the semantic attempt to differentiate “lived experience” from just plain “experience”.
LIVED experience?
As opposed to what? UN-LIVED experience?
The use of redundant superlatives like this betrays inauthenticity, & is - almost without exception - a hallmark of the unvirtuous.
Woke reliance on buzzwords - or virtue-signalling phrases such as “lived experience” - tells you all you need to know about the sincerity of those wielding them.
I think your naturalist/materialist/individualist philosophy is causing you to conflate 'genetics' and 'parentage' in a way the people involved may not.
For example, consider the situation from the perspective of the great grandmother ("She's dead and has no perspective" is not how everyone thinks about such things). In one case there is some specific definitely-a-native woman who would be/is proud of her great grand-daughter and wanting her to be accepted in the group, and in the other case there isn't. This isn't genes, it's something much closer to 'lived experience'... just not Hoover's experience.
Or, consider a couple who for some reason want to and are legally allowed to genetically engineer their foetus, changing just enough genes to match those of members of some other race such that the child looks like that race and would be called that race by 23andme etc.
There was a chief in Canada who was, biologically, white (and looked it). He'd been adopted by the previous chief. As he put it when asked these questions, 'I used to get beat up at school for being Native.'
This is one of those things where there's not really a clear answer, and the major problem is probably the acting like there is.
People have a choice (in theory, at least) of being generous of spirit or precious and exclusionary.
Those who feel at peace and who do not live in fear tend to extend generosity. Those who feel threatened and see the world as a zero-sum experience tend to draw lines.
In a society rife with white biases and systemic racism, there should be many examples of people doing the opposite - pretending that they are white while genetically being not white. Presumably, some of these people would do it sloppily and would be outed and shamed at some point. I cannot remember any stories of this kind in the last 20 years. If there were not any such cases, something must be missing from your explanations, as all of them try to apply race permutation invariant reasoning to a situation which is clearly not permutation invariant.
...How the hell do you pretend to be white? If you look white, you're white. No one these days is out there trying to argue that Irishmen aren't white.
Same way one pretends to be Native American or Black. "If you look White you are white" is a very common position today, but is not self evident and it was not true under e.g. Jim Crow laws.or Nuremberg laws These days, probably, just a few Nazis might not share it. This is just another example of the asymmetry I am talking about.
One post earlier, you were talking in the present tense and saying "I cannot remember any stories of this kind in the last 20 years". When someone calls you out on your mistake, you don't get to invoke things that stopped being true half a century ago.
I will happily acknowledge my mistake but I am not sure what this mistake is in this conversation. I think we all agree that if someone looks white and says they are white 1) almost everyone today except for a few weird Nazis would accept them as white 2) that was not the case in the past. Also 3) for other races, e.g. Blacks and Native Americans in modern US is perfectly OK not to accept someone as their own based just on looks and self-identification.
That’s a weird statement in the US where Hispanics are thought of as a different category from white (hence the white hispanic label - Hispanic being a qualifier). White, but a different white. And even then most Hispanics are thought of as non white informally, although that may be changing.
I'm mixed race but have always identified as white. Does that count?
One other point is that a lot of discrimination is based on what you look like, not what you write down on a form. And there's no way to avoid the former, whether you want to or not. It's entirely possible for pro-white appearance based discrimination to coexist with anti-white "what you write down on a form" discrimination.
I hope you are not living in constant fear of being outed and publicly shamed as non white. My point is that outing you like that would be a very weird thing to do and no one except for literal Nazis would contemplate that.
One other point is that a lot of discrimination is based on what you look like, not what you write down on a form. And there's no way to avoid the former, whether you want to or not. It's entirely possible for pro-white appearance based discrimination to coexist with anti-white "what you write down on a form" discrimination.
That's a completely fair point. Many forms of discrimination exist based on many attributes and they work in different directions for different people and in different contexts.
Race may be *largely* socially constructed, but the projection of racial categories into “white” vs “non-white” is 100% a social invention, and a highly toxic one at that.
This is a great point and I think it can be applied successfully as a heuristic. Incentives are everything. Reminds me of the book “the underground girls of Khabul” which documents the widespread phenomena of women living secretly as men in Khabul, where there is obviously a huge disadvantage to being a woman. I’m half Mexican and half European (mostly Irish and Scandinavian). I present white but my name is clearly Hispanic. I always identify as Mexican because I perceive it advantageous to do so. This same heuristic might also apply to the greater prevalence of MtF transitions in the West.
Most categorical descriptors regarding sociological and biological distinctions of humanity involve arbitrary boundaries at some point. Mixing DNA percentages with genealogies often complicates nice clean delineations. Fashion loves to meld widely disparate textiles, designs, and stylings, yet narrowly "ethnic" patterns worn by non-members is seen as cultural appropriation. Picasso definitely "appropriated" African masks and sculpture, while denying he'd done so, purely to elevate his creative reputation.
An interesting life that might be culturally appropriated, is found here:
Despite his dubious genetic heritage, the mystery man lived a long life, profiting off Native creations, yet also building a significant historical collection that was passed on to CSU after his death, and it may be his good fortune, to have died before the culture police could have paid him a visit.
Scott here writes about the «patrolling the (group) border» complex/problematique. If you study this as a social scientist, it is fruitful to separate out these four sub-questions:
(1) Who are the border guards?
Do everyone both within and outside the group agree on who the border guards are, or not?
And: Do the border guards agree among themselves, or not?
Plus: How are eventual disagreements concerning who should be the border guards, resolved? Including: by whom? By some sort of mutual adjustment (how?)
Or are the issues related to who are the border guards, decided by some authority that everyone involved accepts/respects?
If so: How was that authority established, and how is its authority maintained?
And: To which extent is all the above stuff in constant flux or not?
(2) What criteria do the border guards use?
Are the criteria for who is inside and outside the group clear to all the border guards, or do they disagree?
Are the criteria the same across time, or do they shift?
If they shift over time: How do they shift?
(3) What sanctions do the border guards use toward those who are deemed to unduly have gained access (or unduly have avoided being included – see below under (4))
Social sanctions (naming and shaming), economic sanctions, legal sanctions, others?
How are the sanctions carried out? And by whom?
(4) What are the benefits, or the bad stuff, awarded those who are deemed to be inside the group?
a) If good stuff, what kind of good stuff? Social recognition and status, economic rewards, privileged access to desirable positions, other?
b) If bad stuff: Social ostracism? Social stigma? Economic and other discrimination? Increased risk of being unprovokedly attacked? Killed?
Finally, for anyone interested in these increasingly important border patrol – issues, I warmly recommend the 1984 German move Die Wannseekonferenz (free on YouTube, with English subtitles). There is a quite advanced discussion early in the movie about the relative weight of genetic and cultural Judaism. Also notice the debate about the Mischlingefrage (half-breed question), concerning if German half-Jews should also be sent to the ovens since the German blood has been soiled, or if “the German blood is strongest”, implying that they should be let off the hook:
…Prepare for these discussions, as tribalism & identity politics fastens its ideological grip. Hopefully mostly related to the distribution of good stuff rather than bad stuff, but who knows.
...yes, and all groups necessarily have borders. And how these borders are defined, maintained and patrolled, by whom & how, is a good way to study social (including ethnic, race and gender) groups. Sort-of following the sociological tradition after the great sociologist/social psychologist Erving Goffman.
Sometimes the state enters to institutionalise and operationalise group borders (as illustrated by the Nazi race laws and the debate at the Wannsee conference, or when deciding who shall have the right to vote in ethnic-based parliaments), but not necessarily. Influencers in social media, editors & journalists in newspapers, leaders & workers in NGOs (including in "social movements"), the Cool Girls in high school, and so on and so on, can all be thought of and analysed as border guards.
There are different forms of cultural appropriation, and it's annoying to group it into one category
1. There's stuff like fusion food which is completely inoffensive to all but the extremists
2. There's the intentionally offensive which some are against, and others are for because they are bigots who like the comedy, and others who are not bigots but still enjoy comedy
3. There's unintentionally inoffensive. If someone goes to a Halloween party in a "Jew costume" which consists of writing the tetragram on their forehead, it is offensive regardless of whether it was intended to be offensive.
And of course a whole host of other varieties. I get annoyed when people group all of these things together because some are good, some are reasonable, and some are bad. But I also am sympathetic because categories are made for for man. Diverse things group together even if they don't form a true category.
This is the same how I feel about race. Yes, genetics correlate in ways that allow you to find factors. But factors are real in a statistical sense, not in an essentialist sense. So yes it makes sense to talk about a "black race," but also it really doesn't given that there is more genetic diversity in Africa than there is between Africa and Europe. So is race genetically real? Kind of?
I've never heard of anyone playing "cowboys and Indians" in the present day, but I think it would be considered offensive in most of the country. But you could just call it "cops and robbers" instead, or any other number of names.
Community is more than just about you: it can include family. If someone's grandma knew yours, and went through the same problems and was part of the same group, you can be adopted into a community on that alone. If that grandma didn't exist then of course that community might feel betrayed. Ideas like genes and race don't need to come into it at all.
Based on earlier posts, I feel like Scott understands enough of the human condition to understand this, which is why this post feels like an unsympathetic attempt to dunk on how 'irrational' identity politics are.
I think this article misunderstands the definition of cultural appropriation. Usually it's defined as, specifically, perpetuating harmful stereotypes about a culture you don't belong to. This is contrasted with the "cultural appreciation", which essentially means what it sounds like. This article treats a superset as if it was its subset.
Imagine if I (I'm asian btw, but pretend I'm not for this analogy) started an article by saying "asians are inferior" but continued it with "asians are statistically shorter, and I think short people are awesome!". How would an asian feel?
Huh, I was pretty confident on this definition until you pointed it out. It turns out various dictionaries define it differently.
Some sources agree with me:
> Google (Oxford Languages): "the unacknowledged or inappropriate adoption of the customs, practices, ideas, etc. of one people or society by members of another and typically more dominant people or society."
> Britannica: "Cultural appropriation takes place when members of a majority group adopt cultural elements of a minority group in an exploitative, disrespectful, or stereotypical way."
While others don't (necessary) agree:
> Cambridge: "the act of taking or using things from a culture that is not your own, especially without showing that you understand or respect this culture"
> Merriam-webster: "appropriation | to take or make use of without authority or right"
I learned the former definition because it's a part of the current Ontario curriculum, but I understand if Canadian language quirks don't parse well to people in the bay area. The use of the word "Indian" for example, as referring to an indigenous person, is almost ubiquitous in the US but considered extremely offensive in Canada: probably because the government over a century kidnapping, torturing, and killing indigenous children.
These issues just seem like the inevitable consequences of cultivating a group identity. Now, maybe this is a hot take, but my instinct here is to question the necessity of group identity in the first place. Sure, it was very useful for societies that wanted to win at Imperialism, but aren't we trying to move past that?
[there's a logical leap here where I'm suddenly trying to explain what the world might look like if we had a healthier model for building an identity in the first place, probably because I'm anticipating that my take will strike people as somewhat nebulous?]
I'm imagining a world where there's a clear distinction between what you do and who you are. You're a person who practices medicine professionally, you're not a doctor. You're a person who does illustrations for a living, you're not an artist. So that when people ask what you do, you won't be tempted to respond with "I'm a fireman!" Instead, you'll say that you're employed as a fireman. That way you're not automatically associating/identifying yourself with firemen 'as a group'.
This seems like a weird distinction that I've failed to properly articulate, and it will probably strike people as me advocating for the deconstruction of identity as a concept, but I think - maybe - I'm really only targeting extrinsically substantiated/derived forms of identity.
I think, for me, cultural appropriation is analogous to copyright. I'd like to protect artists, but copyright seems like a suboptimal way to do so, so I want a different mechanism. However, that doesn't mean I want people to violate copyright (especially groups with vastly more power, like big companies) before we collectively switch, because it does protect the (largely poor) artists.
I want to protect cultural minorities, but cultural appropriation seems like a suboptimal way to do so, so I want a different mechanism. However, that doesn't mean I want people to start appropriating culture (especially groups with vastly more power, like big companies) before we collectively switch, because it does protect (largely poor) cultural minorities.
In situations where the power dynamics are flipped,I become much more lenient, because I don't see them as a moral imperative but as an imperfect coordination mechanism.
I haven’t seen anyone else linking this, but it’s as clean a case study as you can ask for: two men — one of Ukrainian descent, one of Native descent — who were switched at birth and didn’t learn what happened until they were in their 60s. Their reactions are notable — memorably, the one who learned he was genetically Native but had grown up in an affluent white home began to pursue tribal benefits for his kids.
> it seems kind of bad if your whole life can be retroactively invalidated by getting the wrong results from a 23andMe test
LS: "No... No... That's not true... That's IMPOSSIBLE! My lived experience is as the son of a navigator on a spice freighter!"
DV: "Search your feelings, especially that throbbing pain where your hand used to be. I can create NEW lived experiences so vivid that they INVALIDATE your previous life."
I do think the appropriation argument is a slightly separate one.
I wouldn't actually say appropriation is awesome. It depends on the size of the culture and the cultural heft of its practitioners.
Imagine being, say, a Gnome in a city that mostly speaks Common and Elvish. An elf claims that they know Gnomish and teach elves and humans, but they're completely wrong. Unfortunately, there's only like 4 Gnomes and like 30000 elves and humans, and the Gnomes can't educate people faster than the fake Gnomish Speaking elf can teach fake Gnomish (especially since they simplified fake Gnomish to be easier for elves and humans to learn). By the end of the year, everyone "knows Gnomish" and they're correcting the Gnomes on grammar and pronunciation.
This is a non-issue if there's a whole country of Gnomes somewhere and humans speaking fake-Gnomish get there and instantly realise that their Gnomish is fake and illegible to true Gnomish speakers.
So this is the difference between, say, Noongar (Western Australian Aboriginal language) vs Cantonese. Cantonese is in no danger of being mis-taught by white people, but Noongar is. And this is significant because you'll lose specific knowledge encoded in the language. Back to the Gnomes, if there are 8 specific varieties of gems that Gnomish makes distinctions for, but Elvish only understands 3, the complexity of gemstones understood by gnomes will be lost if true Gnomish gets replaced by fake, elf-generated Gnomish.
This is an argument for having strong norms against appropriation of small cultures, especially cultures with a history of forced assimilation. For this woman, this doesn't apply - I don't doubt that she was taught genuine customs when she thought she was Native. I also don't think this should have happened to her.
But yeah, something weird does happen to people who are part of small cultures. I'm Chinese, and not particularly invested in it, but I can afford to not invest in my background - there's approximately 1 billion of us and millions of people speak my languages, so it's not my sole responsibility to pass down the torch. If I stop speaking Cantonese or Hakka, the language is not going to go extinct.
This is not true of someone who knows a language with very few living speakers, like a lot of the Aboriginal Australian languages, or Maori in the 50s, then it's quite a lot of pressure!
I don't have to take up the many performance, art, food and ritual activities in my culture or personally know about them. There's enough people for someone else to get really invested in it and bring it to the next generation. I can take my pick of what I like (food) and learn it to whatever level. But if my culture only has 80 people alive, or 12? That's a lot of pressure.
Like, imagine being the last person alive who can make a macaron, or speak German. Imagine being the last ballet troupe that still exists. That's the state of a lot of smaller endangered customs are in (and it makes them vulnerable to bad actors to capitalise on the rarity - if I claim a butter cookie is a macaron, and people don't know any better, I can charge macaron prices for them. People will try my "macarons" then go, what's the point of preserving that? They're just butter cookies! So that's an issue in native art and craft)
I don't know the story, but have trouble feeling much empathy for her given what was explained, because, while I consider it unjust, it also have a very strong vibe of "punished by what they preached" (Not sure how the saying goes in English, but I am quite confident such a saying exists), which is maybe the most common cause for being happy about the misfortunes of others. At least it is for me...
Had she another career, even one where she benefited from native american status (Casino owner for example), I would sympathize.
But here, she made her academic career in native american studies, basically being a gatekeeper and shaper of the (toxic) consensus that is now her downfall....kind of a mild version of Torquemada burning at the stake. It depend a little bit on the branch she was in academically, did she push for more strict consensus or a a more universalist approach?
I think "there is a biological component to races" is the equivalent of "your waifu is not real and you will die alone" in my circles: it's true, everybody knows it's true, it's just considered a very rude thing to say. This is linked to a second taboo against the idea that intelligence is connected to genes.
See, there's no real thing as superior or inferior races in nature, if you live and breed you're good enough for the evolution fairy. Problem is that we're not nature, so we pesky apes went and decided what makes a race superior. Unfortunately, it's intelligence. And unfortunately, that's also linked to genetics.
(Thought experiment: Consider race A that is substantially smarter, and race B that is substantially taller, stronger, faster, happier, more beautiful, longer-lived, and able to shoot psychic lasers out of their brains. You'd want to live as B, but you'd know there's a certain je ne sais quoi that makes A "better". As an aside, this is the backstory of Warhammer 40k).
So, despite both being true, we ended up cornering ourselves into never being able to say "races are partially genetic" and "intelligence is partially genetic" at the same time, without going down a slippery slope that ends with "...and that's why we should bring back human zoos".
People who dedicate themselves to truth, naturally, say both parts out loud and are surprised when others ask "wait, you're into human zoos?" They aren't, they just live in a kinder world where your mind has no bearing on your value as a person.
(I mean, no matter how you look at it, Henry Cavill beats me in height, talent, wits, sex appeal, and number of Warhammer minis. This doesn't mean I'm inferior as a person compared to him, or deserve less rights than him. If you used my genes to create a Walliserops-strand of humanity, they wouldn't deserve any less rights compared to the Cavillborn Primarchs, either.)
Still, the truth tribe's views don't reflect society's unspoken rule that smart ape = good ape, and it's much easier to make a couple bits of info taboo instead of changing our entire collective mindset, so here we are. The "no links between ethnicity and genetics" standpoint becomes more sensible when you evaluate it as a kludge: It's not intended to be true, it's to account for a minor conflict between "all races are equal" and "some genetic traits are better than others".
Accordingly, Native Americans get to consider biological factors when deciding on racial belonging, because they aren't hostile to this compromise, while anyone else gets the full Sleeping Tiger treatment. To its credit, I think the kludge works more or less as intended, and it reminds me of how Kuhn's paradigms accumulate edge cases until a new, more consistent paradigm comes knocking. Maybe we won't need to keep the lie once we shift to a kinder society.
The first, re: defining race - I think race is socially constructed in its entirety, and I think one of the mechanisms for "constructing" it can be "genetics", and one can be lived experience, and one can be tendency to wear specific types of clothing, etc.
My position on race is very much informed by the fact that I am "white" in some places and "not white" in others. Race is not some trait I have that other people observe or fail to. It seems instead to be some trait people choose to give me (or not) in a given interaction. If I can change regions and suddenly I become a member of a different race, that makes the genetic component of this seem pretty irrelevant to understanding the situation.
The nonsense surrounding identification / lived experience / etc. strikes me as one where you can replace [minority membership] with [experience of oppression], which is why certain minorities "get" to do this and certain other minorities "don't get to do this".
There is an interesting BBC documentary about black Americans moving to Ghana, no longer being othered on a daily basis, and saying things like "I'm not a black woman in Ghana, I am a woman in Ghana". This makes sense to me. Their genome didn't change. Their "membership" did. It stopped getting renewed on a daily basis by racists.
On the grounds of "cultural appropriation", my position on it is that it's people trying to apply copyright law logic to culture. I broadly oppose copyright law as it is typically enforced, and think that it's pretty shitty. I mean, if you think about Disney being theoretically able to sue a Hawaiian kid for writing and then trying to sell her Moana fanfiction... It seems very straight-forwardly fucked up to me. And there are many instances of this kind of thing, where copyright law systematically helps the powerful fuck over those with less power, such that the maintenance of dying myths from people whose livelihoods are being destroyed is not really compensated and legally protected, but the "reading of it, bastardizing it to sound cooler to foreigners, and then selling it to a big company" of those myths is compensated and legally protected.
But the answer to that is abolish modern copyright regimes and replace them with something saner (if nothing else, bring back the 28 year term), not "pretend literally every cultural anything is vaguely governed by the warped echo of copyright law in the Zeitgeist.
The problem with saying race is socially constructed is that while it's true on a reasonable interpretation that interpretation makes the claim totally without any impact.
I 100% agree that it's a social process that picks out the groups a given racial term applies to. But that's kinda trivial. It's a social process that picks out the class of things the term "electron" applies to as well.
Ok we can go one better and point out that not only do we decide what the term applies to via a social process it's one that's relatively arbitrary (doesn't pick out some kind of principled scientific concept like negative charge or even species). But that's still almost all of our normal words. That's how we decide what vegetable means, what flower means (in normal speech not botanically) and even what fish means (not a scientific concept... claddistics says we are fish).
Ok, so black is a word like fish -- it's picked to serve our needs (eg what kind of food we want to eat) not those of a hypothetical Vulcan biologist. But so what now? I mean that's the normal kind of word why would you even make a point of it. No one goes around saying fish are socially constructed.
Unfortunately the usual reason ppl (outside some narrow academic contexts) want to say it's socially constructed is to categorically head off claims like: black people are genetically more/less intelligent or the like. But that's just fallacious reasoning.
I mean on average fish are genetically disposed to be more likely to have a swim bladder than random creatures right? Or scales? And d
I'm all for abandoning the idea of 'cultural appropriation'. It seems totally incoherent and the cases of cultural appropriation seem to be rarely exposed by the 'appropriatees'. It seems to me that minority cultures are usually totally unbothered by outgroup use of their food and clothing and cultural ideas. Rather, it just functions as a way for progressive white people to guilt and criticize and limit the behaviors and expressions of other white people in order to demonstrate virtue. It's perhaps the dumbest idea ever generated by the modern Left... and that is surely saying something.
The situation is worse than it seems: Ethnic origin and culture are pretty much orthogonal to each other (though some of the ethnonationalist twitterati seem to disagree). So, as soon as you have people who left their place of genetic origin to move to another culture, your correlations break down. Then again, this describes America, where a lot of people celebrate a cultural heritage they derive purely from ethnic heritage which under different circumstances ("race") they would deny exists. Somehwere in America there is probably a bunch of liberals who simultaneously claim that race doesn't exist, while celebrating their Ukrainian heritage that they only know from books written in English.
If further family history analysis showed that two completely unrelated great-great-grandparents of hers were native would that make everything better?
I am not sympathetic to her, and you miss one of the most important issues here: there's a long history of white people pretending to be Native American for reallllyyy nefarious purposes: stealing reservation land and rations, weird Confederacy dead enders dressed up in Cherokee cosplay because the Confederacy and the Cherokees both fought the feds.... It's not cultural appropriation in the benign sense of "oh cringe white ppl think Indians are cool and accidentally disrespect their culture in the process"; it's intentional theft from Indians. Someone who is as immersed in Native culture as she became would know about this and should have questioned their ancestry from the start given the mysterious circumstances.
This seems wholly irrelevant. It's a conceptual point being argued - just conjure a pretend person with the needed qualities. And before you have a notion of what it means to pretend to be native American you first need to settle on what it means to be native American.
The problem is that either you need to say:
1) If you are descended from an unbroken biological line if Caucasian European stock w/o any adoptions you are definitionally not native american even if your great grandparents lied to your grandparents and everyone else so you've been raised as part the tribe your whole life.
2) Race isn't a matter of genetics so it doesn't matter that all your great grandparents were completely white. If the successfully tricked everyone so the last 3 generations were raised believing they were native Americans in tribal culture that makes them native Americans.
The motives of those great grandparents might affect how we feel about the situation but presumably not the racial classification.
No one who was lied to like this was raised as part of a tribe. The tribes are onto the schemes. At most, they got super into native american culture thinking they were reconnecting with their roots.
You can't legitimately argue this issue from just abstract principles. The history here is relevant and no one who claimed Native heritage from good motives would miss it.
I think this article fails to differentiate between the different kinds of lived experiences. If one of this woman’s parents had been raised in a native home and it turned out she wasn’t genetically native it would seem different to me. But her lived experience was that of an outsider connecting with her roots, not that of a person living her culture.
My dad is Mexican American and my mom is white. I think most people can tell I have that heritage. But I’m not close with my dad’s family and even I feel like my lived experience with the culture is often more akin to that of an outsider. Someone who doesn’t even have that is not living her own culture. She’s just not. I don’t actually think that she necessarily did anything wrong here and I don’t take issue with a lot of the conclusions. But I find it disingenuous to pretend that she meets the bar for lived experience when that isn’t what lived experience means.
I think a fourth option is that, in the native american case specfically, part of the reason being native american is important is that it's a marker of having been disadvantaged by the polices the US government has adopted towards native americans historically, and someone who didn't actually have native acenstry wouldn't have suffered from those disadvantages (perhaps hence why they could become a proffessor.)
Another reason that being native american by blood could matter, is that the rules for group membership require an induviudal to be a child of another group member - but this is compatable with genetics not being the defining characteristics because adoption is also an acceptable way of gaining group membership.
Maybe a final reason is that being a native american means having access to an inheritance which has to be passed down to children (although again not neccarsily biological children.)
"A lot of European countries let you claim citizenship if your parents or grandparents belonged to them."
Not always a positive thing for you.
When I was young, there was a friend of my father's who wanted to return to his native Italy after many years in Canada. His son was not enthusiastic because if he went, he would have ended up in the Italian army - they had conscription, and they would have considered him Italian even though he was born in Canada.
I knew a Russian lady who had gotten Russian citizenship for her daughter, but not her son. She said if she did and he set foot in Russia he could be drafted into the army. And, ah, you don't want to be in the Russian army, even before they invaded Ukraine.
Facing conscription is one risk of citizenship, another is taxation - especially if you are an American citizen, funnily enough. Most countries won't tax you if you are no longer a resident (regardless of citizenship), but if you are an American citizen you need to pay up wherever you go.
I suppose that little American peccadillo has to do with the government thinking there to be a strong possibility they will have to rescue citizens no matter where they are resident. And the Americans actually have a possibility of doing so.
Unlike say the Canadians (of which I am one), where the possible actions range from a diplomatic note, to a strongly worded diplomatic note.
I note that when you did have conscription (or rather the possibility of same), crossing a border certainly seemed to prevent that - otherwise we wouldn't have quite so many badly behaved Americans of a certain age here.
Yep, american citizenship can be an awful white-elephant if you're born in a developed country.
You may have never set foot in america, but you need to spend a non-trivial amount of money every year filing american taxes with fines if you don't. You often find you can't get a bank account because it's easier for many banks to just refuse american citizens than comply with american reporting requirements on banks with american citizens as customers.
In theory they don't tax you if you pay more in local taxes than what you would owe in federal taxes... but that ignores when local taxes are applied differently to american ones. For example if a country has very high sales taxes or property taxes but low income taxes then you'll get fucked on both because the american government will only look at the income taxes.
But say you want to give up that citizenship that has only ever harmed you and never in your life helped you? They demand you pay thousands of dollars to do so.
I guess I find this even harder to understand. Ancestry has no effect on me except through genes and lived experience. If you say someone's Native American, and this is supposed to have real world effects in things like how well they culturally mesh with other Native Americans, how does ancestry cause this except through genes or through lived experience?
Would something like eligiblity to inherit property count? Citizenship laws strike me as the same kind of thing, usually closely related to genes/"lived experience" but not necessarily. (Of course, the example for Jews would be Israel's right of return.)
Ownership-of-property is purely a legal construct rather than a physical one. It's only heritable along family lines because we choose for it to be so.
I suppose that if we choose to say that "race" is some sort of abstract legal token, like property ownership, and that it can be inherited along family lines, then that is at least internally consistent. But then the obvious follow-up question is: WHY would we choose that?
(If someone asked me the same question but for property rights, my answer would be "actually we allow the owner of property to give it to anyone they want, family is just the default option if they don't specify another choice, and we make it the default mostly because it is the most common choice." I doubt it would be popular to apply a similar answer to race.)
Good point! Come to think of it, occupations used to be (largely?) hereditary. I wonder if there were similar questions about inheritance of those? I'd guess some were entangled with property inheritance - the child inheriting the mill becoming the next miller, perhaps? And the transition to non-hereditary occupations must have been ... interesting.
This is literally how Jewishness is inherited: if a woman converts she'll pass the "Jewishness token" to her children.
So, we just need to find some elderly Mi'kmaq in a hospice who doesn't have any kids (or doesn't like the ones she does have because they never visit, or whatever), and have her write a will leaving her Social Mi'kmaqness to Elizabeth Hoover?
Well yeah, it's genes but we can't yet identify them exactly yet so ancestry is the best guess we have.
For a less controversial example - Family Ancestry: Genes sometimes skip a generation, and sometimes weird shit happens. If you are the first or the second person in your family to have a high IQ or not to be an alcoholic, there's a decent chance it was just a genetic fluke and your kids will be far far less bright than you are. Great grandpa was a serial killer is also pretty useful info to have.
Outside of family ancestry (for which one is likely to have records) there are certain things that seem to happen disproportionately in some large genetic groups and not as much in others even adjusted for IQ. I don't think I'm the first to notice that even highly progressive professional white women were far less likely to be wearing masks than their East Asian counterparts, even ones with no apparent cultural connections back home (as far as I could tell). Every Asian country had far more aggressive masking than every single western country; and the Japanese government actually struggled to get kids to take off masks during outdoors Gym Class.
And of course, If you notice this and wonder why it's so universal you might be interested in a study showing one of psychological research's most extreme gaps in the differing responses to having one's face covered between White and Asian babies at 48 hours post-birth: https://sci-hub.ru/10.1038/2241227a0 .
I think any alien with no social desirability bias would immediately (if maybe, weakly) conclude with these datapoints that covering half your face with a mask just genetically annoys Asians less. Who knows how many similar things there are, lurking under the surface or flat out in plain view with no one observing them. And so if you are unhappy in your existing society but don't know why, why wouldn't you take a gamble at the possibility that it's because it's normative behaviors are genetically alien to you? And check out one that might not be?
Through a bunch of people deciding that ancestry is what creates the identity. It has nothing to do with your subjective experience, or anything internal to you objectively. This is what Benedict Anderson called Imagined Community and it is very real despite being entirely socially constructed.
I have a hypothesis. It's a bit ad hoc, so feel free to shoot holes in it or tell me you've already covered the matter or that I'm two pounds of nonsense in a one pound bag.
Lets say that a person's *actual* goal is equality of outcomes on the group level.
When you say "Ancestry has no effect on me except through genes and lived experience" you are speaking on the individual level.
But what if "the group of people who falsely believed that they had Native American ancestry based on familial lineage" had different average inputs and outcomes across their group than "the group of people who truly had Native American familial lineage." This would be based on several generations worth of lived experiences and their resulting inheritance, not just one lifetime. The group averages could be disparate even if there were people with similar experiences and genetics from both groups. (A high performer from Group B is indistinguishable from a median performer from group A, lets say.) Genetics is a close enough correlate with 'generations of lived experiences' that it serves as an effective proxy.
If this was the case, then helping the first group of high-input-high-output people would fail to achieve your aims of equal outcomes, but helping the second group of low-average-input-low-average-output people would, presumably, promote equality between groups.
Of course, the follow up argument to this is that various programs to equalize outcomes should really be discriminating on some 'true' variable like the socioeconomic status of one's parents. Clarence Thomas made this type of argument explicitly at one point. It seemed very logical to me, but it didn't seem to politically resonate. Granted, for this theory to be relevant, discriminating on this actual underlying condition must be taboo or impractical or deemed unlikely to work. Or maybe discriminating on the underlying condition just takes us back to individualism, which people are opposed to for irrational reasons.
I suspect we do see a little bit of this notion playing out in the divide between recent African immigrants (who tend to be higher earners) and the descendants of American slaves. Obama had to struggle to shore up his rather weak connection to ancestral American slaves, since his more immediate African ancestry is post-slavery. In such a case, skin color and individual lived experience ceases to be the sum of all relevant criteria for group inclusion.
Thank you. That is a better phrasing.
Very careful use of the passive voice there. "They should be helped", great, everybody should be helped. But you're sidestepping the question of who is going to do the helping.
You do not inherit genes from all your ancestors. E.g. there's a 1 in 10,000 chance that you inherit no genes from an ancestor 5 generations back. https://www.thetech.org/ask-a-geneticist/articles/2011/ask445/#:~:text=So%20on%20average%20you'll,in%20recombination%20is%20pretty%20random.
Assume that someone has a Native American great-great-grandfather that they happen to inherit no genes from. I think this person could still claim to be Native American even if they had no Native American genes, especially if their family kept Native American culture. Imagine that such a person was mistakenly swapped at birth and raised as white, and is re-united with their biological family at 18 (by going back to the reservation where the bio-family lives and attending their first pow-wow with them, or whatever). I think this person could claim to be Native American even though they share neither genes or lived experience.
People are irrational.
Ancestry is a proxy for culture/upbringing/lived experience—an imperfect proxy, but one that's hard to fake. Plus, for purposes like citizenship, there is that governments cater to their voters, and voters want their children to have the right to citizenship.
Ancestry does impact you, especially in your early years. Things like the wealth of your family, where your ancestors chose to live, the values they considered important in raising children have all had an impact on you. I can't separate who I am today from who my ancestors were, and from the choices they made or had forced upon them, and that goes well beyond genetics.
I'm unsure that "Native American" is a useful category for looking at behavior except in very broad categories. "Mesh well" is unlikely to be one; it's not like they didn't fight each other a few centuries ago.
How well do Russians and English get along? Depends.
>A lot of European countries let you claim citizenship if your parents or grandparents belonged to them.
Citizenship, trivially, isn't race.
The rules you described can apply to a person of any race. Someone with dark skin, kinky hair and 100% sub-saharan genetic history could have grandparents who lived in an particular European country and be granted citizenship. Nobody would say that this means they're the same race as the light skinned majority of this country.
>Another important factor is how society treats you.
This is exactly what Scott was just talking about. If everyone thinks you're native american and treats you accordingly, then the social constructivist perspective would seem to demand that you consider this person to be native american.
And what about a person with 50% aboriginal Australian ancestry who looks essentially 100% white european (a very common thing in Australia) and nobody knows of their aboriginal ancestry? Are they not aboriginal because nobody can be mistreating them on the basis of being aboriginal because they don't know they're aboriginal?
>But if someone is seen as black and is generally treated as such by society including facing the prejudices associated with black people, I would probably consider them black regardless of their genes or lived experience.
By "facing prejudices" you mean having elite universities discriminate against more intellectually capable students than you to help you gain admission?
"A lot of European countries let you claim citizenship if your parents ... belonged to them"
That's just called duel citizenship and most countries have it. It's not because of your race, it's because you have a strong enough connection with the country. Most countries don't allow this for grandparents because the connection is too weak (the one exception I know is my Jewish friend who's parents left Germany for obvious reasons and since Germany feels bad about it they gave him and others like him citizenship)
Under the legal doctrine of duel citizenship, two countries fight over which one gets to keep you.
haha I'm just gonna leave the spelling error there for humorous effect
>They wouldn’t make you take a genetic test to determine if you were really Irish, they’d look at records to see if you could prove your parents or grandparents were Irish.
There was a neat analysis in one of the ACX comments (sorry - tried to google it and failed) that showed that the set of _genetic_ ancestors goes up more slowly than the 2^n (if there is no reconvergence) genealogical ancestors.
Ignoring genetic crossover for the moment, if chromosomes were passed entirely intact, one would have at most 46 genetic ancestors in any generation.
Including crossover, it turns out that the number goes up roughly _linearly_ - crossovers split one's genetic inheritance amongst more ancestors - but only by the number of crossovers that happened in the _sections_ of the chromosomes that ultimately wound up in the final inheritor, and the _total_ length of all those sections added together is one full genome. So the total number of crossovers in any generation of ancestors is roughly a constant.
( Eventually even this linear increase must top out at 3 billion, since crossovers can't split single base pairs )
Is anyone able to find the original comment contrasting genetic and genealogical ancestors?
It's not a new idea. It's generally paired with the observation that, counting all your ancestors once each (regardless of how many different ways you descend from them), about one third are men and the remaining two thirds are women.
You don't need to restrict yourself to ACX comments to read about it.
Many Thanks! One of the nice things about that particular ACX comment was that it pointed to a paper with nice graphs of the number of genetic ancestors vs. generation number and the assumptions behind the analysis and simulations (which I wish I'd saved...).
This? https://gcbias.org/2017/12/19/1628/ (there is a genetic vs genealogical graph about halfway down)
Many Thanks!!! Yes, that was what I was remembering. And that graph looks very nicely linear out past 15 generations.
You may be interested in Charles Mills' "But What Are You Really?"
Thanks for this share!
I’m definitely on team cultural appropriation is awesome, at least in most circumstances (the primary exception being if you are behaving disrespectfully, eg black face).
Black face can of course be disrespectful in certain contexts (just like dressing up as a caricature of any person or racial group could be disrespectful). But it seems to me at this point "black face" has just become a silly taboo, because the vast majority of people who get caught "wearing black face" are simply trying to look like a black person in a non-disrespectful manner.
I meant the original black face from the early 20th century, which is pretty obviously disrespectful.
Ehh sure, in almost exactly the same way that drag shows are disrespectful to women. But one of those is taboo and one of them is for some reason celebrated.
I think it's pretty different- people are generally not going to look at a drag show and think "yes, this is exactly what women are like." Since women are a group that cuts across all races, cultures, etc. and are also half the population, the maximum extent to which you can mislead people about them is less (though still quite significant). Also, the minstrel shows came from a time when black people were, socially and legally, not equal citizens, whereas women currently are, and I think the social justice movement has a point here in the sense that it's much harder to see how drag can be used to oppress women than to see how minstrelry can be used to oppress black people.
Why doesn't similar logic go thru for drag shows? See, for example, someone making this case in 2014: https://www.feministcurrent.com/2014/04/25/why-has-drag-escaped-critique-from-feminists-and-the-lgbtq-community/
Parenthetically, are whiteface and drag kings broadly inoffensive?
> people are generally not going to look at a drag show and think "yes, this is exactly what women are like."
So you’re arguing that minstrel shows are bad because people attending them will think they’re a documentary about black American culture?
If drag is good clean fun a women who are offended by it need to lighten up, then I’m afraid the same is true of black folks and black face. I’m not taking a position one way or the other, but the analogy is quite close and only someone fully brainwashed by woke religious ideology would think one is a mortal sin and the other is harmless.
Mortal sin vs harmless isn't really how I'm putting it, more offensive enough that you should not do it unless you want people to think you're a dick vs usually not offensive enough that it should be avoided.
Do you think people are generally going to look at blackface and think, "Yes, this is exactly what blacks are like"? Blackface and drag come from the early 20th century, when neither blacks nor women were socially or legally equal citizens. Your differences appear not to be different.
And blackface was popular at that time. Drag became popular much later, when women had become legally and (mostly) socially equal, and at its inception was liable to get you thrown in jail for crossdressing.
For that reason I think your argument that their histories are equally bad is not convincing. They were not both used by a group in power to mock a group they were oppressing; "gay men oppress women," if it has any claim to validity whatsoever, only acquired that claim in very, very recent memory.
To be clear, I don't think drag should be celebrated, nor that we should extend our social prohibition on minstrel shows to all instances of anybody darkening their skin to look like a different race. But I do think they are meaningfully different, and part of that is about the history.
Drag evolved as a form of self-expression, or venting, among femme gay men. These are guys with inclinations, mannerisms, ways of speaking, etc. that get them socially punished, harrassed, and isolated in mainstream society, such that they constantly feel repressed, right? And putting themselves in drag lets them escape that, lets them enter this hyper-femme alter ego where they can let loose and express all of the sassy and bossy and boisterous parts of themselves they repressed on a day to day basis. The specific form of the art was probably a joke about burlesque, how all the straight men would go to straight bars to watch these women dancers perform on stage, and gay men got together and said, wouldn't it be funny if we did that too, our way? Nobody involved, I think, hated women or was intentionally trying to make fun of women. The men who originated drag were derided for possessing all of the mannerisms that their drag personas encapsulate. It is reclamation and finding pride within the unique traits that society punishes you for - similar to how gay men adopted the pink triangle, the icon gay men were forced to wear in the concentration camps, as the international symbol for gay liberation.
Minstrel shows and black face, however. Well.
I think you're talking about a specific form of drag art - Ru Paul drag if you will - which is distinct from drag that you see in Bugs Bunny, or Some Like it Hot, or Monty Python, or classical Shakespeare, or any number of other contexts in which people cross-dress for artistic purposes. That sort of diversity in what drag is should be a clue about how it might differ from the minstrel tradition.
Minstrelsy had two dominant subtypes, one of which was comic mocking of black people based on prevailing stereotypes and the other, more "respectable" version piggy-backing on that and trying to represent black people and art in a more respectful manner with those efforts often still being terribly racist from our vantage.
Drag doesn't have the same association. There certainly are forms of drag that are mocking towards women and forms of drag that poke fun at men for being in the humiliating predicament of being placed in a feminine role. Not surprisingly, most of the social conservative dislike of drag tends not to mind that form of drag as much, though that isn't always true. But there's other drag, lots of it, that really doesn't do this at at all.
I would suggest using the word "minstrelry," which refers specifically to the practice I think you have in mind.
Never ask a woman her age, a man his salary, or Disney why Mickey Mouse has jet-black skin and big white gloves.
Yes. Black-face minstrelry was indeed unpleasant and offensive. But I fear we have drawn the wrong lesson from this. The correct lesson is "it's bad to mock other people's appearance (perhaps especially people from a group that have already been treated very badly by society)". The lesson we seem to have actually drawn is "it is wrong ever to disguise oneself as a different race", which is absurd.
Mmmm, I think the point is being a little missed here. At this point, it is offensive _because_ it is a taboo. That does not change that it is offensive. Cultural performance is communication. Because wearing blackface is so universally recognized as racist towards black people, the decision to wear blackface implies "I don't care about the feelings of black people". One who chooses this is deciding that some benefit (minor amusement? unclear) to them is more important than the emotional shock it will (empirically) cause to a bunch of others.
Compare to swear words. There is nothing _inherently_ offensive about those sounds. They are offensive because they are accepted as offensive, so the decision to use implies intentional desire to ignore that taboo, which is, in fact, offensive. You cannot go to a room full of Mormons (that you know is full of mormons) and give a speech while cussing like a sailor for emphasis, and have it not be offensive. Communication is a burden on both the speaker and the listener, and this case is so obvious to most people, that it's silly to claim you intended no offence. (and if we believe your intention, the response is like, ok maybe we can forgive you, but now you know, so stop now) Communication with the world is FULL of symbolic gestures like this, and refusal to comply with symbolic standards is a refusal to to care about others that is, in fact, offensive.
I think purely symbolic things like this are different from cases where there is a clear benefit. For example, non-Indians practicing Yoga. The idea that this is offensive is far more disputed, there was _never_ any mockery involved historically, and Yoga is a tool for health and spiritual healing intended to benefit all humans that would be very good for the world to spread. I think there are things that matter more than some class of people being offended. But whatever unclear, minuscule, benefit blackface provides is not one of them. I think there is a place worth having a cultural battle over, and that is freedom to copy, spread, and share technology, ideas, and art. Not random symbolic nonsense.
Of course if a bunch of people decide to be offended by something, then by definition that thing is "offensive." That's what a "taboo" is, and that's why I called the current view of black face a "silly taboo." I would never personally wear black face, even though I think the taboo is "silly," because I don't want to be socially ostracized.
My point however was that it is a *silly* taboo, because at this point it is for the most part totally divorced from any actual connection with caricaturing black people. If society decided that it's offensive for white people to wear the color white (maybe because the KKK wore white), and everyone went along with it and it became a taboo like black face, then it might very well be offensive for a white person to wear white. That wouldn't make the taboo any less silly. So too here.
I also disagree that we should enforce a norm where people are expected to shoulder supposedly "minor" burdens whenever some group of people is sufficiently "offended," regardless of how irrational their offense is. Presumably lots of religious conservatives are offended when LGBTQ people paint pride flags on their face. And presumably the benefit from painting a pride flag on your face is just as minor as painting your face with black face. So should LGBTQ people stop painting pride flags on their faces in order not to offend religious conservatives?
I think the two of you are basically agreeing.
For pride flags, I think offending religious conservatives is part of the message being communicated in much the same way that MAGA hats or BLM signs or molon labe stickers or etc etc are meant to send a confrontational message to the "speaker's" political opponents.
Aha, thanks for the peacemaking attempt Joshua, but I don't think we're quite agreeing. I don't think the "rationality" of a taboo is so relevant as its "universality". The Pride Flags is a bad example (well, a great example for dsicussion's sake, so thank you, but it is very different from blackface). Pride Flags are normalized in a very large subculture. It is plausibly believable that someone can paint a Pride Flag on their face without thinking anything mean about Christianity. Everyone (I think even religious people) understand that a Pride Flag means "I support being gay as a morally neutral way to be". If you are offended at that message then offense was intended, it's not irrational. It's a real conflict.
Wearing blackface signals that you don't care about the feelings of black people. (at a minimum) Black people understand this. White people understand this. You understand it. It's pretty universal, so it's not confusing, there's no plausible deniability, unless it's a little kid. (in which case, people will correct, but not be too mean, just like a swear word) Why is it silly? Wearing blackface is now just a word in our cultural vocabulary. Communication is all agreement reality, words don't arise from the void spontaneously. I don't see this taboo as particularly special versus other forms of communication.
Basically, I don't think taboos are silly, unless they cause some large practical inconvenience unrelated to their culturally-understood message, or if they are confusing because two cultures which have very different understood implications are colliding together. I think highly-specific aesthetic attire is as valid a way to communicate as words, and we shoudn't think about it particularly different from words. (again, unless there's some big practical externality, like if we all decided not wearing shoes meant something. But we won't.) I don't think blackface is a silly taboo, because not wearing blackface doesn't really inconvenience anyone or significantly get in the way of anyone's creative agency.
Hm, I guess I take it back that Pride Flags and Blackface are particularly different in this regard. Both wearing Pride Flags and Blackface are equally unambiguous messages. For Pride Flags, people are not bifurcated on what the message means ("I support being gay as morally neutral"). They are bifurcated on whether this is an offensive thing to think. A Christian does not have a gripe with my symbol, they have a gripe with my beliefs, and we should just acknowledge that we disagree. For Blackface, similarly, everyone agrees what it means "I don't care about the feelings of black people" (or worse). Everyone just also agrees that this is an offensive message.
As for norms? I simply support being an honest communicator. If you have offensive things to say, I'm not going to fault your communication abilities if you say them. (though I might fault your morals) I don't think that in either case there are "mistakes of offense" going on. (many people misunderstanding the intent of a signal)
Agreed. I like the phrase "adopting best practices" - use them, wherever they came from. It makes no sense to e.g. bar non-(asian)Indian chemists and physicists from using Raman scattering because Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman lived and worked in India.
Only Scottish people get to use antibiotics.
Yup! That _would_ be a consequence of preventing cultural appropriation.
Only nerds get to socially interact on the internet.
Yes, fair, but how the hell do you figure out who fits into that category? Is it a one drop situation, where you can be Nerd Barack Obama with a single nerd parent and be considered full nerd? Is it like the woke paradigm for being trans, where you’re a disembodied nerd soul floating around in Limbo and then “born into a body” that may or may not be a nerd body? What if you’re the Rachel Dolezal of nerds? So many possibilities.
I believe it's based on the ratio of (lines of bug-free code written):(# times actually had sex)
The code has to be bug-free? You can take away my nerd card right now
Cultural appropriation describes the phenomenon "academically", and then we have to add a moral layer on top when we consider the power dynamics involved. A white person in black face has different connotations than a black person in white face because power dynamics don't link two elements in a way that can be directly reversed. It's a Non-commutative operation like the cross product of two vectors in three dimensions.
This of course doesn't solve the problem of who's considered what. There's an episode from Atlanta where an African kid isn't considered "black" just for having dark skin. He only "becomes black" when he gets shot by the police, the blackest thing ever.
In any case and as with any text, the intentions of the author don't have to be considered when producing a reading. For example, a person can't get away with the "just joking" defense if they're on the more powerful side of the appropriation even if they're 100% honest.
How about East Asia? Japan markets its culture globally, and is actually dominant in some areas like video games and cartoons, not to mention areas like electronics and auto manufacturing. (I'm not complaining--whatever Toyota's flaws, their cars last a long time. They earned it!) China is a global military power and a peer competitor to the USA at this point, and having discovered the power of film is gleefully turning out nationalistic anti-American movies like 'Wolf Warrior 2'.
How about smaller European countries? Jokes about Eastern Europeans are still 'OK' even though many of these countries are relatively poor and have suffered greatly from fascism or communism (or both!) in the past hundred years.
It's power relations, but not exactly the way people think--it's whether there's an organized pressure group that can go after you. I'm nominally Jewish (halakhically) but don't go after people talking about 'globalists' or 'bankers' because I hate this crap, and because globalization and finance can be legitimately criticized. Heck, even 'cultural Marxism' describes a real thing. The Frankfurt School really was influential, and not everyone likes what they were up to.
> Jokes about Eastern Europeans are still 'OK' even though many of these countries are relatively poor and have suffered greatly from fascism or communism (or both!) in the past hundred years.
Try being from Kazakhstan and watching Borat. Sacha Cohen is engaging in western metropolitan superiority, and “exposing racism”, while clearly being racist. Which is good work if you can get it.
Yeah, that was the example I had in mind. I should clarify I don't actually think they're OK.
Sure. I got that.
Kazakhstan was originally offended by Borat then changed their mind, deciding that all publicity is good publicity. See, e.g. https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/kazakhstan-tourism-campaign-borat-intl-hnk-scli/index.html
Dunno, I worked in Kazakhstan. No one seemed to care about Borat, as his "K" has obviously nothing to do with real "K" (which is a strange state, but in his own way). S. Cohen is actually just doing fun meta-anti-Americanism: Americans know far too little about the world outside the USofA, and about regions like Central Asia; "absolutely nothing! Say it again!" (In the case of "K", hardly anyone outside the former USSR knows zilch. ) 2: In 1960, Michael Ende (author of 'The neverending story') wrote a kid's story about a black kid; Jim Button, having crazy adventures in phantasmic places, one of them "China". Ende got a lot of flak and had the place's name changed into "Mandala". Now everyone was happy. Till they found an N-word. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Button_and_Luke_the_Engine_Driver esp. "Nazi symbols revisited"
Cohen gets invited to a fancy dinner, goes to the toilet, shits in a bag, gives it to the hostess ... consider if a Goyim had done this when invited to Seder.
Right, "Borat" is, in origin, one big Polish joke. It's not about Kazakhs, it's about Cossacks.
https://unz.com/isteve/borat-somebody-else-finally-gets-it/
I’ve heard these arguments before about power dynamics between individuals of different races and they all seem very… circular at best, and self-fulfilling at worst.
I would call them more dialectical than circular, since every exercise of power shifts the balance of power.
The position is easy to evaluate when the power differential is very large, like a colonizer and the colonized or a boss and an employee. The employee can make fun of the boss but the boss can't make fun of the employee.
When the relationship is murkier it can become really maddening really fast, particularly regarding individuals, who are always many things at once. There's an episode from Community where the characters try to out-minority each other to win an argument. I'm Black! But I'm a Jewish Woman! And I'm gay! Then we can't rely on a general heuristics and have to look at the concrete case.
I mean, maybe. I’m not sure “exercise of power” is well defined enough to be meaningful here.
I feel like the dynamic is actually about status, not power. The employee can make fun of the boss (within certain limits) and the boss laughs along because it's an acknowledgement that the boss's status is high enough that it won't be dented by this little joke.
I think many people get power and status confused, to their own peril. For example the power dynamic between me and my cleaner, and the power dynamic between me and my dentist, are the same. But the status dynamic is different.
Or when a policeman stops a Harvard professor -- the policeman has all the power but the professor has all the status. The professor should not make the mistake of thinking that his high status entitles him to more power in that interaction.
That’s an interesting framing, I need to think about it. Certainly class differences create real tensions between individuals in a way that is often confused for racial tensions.
As David Letterman put it, "You don't argue with a man that has a gun."
In my ontology, there's lots of different kinds of power. firstly, you can divide power into the physics sense of throughput, or into the agentic sense of choosing between hypotheticals. Political power is a type of agentic power. Status is a type of political power. There's 2 types of status: admiration and domination. The type of power differential between a cleaner and a client is an economic type of power.
The way agentic power gets classified is by what quantity it's able to change, e.g. money. You can often imagine this quantity as "a theater of war", analogous to the way a military might hold air-superiority but might be vulnerable in cyberspace.
Status and power are context dependent. You meet people in nursing homes sometimes who talk nonstop about their past career or how high they got in the masons, yet they don't have that status and power anymore even though their group once treated them with great respect. It's temporary and changing all the time to a degree. I believe no one should ever allow themselves to get wrapped up their temporary status and/or power. In the end, its emptiness is revealed. Maybe if you are the president of the country, you get to keep your status to the end of your life. But few other people do.
Also, you can have a role of importance at your church or volunteer group and yet be powerless at your regular job. It's very fluid.
> In any case and as with any text, the intentions of the author don't have to be considered when producing a reading.
IMHO, that philosophy is one the root causes of why people have become so divided/violently tribalistic in the west nowadays. If you think about it, it's pretty much a longwinded way of saying "innocent until proven guilty but only if I like you".
And the whole "power dynamics" argument I also find quite dishonest as well. I might be inclined to accept it if in practice it wasn't just a self-awarded pass to be racist/sexist without feeling guilty about it.
It gets tribalistic if one's unable to accept multiple simultaneously valid readings, even if they contradict each other. Power dynamics appear when trying to impose a specific reading at the expense of another one. But being the author of the text doesn't grant any special privileges by itself. Meaning arises by an interaction between text and reader. Until that interaction occurs, there is no meaning. That's why it is always open: a reader can't read the same text twice ever since Heraclitus waterbended the static out of reality.
> But being the author of the text doesn't grant any special privileges by itself.
You just restated your previous statement, without addressing how @anonimoose was challenging it. Saying something again but using different words isn't a justification for it. I would venture to bet that @anonimoose, like myself, does not agree with your viewpoint that authorial intent does not matter.
Let's say I make a joke, and you don't find it funny. I say: why didn't you laugh? The joke was hilarious. And you say: no it was not.
Schopenhauer said that a joke is just putting something where it doesn't go. A joke presuposses a normative paradigm which determines where things go. If we don't share the same paradigm, then the joke doesn't work. My intention of being funny, or in a more general sense, of producing some effect on the reader, or even transmitting a piece of information doesn't mean I'm going to succeed. That's not just because I'm a bad writer, I'ts because each reader will bring their own set of rules of interpretation, their own framework with them.
To take one simple example: Jon tells an inoffensive joke. Jim takes offense because he didn't realize Jon was telling a joke.
Failing to understand the point of A Modest Proposal could result in one thinking the book was terrifyingly immoral. Sure, that person can take that meaning from it, and it is the meaning they have taken from the book. But failing to consider the author's intent when interpreting a writing -- when that intent is available, or legible within the text -- is probably foolish to ignore.
If you like, consider this an argument about where you're drawing the borders between Israel and Palestine.
I think @Andrew Wurzer makes a great point of how authorial intent can matter for jokes. I think also that what you're doing is some form of bait-and-switch, perhaps a motte and bailey, wherein you're retreating to a more defensible position of "authorial intent may not be everything that matters for specific types of communication, like jokes", and using that to justify (farming the bailey of) "authorial intent doesn't have to be considered at all".
> But being the author of the text doesn't grant any special privileges by itself.
Bad metaphor. Communication is premised on the idea that a plurality of minds want to share their contents with one another. The text is the vehicle, not the telos. An actual text, written in ink, should not be confused with an event in meatspace.
It's not really a metaphor. An event in meatspace is also a text. A dress is a text, a building is a text, a battle is a text, and so on.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/text
https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=text
Nothing in these two links gives me the impression that "text" is defined according to your broader definition, which is non-standard except within a certain corner of the ivory tower.
In practice the semiotic song-and-dance appears to function mainly as a way of lowering the bar of proof. First you prove that your target said something "racist" according to your special academic definition which disclaims any attempt to judge their intentions-- then you swap in the commonplace definition so they can be attacked for their bad intentions.
Racism isn't about power dynamics though. Power dynamics change. But whether or not they hurt someone isn't contingent on the power dynamic itself, but on the persons morals. A racist without power is still a racist and will hurt people if he gains power. That's why we don't want any racists, regardless of their skin color, social status or profession.
Whether or not you have to consider the intentions of the author depends on what question you're trying to answer. Now, a claim of "cultural appropriation" is going to be generally understood (and you can't self-consistently complain about this) as leveling an accusation of bad intent against the author-- so considering their intentions is something you're not going to be able to dispense with.
Cultural appropriation is usually hurled as an accusation of bad behavior, not necessarily bad intent. A white person wearing a feather headband might be thinking Halloween costume, or calling attention to the plight of the natives, or that it looks cool or that it looks silly or nothing. By itself the act of cultural appropriation doesn't mean anything. It's used as an accusation when considering the nature and history of the relationship between the cultures (which is itself open to interpretation).
> Cultural appropriation describes the phenomenon "academically", and then we have to add a moral layer on top when we consider the power dynamics involved.
I agree. A poor white person doing black face is fine, but a rich black person doing white face is punching down and should be fired from their job and rendered unemployable forever.
My wife is Māori. I don't like French and German companies using Māori language and iconography to sell their stuff. Why aren't they appropriating their own culture?
Could you elaborate? I would like to hear your perspective. How are they using Māori language and iconography? What specifically don't you like?
No, I'm not going to elaborate, because doing it justice would take a hundred hours or more. By all means please engage in your own research programme, though.
Well, you can’t expect any sympathy with that attitude
People are allowed to like and dislike things without immediately providing a legible reason for it.
And others are allowed to not give any sympathy to that perspective if there's no justification provided.
gregvp is the one who implicitly invited debate by asking a question, even if it was rhetorical.
*De gustibus non est disputandum* only works if you refrain from disputanduming. Not the case here!
Well, thanks for at least responding. I would have liked to have heard your point of view, but if you aren't going to explain it, I'm not going to wildly guess at what on the internet might be relevant.
I gave one of my comments on one aspect of cultural appropriation earlier in this subthread, in https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/how-should-we-think-about-race-and/comment/51164678 - but I gave an example of a technique developed in one culture that is useful ( more for research than for selling anything ) across many cultures - which I'm guessing is different from what you have in mind. I don't _know_ what you have in mind.
If Maori companies started using German language and iconography to sell their stuff, would Germans be offended? As far as I'm concerned they're welcome to it.
I didn't get the whole "cultural appropriation" thing until I visited Poland and saw "kosher -style" restaurants in cities whose Jews had all been murdered. It felt so shameless.
Yeah, there's a certain period of time required before history becomes ancient history and doesn't carry significant cultural power any longer. The length of that period varies depending on the current cultural hierarchy and the particulars of the history in question.
Wouldn't this be worse in Germany?
Plenty of Jewish people visit Poland every year, I think it's only appropriate to be able to serve them food in accordance to their religious practices. Not to mention that many of those restaurants are run by Jewish people themselves. Judging from your attitude I expect to now hear how Holocaust was actually perpetrated mostly by Polish people, because why else would you be commenting that.
I suspect you might be talking about Krakow or Warsaw specifically, in which case you need to seriously do your research first.
This is an insane take, and frankly a disgusting point of view. Should Jews not be allowed to do business--or eat--because other Jews were murdered by other people in the same place? This makes no sense.
Banned for this post.
It might be worth finding out what "Jewish style" means. Kosher? (I bet not). A serious effort at Jewish (probably Polish Jewish) cuisine? A vague attempt at Jewish food based on impressions?
I don't like that one and only Jewish restaurant in Lublin, they serve dry pierogi, but, as far as I know the owner has Jewish roots. Or maybe she doesn't? Maybe the restaurant is in memory of a friend of her grandmother, who was Jewish? Or a bit of both. A handful of Jews in Lublin survived the German occupation - the last woman who spoke Yiddish since childhood died of coronavirus. Her son speaks the language less well, but is as Jewish as it gets, while being a harsh critic of all cultural projects that commemorate Jews in his city. These projects are usually appreciated by Jews from outside, but he believes that if something has died then it should stay dead. I mention this because it is precisely this one restaurant that he never criticizes. I'm not surprised by this. I don't like their pierogi, because my grandmother used to make better ones - Jewish, Ukrainian, Polish cuisines intermingled so that half the dishes are interchangeable. What's more, a handful of the last Jews in my country mostly consider themselves Poles at the same time. And only the worst sort of anti-Semites deny them that. A Pole, by the way, can be anyone who wants to be one. Even individuals of the kind of German-speaking philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. Sometimes this gives rise to tragicomic results. If you're a black Jew and join a far-right party, there's a good chance they'll celebrate you and paste your picture in every discussion with the left. Polish identity, for all its limitations and idiocy, remains quite open. All in all, it is somewhat similar with Jewish identity in Poland. The more sensitive someone here is to history, to anti-Semitism, to the Holocaust, to identity, the more delicately they will deal with a person who, for example, is searching for his origins, because they suspect he may have some Jewish roots. For years I worked as a priest in Lublin, and in my diocese there were two exceptional priests: both were Holocaust survivors. One knew from childhood, consciously became a priest, and at the end of his life lived in Israel, although not as a citizen, because of his ordination and religion. The other learned of his identity in his fifties, from his dying mother, who confessed that she was only a foster mother. Knowing his real ancestry, this priest changed his religion and went to Israel, where he works at Yad Vashem. Great guy that one. At one time I had an A in anthropology with him in college, although he said that only the devil gets an A. On top of that, there were a few priests who had Jewish roots, but didn't pay much attention to it. My bishop, fascinated by Judaism, thought that I must have Jewish blood because I was a good student. He even questioned my parents about it. Naturally, they were surprised, amused and even slightly indignant about it, because they were raised in the tradition of humanism, where all people are first and foremost human beings, and questioning about genetic roots is in bad taste in a country that was ravaged by the Nazis. At the same time, this bishop remains (literally) a friend of Lublin's Jews, the Israeli ambassador and is generally involved in Polish-Jewish dialogue. As for me, I have the genes of Balts, Silesians, Jews, Gypsies, Ruthenians, Boykos and even Germans and god knows who else, my people fought against russian imperialism when the Sioux fought against US imperialism, in a similar way and spirit and with similar results. It makes me laugh, when it comes out that I am of the white race, that is, genetically perhaps, culturally just a little, my grandmother told me that the followers of the white race did not give us a certificate when such were given during the Second World War. I remain an alien population in Europe since leaving Africa, and I feel guilty, really! that of all the hominins only mine, and your lineage, survived. Ahoy!
They do that already. French and German companies use French and German culture all the time for their products. And French and German culture is actually produced, consumed and used world wide. And you know what: that's fine. A Chinese kid learning to play the piano and excelling at playing Beethoven doesn't hurt my. Quite the opposite: hearing him play fills my heart with joy. He has as much of a right to do so as I have.
Cultural appropriation is a racist concept.
I don't even get why "black face" would in itself be racist. Mocking people for their ancestry, visual appearance or other such innate properties would be racist. But how is a kid who really likes black panther and dresses up like him for a carnival racist?
If a black, latino or asian girl wants to be Anna or Elsa from Frozen, hopefully no one with good intentions would be stupid enough to call her racist for "white facing". How is a white girl who wants to look like Disney's new Arielle suddenly racist?
Intentions matter. Telling people: "you can't do that, you're white" is racist, just like mocking or mistreating people for any other skin color in other contexts is racist.
Steelmanning it, I think there are three arguments, which I find somewhat persuasive in certain cases but not universally applicable.
1) It reminds black people of the history of minstrel shows in America and of racism generally, and is therefore unpleasant to black people. Nice people try not to do easily avoidable things that cause other people unpleasant experience, so doing it is some Bayesian evidence that the wearer is a jerk or a racist.
2) Many of the people who do it also do unpleasant caricatures of the group, whether intentionally or unintentionally. (Compare dressing in a sombrero and serape on Cinco de Mayo or performing in a drag show.)
3) It's a privilege reserved for the group being imitated. Since you are not allowed to do it and you are doing it anyway, it's again Bayesian evidence suggesting that you may be a racist or a jerk. For example, Morgan Wallen got a lot of criticism when it was learned that he had called some of his white friends the n-word in a place where there were no minorities to be offended. Again, I think one way to look at that is that someone who would usurp that privilege anywhere is either being disrespectful or is reflecting or spreading taboo values.
So the solution is to perpetuate segregation?
A kid who want's to be Black Panther now is no longer a symbol of equality, but instead a jerk. I'm not sure that I want to live in a world which perceives this a progress. To me that's regression to 1960s racism ...
I think you would just dress up using the clothing, and or mask, but no colored face paint. All skin colors work for cosplay.
You don't do a Garona cosplay without the green skin. How is cosplaying black panther different?
But even if I did agree with you: What about face paintings imitating war markings of some tribes? What about henna tattoos? What about plastic mascs? If you even start going down that road, you can only end up in many ulgy, and effectively racist, discussions.
Intentions matter! Posing as your hero/role model isn't cultural appropriation, it's showing appreciation ...
"(Compare dressing in a sombrero and serape on Cinco de Mayo)"
It's funny because a guy did this exact thing and the results are about what you'd expect if you're not over-socialized to the concept of "cultural appropriation":
https://youtu.be/IT2UH74ksJ4?si=c5RpI9IMmRksz8xN
A lot of America's racial insanity (by no means all of it) is caused by extending the black experience to all nonwhite groups, with results that aren't always logical. The idea that minstrelsy being legitimately offensive means only Mexicans can wear sombreros is one such example.
I also think about the way affirmative action -- a program that was designed, rightly or wrongly, to address historic injustices experienced by slave-descended African Americans -- is unflinchingly applied to nonwhite (sometimes even white Hispanic) economic migrants who came to the US in the 21st century, without asking if this still makes sense.
The dude in that video was being an obnoxious provocateur… not a great example of being respectful.
It sounds like you didn't watch the whole video.
>I also think about the way affirmative action [...] is unflinchingly applied to nonwhite >(sometimes even white Hispanic) economic migrants who came to the US in >the 21st century, without asking if this still makes sense.
This is at most partly true; it is not "unflinchingly" applied (broad categories of migrants and their descendants are excluded) but rather it is applied and not applied in ways that can seem a little bizarre.
- Asian migrants are often not just excluded from AA, but penalized so as to implement AA, to a larger extent than whites. (Overrepresented, hence evil.)
- Is a Latin American immigrant "Hispanic"? Or are only his children "Hispanic"? How difficult it is to migrate to the US, and how long and difficult the path to citizenship is (and whether there is one) depends much more on migrants' country of origin than on how qualified, hard-working or law-abiding they are. Here it is Latin Americans who are evil (because they are overrepresented - now in migration logic and populist logic, not in AA logic, but they all work similarly). It is very common and entirely normal for a Latin American to arrive legally to the US and live there legally for 10-20 years before finally getting a green card; during that period, it is not just legal to discriminate against that person - it is sometimes mandatory: if they are finalists in an academic job at a state university, say, and there is another candidate that is clearly less qualified but still qualified (according to the committee) then, at least in some states (perhaps all?), the university is obliged to offer the job to that other candidate. Now, if that person finally makes it and settles, after undergoing discrimination that is seen as legal and right and justified, it is usually their children or rather grandchildren, born in the land of plenty, who may have a chance of being qualified as Oppressed. (Their children may be out of luck if they were not born in the US; your mileage may vary.)
What would happen to an Asian Latin American? All sorts of interesting possibilities!
PS. Wasn't AA by gender part of AA from the very start?
>Asian migrants are often not just excluded from AA, but penalized so as to implement AA, to a larger extent than whites. (Overrepresented, hence evil.)
Growl.
Personally, I think the "picking up overlooked diamonds" justification for AA was legitimate, but the "proportional representation" justification is not.
To oversimplify, and to focus on college admissions as a simplified case:
What I, personally, would like to see is tracking the academic success of the various groups in college, and the correlation of this with SAT scores, with the goal of setting the admission criteria for the groups at a level that, as nearly as possible, sets the same predicted academic success for each group.
In other words (and, again, to oversimplify), if an SAT score of N for group A predicts the same GPA as the GPA for group B with an SAT score of N+M, then set the admission criterion for group A at SAT score >= N and set the admission criterion for group B at SAT score >= N+M. Yes, there can be group membership perturbations to the admissions process, but, as nearly as possible, set to _cancel_ inaccuracies in predictions of academic success derived from the admissions criteria. The better the SAT is at acting as an unbiased predictor of academic success, the smaller such perturbations would be.
Unfortunately for your plan, the SAT is already a pretty unbiased predictor of academic success, and actually over-predicts college grades for poor and ethnic minority students (probably due to regression to the mean). Following your suggestion would result in even fewer of these students being accepted.
It does underpredict college grades for women, probably because women tend to avoid STEM courses in college, which are usually graded more strictly. But accepting more women would be undesirable, since they are already overrepresented in colleges and this tends to produce unpopular social consequences (not enough men to date).
I think this https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/give-up-seventy-percent-of-the-way ACX article discusses that phenomenon well. Blackface is taboo mostly because everybody who's at all trying not to be seen as racist stopped doing it decades ago.
> the primary exception being if you are
Watch out for that word "are", it's a trip!
A culture’s tolerance for appropriation appears to be predictably dependent on the egregiousness and the recency of any suffered oppression. If a culture hasn’t suffered a recent oppressor it welcomes appropriation. If a culture has, it strongly discourages it.
Maybe this is because oppressors encourage appropriation to facilitate ease of management and control (think Roman Empire), while recently oppressed people discourage it for fear of losing their claim as an independent and distinct people.
If no relationship of oppressor and oppressed exists I think everybody’s typically jacked to see someone from another culture adopting their customs. It’s validating.
I’m a white American and I personally love appropriating culture. But if you can’t see why a Native American doesn’t love the sight of a white kid running around Golden Corral with a plastic war bonnet whooping and slapping his hand over his mouth, I’m not sure you’re trying hard enough.
None of this justifies the way race-obsessed loonies try to leverage oppressor/oppressed dynamics to justify bad policy. But it can help explain people’s feelings.
The example with the white kid with a headdress whooping it up is offensive not because of the oppression of Native Americans per se, but because the kid is engaging in mocking behavior. If that same kid was super into Native American culture and wanted to participate in a ritual of some kind that he found meaningful, that would be 100% fine and I doubt any actual Native American would be bothered by it.
You make a good point, but I don’t agree that plenty of Native Americans wouldn’t be offended by watching a bunch of white Americans take a stab at traditional dress and performing a rain dance. It would be within the white people’s rights but it wouldn't go over great. If it’s sanctioned by Native Americans beforehand, it’s another story, but that’s not really what we’re talking about.
I think Native American’s see that Native American culture is increasingly and inevitably falling under the banner of American culture, which Native Americans associate with the white settlers who massacred their relatives. And they want to ensure the distinction between those two cultures remains clear as long as possible.
Like I said, I love to appropriate culture. I think it’s inevitable. But it’s not like I can’t see where people who aren’t crazy about it due to recent bad experiences are coming from.
The headdress is also an example of STOLEN VALOR, as I understand it - these things are EARNED, like military medals. It's not like wearing a traditional pair of Norwegian mittens, or any other kind of ordinary clothing. That's just cultural diffusion. That is actually valuable and necessary. If one culture figures out how to make a really good (read: well-adapted to its environment, or perhaps another environment) pair of shoes or educational institution or dwelling, and others copy it, they then have cool/awesome shoes or whatever it is they're copying.
An interesting example: mixing of Japanese and Korean pop culture. Older Koreans tend to dislike Japanese culture or Japanese singers performing K-pop, but younger ones are more OK with it. The cultural memory of oppression of Korean culture is changing.
https://www.scmp.com/lifestyle/arts-culture/article/3220292/new-phase-anime-j-pop-japanese-culture-grows-popularity-south-korea-new-generation-separates-arts
I can think of many counter examples to that though.
Japanese culture in the US. Despite the US mass incarceration of Japanese Americans being egregious and recent, literally all Japanese Americans I've met in real life are happy when other Americans engage with any Japanese culture, from wearing traditional clothing to more recent fashion and cosplay, from learning Japanese calligraphy to drawing anime/manga-style art, etc.. If anything, one of the most distinct features about the outrage against cultural appropriation of Japanese culture in the US, is that it's perpetrated almost entirely by Chinese American and White American people.
The Japanese culture in the US case also applies more broadly to East/Southeast Asian cultures in the US, though the Japanese example is the most prominent, since Japanese culture is the most heavily appropriated one by White Americans.
Korean culture in Japan. Despite the Japanese colonization of Korea being egregious and recent, the Japanese people wearing Korean fashion, making Korean food, or making Korean-style music, is generally taken as a point of pride of Koreans living here, and even actively facilitated by Korean organizations.
Ainu culture in Japan. Despite the Japanese colonization of Hokkaido being egregious and recent, (Yamato) Japanese people learning Ainu traditions like dance and music is at least actively promoted by organizations that claim to represent Ainu people.
South Asian culture in the UK. Despite British colonization of India being egregious and recent, "Chicken Tikka Masala is the national food of the UK" with tons of white chefs in pubs and restaurants all across the nation serving Indian food, is generally taken as a point of pride for Indians.
If anything, I have a harder time thinking of cases where there is tons and tons of backlash against cultural appropriation that isn't related to Black and Native Americans. The one other case that comes to mind, White American cultural appropriation of East Asian cultures, is less outrage against cultural appropriation, but intra-East Asian racism and competition using the language of left activism to suppress other East Asian cultures... to facilitate more cultural appropriation of their own culture.
Thanks for the counter examples. I think the egregious part is where we might disagree. Japanese internment was a terrible temporary injustice, but it’s not quite the same as millions dying of genocide and slavery over many decades.
The Korea-Japan example is an interesting one I’m just starting to learn more about. It definitely stands out. Though Dictyranger’s post about it seems to indicate that some resentment of appropriation still exists.
And I’d also disagree about South Asian Indians being unconcerned about their culture being appropriated. There seems to be quite a bit of concern online, particularly over Hindu symbols like the bindi and commercialized yoga.
I wonder if it would be better to look at it as commercialization of non-commercial cultural assets, and/or secularization of spiritual cultural assets then?
I haven't met an Indian who took offense to White British people preferring British Indian cuisine to the indigenous White British cuisine, however I could definitely see the issue with the usage of Hindu symbolism in the yoga industry.
Food and modern entertainment are generally secular and commercial. Cultural appropriation of these cultural assets tends to attract the least outrage and the most support, and pro-cultural appropriation folk tend to cite food and entertainment examples heavily when making their case.
There is also a set of cultures that are extremely secular and commercial, e.g., White American, Western European, Japanese, and more recently other East Asian cultures. Within this set of cultures, cultural appropriation can be done pretty freely. Even when religious cultural assets like crosses or fox gods are appropriated for secular commercial use, the outrage is fairly limited and/or dishonest.
The people that get angry at Christian imagery in Evangelion would have been angry even if Evangelion was created by a white guy. The people that get angry at white people cosplaying anime characters mostly hate anime to begin with. Cultural appropriation outrage in these cases is like environmentalism outrage against improving public transit.
Cultural appropriation that respects non-commercial and/or spiritual lines is often pretty welcome. While I don't really know about Hindu, I can say that Thai Buddhist temples in the US I have been to have been very welcoming of white people who legitimately seem to care and want to be Buddhist. One of the prominent members of the Thai Student Association in my university was a white guy who was interested in Thai traditions, and most of us actual Thais/Thai Americans were if anything supportive and maybe impressed.
Part of the problem with cultural appropriation and Native Americans is that the only way for White Americans to engage with Native American culture is secular/commercial use of spiritual/non-commercial cultural assets. Thai Buddhism sees itself as a legitimate enough religion to a White American to honestly convert. Shintoism is sufficiently secularized and commercialized within Japanese culture that non-Japanese secular and commercial use is generally tolerated or encouraged. Native American religions have neither enough true believers within the Native American community to be engaged with by outsiders like Thai Buddhism, nor the secularized commercialized identity to be engaged with by outsiders like Shintoism.
From what I've gathered, Chicken Tikka Masala was actually invented by a South Asian chef to appeal to British tastes. Wikipedia seems to back this up:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_tikka_masala
What about black face in Dutch culture, which has a very different history, but is getting swept up in the moral panic about racism, by Dutch elites that heavily adopt US culture/norms?
Or the Iranian variant, which seems very different still, although it's safe for now, as they reject US globalism.
I get the feeling in the US the really strong social taboo around race and blackface function as an expensive signal of respect because of the uniquely horrible history. Similar with American Indians. Extending it to general race or non US contexts is bad
I go for (2) on the second trilemma, with some (1). Many things seen as cultural appropriation aren't wrong, and the things that are are **cultural** appropriation, not **racial** appropriation, so (2) definitely applies.
I had a similar reaction reading the article, but I think there's an additional dimension here. One of the things the article talks about is how she was always beading and wearing stereotypically native jewelry and dress. She's contrasted with a candidate for the Native American studies position she eventually got (which, BTW, is maybe not officially affirmative action, but I think it's likely she wouldn't have gotten that job if she were known to be white) who interviewed in a three piece suit, and was asked if his tie was a native pattern (it wasn't). There's an idea that the department preferred a white person who acted overtly native, and in particular, satisfied their stereotypes of what it means to be native, to an actual native who didn't. This arguably selects for people whose native identity is more tenuous; if you're undeniably native, you might not feel the need to overtly demonstrate it.
But of course, this is ultimately a critique not of Elizabeth Hoover, but of the people who hired her, which I think is fair.
A simple solution here would be not hiring on the basis of race or ethnicity. They shouldn't be trying to hire the "right" kind of Native person; they should be trying to hire the best Native American studies scholar (who of course would likely end up being Native in many, but not all, cases)
There's nothing "simple" about this solution in the sense of acheiving that outcome from where we are right now.
Nothing simple politically/culturally, or in an implementation sense? I agree with the former, disagree with the latter.
You can't actually separate the politics and culture from the implementation. Any decision to change the implementation will come from the political / cultural situation.
Of course, but “will political and cultural forces allow us to do this thing?” is a different and discrete question from “should we do this thing/are there practical problems with implementing this idea that make it a bad idea?”
I definitely see your point, but to me, the lack of will is a very practical problem.
> (who of course would likely end up being Native in many, but not all, cases)
Would they? It seems to me that ingroup bias is likely to affect their work too much.
The best qualified people to study Native Americans would be people who are neither Native American nor part of any of the groups that have historically had much contact with them. Asians, probably.
Well, rightly or wrongly, that's not at all where the current zeitgeist stands on this issue. And even if it was, have fun finding Asians (or whoever) who are motivated enough to get a doctorate in the field.
The last big history of American Indians, "Indigenous Continent," was published in 2022 by a Finnish professor named Pekka Hamalainen at Oxford. From the NYT:
"A Finnish Scholar Wants to Change How We See American History
"In “Indigenous Continent,” Pekka Hamalainen aims to upend the nation’s grand narrative, putting Native people and Native power at the center."
Ingroup bias is good as well as bad. You want some of each to study a culture from all sides. People who are familiar from the inside and people who come from the outside.
You can’t help but get biases though - anyone who studies something is biased about it as the thing that they personally think is worth spending their time on.
>She's contrasted with a candidate for the Native American studies position she eventually got (which, BTW, is maybe not officially affirmative action, but I think it's likely she wouldn't have gotten that job if she were known to be white) who interviewed in a three piece suit, and was asked if his tie was a native pattern (it wasn't).
Personally, I hope neither person got penalties or bonuses on their interview score for their address. Both stereotypical Native dress and a 3-piece suit sound like appropriate clothes for an interview for a Native American studies position to me. What matters more is who does an actual better job teaching and researching Native Americans.
It'd be funny if it turned out the guy in the three piece suit was white too.
> this is ultimately a critique not of Elizabeth Hoover
I disagree. She supported such attitudes and outcomes and aimed at gaining a role where she could make similar decisions herself.
Eh? If she has the lived experience of being native (despite genetically not being so) why should we assume she would not be hired if she wore white-people clothing? She has not ONLY the degrees but ALSO the lived experience, there's no reason to think that she doesn't have the expertise and qualifications needed for the job.
She is also getting lumped in by association with purposeful fakers like Rachel Dolezal by people who don’t actually read the story.
One element is that yes, it is cool and sometimes useful to take these labels today, but it isn’t cool to *say* that these labels are useful- after all, Native Americans are a repressed minority.
Another element here has to do with trans stuff- trilemma #1 comes dangerously close to acknowledging that people can in fact be valid “transracial”, which conservatives will pounce on for the absurdity and which transgender people don’t want to be analogized to.
I only hear of valuable privileges, like opening highly profitable casinos. How are NAs "repressed" today? By whom?
I have two things to say.
First, this paper which makes a similar argument to this blog post: https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev-polisci-032015-010015
Second, I think that one could also say that (the genetic part of) race has the same relationship to population genetics that color has to wavelengths of light. In both cases we draw some boundaries on some continuous thing. Population genetics and wavelengths of lights are continuous.
Good analogy thank you
Actually genetic distances aren't entirely continuous, so race is more distinct than colors. See research like:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7086171/
Africans are more genetically distinct, but what exactly is the boundary between the "Caucasian" and the "East Asian" race? What are Azeris? Russians? Kazakhs? Uighurs? Hui? It's rather continuous, no?
I think the point is that it's not perfectly smoothly continuous: even within the Eurasian area, people are more genetically similar to other people a given geographical distance away within areas of easy migration, than they are to people the same distance away across a significant (albeit partial) barrier to migration, such as a mountain range or desert. Thus human genetic variation is neither perfectly discrete, nor perfectly clinal.
Sure. But human perception of wavelengths of light, while at least continuous, is not totally smooth. You have 3 cones after all. So for some x, the colors x and x+5 nanometers might look more similar than x+5 and x+10 do. The fact that past blue it looks a bit red again even though that's the furthest thing away is maybe similar to how some of these Aboriginal PNG people look a bit like Africans again even though again that's the furthest thing away.
We should probably be careful of taking the color spectrum analogy too far. But if we are running with it, we can contrast the human visual system's response with the output of an instrument that measures the raw wavelengths of light, and note that the output of that machine shows that there is a smooth continuum of such wavelengths as measured in the real world (I assume; could be wrong about that), whereas the output of genetic sequencing and principal component analysis does show that the variation is clumpy, with most people belonging clearly to one cluster and not another.
It's a fair point. But in the real world, the colors we see aren't totally continuous across the spectrum, right? Aren't they clumpy? There's a reason we talk about blue and green, colors in between aren't as common in the natural environment.
Russians and Azeris are mostly "Causasian". There are of course some populations which are near halfway between "causain" and "East asian", like Kazakhs and Uyghurs, but they are small numerically.
Get them on PCA plot and this will answer your question.
I agree, my point is that the PCA is basically a continuous like from European to East Asian.
If you read the paper, you can see the various mountain ranges, deserts, oceans, lakes, tundras, ice, and other unfriendly territories. These result in less gene transfer between the regions separated by these. So these natural barriers cause some extra genetic distances. Cultural distances can do the same thing, e.g. Slavic vs. Germanic in Europe.
Well, races can mix, if someone is X% African and 100-x% European what race do you call them? The cutoff for x in Brazil is way higher than in the US.
What I thought was meant by "race is a social construct" is that there's some genetic reality to ethnicity, but that the way we categorize ethnic groups as belonging to various "races" is more arbitrary. So at various times Italians, Irish, and Ashkenazi Jews have been categorized as non-white, but now they're generally considered to be white.
Ethnicity still gets fuzzy around the edges, especially when trying to deal with a blood quantum, but there are clear clusters who mostly marry within the cluster and who have obvious phenotypic differences from other clusters.
I guess I still find this unconvincing. It's like saying "continents aren't geographically real, just a social construct" because it's hard to say whether Armenia is part of Europe or Asia, or because the ancients grouped North Africa together with the Mediterranean instead of sub-Saharan Africa.
This is . . . a point you could make, but if people then said "continents aren't geographically real" to mean there's no sense in which they form natural shapes, or that it's meaningless and impossible to say Europe is north of Africa, then the phrase would be causing more trouble than it solved in terms of confusion, even assuming it solves any real (as opposed to strawmanned) confusion at all.
Another possible example: "there's no such thing astronomically as day or night". It's true that there's no hard boundary by which you can say that 6:10 PM is in the day vs. the night (is it sunset? astronomical twilight? nautical twilight?), but if you jump from there to "it's meaningless and impossible to claim that night is darker than day", then you've taken it too far again.
But some (most) continents aren't "geographically real": the division between Europe and Asia is pretty arbitrary, and even thinking them as two different continents is basically an extrapolation of ancient Greek-Persian rivalries; the division between Africa and the rest of the Old World can also be pretty deceptive, not so much because they are actually connected by a bit of land, but because the Mediterranean was long a means of transport first and an obstacle second - the Sahara is arguably more of a natural division, though it also got and gets traversed. And so forth.
Yeah, I think the point I want to make is that things can be not real, yet still so meaningful to talk about that every argument that starts with their unreality is false.
For example, it's an objectively true statement to say "Europe is further west than Asia" even if neither Europe and Asia are continents.
As such, the fact that "Europe and Asia aren't real" is anti-helpful if you use it to argue about any particular point, like whether one is further west than the other, or colder than the other, or richer than the other, or whatever (including objective geographical points like which is further west)
But there are valid points to be made that hinge upon people recognizing that certain concepts are really idola fori. I just made one, by comparing the Mediterranean to the Sahara. What you are really bringing up is foolish arguments used by taking "race isn't real" as some sort of axiom, out of which wrong conclusions are derived by a succession of fallacies. I have never seen anybody other than online idiots argue in that fashion.
Ghosts aren't real, and, if some fool came and argued that then houses that are believed to be haunted can't correlate with houses that are derelict, as ghosts aren't real, and that thus even postulating such a correlation is a prejudice that is trivially rebuttable, my response would not be to defend the existence of ghosts.
Yeah, look how often people talk about "Africa" and forget that Egypt and Libya and Tunisia and Algeria and Morocco are all African countries, and contain 20% or so of the entire population of Africa.
Sub-Saharan Africa is far more of a natural unit.
Though again, in antiquity (and not only?), the two Africas (really "Egypt" and "Aethiopia") bled into each other through the Nile. These are concepts of limited applicability.
Similarly, South Asia is a natural unit that should probably be considered separate from the rest of Asia, if Europe is.
"I have never seen anybody other than online idiots argue in that fashion."
But why are the online idiots, whose numbers are legion, convinced that The Science has proven that race isn't genetically real?
>"Europe is further west than Asia"
Is it?
https://xkcd.com/503/
This is clearly just Randall's fault for not living on the same landmass as 87% of the world's population.
Most of Europe is further west than most of Asia, but parts of Europe are further east than parts of Asia. Because the dividing lines between continents are socially constructed, and we've decided that the Middle East is Asia, while Moscow is Europe.
Planets and stars are socially constructed. At one time Pluto was considered a planet, then it got the Hoover treatment.
I've never really thought of the Middle East as either Europe, Asia, or Africa. If you divide the Old World into those continents, sure, you have to put every part of the Middle East into one. But for the most part, such a division is an empty exercise. Continents are an example of arbitrary categorisation, since there is not even a formal basis for it as there might be with say a genetic model of race - and even the number of supposed continents can vary, or is at least defended with outrage rather than rigour, or acceptance that division into principle components is to some extent arbitrary.
Imprecise boundaries exist (or not) relative to what they're being used to implement. If there was about to be a huge war to expand the European Union to the edge of the European Continent, on that justification, that's when you'd bring up the idea that, "Europe doesn't actually exist." Likewise race doesn't exist relative to, you know, being racist, but not relative to explaining US history 1820-1920. It might sound inconsistent, but concepts in and of themselves don't literally exist, which leaves flexible, figurative existence.
I use the term "continental-scale races" to denote racial groupings that are roughly the same in number as the continents but don't correlate exactly with Herodotus's thinking about continents. (And note that Herodotus, who was from what's now Bodrum, Turkey, warned against taking his distinction between Europeans and Asians too literally.)
To say a category is socially constructed isn't to say those categories lack properties that can be discussed based on that shared social understanding. It just means when you talk about those properties, you are talking about the contours of the social reality. To pick a hopefully more clear example, I can say "100 dollars is worth more than 1 dollar" and this be a propositional claim while talking about a social construct. The case for anti-realism when it comes to continents is compelling - the lines represent interpersonal convention rather than an objective property of nature we can think of as "continentness" - but that doesn't mean you can't say Asia is generally east of Europe. It's just when you do, the primary referent of what you are talking about is mental states. Continents have no reality apart from what social agreement gives them. This isn't true of, say, electromagnetic waves. It isn't even true of tectonic plates.
When academics talk about race as a social construct, this is usually what they mean. It can get confusing because ethnic relatedness, which does have a basis in real biology, is part of what informs racial belonging through phenotypes associated with the different races, but "race" isn't that. It's more a collection of expectations about one's appearance and cultural identity, that correlates with, but is not the same as the genetic associations. But because people *want* that to be the same thing, you sometimes get internally incoherent ideas about who belongs to which group.
Isn't there a continental plate that runs through the Mediterranean? I know there's also the Somalian plate, but at a high level, it seems reasonable to me to regard Africa as its own continent.
Well, there's geography as in tectonics (but then India and Arabia are their own continents) and then there's cultural geography.
India is its own continent- though- isn't that why the Himalayas?
Also to me, Indians, Sri Lankans, Nepalese etc feel all more similar to each other than any of them to East Asians.
New Zealand definitely has its own tectonic plate, and is many miles from other continents. https://explorersweb.com/zealandia-the-eighth-continent/#:~:text=Nowadays%2C%20seven%20is%20the%20most,is%20what%20some%20geologists%20believe.
What does it mean to be geographically real? Is it a stronger or weaker property than being real? Can something be geographically real but not real or vice versa?
"The division between Europe and Asia is pretty arbitrary therefore... they aren't (geographically) real" is a nonsensical statement to me and needs an explanation.
I think the distinction between "race" and "ethnicity" is pretty on-point though. Race is stuff like "Asian". Ethnicity is stuff like Vietnamese versus Japanese. As far as genetics goes they are different ethnicities, but the same "race" as constituted in America anyway. (Let's not even get started on "Hispanic" shall we?)
It's more sensible to think of ethnicity as cultural, while race is genetic. So if you're adopted into a family you aren't biologically related to, you will be raised as part of their ethnicity even if your race is entirely different. The US government defines in broad coarse terms like "Asian", but there's not really a sense in which South Asians naturally cluster with East Asians.
The US Census in recent decades has, in effect, treated "race" as meaning biological ancestry and "ethnicity" (i.e., Hispanic) as meaning cultural ancestry.
For example, the great Mexican boxer Canelo Alvarez would be considered racially white, but is culturally Hispanic. The Census made strong efforts to explain to respondents that Hispanics could be of any race.
My definition is that race is genetic while ethnicity in c. 2000 America referred to traits (such as surname, language, cuisine, religion, etc.) that are usually passed down within biological families but that don't have to be.
This just seems like the commonplace confusion between "social construct" and "not real". "Europe" obviously is a social construct, but the socially constructed place is definitely north of Africa.
Similarly, money is social construct, but you'll still be sent to prison for counterfeiting.
There’s a definite night. It’s after astronomical dusk, and is an exact position of the sun below the horizon - below 18°. However I suppose you could say that the exact percentage is arbitrary.
This is something that the social constructionists rarely grapple with. Sure a day, a year and and hour are social constructs in that humans have named them, but the hour is totally arbitrary and the other two have actual existence as orbits or rotations independent of human existence.
That would imply the UK has no night for a couple of months around midsummer. But people would laugh at you if you said so. The sun goes down and it gets dark, just not fully.
I too believe my own facts. Night is ambiguous in colloquial language - it doesn’t mean dark necessarily, depends on context and time of year.
That said if you told people it didn’t get fully dark in the U.K. in June they would accuse you of being captain obvious. If you then explained (as I did) that it wasn’t technically night they would, if of reasonable intelligence, thank you for the info.
I thought it was kind of cool, but nevermind.
It’s not just the edges though; races are not clades. The most recent common ancestor of all black people is also the most recent common ancestor of all humans. (Which is to say, black people can be divided up into subgroups, such that some subgroups are more closely related to white people than they are to the other groups of black people. NOT because of interbreeding, just because of splits within Africa that happened before the out-of-Africa migrations.)
Likewise, the MRCA of all Asian people is also an ancestor of all Native Americans, and thus presumably some Asian populations are more closely related to Native Americans than they are to other Asians.
(Not that this justifies “race isn’t real”; nobody is claiming that reptiles aren’t real just because birds exist. But it means the genetics are much less obvious than you’d assume based on physical appearance and geography.)
Yes, this seems right. Some socially-defined "races" match underlying genetic/historical breeding groups well; others don't. Scott argues that that there's a reasonable match between socially-defined Jewish people and genetically-defined Jewish people. Fair enough. But that is clearly not true for "black", which seems to be an essentially American social construction.
What do you mean? The socially defined race "black" has sub-Saharan African ancestry. This is a very reasonable match.
Yeah, this isn’t about “how Americans define blackness”. Even very obviously “black” 100% African ancestry people are not a single coherent group. They are multiple groups that we categorize as one group because of external similarities that do not always correspond to genetic similarity.
There is more genetic variation within sub-Saharan African people than within all the rest of humanity combined. They are not a genetic grouping in anything like the sense that Jews or Japanese people might be. It's chalk and cheese.
To such an extent that this variation affects patterns of settlement outside Africa (even though we are talking mostly about enslaved people, who had no choice). Sickle-cell condition was half-understood empirically before it was actually understood - "black people do not thrive in highlands" (OK, there's a much more colorful expression in Spanish, which used to be used by Black people in a certain part of South America, when speaking of themselves) - obviously untrue of Ethiopians, say.
And yet there are certain genetic traits common to sub-Saharan Africans which identify them as the social race "black." It's not an arbitrary social construction.
I gather that the vast majority of that diversity is contained within a handful of tiny hunter-gatherer and pastoralist populations in Africa, often referred to as the Pygmy and Bushman peoples, who contributed basically nothing to the ancestry of today's black diaspora outside of Africa, though those other Africans do have more diversity than Eurasian and Native American populations. See https://www.razibkhan.com/p/out-of-africas-midlife-crisis (Khan refers to the Pygmy and Bushman peoples are "very diverse", the other sub-saharan Africans as "not very diverse", and everyone else as "very not-diverse". I think the preferred term for the not-very-diverse Africans these days is "Niger-Congo"; you will sometimes hear "Bantu", but that more strictly refers only to the largest and most widespread branch of the Niger-Congo peoples). But that doesn't mean that the "not very diverse" Africans aren't still more genetically similar to each other than they are to any non-African populations.
That is to say, "black" does map on, to a large extent, to peoples sharing more common ancestry with each other than with any other groups - they just went through less of a population bottleneck than non-Africans did (even if it gets rather fuzzy as the proportion of Eurasian admixture increases as you travel north through East Africa towards Egypt).
There is also a claim that I'm not quite sure about where to dig up data on, but I seem to remember reading, that most of that genetic diversity isn't actually doing anything very interesting phenotypically - that it is mostly either in non-coding stretches of the genome, or synonymous alleles that don't affect how a gene is expressed, resulting in Niger-Congo Africans being no more phenotypically diverse (i.e. being less diverse in the traits that people tend to actually care about) than non-Africans. Maybe someone can point me to better information on that?
> The most recent common ancestor of all black people is also the most recent common ancestor of all humans
How does that fit in with the claim that all non-sub-Saharan-African humans have Neanderthal ancestors and sub-Saharan Africans don't?
If this is the case then the most recent common ancestor of all humans is prior to the sapiens-neanderthal split, while the most recent common ancestor of all sub-Saharan Africans is more recent. Right?
Technically, you're correct. But "Mitochondrial Eve" and "Y-chromosomal Adam" are the guideposts used to define the common ancestry of Homo sapiens sapiens. They both lived between 100,000 to 200,000 years ago in sub-Saharan Africa. Neither Neanderthal (nor Denisovan) Mitochondrial or Y-chromosomal DNA is present in modern human populations (AFAIK). Neanderthal and Denisovan alleles are found on chromosomes other than the Y. And even though they are admixed into modern human gene pools (except sub-Saharan Africans—until recently) they don't make good guideposts for when H. sapiens sapiens diverged.
This is actually outdated. They recently (2013) identified a Y haplogroup that split from the main clade far earlier, which pushes Adam back to 338kya or so. See https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3591855/
Thanks for flagging this paper! Looks like it may upset several tidy assumptions that have been made about human origins. Wow! From the abstract...
> "We report the discovery of an African American Y chromosome that carries the ancestral state of all SNPs that defined the basal portion of the Y chromosome phylogenetic tree. We sequenced ∼240 kb of this chromosome to identify private, derived mutations on this lineage, which we named A00. We then estimated the time to the most recent common ancestor (TMRCA) for the Y tree as 338 thousand years ago (kya) (95% confidence interval = 237–581 kya). Remarkably, this exceeds current estimates of the mtDNA TMRCA, as well as those of the age of the oldest anatomically modern human fossils. The extremely ancient age combined with the rarity of the A00 lineage, which we also find at very low frequency in central Africa, point to the importance of considering more complex models for the origin of Y chromosome diversity. These models include ancient population structure and the possibility of archaic introgression of Y chromosomes into anatomically modern humans. The A00 lineage was discovered in a large database of consumer samples of African Americans and has not been identified in traditional hunter-gatherer populations from sub-Saharan Africa. This underscores how the stochastic nature of the genealogical process can affect inference from a single locus and warrants caution during the interpretation of the geographic location of divergent branches of the Y chromosome phylogenetic tree for the elucidation of human origins."
I don't think this is right. What happened (AIUI) is that some hominins left Africa and became neanderthals, while other hominins in Africa became h sapiens. Some subset of h sapiens left Africa (and this group were the ancestors of all non-black humans) and interbred (to a quite limited extent) with the neanderthal population, before driving them to extinction.
Neanderthal and modern human populations diverged about 300Kya. IIRC I believe that modern non-African humans left Africa around 70Kya (?), and it was a small group of between several hundred or several tens of thousands of individuals (I think there are still arguments about the size of migration). Thus non-African populations are much less genetically diverse than modern African populations due to the founder effect and inbreeding among that small population of humans.
FYI, there were several previous migrations of modern humans from Africa, but all of them seem to have died out and not left any genetic signature in modern non-African populations. The ancestors of Neanderthals and Denisovans left Africa much earlier. I don't know if they were two separate migrations or whether they diverged once they were out of Africa. Interesting lecture on how the genomic comparisons are done, and what they have concluded so far, here...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QS8bukoLJTw
I have absolutely seen people claim that reptiles and fish are not a thing on the base of cladistic taxonomy. But to be fair to this argument, the traditional conception of races, even in biology (e.g. Cuvier, Haeckel, Carleton Coon) did treat races as clades (branching early in human evolution and persisting in separation, with relatively 'pure' cores despite some mixing at the edges), so it may be fair to say that races as traditionally interpreted do not exist.
All of these groups are real. What feels arbitrary is that, as a Jew, if I have to enter my race in a form, I'm expected to enter "white" and not "Jewish". This expectation changes relatively rapidly across time and region. But people tend to think of white and black as obvious and immutable races. Saying it's arbitrary is trying to point out that the racial categories we use today are more mutable and less fundamental than people think.
I have a different analogy. Imagine an alternate universe where males are divided into men and manlets who are males shorter than 6 feet (and everyone's height is
measured in feet).
Historically, men held positions of power, while manlets weren't allowed to dire in the front of the bus in the living memory. "All men were created equal" was written in one country which enslaved manlets until a bit over 100 years ago.
Nowadays, most cultured people accept that manlets shouldn't be discriminated against. Where they draw the line are the crazy radicals who claim there is no such thing as a "manlet". After all, they argue, there are clear correlations between the height and intelligence, attractiveness to women, penis size, etc. The claimed "tall privilege" is obviously a bogus, as there are rich manlets and poor men.
Now, as a denizen of our universe you might think "huh, manlet as a category sounds awesome"! But you might also understand where the people arguing against that category are coming from. It's not that there is no difference between 6 foot 6 and 5 foot nothing. It's that an arbitrary category which was used to perpetrated discrimination is just not useful enough to justify its continued existence. After all, categories were made for Man (not for Man and Manlets).
Does the distribution of height have two distinct peaks, one for men and one for manlets, like if you'd have a society consisting of half Norwegians and half Pygmies?
Do you mean that race as a concept will become obsolete once we have enough mixed ancestry people to smoothen the distribution? Wouldn't that make an interracial relationship a moral imperative?
I don't think that e.g. pure-blood Chinese are going to disappear any time soon, so I expect the current racial clusters to endure for quite some time. Why would it be a moral imperative to do something about that?
I've long assumed the answer to the first is "yes" and to the second is "not imperative, but tiny small bonus". But I'm beginning to suspect the actual answer is "yes, but people will come up with some other, equally hurtful, social division in its place".
It might be a worthwhile goal for an individual country, encouraging its citizens of various races to interbreed, as long as they close their borders and stop importing more racial diversity. But for the world as a whole, we would want to have very, very good reasons to be confident that the human biodiversity hypothesis about the partly-genetic origins of race differences in average intelligence is false, before taking a gamble on such a project - or at least, not seek to implement it until we are very comfortable with, and capable at, reprogenetic techniques for increasing intelligence.
Otherwise, the sort of global homogenization project you have in mind would rely on the maintenance of modern transport infrastructure, and if you need a certain fraction of people above a certain IQ to be able to maintain that infrastructure (as well as the modern industrial and agricultural tech that provides food in such abundance), and that IQ level is significantly above the global average, and if the HBD claim is true, then you could maybe, at best, achieve your homogenization goal once, then modern industrial society would break down, billions would starve, and we'd be back to being relatively reproductively isolated on our respective continents and eventually diversify into a new bunch of races, who would squabble among themselves at their meeting points just as much as the current ones do.
Mike Judge's animated sit-com "King of the Hill" has an interesting example of the potential complexities: It never occurs to conspiracy theorist Dale Gribble that his tawny son Joseph is obviously the biological offspring of Dale's wife and his American Indian acquaintance John Redcorn. Hank and his son Bobby Hill never notice either that Joseph looks and acts more like John Redcorn than like Dale Gribble.
I looked this up on Google, which provided a helpful (if hallucinatory) AI summary:
"Generative AI is experimental. Learn more
"In the Fox series King of the Hill, Dale Gribble has a sexual relationship with John Redcorn, and Joseph Gribble is their biological son."
>So at various times Italians, Irish, and Ashkenazi Jews have been categorized as non-white, but now they're generally considered to be white.
When? You mean when men of these groups had the right to vote during the time period where only white men had the right to vote?
A lot of people point to a cartoon depicting the irish as a different race to europeans, but they do not understand that this came from a satirical magazine and was not an official statement of the racial identity of the Irish. Not sure if you had this in mind, but please avoid this error if you did.
>Ethnicity still gets fuzzy around the edges,
So what? Almost everything in the real world is fuzzy. This is exactly why it's an isolated demand for rigor.
There's no dollar amount where a person goes from being not-rich to rich, so by this logic the existence of rich people is extremely dubious (if having a million dollars makes you rich, does one fewer dollar make you not rich? How about one dollar fewer than that?)
The only question that matters in this situation is: "Does using the concept of biological race allow us to make better empirical predictions about the world than not using it?"
And the answer to that question is a resounding "YES".
Yeah, it's a myth that they were ever legally non-white. White people just weren't all socially (rather than legally) equal back then.
In general when thinking about social construction the structuralists shy away from defining as social constructions those things, like money, which are fully constructs and instead apply it to race or ethnicity which, as Scott pointed out, have biological markers overlaid with cultural markers although it’s never quite an exact fit.
The United States had explicit racial laws about whiteness, and European immigrants always qualified as white.
https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/2013/02/24/pathetic-that-this-even-has-to-be-pointed-out/
Then again, at the same time Mexicans also counted as white, yet many people now would not define them as such.
With Mexicans, it was and is more complicated than that.
Italians, Irish, and Ashkenazim have always been considered "white" in the United States. This isn't some vague question like figuring out who counts as "white" today - many places in the United States had vigorously enforced laws about who counted as white, and Italians, Irish, and Ashkenazim counted as white. They were often thought of as lesser kinds of white people, but this had nowhere near the same legal or social consequences that actually being considered nonwhite had.
One thing I've always found fascinating is Lucy and Ricky Ricardo. Interracial marriages were super controversial in the 1950s, and yet the most popular TV couple in the 1950s was what would today be considered an interracial couple. And it's never once mentioned, he's just a wacky foreigner with a funny accent.
There's some ways in which the US has got less racist since the 1950s but there's definitely some examples in the opposite direction.
Hispanics were considered white back then. The federal government invented the Hispanic category later. There's some video by Hanania and Bernstein about this.
True, but Arnaz as Cuban was still considered different enough that CBS did not want to cast him opposite Ball. It took some convincing for them to accept the idea.
It's probably fair to say that Italians were considered to be their own ambiguous, non-Black category (similar to Latin Americans nowadays) and that the Irish were once thought of as their own inferior white sub-race, at least if they were poor.
The idea Italians, Irish and Jews were ever considered non-white in America is completely false.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2017/03/22/sorry-but-the-irish-were-always-white-and-so-were-the-italians-jews-and-so-on/
Only if you pretend to think that the legal distinction is the only one that matters.
It's not the only distinction that *matters* - in what was to some extent an Ango-supremacist country, being a non-Anglo white, with sort of de-facto second-class citizen status, is obviously less than ideal, but that's obviously not the same thing as being classed as non-white where non-whites are de facto, or even de jure non-citizens.
One thing I find consistent in these exchanges is the "race is a social construct" people using a stricter, turn-of-the-20th-century academic definition of "race" and race theory, and the "race is describing genetic groups" side using a more general, colloquial definition. Genetic clustering clearly shows different human groups -- these groups vaguely-but-not-perfectly correlate with the old "scientific" races.
Social consequences of racism have been based mostly on the older definitions, which got enshrined in law and cultural systems. So it makes sense that people approaching from that angle would zero in on the "social construct" side of things. On the other side, the scientists who came up with the original races, when presented with modern genetic data, would likely modify their account to better match the data, same as we have as we learn more about animal species. You don't hear "species is a social construct" nearly as often, you hear "scientists incorrectly assigned these species to the wrong clade."
I think this is where people end up talking past each other. Does the genetic diversity in Africa mean that Race as a concept is scientifically meaningless, or that really we should add 2-3 races to Africa to properly describe the different populations?
Look at something like Duda and Zrzavý "Human population history revealed by a supertree approach" (2016) for what that might look like. So far as I can tell, the clades are something like:
- Bushman
- Pygmy
- Bantu/East African supergroup which contains everyone else
You really have to push into the tree, and make a nonsense of any concept of similar levels of difference, to get anything like an 19th century racial taxonomy.
And if you try to retain that level of distinction, then you get categories like the Pygmy-West-African-Anuak-Hazda-Sandawe-Maasai-Iraqw-Aari-Dogon-Somali-Beja-Egyptian-Bedouin-Palestinian-Druze-Kurd-Turk-Greek-German family that includes Germans, English, Italians, Spanish, Poles, Russians and Finns.
Thanks, I will take a look!
That's the motte. The bailey is, I think, that if you make an argument involving race people dislike, people can say "didn't you know race was an obsolete, racist, pseudo-scientific concept?" even if the argument isn't made less valid by that races are arbitrarily delineated categories on a continuous spectrum, all the while the same people are at other times perfectly willing to discuss race.
Ugh. This sucks for her. Nothing else to add.
“I would feel pretty bad telling her she couldn’t and she was a poser and an imperialist and the tribe should refuse to interact with her.1
I guess this means that maybe I sort of kind of grudgingly accept (3)”
I take this (and the inverted/parallel case of the “white” guy raised on the reservation) more as meaning you don’t like telling people they can’t be part of something they want to be a part of, and likewise object to others doing that. This preference cuts across rationales, hence the apparent inconsistency of saying (in the case of the guy) “lived experience trumps genetics” and (in the case of the girl) “genetics (kind of sort of) trumps lived experience.” In both cases the real trump card seems more to be something like “Who am I (or the tribal elders or whoever) to call for this person to be expelled?”
I can’t believe you go through this whole piece without linking to the classic Dave Chappelle Clayton Bigsby sketch: https://youtu.be/BLNDqxrUUwQ?si=2K2_0vnTspnHAK3r
I was thinking of CollegeHumor's "Are You Asian Enough?" sketch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVR3B01NxiM
I was thinking the same about his Racial Draft sketch. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2z3wUD3AZg4
Nonwhites are like 10% of the white nationalist movement.
My comment here is sort of tangential, and is mostly on the idea/value of "race" as a concept. On the one hand, race is certainly just as "real" as dozens of other concepts that no one questions the validity of, but I think I have been convinced that it isn't (or maybe shouldn't be, I'm not denying reality, but rather make an aspirational statement) be _important_. This stems mostly from my views on individualism. You can say lots of things about groups of people, but almost every single thing you can say about those groups is a thing that, in any specific instance, am not going to care about the group trait and instead am going to care about the specific individual in question.
About the only reason why these kinds of group/colelctive traits might matter is that there are (or at least could be), policies whose goal is either greatly obstructed or maybe even made entirely impossible by group realities (since the policy is targeting those groups). This is true, but I'm almost always against those policies for reasons completely unrelated to their efficacy or lack thereof.
TO make a more direct comment on the article: when it comes to this particular situation, I personally think that genetic doors to cultural groups are generally a bad idea. I understand the reasons (which you point out) that they get implemented, but they are, in my opinion, bad reasons, or at least reasons that aren't justified by the harms caused.
Take your specific example about native americans being swamped by the hordes of white people who would want to adopt their culture. It seems to me like this is a non-problem. White people can do what they want, try to join the culture, and they will either do so well enough that existing members of the culture will accept them as assimilated or not. In other words, the principle of free-associate renders this concern moot. If there is some big group of "fake" native americans, the "real" ones don't have to associate with them. And the culture will only actually get diluted to whatever extent it's members don't care enough about preserving to it maintain it, at which point the problem is not the "fakes" but rather the lack of caring of the "real" members. And that problem doesn't seem impacted by the existence of poor-imitators.
>You can say lots of things about groups of people, but almost every single thing you can say about those groups is a thing that, in any specific instance, am not going to care about the group trait and instead am going to care about the specific individual in question.
Oh? So you have some sort of fast, efficient way of testing each individual prospective african or arab immigrant to europe to know whether they're going to commit crime or anti-social behavior? Whether they're going to culturally assimilate or not? Whether they're going to be a net fiscal burden?
Or is the sensible thing to look at how they behave as a group, and realize that it's more efficient to reject virtually all of them who aren't doctors or engineers of something, even if that means we lose a few diamonds in the rough?
And does this only apply to race? Are women discriminatory for demanding women's only spaces instead of judging the actions of each individual man first?
Do you have a way of working out the behavior of each individual student at a prospective school for your children? Or do you see that the school is full of low income black kids and you know to stay away?
>This is true, but I'm almost always against those policies for reasons completely unrelated to their efficacy or lack thereof.
Bully for you. But DEI is a monumental political force and has significant normie support (or at least, tolerance) precisely because they believe that group outcome differences matter and are not caused by biological group differences.
> But if you’re going to say individual Arabs and Africans should be discriminated against because on average they are poor, how is that different from saying white people should be discriminated against because on average they had privileges they didn’t earn?
This is actually a nice way of putting it, and one I haven't heard before.
>"But if you’re going to say individual Arabs and Africans should be discriminated against because on average they are poor, how is that different from saying white people should be discriminated against because on average they had privileges they didn’t earn?"
If a characteristic is predictive of future behavior and members of an identifiable group share a different value of that characteristic than that of the population as a whole, then in circumstances where you cannot feasibly determine a the value of the characteristic for each individual member of the group you get a better prediction of the future behavior of each individual by imputing the characteristic value as that of the group than you would if you used the wider population's.
That's a different kind of being "discriminated against" than being penalized because other members of your group received benefits in the past.
I don't think this is accurate. The internet skews towards nut-picking and confirmation. This means that people who are pro-DEI will only see examples of the weakest anti-DEI arguments. "anti-DEI people actually believed in individualism/colorblindness and also spoke out against statistical discrimination against members of “bad” demographics" exist in spades, however their arguments will never be shown to anyone who's pro-DEI due to how the incentives of the internet work.
> But if you’re going to say individual Arabs and Africans should be discriminated against because on average they are poor, how is that different from saying white people should be discriminated against because on average they had privileges they didn’t earn?
Discriminating against someone because they're on average poor is using predictive factors to determine something about the individual. In this case, people don't want individuals with certain negative effects, use "being poor" as an imprecise predictor about those effects, and the fact that they're Arab/African is coincidental.
Discriminating against someone because they might have privileges they didn't earn is entirely unconcerned with anything related to the individual. It's a type of discrimination that necessarily ignores anything that could be relevant to the individual being a good/bad fit for whatever you are discriminating for.
The former seems like a bad implementation of a potentially-correct selection process. The latter can't be logical in any selection process where you are trying to find individuals that fit certain characteristics. (It's also immoral in my opinion, but the other commenter proposed a good case for that argument).
I'll be honest, I'm not super interested in an extensive back and forth on this topic. That really should have meant I didn't make my first comment, but I did, so I'll give you a response here. I don't expect (nor am I trying) to change your mind, but maybe you will see the points where my values are different than yours.
I think that rejecting individuals for group characteristics is morally wrong and I think that negative impacts that Europe is seeing from immigration are not results of inherent characteristics of those groups, but rather the _terrible_ specifics of immigration policy in Europe. America is an amazing machine of assimilation (or we used to be, we are trying our hardest to stop being and I worry every day that we will succeed), and that is a result of dealing with immigration intelligently. I think Europe is (and always has been) worse at this and therefore gets bad outcomes. Thats Europe's fault, not the immigrants. Although to be fair, I don't know how to fix Europe's problems, so I don't reallly have a solution to the very real problems that they have with immigration, and I can't deny that just blanket rejecting groups wouldn't fix the problem, assuming that was the only thing one cared about. Luckily I'm not European so It's not my problem (although, if I was, "fixing the problem" would very much not be the only thing I cared about). Either way, I won't tell Europe what to do.
As for schools, I have a whole tone of problems with the public schooling system and blame most of the issues we have on systemic issues that have, again, nothing to do with race (this will be a theme of my answers: almost any case you can think of to present, I'm pretty sure is due more to underlying systemic failures rather than race).
And finally, DEI: again, there are a whole _host_ of reasons to be anti DEI that do not rely on or presuppose _any_ beliefs around race. My reasons to be anti-dei are entirely race-agnostic and would be true no matter what facts were or were not true of any other race.
Feel free to respond to this if you want, but I'm not trying to have a conversation here and won't reply again. Like I said, I don't expect to convince you and I know you won't convince me, because my values and morals result in these beliefs and _do not depend_ on what the "realities" of race is. They are not outcome-driven, they are values-driven.
"rejecting individuals for group characteristics is morally wrong"
So do think it's morally wrong that people prefer to hire women/girls as babysitters? As a man, I don't feel that being discriminated against in this way is an injustice; even if it is inconvenient for me, they are only behaving prudently.
It's all about opportunity cost; getting individuating information is often costly and sometimes impossible.
I have no problem admitting that as a general rule, I would prefer to live in a white neighborhood. I think the vast majority of white people who pretend to find this shocking and deny that they feel the same are delusional hypocrites. But as it happens, I actually do live in a black neighborhood. For all I know, my Mexican wife and I are the only non-blacks on the block. And it's a fine neighborhood and the neighbors seem lovely. Just chatted with one today. I can tell from other cues that it's not the kind of black neighborhood to be worried about. Have I learned the errors of my racist ways? No... I know the statistics. I know that there are very substantial differences in crime rates on average...but that the black people I am (justifiably) worried about are a minority of black people.
The idea that it could be wrong to take accurate information into account is just weird to me. The question is: are you drawing reasonable conclusions, ie the issues above about immigrants, and we could argue about that; the devil is in the details etc.
But I don't get what's so hard about this. It's like people think the only two options must be "each and every black person is a dangerous criminal" OR "differences in crime rates are a racist fiction, they are just jailed more crimes they didn't commit; if you take personal safety precautions, you're a bad person, etc".
As for judging individuals... You obviously should, and I think most people do, use individuating information as much as possible, but the amount of information you have is always limited, sometimes you're unable to get more...
Even if you judge someone based on their past behavior... You're just using the "stereotype" (ie statistically true generalization) that people who commited crimes in the past are more likely to commit crimes in the future.
And sometimes people are legally prevented from getting or using that information, as when it's illegal to require a background check, ironically and perversely on the grounds that using that individuating information is "racist" because of "disparate impact"...which then causes employers to (rationally) discriminate on the basis of race, when they would not have done so otherwise.
> Oh? So you have some sort of fast, efficient way of testing each individual prospective african or arab immigrant to europe to know whether they're going to commit crime or anti-social behavior? Whether they're going to culturally assimilate or not? Whether they're going to be a net fiscal burden?
> Or is the sensible thing to look at how they behave as a group, and realize that it's more efficient to reject virtually all of them who aren't doctors or engineers of something, even if that means we lose a few diamonds in the rough?
It seems to me that the sensible thing to do is realise that they *don't* "behave as a group", and simply not make policy on the basis of group membership.
> The consensus says "biological race doesn't exist".
Open offer to any expert believe`n gamblers out there; we test if races exist by finding 1000 claiming to be Russians from born in Russia, who are as white as snow; and we test if they have sickle cell if none of them have sickle cell you give me a million dollars, if there is sickle cell at 1/10th the global rate ill give you 10$, and I'll tell all my racist family, racist friends, and racist community that race doesn't exist
Once in a life time opportunity; you can fight racism today.
I think maybe you're missing the word "million" when you offer to pay out $10 if you lose? If you are really offering only ten dollars then this is a terrible offer even in worlds where you are wrong, since that won't even cover the cost of the experiment. (And also you would be asking for 100000:1 betting odds in your favor, which is hardly a sign of confidence.)
nah Im broke and for all I know there are sickle cell in russia, I didnt look it up
That sort of proves the uselessness of race, doesn't it? You can test for sickle cell and get answers that have meaning. You can't just directly test for Russian-ness. Because it's a construct that's pretty amorphous.
At best, we can say that your results are close to other people in Russia. If we wanted to, we could go further and separate out people from the north of Russia from those in the south. Heck, we could even isolate individual religious groups - same way that the Amish in America are genetically distinct from other "White" people. You can ethnically separate Russian Old Believers from those who accepted the reforms of the 17th century.
Are the Russian Old Believers a separate race/ethnicity from the rest of the Russians?
Biology is often fractal, fractals maybe hard to enumerate a count of features or get the fight frame of reference for viewing what you want, but I'm going to insist that you measure coastlines and vaguely know how to handle the concept of a 3 legged dog dispite a dog being defined as 4 legged
If there's a measurable difference between the old believers and the rust of Russia there's a millions of small real reasons for them "demity parents were party insiders because his grandparents were from Lenin hometown" and you can expect a slightly flatten bell curve if you have some errors with race but even with my complete pure racist process of "Russia white, Russia won't have sickle cell" no one instantly wanted to bet that Russia had >1/10th the base rate
I agree with you that Russians won't have sickle cell. Let's do the same thing with Russians and Tay-Sachs disease. Take 10,000 ethnic Russians and if none of them have Tay-Sachs you give me a million dollars. If they have rates 1/10th that of the Old Order Amish, I agree that there's no racial difference between the Old Order Amish and the Russians.
Because I'm pretty sure that currently, Old Order Amish and Russians check the same box - White - on the American census. Why do you think that is? After all, we know they're genetically distinct.
Could it have something to do with social kinship and history? Perhaps Europeans are socially close, even if they're genetically distinguishable. So a European will be socially closer to a genetically distinct European than to an equally distinct African. Does that sound so crazy?
???
literally moving the goal post, I dont know what a taysacks disease is and your clearly accepting the premise biological race is real but want to make it about only skin color.
Genetics are real. I acknowledge that.
Ethnicity and race are ways to group genetics together. For lack of a better analogy, consider Crayola crayons. They sell 8 packs, 64 packs, 256 packs - what's the "real" number of colors?
The answer is that is an infinitely divisible spectrum that we group together based on our needs - not based on anything inherent and unchanging.
That's the same as grouping Old Order Amish and Russian people together as White. They're genetically distinguishable - I hope we can agree on that - but since we're trying to have a low number of races, we'll call them "White". "White" is itself a collection of genetics that can be further broken down, or could instead be increased to a higher level of generality, e.g., say White is just part of the Eurasian genetic identity, etc.
using your own analogy, theres some small number of simple colors, a very large list of named colors and a well defined space of 255^3 colors, and then a very very very small minority who want to break down color with math I dont even understand.
Realness depends on paradigm, I can use #FF0000 some places but need to use "red" others; there are efforts to name all the rgb colors https://graf1x.com/list-of-colors-with-color-names/ or theres lists of color schemes of 16 colors https://github.com/crazymonkyyy/leet-haker-colors
I see no issue with any of these color schemes(besides the formal color thoery being annoying)
The consensus says "biological race doesn't exist" but why isn’t Elizabeth Warren Native? - It’s easier to degrade people if you give them an opportunity to save face and pretend that’s not what’s happening. Most people are actually perfectly willing to be degraded provided there’s some theoretical limit to how far they think it’ll go.
If race doesn’t literally exist, the victim thinks then maybe someday the social construct will fade away, and they’ll stop demanding I atone. Maybe one day I will suffer enough degradation to atone and they’ll stop telling me that I’m terrible.
Surprise, surprise! They actually do just hate you. It’ll never end. And you deserve what you tolerate.
It's possible that *everyone* resents the affirmative action, but it is suppressed when a person fits into the category.
When that person is revealed not to be in the category, the suppressed resentment is released and boils to the surface, causing reaction that is surprisingly large.
This is magnified when there is significant amounts of money at stake.
Culture is meant for sharing, that’s one of the best things about it. 90% of the time, complaints about cultural appropriation are just veiled hatred of the majority group, using weaponized vocabulary to gain status and play power games.
People shouldn’t be limited to making art, food, clothing, or events from only their race, however race is defined. It’s absolutely silly and needs to be mocked as a concept.
I mostly agree, but it's unfortunate when people who aren't in a cultural group make, say, "native jewelry" and 1.) customers think they're getting actual native jewelry and 2.) a native artisan can't feed his or her family because the outsider has greater means for promotion and production. It's not really fair that a Navaho artisan should have to compete for market share for authentic native products against Macy's.
If the "cultural appropriator" is lying about the provenance of their product, then I agree with you that is troubling, but no more than a company saying something is organic when it isn't. But if your complaint is that Macy's can make sufficiently authentic/high-quality native jewelry more efficiently than a Navaho artisan, why is this any more of a problem than capitalism generally? Why should I care more about this Navaho artisan being put out of business by a more efficient competitor than I do about a family burger joint being put of business by McDonald's?
Yes, I'm specifically referring to cases where the products' provenance is misrepresented or when a design is stolen from a small creator (which is more common). Anthropologie and other brands have been accused of stealing designs from native artisans (I just used Macy's as an example), when a simple fix would be carrying the small businesses' pieces in-store/offering them a design contract. It's not illegal to copy and duplicate, but it's...unseemly in some circumstances. This isn't specifically a native artist thing; big brands do this all the time and then pretend they had no idea some popular etsy store had these very unique and original earrings first.
Isn't this what copyright and patents are for? This has nothing to do with appropriation. Native Americans do not "own" the culture of their ancestors. Nobody does.
There are a bunch of things you can't copyright or patent, or which are disproportionately expensive to do so; for instance, the design of a piece of jewellery is very unlikely to be sufficiently original for any IP to accrue, and that would require registration as a design patent, which would need lawyers, not just filing fees.
And if it's a one-off original? Then it would need to be priced in seven figures to pay for the lawyers. So an individual artist creates an original piece of jewellery in the Native American tradition; this is then copied and mass-produced. There really isn't much they can do about that. If it was a painting, then it's copyright, but similar design protections don't work for a lot of craft-art.
>So an individual artist creates an original piece of jewellery in the Native American tradition; this is then copied and mass-produced.
This almost seems closest to trademark law. If a particular tribe has a tradition, it sounds like the most natural match to IP law (caution: I've only dealt with software patents, and only as an inventor, interacting with the IP lawyers). If the tribe was a corporation, it could be the repository for ownership of the copyright.
As valerista wrote, one class of these cases is where
>products' provenance is misrepresented
and that is exactly what trademarks are supposed to combat
That's the thing. It's not really illegal, but creating awareness around the ethics of copying or, if you like, "appropriation" is all some of these makers can do. It's really down to the person's conscience. Anybody can buy a dupe or cheap copy of things that are rare or authentic, but YOU know whether it's a copy or not.
Usually it works like this: Emmental valley cheese gets famous, everybody starts copying it (and cheese lovers around the world rejoice), but the official "real Emmental cheese" trademark is reserved for the stuff proved to be made in the actual Emmental valley, which sells at much higher price. Similarly, any factory can make cheap wood icons in Congo style (sometimes made of plastic), but the real ones straight from Congo are the ones that sell with highest price. This way everyone can get good things that they like cheaply, the gourmets get the real stuff for higher price, and anyone who tries to fake a real thing gets punished. Looks like everyone gets to be happy, what's the problem?
I think that's ideal!
I agree with that point. I would call that cultural commoditization rather than appropriation.
But, however, if two white women are so inspired by the cooking they learned in Mexico, and decide to start a taco food truck, they shouldn’t be told they are doing something wrong. What do you think?
I mean, it's anti-white racism. Nobody goes after Chinese guys cooking Mexican food.
I used to frequent a Mexican restaurant run by Chinese people. It was pretty good! (I'm guessing the common denominator is rice.)
And yet I've never seen a Chinese restaurant run by anyone but Chinese.
Isn't that mostly because most Chinese restaurants run on very slim margins, so nobody sees it as an opportunity? Also there aren't that many westerners yet who would be well enough established in Chinese culture to do so.
What I do see all the time are restaurants who offer "asian cuisine". They tend to have Thai, Vietnamese, Chinese and Indian food on the same menu. And I really doubt that the owners all happen to have heritage in all those regions at the same time ...
You'd be surprised - the refugees from southeast Asia are slightly more likely to be mixed or diaspora because of policies of various dictators in the 60s - 80s (e.g, Khmer Rouge very specifically targeting Cambodian-Chinese).
It's actually not unrealistic to know someone who is Cambodian-Thai-Chinese or Vietnamese-Thai-Chinese in some cities, and even if their ancestors aren't strictly that ethnicity, they've lived in at least one of these countries for a while too, which I'd count. Southeast Asian cuisine is strongly influenced by all the diaspora.
So your restaurant with Thai, Chinese, and Vietnamese food is probably the outcome of a Thai-Chinese who lived in Vietnam for a while or some combination of the above. I can count at least 3 people in Melbourne, Australia that I know with this kind of background!
I remember this case, and honestly...if they would have just let the food speak for itself, nobody would have really noticed. They had to give interviews and mention how they badgered a bunch of tortilla-making abuelas in Mexico for their secrets.
Is that unfair? Is it also unfair when Yo Yo Ma sells more records than a slightly less talented cellist who happens to be full-blood German?
No, neither is unfair. Navajo designs belong to the common cultural heritage of mankind, just like Bach. Given that the European cultural artefacts adopted by the Navajo include literacy, hygeine, medicine, and about five thousand years of technology (and Bach!) and the Navajo cultural artefacts adopted by Europeans are limited to zigzaggy patterns and the occasional scalping, I don't think the Navajo can complain that they're getting the raw end of this cultural exchange.
Okay, design a video game or write a symphony (or whatever it is you create, if anything) and let a giant corporation somewhere in the world copy and sell it. It's the common cultural heritage of mankind, after all. All that matters is that whomever has more power, money and resources makes a profit. Don't expect consumers to care; they got the thing, right?
I mean, this is why we have intellectual property laws, so that people can have a period where they exclusively benefit from their cultural contributions before they become the common cultural heritage of mankind.
Bach and zigzaggy patterns have long since passed that period of exclusivity.
>Bach and zigzaggy patterns have long since passed that period of exclusivity.
if they are like design patents, or copyrights, yes. But perhaps zigzaggy patterns from a
particular tribe are more like trademarks of the tribe, and
>Unlike other forms of intellectual property (e.g., patents and copyrights) a registered trademark can, theoretically, last forever.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trademark#Maintaining_rights
I see your point, and I agree. But I really hate making arguments where a subtext is, "if we'd killed them all when we'd had the chance, we wouldn't have this problem now". I think it sets a bad precedent for the future.
I would say that intellectual property is the same kind of thing and it's absurd to own ideas whether you are a race, a tribe, or an individual.
Conversely, you could also "steal" the ideas of the large corporation. That's why large corporations such as Disney and Microsoft are so protective of their IP rights.
When did this thread turn into a rant about corporate hegemony? That's a completely separate problem from the one in question
This is a good point as far as it goes, but I'm not sure that "cultural appropriation" is the right name for the real complaint. Even after we get rid of one group of appropiators (the makers and sellers of the replicas), the non-natives who buy the genuine stuff are still culturally appropriating as enthusiastically as ever.
>Culture is meant for sharing
No, it's not. It's meant for the people within that group, and this is especially true for anything with religious significance (which most traditional culture has to some degree). Without any kind of cultural gatekeeping you get big homogenous monoculture.
The only reason most of the cultures of the world that people admire exist is precisely because they were separate from other people. Even modern cultures like hip-hop, these were existed in culturally secluded communities, and having everybody make hip-hops leads to a dilution in the essential character of hip-hop.
>People shouldn’t be limited to making art, food, clothing, or events from only their race, however race is defined. It’s absolutely silly and needs to be mocked as a concept.
Do you think a mix between chinese opera and rap music would be anything other than obscene? Then you probably have terrible taste in art and your views are informed by this.
I don't know about opera, but some of these guys are pretty good:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_yGGq-V0PE
And there's this fun video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rILKm-DC06A
Arguments similar to yours are traditionally used to condemn miscegenation.
You seriously can't claim other people have terrible taste in art when you reject any advances in culture. Do you seriously want all these cultures insulated from each other and stagnate forever? The breadth of human experience is limited. Novel art cannot be created without incorporating aspects from different cultures.
there's a continuum of tradeoffs between different types of diversity. the best point is probably somewhere in the middle.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha_diversity
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beta_diversity
Shakespeare was hardly culturally secluded.
> Without any kind of cultural gatekeeping you get big homogenous monoculture.
I agree this is a problem but it's what we're heading for anyway. The solution to global monoculture is rapid cultural innovation -- inventing new cultural artefacts faster than they can diffuse across the world.
Monoculture won't happen until everyone speaks the same first language, which is not happening.
Food and action movies cross oceans easily, because they are not bound by language. Other forms of culture, not so much. For example, everyone finds jokes in their own language funnier than translated jokes. So comedy movies don't cross borders as easily as action movies. Poetry? It is not translatable at all. In France, Moliere is bigger than Shakespeare. In the UK, Shakespeare is bigger than Moliere. Will that ever change? I don't think so. Rap is also poetry, and even if the Chinese come up with their own rap, it will always be Chinese rap, and not the same thing as American rap, just like Moliere is not Shakespeare. The language barrier is immense.
I'm a little bit into metal, not enough I can say I'm a conoisseur, but just enough I can see national and continental pattern. For example, thrash metal and other genres derived from thrash are popular in the US, while power metal is popular here in Europe. There are many power metal bands that can fill arenas in Europe and Latin America, but hardly ever tour the US because nobody over there shows up for them. This state of things won't change anytime soon and probably ever. I don't think time is a factor. Power metal will never be as popular in the US as it is in Europe. American ears are just wired differently from European ears and I suspect it's because they grow up hearing a an American accent which has a specific musicality to it.
I also notice that different flavors of metal are typical of different European countries, even within power which is only one of the many genres of metal. If you have subtle ears you can try to guess which European country a band is from. I think that this is because everyone grows up hearing a different accent, therefore is drawn to different sounding music, and that is not changing.
Not to mention the fact that here in Italy, the masses mostly listen to Italian language pop, for the simple reason that people like to sing along, and can't do so in a foreign language!
I think that the language you grow up speaking affects you in countless ways. Combine that statement with the fact that human naturally segregate by language (this is the English language Internet; keep in mind every major language community has its own Internet, and obviously the offline world is even more divided by language) and I don't see how a monoculture is possible.
Very well argued. And you did well by staying without "as white as it comes" culture to drive home your point. If the argument of monoculture had any merit, it would have happened in central and western Europe centuries ago.
"within", not "without"
Are you for real? A mix between Chinese opera and rap sounds legitimately fun as hell and I'd love to hear that.
You may be in luck.
https://www.shine.cn/feature/art-culture/2304166636/
I was hoping someone would respond by posting something like this.
And then you can mix this rap opera with some throat-singing/electronics mixture. And human art and culture continues, as it always has. And no one has to give a fuck about race or the rules around it while we just enjoy ourselves and that silly new music gen-æ is making.
If popular enough, "Chinese rap opera" eventually becomes its own genre...
I don't know if it would have to be obscene or at the very least terrible art. Not sure that it would work well at all, but people have every right to try it, and these guys might actually be worth listening to.
I think a lot of complaints about cultural appropriation are about someone white taking a cultural product from a minority group, watering it down (making it less distinctive) and then mass producing it for a white audience.
My view is that as long as they don't pretend it's original and they signpost and credit the people they've copied from (and pay them if that's correct in IP terms), then that's fine.
The problem is that the history of cultural appropriation is full of people taking original creations from minority communities, giving them neither credit nor money, and then reproducing them in a way that waters down their distinctiveness. You can go listen to Pat Boone and Little Richard's versions of the same song and you can see why people are annoyed that the only one they had access to is Pat Boone (though, to be fair, Boone credited black songwriters and made sure they got paid. His many imitators, though, not so much).
Similarly if the only Italian food available is Olive Garden, or the only Mexican is Taco Bell.
But, in this much more connected world, as long as the cheaper, mass-produced mainstream version isn't pretending to be the real thing, who really cares? The real thing isn't hard to find any more (I mean, yes, there isn't decent Mexican food in Britain, but that's because there aren't any Mexicans here to cook it).
I think we ought to start to see the full-on prohibition on cultural appropriation as being path-dependent on a world with very limited media. That doesn't mean that lying is OK, of course, but if a white person wants to run a taco truck, why not? Just don't pretend to be Mexican or authentic. Just stick up the word "Fusion" and you're safe.
>My view is that as long as they don't pretend it's original and they signpost and credit the people they've copied from (and pay them if that's correct in IP terms), then that's fine.
Agreed.
The way I view it, cultural appropriation is two abstraction levels away from theft, and one abstraction level away from copyright infringement. It essentially inherits the cultural meaning of sampling and remixing (in the maximally-extended sense), with all of their benefits and pitfalls, but without clearly definable and enforceable borders.
Cultural appropriation is basically the name given to a failure mode of one of the main tenets of a liberal society. It's contentious because arguments for and against it can be interpreted* as arguments in favor of the failure mode and against liberal society respectively.
* the lack of "mis-" is intentional.
>there isn't decent Mexican food in Britain
I really liked a restaurant called Foreign Muck in Cornwall. But I have never been to Mexico so I can't judge it on that metric.
It's not just silly. It's simply racism plain and simple.
My pet theory is that some people want to be racist but have to suppress that urge due to their social peer group not accepting it. "Cultural appropriation" gives them a somewhat socially accepted way of living their racist tendencies without having to openly admit their racism. I'd even argue that the hatred for racism is internalized so much, that people doing it don't even realize it ...
I read posts like this and laugh, thinking with half of my brain that it must be satire. "Surely Scott understands perfectly well what's going on. Surely he isn't actually puzzled and asking these questions sincerely." Then the other half of my brain kicks in.
The chief driver of race discourse in the U.S. is the social and political advantage of particular groups (tendentiously called "disadvantaged.") There is little interest in descriptive accuracy or logical consistency in that discourse, because such would not serve said advantage. Simple as.
One can talk about genetic factors or whatever, but that only irritates people because it impedes the purpose of the exercise.
I mean, some *are* disadvantaged. You get to East and South Asians and Jews and it starts getting blurrier.
It gets a little sillier when excessively left-wing Jewish people complain about non-Jewish actors playing Jewish people. Like, come on, people, we own the industry, enough already. I think they realize they're slipping down the intersectionality stack and don't like it.
It is so beside the point to begin litigating who is or is not disadvantaged, as if that has any relevance to the question Scott was raising about the groupings.
The point is that the discourse serves a purpose (I didn't say a *good* purpose) that explains perfectly well why there is little interest in descriptive accuracy or logical consistency.
I mean, it affects whether most people accept the thing is bad.
I don't think I really disagree with you on much else here.
Accept what "thing?" The logical contradictions Scott is pointing out?
The appropriation, I mean.
> that explains perfectly well
Sir: are you forgetting to aspire?
They're not systematically disadvantaged as they so desperately claim. Black Americans are extraordinarily privileged. No other group in history could expect to behave the way they do while enjoying such an objectively high standard of living. Their disadvantage is primarily genetic, but nothing would ever convince them of this.
> Their disadvantage is primarily genetic, but nothing would ever convince them of this
I think a good case can be made that it's primarily cultural.
Agreed: for many reasons people do not want to discuss the idea that some cultures are poorly adapted to their environment in the same way that camels are poorly adapted to the Siberian taiga. There is also the idea of cultural "authenticity", which elides the fact that every culture has aspects that work well for it and others that work poorly for it.
Isn't Jewish control of the industry on its way out because of diversity initiatives? Overlap between disadvantaged groups and Jews is low, so if you have to be disadvantaged to do well, Jews don't get to keep joining.
Well, the good news is that they have their own ethnostate now.
>good news
Not for Palestinians, it's not
Maybe they should have accepted one of the many peace offers they walked away from, then.
This is where the fad for epigenetic transmission of ancestral trauma pays off. There is no limit to how far into the future the Holocaust counts as a disadvantage.
But if you accept that “the Holocaust” can’t be used to justify Israel’s indifference to Palestinian casualties, then you have to accept that “slavery” equally can’t be used to justify violent crime and gangs in Black communities. There’s a reason Israel/Palestine is the issue tearing the left apart right now.
> But if you accept that “the Holocaust” can’t be used to justify Israel’s indifference to Palestinian casualties
I thought that's what the justification was supposed to be?
Yeah. I’m saying that doesn’t work, but neither does DEI because “slavery”
No, the justification is the continuous, shockingly brutal terror attacks from Palestine.
Who is using that to justify this alleged indifference?
Yeah, 100% agree, there are numerous, serious philosophical and scientific problems with "wokeism" that the left likes to paper over because it doesn't serve their narrative. For example, the concept that race is immutable but gender is mutable - this is a really fascinating concept! After all there are many, many more people out there of mixed race than there are of mixed gender.
Anyway, my point is: Why can't we all just respect Elizabeth Hoover's transition? Stand up against bullies who mis-racialise.
I was thinking that exact point while I was reading the article but forgot to make it in the comments.
Yes. Agree, and I find that footnote 2 'rhymes' with this observation. Where is the tolerance in the US these days?
You believe all of these people to be faking, that they're all consciously involved in some sort of a conspiracy?
No, I believe that it is very easy for people to sincerely convince themselves of perspectives that serve their own advantage, whether materially or psychologically.
What is the end result of "convincing"?
And take your take here: do you too not believe the things that you believe on this matter?
The end result is the configuration of social tendencies that Scott finds so puzzling due to their internal incoherence.
I didn't say that everyone engages in this pattern of belief formation. I said that it is very easy to do so.
> The end result is the configuration of social tendencies that Scott finds so puzzling due to their internal incoherence.
And within this complex space, do we find the phenomenon of *belief* anywhere?
> I didn't say that everyone engages in this pattern of belief formation. I said that it is very easy to do so.
I agree, thus I made no claim that you did, but I'm not sure what the relevance is.
I find myself reminded strongly of an argument Coleman Hughes made in "The End of Race Politics." Hughes claims that most people who say they believe that race is a social construct are lying or self-deceived. If they really believed that race was a social construct then they would take it less seriously, not more. Most "woke" types treat race with deadly seriousness, which indicates that they are actually extreme racial essentialists. (I've heard a similar argument made about TERFs, they claim to believe that gender is a social construct, but they act like extreme gender essentialists who believe that men have evil essences).
This also has given me a new perspective on a conversation I've had before with other people about the race of various alien characters. Under the "lived experience" view, Superman would be white, even though he is a space alien, because he has grown up raised by white people and is perceived as white by most people he knows. The Martian Manhunter, a shapeshifting superhero who has taken various human forms over the years, would vary based on continuity. In the "Supergirl" TV series he has spent many years in a civilian identity in the form of an African American man, Hank Henshaw, so you could argue that he is black in that continuity. In the Post Crisis DC comic universe by contrast, he has created the identity of a white private detective named John Jones, so I suppose he might be considered white after living on Earth for a long time. In the "Justice League" cartoon, where he has no secret identity, he is not any human race at all (although he might eventually be considered Asian since he assumes the identity of a Chinese man near the end of the series).
People who say "X is a social construct" don't necessarily think that social constructs are weak phenomena that can be easily changed. On the contrary, they think social constructs are the strongest fabrics of social realities, and the principal defining aspects of a person's social and political standing. In that sense, it doesn't matter if they're arbitrary and contingent inventions, they're still supremely consequential.
They're not being hypocritical by saying "this is made up" and then treating it as essential in a political context - that's what strategic essentialism is, and there are strong arguments that beliefs about essentialness are self-fulfilling, which cuts both ways. Where this school of thought is weakest is in imagining and proposing alternatives, or theories of social change, which we know is possible, but treated as an afterthought compared to critiquing the status quo.
I think there’s a motte and bailey going on. When people say, “X is socially constructed” they mean to imply that it’s culturally malleable and to undermine the reality of X. Of course, when you push back by saying, “and how exactly would you socially construct X” they retreat and say “social construction doesn’t necessarily imply malleability”
Sure, but then *everyone* is in on the Motte and Bailey game, including Rationalists, scientists, etc. This planet is a gong show.
>(I've heard a similar argument made about TERFs, they claim to believe that gender is a social construct, but they act like extreme gender essentialists who believe that men have evil essences).
I think this is likely true of a lot of TERFs. But there's been a widespread move to paint TERFs as a sort of aberrant offshoot of feminist ideology, when the reality is that TERFs are more like the mainline of feminist ideology that non-TERF feminists branched off from. That is, most of the philosophical framework of feminism was actually developed around ideas of gender non-essentialism, and gender being built around socialized experiences. Earlier waves of feminists may or may not have wanted an excuse to malign or discount trans people, but the academic framework that they built definitely lent itself to that. Non-TERF feminists have rejected the conclusion that trans people are dishonest or blameworthy, so by extension, they reject the notion that gender is a purely socialized phenomenon, but by and large they haven't grappled with the fact that this more or less one of the foundational assumptions of the philosophical framework they've inherited.
I also think this is something of a straw man of their position. I would say that they aren't big fans of gender roles at all, but do consider biological sex important. Abolition of gender roles has long been a radfem idea ... but they do still want the option of having separate spaces for females (among other things).
"President of the United States" is a social construct. Doesn't mean it's unimportant.
Yeah, but if someone has greater awareness of different ways other countries construct their governments, they will likely treat the office more practically and with a bit less reverence.
I don't think I've ever heard a TERF asser that "gender is a social construct" (and I know plenty of TERFs). I think literally every person I've heard express that slogan uncritically endorsed gender ideology as generally understood.
"...I've heard a similar argument made about TERFs, they claim to believe that gender is a social construct, but they act like extreme gender essentialists who believe that men have evil essences..."
They believe the gender is a social construct, but sex isn't. Confusing the two things is what causes all the problems with gender ideology. TERFs are sex essentiallists, and that's a fairly strong position to hold.
That second paragraph felt like a plot twist hahaha.
Terfs (hi) believe sex is a biological reality, that "woman" is a term to refer to humans of the female sex, and that "gender" aka the magical feeling of being a woman despite having a y chromosome in every cell of your body, is a "social construct". They also believe women are oppressed based on sex. Marxist radical feminism literally talks about how men try to control the means of reproduction, which no trans identified male has.
And yes they also believe that biological sex includes actual differences, like men being stronger, more aggressive, and more sexually and physically coercive and violent. They think denying this endangers women.
It looks like she's receiving harsh treatment not because of an innocent mistake about ancestry, but because she was found to have concealed the truth for some time, and in doing so misrepresented herself in a fashion she ought to have known would engender outrage among that community. I think you might be underrating how much that perceived breach of trust, as a social matter, transforms her story from what might have been dealt with as good faith mistake, into a story of bad faith deception, rendering her untrustworthy, and anathema based on the violation of taboo.
Clearly the people in favor of shunning her are choosing to take an uncharitable view of the circumstances, but that may be the appropriate stance if their priority is to avoid weaking the taboo.
I think it's a fair point that her own dishonesty casts her in a significantly different light than if she'd admitted to the revelation of her ancestry as soon as she found out. But, if her social standing and career actually depended on other people acknowledging her as Native American, and she would no longer have been acknowledged as such if she admitted that she lacked native ancestry, even if she wouldn't have been ostracized to the same degree, I think that many of her detractors would probably have done the same thing in her place.
Sure, she was dishonest...but this presumes an objective standard of race to be dishonest about! That's the whole point - if race is just lived experience, then it's absolutely incoherent to say she was dishonest about her race because of where her genes are from. You can't have things both ways.
I think Scott's piece nicely demonstrates that there isn't one consistent standard that's universally applicable - each group has its own "rules". So, inconsistency across groups is normal - it's internal contradictions within a group's own set of rules that ought to raise questions.
> Sure, she was dishonest...but this presumes an objective standard of race to be dishonest about!
No it doesn't, because the allegation isn't simply that she falsely identified as Native American, but that she lied and/or intentionally misled people about her ancestry. The former involves presuppositions about what race means, but the latter doesn't.
She got nuked from orbit when the truth came out, and “not having blood ties” was a big part of it. This was predictable, so really she can hardly be faulted for trying to prevent it.
When you have a true crisis of faith, the easiest path forward for the time-being is inertia. most normies will never understand this because they're not introspective enough to have ever recognized a buddha on the road.
This is a brave post, given that it seems bound to attract both scorn from the Hoover-vilifying crowd *and* uncomfortable snide comments from people who care entirely too much about race science. You deserve credit for writing it honestly and earnestly.
>snide comments from people who care entirely too much about race science.
yeah, gee, I mean, it's not as if RACE is one of if not the single biggest politico-cultural issue of the modern era that influences the actions and policies of every major institution in the country. I just simply don't understand why anyone would care so much?
Now, if you excuse me, I have to drop my kids off at school to be taught they they have white privilege.
"Race science", I said; not "race". Evidently, whichever side or awkward middle-of-the-aisle one occupies, "race" as a political issue is worth thinking about; nobody sane would or does deny *that*, least of all the woke crowd, who, as you unsubtly complain, do make quite a big deal out of race to say the least. I was instead referring to the crankier side of the HBD crowd — people who'd zero in on Scott's forays into the DNA side of the question and deliver treatises on how that's what it's Really All About.
There is, I've observed, a pattern in Scott's comment section where he'll contradict the 'woke party line' on some issue in a measured, moderate way, and the most extreme right-wing contingent will pop up with, basically, their best impression of the Dark Lord trying to tempt the wavering hero further into the dark side, delivered in a kind of unpleasant patronising tone. "Ah, I see Scott is finally starting to understand that [etc.] — took long enough…".
I will be surprised (though happy for him) if we get none of that today; such comments achieve nothing save make cancel mobs' points for them that the mildest acnowledgement that maybe Hoover doesn't deserve lifelong scorn is a slippery slope to actual Nazism.
...You're talking to one right now. Look at their other comments.
Well, yes. I considered answering with simply "Thank you for proving my point"… But I thought an actual explanation would be more in keeping with the discourse rules that this comment section is *meant* to uphold, albeit more for the benefit of other readers than of the person being replied to.
> "Ah, I see Scott is finally starting to understand that [etc.] — took long enough…".
to quote scott himself "HBD is probably partially correct or at least very non-provably not-correct." https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/2021/02/backstabber-brennan-knifes-scott-alexander-with-2014-email/
Well, yes. I said "the crankier side of the HBD crowd", which is to say that I believe that there is also a non-cranky (or at any rate significantly less cranky) side, Scott is on it, and that's another, broader example of the pattern of "Scott expresses partial disagreement with the politically-correct party-line, extremist cranks assume that means he's this close to agreeing with them".
okay yeah that's true. would say they are more cranks than cranky. evaporative cooling and all.
It's funny how many people who read him don't realize SA is an HBD lib. Have you read his Kolmogorov and the Lightning piece? What did you think it was about (hint: it's his own race science beliefs). I don't think it's possible to have the sort of autistic truth-seeking decoupling personality that you'd expect to be overrepresented in rationalists and post-rats without being at the very least unsure of HBD/"race science" being true.
I think a lot of people here, myself included, have the critical thinking skills required to not blindly trust the consensus position, the dominance of which is clearly fuelled by motivated reasoning, but are very leery of both HBD as a movement (because it's overwhelmingly dominated by equally-or-more motivated racists looking for an excuse) or attempts to steer any conversation in its direction (because it's an in for the aforementioned racists, has a near-zero chance of yielding any constructive fruits, and is also terrible optics). Scott has a large body of work demonstrating that he is (at least in general) a thoughtful, pro-human and open-minded person. In this context I have to read his support of HBD as him being (perhaps to some extent unwittingly) one of the 'three principled libertarians among seven zillion witches', to use the dynamic he himself described when discussing anti-censorship enclaves more broadly.
"because it's overwhelmingly dominated by equally-or-more motivated racists looking for an excuse"
I think that depends on what you mean by "dominated". Most of the prominent spokespeople that I can think of - off the top of my head, Charles Murray, Emil Kirkegaard, Bo Winegard, Nathan Cofnas, Noah Carl come to mind - do not seem to be motivated by looking for an excuse to harm people of other races. I'd throw Steve Sailer in there too, on the strength of everything I've actually read of his works, though the fact that he blogs at Unz alongside a bunch of people who do seem more likely to fit the category of racists looking for an excuse is kinda bad optics - I guess a paid gig is a paid gig, and people are going to call him a Nazi no matter who he shares column inches with.
Numerically, sure, it wouldn't surprise me if the "racists looking for an excuse" types outnumbered the "stats nerds who drew a radioactive ticket in the lotter of fascinations" among the broader HBD fandom. But I don't get the impression that they actually dominate the intellectual elite of the movement.
If you'll read my message again, I said "the crankier side of the HBD crowd", which is to say that I believe that there is also a non-cranky (or at any rate significantly less cranky) side, Scott is on it, this doesn't especially decrease my opinion of him, but neither does it significantly increase my opinion of the cranks.
True, though we're not going to get the real leftist counter-argument as they rarely come here.
I used to read Sneer Club on reddit in part for this reason.
Well, now, I didn't say the scorn would definitely be within this comment section. Could just happen on Twitter or whatever. (I'm one of the standard-bearers for leftism around here, when I bother to comment, but *not* of the crowd inclined to vilify Hoover with maximum severity, so not particularly in a position to offer a counter-argument given I largely agree. I could quibble about the blanket yay-cultural-appropriation bit, or reheat arguments about the meaningfulness of the DNA clusters, but none of this is particularly relevant to the main point.)
'honestly and earnestly' seems a stretch... it reads fairly snide to me.
I think this is a mistake — from what I've seen of Scott, I think, right or wrong (and do not mistake my post for an endorsement all his conclusions), this reads to me as him giving a genuine account of his thought process on a thorny issue, without obfuscation or editorialising.
But there is a certain amount of careful editing and presentation, which I think obscure his thought process. To be critical, he's not saying everything he thinks, and so it's hard to tell if he knew his answer before he started coming up with his arguments. (There's something in the rationalist sequences about this, something about writing the answer on the bottom of the page before listing your arguments for the answer.)
Specifically, there's one of those "dog in the night" effects, where the strings "sex", "gender", and "trans" never appear in the text of his post. And to be clear, I do pretty much agree with his conclusions here. But if I were going to be as uncharitable as possible for me, it's that he already views race-essentialists as his outgroup, so it's not even "tossing them under the bus" in order to buttress a future argument against sex-essentialists.
It had honestly not occurred to me that anyone would read the post as a proxy/prelude to a discussion about gender stuff. Of course, the same kind of logic *can be applied* (in any direction) to gender stuff. But discussions of the genetic basis of race (!!) seem to be one of the few things that are no less fraught and controversial than gender stuff; so it doesn't really make sense to me that you'd use one *just* to talk about the other, as some kind of attempt to dodge out of controversy!
(Also, one of the things which complicate this conversation for Scott is that, as discussed elsewhere in this threat, he's entirely more sympathetic to the "races are genetically real and important" than progressive consensus would want him to be. Or that I would want him to be, honestly. It's less than trivial that he would view race-essentialism as his outgroup in the general case, even though he thinks it leads to bad community norms in cases like Hoover's. Articulating this complexity, without performatively denying his cautious belief in HBD stuff *or* letting it cloud his judgement, is precisely the intellectual effort I was praising him for.)
(To be clear, that was just an example of being uncharitable. I think it's a completely valid choice to look at a chain of logic, decide that it's too big and too controversial to fit into a single post, and thus to break up parts of it into independent pieces. It can also be a useful tool to approach a tricky subject rationally - if we take one isolated example, or one class of examples, and figure out what the dynamics are in that example, then we can try to apply the same logic to the dynamics of a different situation. It's the start of the old "compare and contrast" routine, where we list the ways that two situations are similar and are different, and see whether the sum total weighs in favor of similar conclusions or different conclusions.)
Using Jews as the "good" example here (for several meanings of "good") is a bit insane.
1. Exposing other people (who observe some form of Judaism or consider themselves culturally Jewish - whatever that means by now - or have close family members who suffered from antisemitism, or have suffered from it themselves in some fashion) as fake Jews because of their lack of maternal Jewish ancestry is, at least, *a* Jewish national sport, to about the same extent that football (aka soccer) is the national sport of Mexico. It's probably more popular than an earnest belief in God; you don't need to believe in God deep down to believe that He set down the true rule on who is a Jew (or that he gave the land of Israel to the Jews, etc.).
This actually shows that AA or land rights are something of a distraction; people will engage in this sort of behavior even if the reward in keeping others from the group because of who their parents were is purely psychological.
2. There has been a growing divergence between different "Jewish clouds" since at least the end of the 19th century. The number of people that would be at least somewhat Jewish according to hard-core antisemites (or if they got a Nobel Prize) is probably about thrice the number that are counted as part of the "core population" of Jews in population surveys. In the US, isn't that core population again about twice the number of people who are actually affiliated with a synagogue, say? (These are old proportions; they may have increased.)
3. Even more to the point, the different meanings of "Jew" really do correspond to different ways of seeing oneself and existing in the world. That is true even for a single meaning: a hundred years ago, "culturally Jewish" meant being engaged in Yiddish literature or theatre, say; nowadays, it seems to mean next to nothing, just a "next to nothing" that, however easily learned (a few phrases picked from The Joy of Yiddish, say), only some people, having the right ancestry, can indulge in (but most don't).
Huh, 1 isn't my experience at all. My experience is the opposite - "Look, King so-and-so had an ancestor five generations back with a vaguely Jewish name, that means the king was Jewish! Let's add him to the list of famous Jews alongside Einstein and Freud!"
Right: there is a different, informal rule for the very famous - at least when it comes to making Lists of Jews (especially on Wikipedia); I don't think that it would carry over to daily life.
All I can say is that in my experience in the Jewish community it is very welcoming to outsiders. Perhaps it’s different in Israel in certain segments of the ultra-Orthodox, but I think this is the rule in most places
Again, 1. this is a common mistake: attitudes in the periphery are not the beliefs of the core, and what gets commonly imputed to "ultra-Orthodoxy" is common not just to Orthodoxy (the default, or often only, variety of Judaism in most countries, Israel included) but to all those who take Orthodoxy as their reference, without belief or the hard work involved; 2. the issue here is not really attitudes towards strangers (who do not claim to be anything other than strangers), but "who is a stranger?".
Are you Jewish?
I mean you’re making extremely bold claims about Jewish culture and community.
I don’t really want to get drawn into these claims, I only note that in my lived experience within the Jewish community it does not conform to your stereotypes.
Peace!
This is my experience too. Jewish pride as “the chosen people” (whatever that means) is closely linked to their statistical over representation in Nobel Prize winners etc. And like any religion, the Jewish faith is inclusive - if you want to be a Jew, great! Welcome!
> “the chosen people” (whatever that means)
I have a fun theory: they are the most powerful meme, and if humanity can find a way to overcome it, we may be able to finally realize something like Heaven on Earth.
As a bit of releavent anecdotal experience. I’m 1/4 Jew (24.9% 23andme). When I joked about having become a Jew after getting my israeli passport, a proper Jew friend from a good family in the US laughed and corrected me: “israeli, not jew”. So on your hypersphere this definitely doesn’t seem to be enough. I myself definitely don’t consider myself a proper Jew. I’m thinking of myself as “Jew-ish” haha.
PS: Thanks for the insightful article, you are my favorite author these days. Your story about prime numbers in a dmt trip made me found a very interesting meditation advice in the comments section a couple days ago (a link to selfdefinition).
As to #1, the idea that only a Jewish mother could make you Jewish ended with the Nuremberg Laws. Once the Nazis decided that 1/4th Jewish ancestry would make you no longer fully German, most Jews decided to adopt the same standard. As I heard it said growing up, "if you're Jewish enough for the Nazis, you're Jewish enough for me."
If you look at the State of Israel, they allow Jews to make aliyah on the same terms. 1/4th Jewish ancestry, either side of your family.
It's a perfect example for how race/religion are socially constructed.
Would you really say that some sizeable fraction of the people in Auschwitz wearing yellow stars weren't *really* Jewish?
>As to #1, the idea that only a Jewish mother could make you Jewish ended with the >Nuremberg Laws.
Would have been nice, but...
>Once the Nazis decided that 1/4th Jewish ancestry would make you no longer fully >German, most Jews decided to adopt the same standard. As I heard it said growing up, >"if you're Jewish enough for the Nazis, you're Jewish enough for me."
Then you came from a very nice family that gave you a deficient Jewish education (note: a good Reform education counts by definition as an extremely deficient Jewish education according to Conservative and Orthodox standards). Let's not confuse "most Jews" with "most Jews who are my friends and who think like me".
>Would you really say that some sizeable fraction of the people in Auschwitz wearing >yellow stars weren't *really* Jewish?
*I* wouldn't say that, but, for many people who put their Jewish affiliations up and forefront, it's one of their all-time favorite things to say - "Hitler is not my halakhic authority" or words to that effect. Actually, I just did a search and, to my partial surprise, one of the first hits was that a *Reform* rabbi saying exactly that:
https://merrimackvalleyhavurah.wordpress.com/2019/01/03/hitler-is-not-my-halakhic-authority/
As for the state of Israel, you can currently emigrate with 1/4th Jewish ancestry, but you will be classified as a non-Jew on your official documents. The permission to emigrate is just immigration law, and Israeli politicians have tried to forbid such people from immigrate several times (religious Israelis feel strongly about it, and secular people either agree or don't care, unless they are Russian or perhaps Polish). That can change at any moment - it's not (to the extent that this can be said in a system without a written constitution) constitutionally protected, as Jews' right to immigrate is. See, e.g.,
https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/the-3-myths-behind-opposing-the-grandparent-clause-reform/
My definition of Judaism is the same that the State of Israel uses. If you want to say that the State of Israel doesn't know who or isn't Jewish, fair enough. Scotland, after all, has no true Scotsmen.
Regardless, I hope we can agree that the most impactful definition of Jewishness - from a practical standpoint of dollars and cents - is the definition for immigration to Israel.
If I'm not religious enough for an Orthodox rabbi, then I can go to a different shul. Not like that makes a huge financial difference.
But the difference between immigrating to Israel or remaining, say, in Yemen, Iraq or Syria? Incalculable.
And it's inarguable that the definition of Jewishness employed by the State of Israel is based, not on Halakha, but instead on the Nuremberg Laws. Showing *ta da* the social construction of Jewish identity.
QED.
Look, I don't want to start a fight on what other people (not you or me) believe, or engage in a recreation of the Parrot Sketch. But no, the definition of the State of Israel is completely unambiguous: it is the traditional, matrilineal definition (with a caveat: a convert to another religion cannot avail himself of the Law of Return, whereas, for Orthodoxy, that person is still a Jew, just an extremely bad one that one should sit shiva for). This has been the case since at least Golda Meir's times. (Well, it was still the case before, but she made it unambiguous, by leaving it to a committee of Rabbis, knowing perfectly well what they would say.)
I don't doubt your good faith, in part because this is a common misconception (in the US, not elsewhere). The Law of Return does not imply that non-Jews (according the traditional definition) are Jews: it just implies that the Gentile grandchild of a Jew can immigrate, just like the Gentile spouse of a Jew can immigrate. Of course that can change at any moment (and in fact it almost did a few months ago - an Israeli Facebook friend was very upset about this, having married out of the group); it is only Jews who have a constitutional right to immigrate to Israel.
At any rate, *of course* Jewish identity is socially constructed, as is what other people find meaningful.
Bonus track, or rather homework, if you speak German: people arguing (in mainstream secular publications, sometimes with an academic imprimatur) that it is obscene for Gentile children of Jews to claim to be Jews in Germany, *because* Nürnberg (as in, "how dare they, in the country of the Nuremberg laws, to claim..."). What the logic there is, I cannot tell, but maybe you can figure it out.
Alright, so I'll concede the semantic argument. Those who are grandchildren of Jews on their father's side are not Jewish.
Would you agree that they belong to a class of people entitled "close enough to Jews to be treated similarly to Jews, rather than as non-Jews". That category is what the Law of Return and Nuremberg laws share in common. Of course, that category could change at any moment, showing how social definitions of this category - which I will scrupulously avoid calling Judaism, but we might instead call "proximity to Judaism", are malleable.
In the same way, the American South used to use the one-drop rule for assessing whether a person was White or Black. If a Black person with mixed ancestry moved from the American South to Brazil, they'd find that the Brazilians used a completely different system to determine race. They even had a racial categorization (Mixed race or Pardo) that the United States lacked.
If they moved to Malaysia, they'd find that the racial categorizations change again. To "Malay", "Chinese", "Indian" and "Other". That means that the Jews of Israel and the Blacks of Brazil would check the same box on the census in Malaysia.
Meanwhile, the Malay, Chinese and Indians all check the "Asian" box on the census in America.
These categories change as you move around and as time passes. They aren't written on the back of the Ten Commandments or anything.
I completely agree, but the point is that no Orthodox Jew, and no person in vague proximity of Orthodoxy (including most Israelis) agrees: they see the definition as set in stone. A friend of mine who moved to Israel and served in its army was not treated similarly to Jews by plenty of people, though admittedly he was treated similarly in the sense that he was drafted. See also some of the links I gave: a grandchild of a Jew who identifies as a Jew will be explicitly compared in mainstream German media to outright frauds; leaders of the mainstream local Jewish community encourage this, and people outside it are delighted to follow and add to it with glee (why exactly, well, I have a conjecture).
My understanding is that the allowance for intermediate categories is something that existed in an informal sort of way before Nuremberg (you can find "mishling" in Yiddish dictionaries) but it's something that very many Jews strenously deny: if you and I had a dollar for every time that someone has said "there's no such thing as a half-Jew", we wouldn't just be millionaires, we'd be really, really rich.
Not sure how we got here...
That is not actually the definition the state of Israel uses.
While you are correct that people with a Jewish grand parent are allowed to emigrate to Israel under the law of return, they can not be designated as Jewish on their government issues ID unless they have a Jewish mother.
This also means that such people can not legally get married in Israel because Israeli only recognizes religious marriages and these people are officially considered to have no religion.
I presume that the people who are vilifying Hoover would claim that either she factually was insufficiently careful about verifying she was native American or, like strict liability crimes like sex with a minor, truly justified epistemic error is sufficiently rare and falsely claimed error common enough that it makes sense to punish people simply for being wrong.
I think this approach is wrong and it's implicitly saying: people who look white need to reach a higher level of proof before making these claims but it's at least worth steelmaning.
>verifying she was native American
This assumes race is genetic! That's the whole point
If you claim, as many on the left do, that genes have nothing to do with race, then it's absolutely incoherent to claim that she actually "isn't" native american. If "lived experience" is what makes race, then she's necessarily more "native american" than many people with bona fide native ancestry.
That's not what they claim. What they claim if you pushed them is that the way genes map to races is determined by social facts not scientific ones -- ie it's not the best (or even highly) way to divide genetic space for thr purpose of scientific explanation .
They then try to use this to argue that somehow this means that therefore race can't explain phenotypic differences by reference to genetics but that's fallacious.
A world in which Ms Hoover got no advantages from thinking she was native, she'd have decided to 'pass' as white. She had a mirror. She knew she wasn't supposed to be very -much- native, but it was more fun for her to pretend. Meanwhile, I'm 100% western european and have to carefully mouth shibboleths about cultural appropriation in order to speak in public about some of my interests, (which you might call applied anthropology). I was told growing up that I was a very small amount mohawk. My hair and eyes are darker than Ms Hoover's, and for one long moment while applying for college I thought about checking a different box. But I did what I regard as the honorable thing. She took the easy path, and is now paying the price.
The easy path of not being discriminated against because of her race, got it.
So, I feel like the stories we read about are people like Ms. Hoover who derived at least some career benefit from being pretendians, but for each of these there's like thousands of people who take intense pride in being maybe microscopically Native without any tangible advantage. I think for the vast majority of these people (and probably at least initially for Ms Hoover) the advantage is that people really want to be part of some culture or tradition beyond "American". I don't blame them really. Pride in being American isn't cool, and if you are too deracinated to glom onto a concrete ethnic identity (like Irish or Norwegian) this is one way to go. Not sure what the solution is.
I blame them. Imagine being so shallow as to base your identity and self-worth on ancestry.
Poor kids these days get it shoved down their throats so hard though that it's hard _not_ to. My kid started kindergarten a few weeks ago and one of the first things they did was make every kid discuss their "identity" in terms of what countries they or their ancestors came from.
"Tangible" is doing the heavy lifting, here. There are clear social advantages to being nonwhite in some circles -- not coincidentally the circles in which we find white folk making a big deal of being 'one eighth cherokee'.
A decision theory counterargument: ideally, you want your system of justice to ban people from profiting from doing bad things.
Now, if you accept the narrative that white people robbed the indians of their land and did various bad things to them, then indians aren't just a different group, they're one that was actively victimized by white people, which means white people shouldn't be allowed to benefit from it. Now clearly you can't just kick out all the white people to give indians back their land (whatever fringe leftists may want), but you can have various social status or AA benefits going to native Americans to sorta compensate. Let's assume those make it roughly even.
if the white people who stole the indian's lands knew their great grandkids would have to owe reparations, maybe they wouldn't have taken the land. But in a world where some of their great grandkids just end up claiming to be indians and get those benefits themselves, they don't worry about it.
So the implication here is that it's wrong to claim to be a race (a set of people claiming continuous identity through generations) if the earlier generations wouldn't have claimed you, especially if their ancestral enemies would have.
I think this model of race is consistent and some people go by it. I don't actually think it's a good idea though, since even if you accept the premiselst people just don't think about the effects on their great grandkids when making plans. But that's a general argument for statutes of limitations on cultural grievances.
Interesting! So under this model, we aren't trying to incentivize certain behaviors from Ms. Hoover herself, but rather from her ancestors?
I'm trying to construct an analogy that uses individuals instead of groups. Suppose Alice robs Beth, and doesn't get caught (at first). When Alice dies, the money is split between her kids. Later on, the robbery is solved. Normally you'd take the money back from Alice and return it to Beth, but Alice and Beth are both dead, so in order to do this you have to "rewind" Alice's inheritance (take the money from her kids that she shouldn't have been able to give them) and then "replay" Beth's inheritance (give Beth's kids the money that would have been part of the inheritance if it hadn't been stolen). Claiming false ancestry to try to get a more advantageous position in this transaction would be wrong.
Close?
I think that, legally, it would matter whether you claimed false ancestry with the *goal* of manipulating the reparations or for some unrelated reason (i.e. what is your mens rea). Also you need to apply a LOT of fuzzy logic to decide that affirmative action is the same as returning stolen money, especially when not every single white ancestor was a thief and not every single nonwhite ancestor was a victim and many people are descended from both. But I guess I can kind of see the shape of this logic.
Yeah I think that's right. I think the model of beth stealing for her kids vs white people stealing from indians also has the assumption that "race" as a group is continuous - that it's the component of Beth's identity that lasts across generations. So "race x steals from race y" would have an older statute of limitations than "person x steals from person y", because races keep up grievances longer (Jews are still upset over Egyptian slavery).
Is this true?? I know we talk about it at Passover but it seems to me of the same tenor as “Christians are still mad at Pontius Pilate.” I have no strong feelings about el-Sisi
I don't think it's really true in practice, but then I also don't think most American Indians are very upset over the woman in this article. There's probably some hardcore religious people who are though.
Unfortunately for that theory it also incentivizes voting for people who promise to get rid of AA and shutdown the idea of any sort of reparations.
> “When people talk about the “planet of cops”, they mean that people import some the norms of law - zero tolerance, inability to consider extenuating circumstances, social unity in enforcing brutal punishments - into the sphere of morality”
One of the issues I have about the current culture (planet of cops / cancel culture / whatever) is precisely that it *doesn’t* import an important norm of law: the concept of mens rea has been jettisoned.
Arguably, this culture is far less likely to consider intent or extenuating circumstances than the average court.
We could keep the concepts "cultural X" and "ethnic (biological) X" more separate in our minds - there's a lot of overlap between the two, but we don't have to lump them together into some kind of "*really* X".
Maybe “identity” is not that useful of a concept.
Identity is important otherwise people wouldn't kill over it. Identity politics being stupid has other things like legalistic definitions (either "one drop", o committys, or dna test; all shit) on something fractal; dei; affirmative action; racism effecting practical and objective considerations; etc.
I think maybe it is important for power politics, but I’m not so sure it’s good for individuals.
I have a deeply complicated relationship with my childhood cult; man has a god shaped hole in his heart that doesn't make god real or any of the cultural behaviors someone may pick up rational but that hole needs to be filled (and theres nothing more irrational then modern person who doesn't realize they filled it with science or something else vapid)
Woke/racist identities airnt bad because they are identities; but because they are unstable and shallow
Was it Chesterton who said if men don't believe in God they don't believe in nothing, they believe in anything?
I think one of the problems we have grappling with this here is most rationalists (or rat-adjacent people like me) have relatively weak religious impulses. You tell us there's no God, we're like, 'Cool'. But normies go looking for something else to believe in. The similarities between social justice ideology and Christianity (sacred victimhood, confession, ritual submission) have been commented on by others.
> Was it Chesterton who said if men don't believe in God they don't believe in nothing, they believe in anything?
That more extreme then what im claiming here, you could fill the god shaped hole with "america", "democracy", "science"; while I have negative opinions about such things its fairly workable; a nationality will happily give you a moral debate framework(legal/illegal, political parties) and songs and symbols for handling crisises
> I think one of the problems we have grappling with this here is most rationalists (or rat-adjacent people like me) have relatively weak religious impulses.
Rationality(in circles were you can assume lesswrong in invoked) is also an identity; including a dooms day myths and moral system.
> But normies go looking for something else to believe in.
Just the opposite the normies had god's to spare; several sports ball teams, holidays, maybe 2 ethenicities, 3 nationality's.
I guess you're right. I'm only rat-adjacent and don't believe in paperclip maximizers or EA.
I don't think it's impossible to believe in nothing. I'm pretty sure I don't believe in anything. The hole is very much empty.
are you claiming to have a stable identity at the same time?
No.
>man has a god shaped hole in his heart that doesn't make god real
Well, by definition, nothing that is not God can "make" God real. But the God-shaped hole is certainly *evidence* that God is real. Explaining bee behaviour as the product of an evolved instinct to search for flowers wouldn't be plausible if flowers didn't actually exist.
it's bad for an individual insofar as they don't reap the economies of scale of a loyalty to a brand.
Adjacent to the specific content in this post, I am frustrated that, years into widespread obsession with race and gender, it seems we still haven't had any constructive discourse on establishing norms for these issues.
I genuinely wish I had a better framework to understand what the appropriate norms should be on meta-questions like treating all people the same vs when to provide specific accommodation; when it's okay or problematic for there to be demographic discrepancies in various environments; when something that is notionally neutral is actually inequitable and warrants intervention etc.
It was surreal for me, developing questions about gender in 2019/2020 and watching as race was treated as an inviolable, objective fact, while gender (read: sex) was suddenly treated as purely fluid and subjective.
That's a very interesting and original point.
Hoping you’re not being facetious, because it certainly seemed wild to me at the time and ever since.
The case for sex being immutable and objectively, materially salient is a lot simpler than the case for the salience of race, however someone defines it.
I wasn't being in the least facetious. Of course there's been a lot of talk on here about gender fluidity, but I've never seen thoughts about gender fluidity compared to the issue of how real and fixed race is or isn't.
So you never heard of this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypatia_transracialism_controversy
Nope, TGGP, I haven't. It's probably because I'm not as highly evolved as you. In any case, I'm not sure how relevant what's in Wiki is to my exchange with Jean. She described being struck in 2019/2020 by the contrast between how much gender fluidity was discussed, and how little the equivalent take on race was. Seems perfectly plausible to me that she noticed the contrast on her own, as she said she did, without the benefit of Wiki. It also seems perfectly plausible to me that others had also had the same thought she had, a couple years before she did, and had a big fight about it. When I said it was an original idea, I did not mean that I doubted that it had ever occurred to any other members of our species. I meant that it had a refreshing sound, to my ears anyhow, compared to the other comments I had read. It didn't sound like it came from somebody's entrenched position on various related matters, as many posts did, it sounded like a fresh thought.
And we all know sex is 100% correlated with gender and body development, as shown by these photos of people who are obviously men. (NSFW: nudity) https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/0/01/Complete_androgen_insensitivity_syndrome.jpg
<mild snark>
One just needs to look closely. No need for atomic resolution, optical microscopy is (barely) sufficient...
</mild snark>
It's something I've heard about in that time: "Okay, if transgenderism, why not transracialism?" (Usually in hushed whispers.)
...Because race dysphoria is not a common medical condition, assuming it even exists. Not that I'm against transracialism, mind you, but at that point you may as well just skip past it and go full transhumanism.
I don't know, it's certainly real for those white nationalists mentioned in Footnote 2, who had to comfort themselves about being "white in spirit" or whatever after getting back those genetic results. More generally speaking, there's a very long history of people trying to switch races, and an even longer history of other people trying to stop them, even to the point of causing significant distress to those trying to express themselves in their own way. Where else did the likes of the "One Drop Rule" and the like come from, if not that struggle?
I have it on good authority that the assertion "you must have gender dysphoria to be considered an authentic trans person" marks you out as a gatekeeping truscum.
If gender dysphoria isn't a rule-in criterion for transgenderism, why should racial dysphoria be a rule-in criterion for transracialism?
If it weren't for all the taboos around it, I would absolutely expect to see a lot of race dysphoria. First, though, we'd need a transracial acceptance movement to gain sway in a political faction.
The answers to those questions are a negotiation of power politics and will always be fluid. Narratives are used as coordination mechanisms and cover stories for power.
Take the SAT. Eliminating it makes it easier to practice affirmitive action (which in theory provides benefits to some groups) while harming others. It also takes away a tool institutions use to gather information about applicants that they traditionally find useful.
Before 2020 this was fine. From 2020-2023 it was not fine. Now it’s fine again. Who knows going forward.
In the 1970s school busing was just a thing we had to do to fight racism. Then it wasn’t because people kept electing politicians that were against busing. But we still see it come back sometimes and race is used in setting attendance boundaries.
At the very least we ought to get rid of "cultural appropriation" as a pejorative.
I broadly agree, but how many ACX readers were slinging it that way to begin with?
If academia cared more about what people do as opposed to who they are, none of this would be an issue.
Re: the surprising inclusivity of White identitarians, there's a great meme that goes "General @WhiteRaceSavior, you are browner than I expected."
There are a surprising number of memes like that, e.g.
"When I'm in a 'Racial Diversity' competition but my opponent is 'The Racist Community':" (https://www.reddit.com/r/PoliticalCompassMemes/comments/151hcyl/found_a_meme_in_the_wild_with_natural_funny/)
&
"Dudes on here be like, "I'm racist", and then their friend group looks like this:" (https://9gag.com/gag/aKmxEv1)
EDIT: Upon further thinking about it, I guess it just goes to show that the opponents of racism have won. Their definition of "White", where you can become white by acting & thinking white (e.g. the phenomenon of "Talking White", "You ain't black!", or more simply "Being a race traitor"), has been accepted by *their* opponents (the Racism community). It's just that the Racism community has decided to go, "Actually, that's a good thing."
And so when a white supremacist gets genetically tested and finds out that they're not genetically white (or at least genetically pure), the response is a flood of support & "As long as you're white in spirit, you're one of us." (the whole "if you are truly committed to being a white nationalist" thing mentioned in Footnote 2). Transracialism as transcendance: whiteness as something open to everyone, transcending flesh & bone. Kinda like the philosophy of "La raza cósmica"/The Cosmic Race, an extremely odd episode of history that more people should hear about. (Basically, it was the belief that *mandatory* miscegeneation would lead to the creation of "The Cosmic Race" and unite humanity in one, a harmonious utopia where everyone was the same race... just by different means than the usual.)
It's not that: most people who get called "racist" aren't actually racist in any meaningful sense (they just oppose things like affirmative action), and the vast majority of those who adopt the term do so merely to distinguish themselves from their enemies, who happen to call themselves "anti-racists" (their name is meant to deceive stupid people; don't fall for it!).
But to address the broader point you make in your update, it's not true in the slightest: the opponents of pro-White racism have won, yes, but the overwhelmingly dominant institutional position is staunchly racist.
The most interesting thing to me isn't that, but the fact that they've won so thoroughly that even their opponents accept their ideas & use their language. Their power is so great no one even realizes that there are other words & other ideas... or more simply put, that they've already won, and we're just fighting over the world they created. It must be an intoxicating amount of power to hold, no wonder they behave the way they do.
(I.e. there will never be a post-Woke world. There can be a Woke future, and an Anti-Woke future, but no "What is Woke?" future. It's their world, we're just living in it.)
You think so? Give it time… everything rises and falls, even empires, even ideas
I mean, the Romans and the Pagans and the like are still waiting for Christian morality to fall... but as Nietzsche would point out, we're *still* ruled by Slave Morality even ~2000 years later. The Church itself may be politically irrelevant, but the ethos of that religion of slaves & prostitutes, of the weak & meek, is still alive & kicking today.
In fact, depending upon how you look at it, it's *the* dominant force today. Everything must be justified in terms of victimhood, oppression, suffering, the immortal soul (where else do gender identities come from? And what else could they represent?), etc. etc. Even conquerors & tyrants have to justify their actions as actually being a form of liberating victims from oppression. Even those criticizing "The Great Awokening" do so by claiming to be the greatest victims of all, almost "50 Stalins" style (https://sanerthanlasagna.wordpress.com/2016/02/01/50-stalins/). People have talked about how Woke is a religion. I don't think they quite grasp what that really means: it means that empires never really fall. Just mutate & come back anew.
It's the End of History in the Fukuyaman sense: it's not that nothing ever happens... it's just that nothing we ever do will be as important as the fact that they won, & locked in history. Everything thereafter is just what winning looks like: becoming the water in which people have to swim, until even your worst critics are breathing in your thoughts like air, and even your defeats are victories because there's no one left to oppose you. Just people who *are* you, because they can't imagine being anything else. Not anymore.
(Incidentally, this is sort of what people talk about when they're discussing "Values Lock-In" regarding AI & the next century. Empires may no longer fall at all if they're made of biologically immortal machines instead of squishy humans -- "Society advances one funeral at a time." and all that -- so whoever is the empire of today, and in particular gets to align the AIs of today, may get the final say in the story of human history. With all that entails.)
Yeah, it's like when the homos got called queers and decided to just roll with it.
In Russian YouTube, there is an extremely popular public speaker anthropologist Stanislav Drobyshevsky. He often says that race exists, just any studies of it were suppressed worldwide because of the current political climate. If I understand him correctly, race is similar to the term population (as in a community of interbreeding beings), but wider. So, race is something like population of populations.
I am not sure how useful race is scientifically, but when he describes studies of races, it all seems reasonable to me. People, including scientists, love to categorize and group stuff, and it is indeed weird to only demand isolated rigour here, but not in many other areas.
P.S. just to clarify, he is no racist, as far as I can judge, and never expressed any views that one race can be better then other somehow. However, he many times described how terrible some human cultures can be, but I guess we all already know that.
I can't be the only one to find the oversized role of academia in the drama remarkable; almost everyone involved, and in particular everyone attacking Hoover, either works in academia or has academic background (usually not of the STEM variety). Shouldn't a conflict about who does or doesn't belong to a community be played out in the overall community rather than in universities? I can't imagine a group of students at a non-religious college demanding the resignation of a professor who has falsely claimed to be a Jew, or for that matter an American or a Ukrainian.
The article even comes close to noticing this:
> De Master asked Hoover if there had ever been questions about her Native heritage before she arrived at Berkeley, and Hoover emphatically said no. (Hoover denies saying no.)
The version of Nativeness that is at play here seems to be rooted in American universities much more than on any reservation; I don't know of any other ethnoculture that is so academia-centered. The boundaries between tribal and academic work are porous here in a way I haven't seen anywhere else:
> For a long time, Hoover continued to show up to every department meeting, even to parties and retreats where her presence wasn’t mandatory. Some of her former students and faculty friends began to dread running into her. Eventually, the chair of her department announced via e-mail that Hoover would stop attending these events; the department’s administration also quietly tried to make sure that Hoover no longer worked in Native communities, as she had promised in her statement of accountability. (Hoover says she has upheld her promise without any administrative intervention.)
>
> Almost immediately, however, rumors circulated that Hoover was breaking that promise, taking part in cultural burns—the lighting of controlled fires to manage Native land—and posting photos of herself at these events on Facebook. Hoover denies that the burns are part of her scholarly work and says that she had been invited by the tribal chairperson who hosted the burns. (The tribal chairperson did not respond to a request for comment.)
Why should her university have any part in deciding what tribal rituals she partakes in? Some heavy "the real Indians are us" energy here.
> One day last fall, the Native grad student who had paused her community work was feeling overwhelmed by the turmoil in her new department and went to a cultural burn up north. She wanted to be around people who weren’t embroiled in the drama surrounding Hoover, she told me. When she got to the burn, which was crowded, Hoover was there. The tribal chairperson acknowledged Hoover, announcing that she had given him a beaded medallion a year or two before. “And then she was at the campfires, laughing really loud, like how Native women usually laugh,” the grad student said. “It’s weird she laughs like that.”
So the tribe doesn't care, perhaps even appreciating someone from the outside keeping the flame going. But academics are not so easily fooled! Isn't there somebody you forgot to ask?
I mean, it's a politically negotiated category whose boundaries shift depend on who's talking and how much political clout they have. It seems especially heinous with blacks and Native Americans because they're groups seen as being done badly by (with justification) historically to the white majority and who are still doing badly now.
Conversely, few people would look that hard at your Italian or Irish ancestry if you wanted to open an Italian restaurant or Irish pub. Jewish people will occasionally go after non-Jewish people trying to write about Jewish subjects, but I don't hear about it that much.
Then you get the white girl who decided to wear a Chinese dress to prom, was attacked by a Chinese-American guy for cultural appropriation, and then defended by Chinese people in China who found it flattering. It was a while ago but Avril Lavigne got in trouble for making a stereotypically Japanese video for her Japanese fans--she was big in Japan long after she had ceased to be big in America.
Why can you appropriate Irish culture freely, but not Japanese? Both were discriminated against. And back home, the Japanese have no problem with cultural appropriation; they copied large amounts of Western culture as part of industrialization, and it worked out pretty well for them. Anime shows pretty heavy influences from America's Disney films, samurai movies were influenced by cowboy movies, and so on. They are able to market their culture--revenue from Crunchyroll subscriptions and Square Enix games presumably goes back to Japanese companies that then pay Japanese people. Heck, Japan is actually culturally dominant in some areas at this point when it comes to cartoons--look at all the anime avatars on Twitter. (I think it probably is a way to get unwoke stories--your best chance to get a strong male protagonist on a traditional hero's journey is a shonen anime at this point.)
So it's more about whether the culture in question has a organized pressure group that can go after you.
I completely agree with your claim that "race doesn't exist" is a phrase suited mostly for deliberate confusion and deception. When I read a biologist or anthropologist make this claim, they are usually defining "race" as this straw man in which races share no common traits and have no common ancestor. No educated person comes close to believing something like that.
While I appreciate pointing out these subtle tensions between these various claims about race I think it's really important we make a broadside attack on the claim that "race is socially constructed" as used in conversation. Not only is it wrong I think people don't appreciate how much getting the feeling that the accepted truth is built on bullshit pushes people toward unjustified extremism.
Yes, of course race is socially constructed (as you observe) in the sense that our racial categories aren't mapped to the maximally scientifically explanatory divisions (eg it's not what you get by running a classifier on the genetic/phenotypic data). But the reason it's used is so people who don't have the scientific chops to deal with arguments that the reason black people do worse on Y task is clearly genetic can reject them out of hand.
Obviously this is fallacious reasoning. All that needs to be true for claims about genetics explaining differences in some group phenotype to be true is for those groups to have non-zero correlation with genes affecting said phenotype (and maybe a tad more if you want it to be robust across generations). You don't need to pick the maximally scientifically informative split for the explanation to work. Same way you can say the reason anvils tend to fall faster in air than feathers is anvils tend to have greater weight per cross-sectional area (even if occasional anvils are made out of some super low density substance) even though anvil/feather is hardly a principled division into categories for mechanics based explanations.
I've got advanced degrees so I've got no problem pushing back on this using the right language but I think everyone who is at all skeptical senses they are being played. Indeed, I think it's that sense which helps create the crisis of expert trust in this country -- the feeling you know you are being fed crap (agree or not there are much stronger non-fallacious arguments for the claim that the large majority of variation in things like educational attainment between races isn't genetic...but it's uncomfortable for many people to talk about this in less than totally certain terms).
Thankfully I've seen geneticists like David Reich implicitly call out this reasoning but not everyone goes and reads what the actual scientists say or what their reasoning is. That's why I've also seen people who are smart enough to realize something is bullshit here get dragged into the opposite kind of race essentialism because those are the only people who take their criticisms seriously.
Look, I get it that it's hard rhetorically/emotionally for people on the left to have to treat this issue as even a legitimate topic of scientific debate thar evidence needs to be cited for but you don't have to actually be able to make every argument yourself or even engage in that debate -- but doing so badly just makes everything worse .
I couldn't find the angry commentary tweetstorm that must have happened in this situation, but this letter from Hoover's former friend makes clear that she's angry about Hoover's deliberate lying, not about genuine mistaken identity: https://nativeappropriations.com/2023/05/a-letter-to-elizabeth-hoover.html
She writes:
> The thing that is hard for me is you could have done all of this good work as a white woman. You could have stood in solidarity with Native people, been a true accomplice, a co-conspirator, without having to claim identity. The work needs to be done, and communities need people to do it with them. You could have had the same career and do the same work as a white woman, and folks would have welcomed it. But now you’ve broken all of the trust and called into question all of the work, because you started it with a lie.
"You could have had the same career and do the same work as a white woman, and folks would have welcomed it."
Sure.
Exactly lol no they wouldnt have. Universities hire and give grants based on minority group status. Furthermore “accomplice” “co-conspirator”? What silly language, leftists academians are obsessed with pretending their subversive shadow agents fighting the man, when in fact theyre bloated, subsidized, power-wielding tyrants and sycophantic fools
I doubt a new white guy fiction author could get published unless he claimed to be gay.
I actually did contemplate going bi when I was thinking about trying to write a book, but decided I should actually write the book first.
You don’t think new white male authors have been published in the last couple years?
1. The "no biological basis" and "genetic affilnity" arguments address two different problems. "No basis" was coined to invalidate the assertions of Black genetic inferiority that cropped up several decades ago. "Genetic affinity" is one means for a group to define its own members. While the two concepts conflict, they coexist in enlightened society.
2. The 1979 Steve Martin movie, "The Jerk," perfectly limns the genetic affinity argument. Steve Martin is adopted as a baby by Black Mississippi sharecroppers. By his teens he has an almost perfect Black cultural repertoire and sees himself as Black; his one deficiency is that he doesn't have rhythm. He goes out into the world and no matter how hard he identifies as Black, he's treated as white. Result: fish out of water. His misery is finally resolved when his adoptive family (which he has adventitiously enriched) takes him back to the farm and to a much improved sharecropper's shack. Miraculously, he gets rhythm. While the happy ending endorses lived experience as the criterion, the bulk of the movie shows that skin color and genetics (no nappy hair!) are the determinants.
Cultural appropriation is a complement to the culture appropriated.
Land or labor appropriation is another matter.
> So here’s another trilemma:
>
> 1. Either you stop worrying about cultural appropriation.
> 2. Or you stop using a genetic component in whatever definition of race you use to define cultural appropriation.
> 3. Or you accept that some well-intentioned people who tried to build art around their identity group will retroactively be vilified as colonizers, through no fault of their own, after their 23andMe results come back.
I'm gonna take a hard-line #1 here. Not only is "cultural appropriation" not something we should worry about, it's not something that *exists.* The proper term for the thing that it is referring to is simply "culture;" cultural appropriation is a made-up nonsense term used by cultural arsonists to try to problematize the way cultural development has always worked since the dawn of time. The first and most fundamental rule of culture has always been, "everyone appropriates from everyone around them."
These days, the steel guitar is commonly associated with country music. But it was originally developed in the late 19th century by Hawaiian musician Joseph Kekuku, for use in traditional Hawaiian music, and it features prominently in the "island style" sound commonly associated with Hawaii. Country artists using steel guitars are a clear-cut case of cultural appropriation then, right?
Not so fast. Kekuku took the guitar — a Spanish instrument which evolved from the lute, an ancient design whose origins are lost to history — and added a playing bar made of steel (a metal unknown to the Hawaiians until Europeans introduced it!) to produce a specific sound quality. Later artists continued to tinker with the design, adding a resonator, then electric pickups, then pedals. (Fun fact: the electric pickup was first invented for the steel guitar, and was later adapted to more standard guitars. Were it not for steel player George Beauchamp tinkering with speakers and magnetic fields to get a louder sound out of his instrument, rock 'n' roll might have never existed!)
At every step along the way, be it Kekuku and his fellow Hawaiian guitarists who developed the distinctive Hawaiian style, those before them, and those after them, people took things that already existed, added something of their own to it, and built something (marginally) new out of it. This is the way culture has always worked. "Appropriation" is the natural process of cultural development, nothing more, and no one has the right to make anyone feel ashamed of it.
Cowboy movies ripped off samurai movies, which ripped off cowboy movies. And we all know about anime.
Tempura comes from 'tempero', Portuguese for 'seasoning'; they picked up the technique from Portuguese missionaries.
> And we all know about anime
Just in case someone doesn't ( https://xkcd.com/1053/ applies here! ) the distinctive "anime look" of people with big heads, big, wide eyes, and no nose, was heavily influenced by manga superstar artist Osamu Tezuka, sometimes referred to as "the father of manga." He, in turn, copied the look wholesale from Donald Duck comics (big eyes, no nose...) which he was introduced to by an American soldier during the postwar occupation of Japan.
LOL, good point. Thanks!
Looking at really old school manga, from the 1960s or so, is kind of like looking at a Cambrian era fossil bed. You can see specimens with familiar elements, things whose line of descent made it down to modern day media. But some of it is just weird and unfamiliar, because the creators were making forays into territory which never ended up being settled. It's one of those things which makes me viscerally *feel* the similarity between cultural evolution and biological evolution.
The cultural exchange back-and-forth between America and Japan is a fascinating thing. Here's a non-anime example: Have you ever heard of Japanese Spider-Man? Decades ago, Marvel Comics licensed the rights to a Japanese TV studio to produce a live-action Spider-Man series. It was... different.
This iteration of Spider-Man is a hero empowered with mystical spider-powers by a benevolent alien, who has to fight an invasion of aliens attacking his city. But whenever he defeated the monster of the week, it would magically grow to giant size, so Spider-Man would summon his leopard-themed giant robot to fight them again and finish them off.
If that monoplot sounds suspiciously familiar, it's because once the series wrapped, the studio took the formula and grafted it onto their relatively new hero-team series called "Super Sentai," which became wildly successful and eventually caught the eye of some American TV people, who licensed it and produced an adaptation called Power Rangers. (You might have heard of that one.)
The whole thing came full circle in an amusing way several years later when Sony produced the first Spider-Man movie and Weird Al Yankovic made a song about it, in which he described the villain as wearing a "dumb Power Rangers mask." I doubt Al knew just how right he was!
To say nothing of the fact that a bunch of those cowboy movies were made by Italians!
I mean, I think the real answer is (4) the consensus, which you described accurately at the start of the post, is messy, with many exceptions that prove the rule.
In this case, the key element that you left out of the summary is that there has been some level of deception. People interviewed in that article told the author that they received obfuscatory answers about her ancestral connections to her tribe for many years; and over that same period she benefited from her Native identity by getting a good academic position. Compare and contrast Elizabeth Warren, who apparently had approximately the same thing happen to her, but pretty much as soon as her ancestry was questioned, discovered the truth and admitted it; nor did she benefit from her Native identity.
This is still messy, because you're right that as a young person, she seems to have had many formative experiences that would normally be associated with being Native; and under any other circumstances that might have been enough for her to count as Native for social purposes. But as you note, any definition of race is in fact a messy superposition of several different things. If you want to make a claim on tribal property, you have to go through certain proofs which are different from just social identity; and if you want to present yourself as Native for professional purposes, the social proofs are different again. And she seems to have deliberately concealed the truth during some of these processes.
Oh, this is basically the same as your conclusion at the end there. Sorry, I hadn't read to the end.
You say, "Elizabeth Hoover's ex-friends who have turned against her..." I may have gotten bored before the end of the article. Have her friends turned against her? I remember a couple of aquaintances turning against her, but not friends.
"They can legitimately be angry with her for not admitting she was biologically white the moment she figured it out, and for making up fake facts about her tribal heritage after that point. But they should be clear that they're angry at her for lying, not for "being a fake Indian"." Yep, that seems right.
Being white is considered low-status among Critical Social Justice advocates and even many progressives. The backlash is used to penalize white people that may seek status or benefits of being a minority by making false claims. The CSJ worldview appears inconsistent because it's not truly egalitarian. CSJ advocates like things that benefit groups they consider historically oppressed, despite rhetoric about equality/equity. I think for your trilemma, you say "vilify intentional deceivers but not those who make a simple mistake" and the worldview is consistent.
I read the article as much more damning of white allies than of Hoover. There are several mentions of her (depending on your interpretation) playing up/embracing her heritage by wearing A LOT of Native beaded goods/beading in meetings. And then there’s this:
“Annette Rodriguez was a graduate fellow at the center toward the end of this period. She told me about a Native scholar who gave a job talk wearing a three-piece suit with a distinctively patterned tie. Someone asked him about the pattern, expecting that the design had come from his tribal community. The scholar said it was from Barneys. “He wasn’t going to fuel the fantasies of the white imagination of what an authentic Native person was,” Rodriguez said. “Liz was very happy to do that.””
A big part of the anger I see in the article from Native people is that there’s more room for Pretendians who flatter the assumptions of white peoples than the full range of actual Native experience.
I think this is probably similar to the phenomenon of trans people behaving in ways that seem more conspicuously gender essentialist than most cis people. They feel a pressure to do so, both to impress their gender identity on other people out of fear that they won't "pass," and to justify themselves their own investment in their transitions.
A person who can't be visually identified as plausibly-Native-American is only likely to be taken as a representative of a Native American social group if they make it a conspicuous part of their social performance. Since a white person who doesn't make a conspicuous social performance of being Native American won't be identified by others as being Native American, people who appear to be white who're identified as being Native American will almost exclusively be those who make a social performance of it.
I think though, that cases like this are also driven to a great extent by the cultural value that if you have membership in a minority group, it's valuable and praiseworthy to participate in its cultural practices, and treat your membership as essential to your identity. If other people can visually identify you as a member of a group, you can plausibly claim that your membership in it is essential to your experiences, and important to your identity. But if other people can't identify you as a member of that group, you pretty much *have* to actively engage in cultural practices associated with it in order to claim that your membership is meaningful. When we praise investment in minority identities, we're effectively encouraging people to do that.
Cultural appropriation is a fundamentally insane concept that misunderstands how culture works at the most basic level. Race, in the genetic sense, obviously exists and is obviously distinct from (but correlated with) ethnicity in the cultural sense; however, in most cases it's ethnicity that people care about, not race, and race gets used as a proxy for ethnicity.
...But that doesn't actually resolve the issue. People caught between different ethnic identities, or other identities, without fully belonging is a thing. And when you add material incentives (like affirmative action) in, built on an assumption of clean lines that don't exist in reality, things can get ugly.
My impression from the story was that Hoover was the type to cancel others caught in this sort of situation, and so I didn't feel too bad for her being hoist on her own petard. But I don't think that was actually said, so that was uncharitable of me. She definitely thought her voice was more important because of her Native identity, and used that to her advantage, but maybe this always was based in culture rather than blood. I don't know - the specific case doesn't matter that much, but the general problem is not straightforward.
There's definitely also the issue of social-justice types declaring belief in constructivism and fluid borders between identities, but proposing policies and social norms that rely on an underlying assumption of sharp and immutable lines.
Read THERE, THERE, which wrestles with this.
In the case of Native Americans, there is another option for deciding if someone is really a member of the group--whether or not they're legally a member of one of the tribes. Each federally recognized Native American tribe has their own rules for who can become a member based on ancestry, residency, and other factors. Whether these rules are reasonable or not, I think most people would agree that its their prerogative to define membership however they want. Universities (which seem to be the main place these controversies happen) probably aren't going to demand genetic tests of potential Native American faculty, but they could just ask whether they're a member of a legally recognized tribe and accept that tribe's decision on whether they're 'really' Native American.
CTRL + F "legal tribal membership" and "claim membership in any tribe" in the post.
The reason I didn't harp on this as The One Solution is that everyone knew when they were hiring her that Hoover wasn't a legal tribal member, which means that everyone was willing to acknowledge her as culturally native even if not legally. For the reasons I discuss in the last part, I think it's good to have a legal/social distinction like this.
I am really confused about why the section on race in part II was included; the part that includes: "I'm against the claim that "there is no such thing as biological race" - it's one of those isolated demands for rigor that we don’t stand for around here."
Which is a pretty strong opener...but then you pivot away. If you replace "race" with "genetic ancestry", nothing changes, the essay and arguments still flow identically. The core argument, that genetics/biological race is a morally bad category to draw for group affiliation, does not require biological race. Am I missing a subtle point here? Is it just the 23andMe thing?
That seems like a spicy topic to touch and then drop and argue against almost immediately.
I thought this piece was clear enough about this but based on comments I guess not.
NO pretty much no one on the left is really going to say race has nothing to do with genes (or ancestry which I'll use equivalently since there is sufficient genetic variation to infer ancestry from it). I mean there are always idiots but in general no.
The claim that they tend to make is that race is socially constructed, i.e, that the way we divide up genetic space into races isn't even close to how you would do it if you were picking scientific concepts, e.g, if you tried to break up the genetic space into ancestral groups based on degree of interbreeding and genetic similarity etc it wouldn't come up with a group that tracks, eg, the us cultural concept of black under the one drop rule.
And while one can argue this point on its own it's reasonable enough. People, except the deeply confused, aren't making an argument that's totally stupidly dumb.
The error in this approach is when it's used to try and suggest that therefore you can't possibly explain observed differences in statistical outcomes by race by reference to genetics. Of fucking course you can. Sure, maybe being black under the us cultural definition isn't the ideal scientific concept but it doesn't change the fact that conditional on an American being black there chance of having sickle cell increases drastically.
As I said I thought this was all basically clear from the discussion in the post but apparently some comments seem to think liberals are really suggesting the extreme view that genes have literally nothing to do with it view. And sure I guess you can always find some idiots but despite spending my life in academia I haven't met someone who said that (tho large numbers prob means there are a few).
I thought Harden’s The Generic Lottery was a good map through this minefield, would you agree?
> The claim that they tend to make is that race is socially constructed, i.e, that the way we divide up genetic space into races isn't even close to how you would do it if you were picking scientific concepts, e.g, if you tried to break up the genetic space into ancestral groups based on degree of interbreeding and genetic similarity etc it wouldn't come up with a group that tracks, eg, the us cultural concept of black under the one drop rule.
That sounds like a good argument for doing a better job of coming up with racial categories, then. Obviously it's nonsense to say that Lewis Hamilton or Barack Obama is "black" when they're clearly no more black than they are white; they need to be put in a racial category of "half black half white" if you insist on classifying them.
I don't think it's even a good argument for that. It's totally reasonable and appropriate to divide things up based on social role.
I mean look at dog breeds. They aren't the most joint carving way of dividing up dog genetic space. For instance, border collies were only closed as a breed a few years ago meaning that the sire of your registered border collie could have even been another breed. We defined that group in a way that didn't ignore genes (you weren't going to be allowed to register your blonde labradoodle) but was choosen in large part based on the role the dogs played in our society.
And that's a good way to classify dogs into breeds bc we care about those roles but it doesn't stop us from saying things like border collies are more likely to have seizures in response to some heart worm meds than other breeds.
It might be, if it were true, but it isn't. The way we divide genetic space into races is a nearly exact match to the way you would do it by pure statistical clustering of raw DNA information, as you can easily learn from any of the many scientific papers comparing the two methods.
When edge cases become common enough to cause problems for the divisions in current use, those divisions are adjusted to accommodate the new reality. Barack Obama is "black" today for at least decently good reasons, but when finer distinctions were more significant, he would have been "mulatto". There are two primary reasons we don't use that category today: first, it's not large enough to be worth worrying about; second, it used to have superior status to "black", and was a status that an otherwise "black" person could force acknowledgement of, whereas today, "black" is the superior status, and people are already willing to grant that superior status to mulattoes. Why would they insist on a voluntary downgrade?
> And while one can argue this point on its own it's reasonable enough. People, except the deeply confused, aren't making an argument that's totally stupidly dumb.
You might think this would be true, but it isn't.
Ok, I grant that's not true generally but I haven't seen it on this point (they will make a totally stupid arg if there isn't one that fits there desired outcomes that's nearby and better).
One week later, here's something that just happened to come up: https://www.npr.org/2024/03/13/1197955918/race-in-medicine-andrea-deyrup
> We've probably said it a hundred times on Code Switch — biological race is not a real thing. So why is race still used to help diagnose certain conditions, like keloids or cystic fibrosis?
Look that's a fucked up but I think it supports my charitable analysis. They obviously don't literally mean there is nothing that they refer to by race so what do they mean when they say bio race isn't a real thing.
I think best interpretation is they think that race doesn't track a scientifically principled concept.
What they get wrong and fuck up is when they infer from that to the conclusion that therefore it can't correlate with any outcome. But that's just how I diagnosed it on the OP.
On the first part = bio race isn't real there is a non-stupid thing to say that suits all their purposes as well as the really dumb thing.
When it comes to wanting to reject the ability to predict phenotype/disease from race they just directly want to reject the idea that race can explain these things so stupid is all they got.
> I think best interpretation is they think that race doesn't track a scientifically principled concept.
> What they get wrong and fuck up is when they infer from that to the conclusion that therefore it can't correlate with any outcome.
That's not a mistake. It is a valid conclusion from the premise you state. The problem is in the premise.
No it's not. Taste isn't a principled scientific way to divide up the space of chemicals (something like chemical formula is) or but that doesn't mean that there isn't any correlation between bitter tasting chemical compounds encountered in, say plants in the Amazon, and poisonous compounds.
I think many people say many things, some of which make sense and others don't.
I mean yes there are always some people who will say something crazy but that's not usually how we deal with belief ascriptions.
If I say something like: democrats believe in reducing CO2 emissions we don't count it as wrong because 5% of them think CO2 is really a name for a kind of bird or whatever. There is always a certain implied deference to authority and disregard of lizardman constant.
Highly recommend Kim TallBear's extensive work on this, including her Substack: https://kimtallbear.substack.com/p/self-indigenization-genocide-and
And book, "Native American DNA". This issue, especially for Native Americans and indigenous folks more broadly, has a lot more going on than mere individuals. I think the problem here isn't that Hoover is a one-off, but an example of a very common issue that folks are dealing with all over the place, from Elizabeth Warren to state-level politics, like in Vermont: https://vtdigger.org/2023/11/14/a-false-narrative-abenaki-leaders-dispute-the-legitimacy-of-vermonts-state-recognized-tribes/
I believe that these claims that 'races are not at all biological/genetical' comes from the fact that 'race' is a poor word to accurately describe the concept of 'ethnicity', given that the word 'race' originally describes a purely genetic concept. In the human species, the so-called 'races' have a greater genetic diversity among themselves than between themselves. . It is just an exaggerated version of the more correct take 'races make no sense on a pure biological perspective and are a blurry social construct'.
I think that most of these issues would fade away if in English 'ethnicity' was preferred to 'race' in this specific context, as it is the case in many European languages. I think everyone would agree that 'ethinicity' has some biological component to it, as it is clear that groups that recognize themselves as a particular ethnicity partly do so in the basis of ascendance and appearance
When it comes to Elizabeth Hoover, I guess it's fair to not recognize her as Mi'kmaq base on her lack of ascendance (although I couldn't care less), but I find it completely unfair that all these people criticize her while her actions and her lying (even if bad) seem clearly humane and understandable.
I've asked my Chinese students how they define Chineseness.
Is it the ability to read, write, and speak Chinese fluently? Then what about ABCs, adopted Chinese Children, and American Born Chinese who generally lose this ability. And what about foreign children and mixed children who attend local schools in China? Or the small numbers of foreigners who do become extremely proficient? Are they Chinese?
Does one have to "look" Chinese? Then what about Tibetans and Uyghurs and other visible minorities? Koreans and Japanese can blend into China better.
Does one have to "think" like a Chinese person? ABCs and Chinese from the Mainland, Hong Kong, or Taiwan, all "think" differently.
Who is more Chinese? The third generation Chinese-Canadian who doesn't speak a word of Chinese? Or the Ghanaian kid who grew up in China and only speaks Chinese? Half the taxi drivers in China would admit they don't speak "proper Chinese".
What's interesting about China is that you can earn genuine respect in the degree to which you can appropriate Chinese culture and language. And I feel that language and culture are far more significant in shaping who you are than your appearance, though that of course can impact you too. Beautiful people and obese people and white people and black people and Chinese people and so on, will all internalize their experiences differently. But it would be nice to have a way for anyone to deemphasize their embodied experience, in a Chinese kind of way, or a Jewish conversion kind of way.
The general consensus is that this is not an easily resolvable problem but I also get this sense that there is a bias to racial categories.
I imagine you would be more uncomfortable trying to fit into China today with the additional problem of others assuming you can speak the language. I think the term “Asian” has become associated more with East Asians than say other groups like Pakistanis or Indians, but then Asia is so massive that it’s hard to have a term that can meaningfully describe everyone.
How we physically present to others can have an impact on our sense of identity, but I feel that language and culture will serve everyone better in the long run. Kind of like your comment about not feeling so much solidarity simply because someone is Chinese.
Perhaps in the US there is more hair splitting because of greater overlap in language and culture so the focus is more often on racial identity.
You’re right, but it’s more a quibble. I’d still argue that the phrase Asian or Asian-American suggests more that someone is East-Asian than South-Asian let alone Arab. As Michael Watts points out, Asian in England is more likely to mean Pakistani or Indian.
> I think the term “Asian” has become associated more with East Asians than say other groups like Pakistanis or Indians
That's specific to the United States. In England, "Asian" means Pakistani or Indian.
That’s right.
> But this is more just a curiosity than anything; I don’t really feel solidarity with people just because they’re Chinese.
The Chinese, in China, place a great deal of weight on their "shared Chinese blood". If you learn the language, the expression will come up.
“共同的血脉” but as so many things in China are it’s hard to say how separate that view is from government influence. Much easier to get accepted as a foreigner in China than in Japan or Korea. And south China is different from the north with greater linguistic and ethnic diversity. Something they’d be proud of.
There's an excellent Saturday Night Live sketch, "Bank Breakers", where the joke is that there are two contestants on a game show, a relatively unsympathetic guy who wants to have fun, talk smack, and spend his winnings on entertainment, and a sympathetic mother who wants to fund hearing restoration surgery for her daughter. This ruins the guy's otherwise appropriate fun.
As the guy blunders deeper and deeper into involuntary villainhood, he tries to play for sympathy himself by noting that it's difficult for an immigrant, like him, to adjust to American culture. Prompted by the host, he's forced to reveal that he immigrated from Pakistan at the age of 15... weeks. His opponent turns out to be a veteran who was stationed in Pakistan for two years, causing the host to remark "That's crazy! So Gretchen's spent more time in Pakistan than you have!"
But I think the obvious message of the joke is actually incorrect in many ways. Suppose the two contestants were to both immigrate to Pakistan and attempt to make their life there. Who would fit in more effectively? Who would be more accepted by the locals? Who would be more familiar with the culture? I submit that the answer to all of these questions is "the guy who left when he was 15 weeks old". Since his parents left Pakistan after he was born, there's even a decent chance that he can understand Urdu, which would give him a practically unbridgeable advantage.
I’ll have to check out the skit.
If your skin colour matches the skin colour of the majority in your society, I think you’ll have some initial advantages. But if you acquire the culture and language of the other country - like Chinese children adopted by white Americans - you’ll probably do alright. If I wanted to become “Chinese” I’d rather become Chinese by growing up in China and thus acquire it’s language and culture than be born into a “Chinese” body but not have access to the language and culture.
I’m white but have spent the majority of my life in Asia. My second generation immigrant friends from high school in Canada a who spent their entire lives there, are way more culturally Canadian than I am. The fact that most of them aren’t white isn’t an issue for me.
There is also so much more intercultural marriage these days, so racial classifications are increasingly absurd.
Correction: Genetic affinity is one means for a group to define its own members or for non-members to do so (invidiously, usually).
“there’s a missing step here, something like 1.5: maybe people should stop caring about their cultural identity”
I surprised there’s little validation for this point in the comments as of yet. It’s definitely where I land, at least the modified version of “people should stop caring *so much* about their cultural identity”.
I do understand the emotional and political strength that especially disadvantaged groups can draw from coming together under a shared identity but let us also acknowledge the huge dividends of assuming a more cosmopolitan or even an animalian identity < insert picture of furless ape contemplating a brilliant Milky Way against the deepest darkness >
I feel like I can steelman the idea of "cultural appropriation" as the idea of "profaning things that others find sacred". I remember one time in the US I saw some hipster wearing what appeared to be an Australian Army slouch hat complete with rising sun badge and I did feel a certain amount of personal offence -- that's a sacred object (of a sort) in my culture, and he's just wearing it with no regard to its context. And I understood how people from certain Native American cultures might feel about certain varieties of feathered headdress.
Of course the fact that somebody is offended by something doesn't make it immoral, it makes it impolite. I feel like one of the big effects of the death of ettiquette in the West is that we've taken many things that used to just be "impolite" and labelled them as immoral. But we _need_ that grey area between good behaviour and immorality, that wearing-shorts-to-a-wedding regime of behaviours that (a) can make people think less of you, but (b) nobody needs to get morally outraged about.
Is it a unique Scott feature to decry isolated demands for rigor... then respond will all the rigor demanded and more?
I have a less rigorous take
1. Common sense dictates she gets a pass given it was an honest mistake of family history and she has enough lived experience to cover the gap.
2. The community that denounced her did not do so upon sober consideration of all the facts.
3. Instead they were primed to call out white people in academia claiming to have native ancestry because of prominent cases and general belief where some do so cynically with 0 lived experience
4. She basically got caught in the cross fire
5. Toxic woke environment caused friends to turn on her out of fear of their own careers and reputation who otherwise would have been capable of that sober minded consideration of the facts.
Just an Nteenth warning of the terrible-ness of cancel culture, not *necessarily* proof that our models of race+culture have to be rewritten.
I read this post as Scott attempting to point out a piece of nonsense in leftist ideology by stretching for a topical event that he can present as related. The points he wants to make aren't really related to the issue he wants to tie them to, but he's too genteel to make them honestly.
For something similar, with a little more blunt honesty balanced by a little less willingness to prod people in the direction of the truth, you can see https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/i-have-to-admit-i-still-dont-fully , though it's paywalled.
We're 155 comments in so this is going to get buried, but you all are missing it. Elizabeth Hoover is being burned at the stake because NOBODY READ THE ARTICLE.
There isn't a general principle to tease out of the condemnation issuing from all quarters because nobody read the article. There's no innate genetic component to race that can be understood through the lens of her persecution because nobody read the article. There aren't any fundamental, nuanced Native American social dynamics to her being ostracized from that community because nobody read the article.
Until now I had no idea there was a another side to this story because I didn't read the article. I only know about Elizabeth Hoover because I read "Let's Talk About Pretendians" at the Make More Pie substack (https://nancyrommelmann.substack.com/p/lets-talk-about-pretendians?utm_source=%2Finbox%2Fsaved&utm_medium=reader2) and it never occurred to me to doubt that the source material was anything other than a scathing indictment. I found Nancy Rommelmann's take interesting and thought provoking, but now that I know she was bulshitting I hate her for lying to me.
Then again maybe Scott is lying to me. I wouldn't know, because I still haven't read the article, and I never will because my subscription to the New Yorker expired 25 years ago, I've already used up my free articles for the month, and this issue will be forgotten by April. Jesus.
Wow! There's a lot of material here, and lots of logic branches to follow. Following my Business Writing training, I'll put the Bottom Line Up Front: None of it should matter. In general. For most purposes. Okay, it's not that simple.
I'm tempted to write a book to try to capture all my thoughts on this, but I doubt anyone would want to read it.
I'll summarize: none of this would matter much if there weren't legal rights, privileges, and considerations attached. Elizabeth Hoover says she knew she wasn't eligible for enrolled citizenship in the Mi'kmaq nation, but there'd be no reason I can see to argue about her status except for the US rules that make it important. Scott says she never "officially claimed" affirmative action benefits, but there is no procedure for "claiming" these benefits - they are given by organizations that choose to do so. Both Harvard and Elizabeth Warren loudly claimed that her (disputed) status as a Native American was irrelevant to her hiring at Harvard Law School, but this makes no sense. Before she was hired, Harvard had publicly announced a commitment to hiring more Native American faculty. When she was hired, Harvard proudly claimed her as the first Native American woman on the Law School faculty. So, either Harvard was lying about a commitment to hiring more Native Americans, or it lied when it claimed it didn't consider her status. The same holds with Elizabeth Hoover - she was mentored by people who believed in her Native heritage, and hired because of her Native status.
A personal example: My maternal grandmother spent a fair amount of time and effort establishing her descent from 4 people who sailed on the Mayflower. She had her membership certificate in the Society of Mayflower Descendants hanging on the wall of her living room. I later found that she was approved by the North Carolina chapter, which was not her first attempt. Later, the national organization determined that her lineage could not be used to establish descent for anyone else (including her children) - presumably there were some weak links in her documentation. This situation would matter to relatives who want to be Mayflower descendants, or to the genealogists who guard the purity of the membership rolls, but to no one else. If being a Mayflower descendant conferred legal advantages, it would be a different story.
My college recently used its LinkedIn presence to highlight an "Indigenous" undergraduate student, who was photographed wearing clothes and jewelry from her culture. She grew up in New Jersey, and was indigenous to eastern Algeria, but still counts as "Indigenous". She certainly has every right to study, practice, and take pride in her parents' culture, but there'd be no particular reason for the University to take notice, and highlight her status, except that they earn Lefty Cred by having Indigenous students. Even students whose parents voluntarily emigrated from their homeland to a new country on a new continent.
The concept of Cultural Appropriation should be dropped. This is a process previously referred to by sociologists as "syncretism", where people freely borrow from other societies, and enrich themselves in the process. Of course, it could be done in an offensive way - drag queen nuns, say, or it could be questionable taste - say, boy scouts demonstrating sacred Indian dances. In a pluralistic society, there's really no way to prevent this. Low-key discussion and education could stop the offense by well-meaning people, but provocateurs will provoke, even if they're criticized for it.
Then there's the case of Buffy St. Marie, a very talented artist who identified as Native American but turned out probably wasn't and CBC outed her last year. It seemed that some of her relatives had tried to out her and at one point she threatened them with legal action, which may have caused them to back off. There was an uproar amongst various Native American activist groups, demanding that her awards as a Native American singer be rescinded, apparently on cultural appropriation grounds. But whether or not she had any native blood, she'd been adopted by the chief of the Piapot First Nation. According to Wikipedia, the chief's descendants said the attacks on St. Marie were "hurtful, ignorant, colonial — and racist" They explained ""We claim her as a member of our family and all of our family members are from the Piapot First Nation. To us, that holds far more weight than any paper documentation or colonial record keeping ever could."
So people are very divided about St. Marie. I for one think her story shows how these concepts of race and "lived experience" are concepts that aren't well defined, so they mean different things to different people. Scott's piece does an excellent job of teasing out this point, but I think his analytic framework is a little limited. This is an area where opposites can easily be true, that is, race can be something that exists or doesn't exist, because it's an ambiguous term. The law of the excluded middle excludes ambiguity, which makes it a very weak foundation for any logic that's supposed to apply to the real world, which is full of ambiguities and uncertain quantities. So, it's possible to believe that lived experience is more important than genetic markers of race, or the other way around, not just be on one side or other of the point, but both at the same time. Because both have some truth in them and some falseness, if you want to look at it on that axis, but maybe a better way to look at it is, both beliefs are useful in addressing situations.
So it seems like St. Marie and Hoover were in a very similar situation with regard to their "lived experience" and genetic status, though St. Marie has refused to take a DNA test, but St. Marie has some very deep and loving support from the First Nation family she was part of. When I read what they said, my feeling was, what's anyone complaining about? Do Native Americans not have the right to adopt someone? I'm also influenced by my appreciation for St. Marie's music and her advocacy of Native American causes. Perhaps the real issue in Hoover's case is that she was an academic rather than an artist? Or that she didn't have similar connections to the Native American community she claimed to be part of? Or are the two situations more similar than I'm perceiving them to be?
At any rate, I don't see why we should need to choose between the various inconsistent views of genetics and lived experience Scott's posting talks about. They aren't completely inconsistent, unless you're of the view that when it comes to race, genetics is everything or nothing, and likewise for lived experience. Both, or either, of these positions seems absurd to me, like arguments by someone who actually believes concepts have to be definite and are not allowed to be ambiguous or even fuzzy. Yet, the amount of argument over these points, and the obsessive insistance that one or other belief about race is "true" or "false" does seem to take up a rather large part of our political and academic discussions about this subject, which for me only goes to show how emotional rather than rational the discussion continues to be.
Dear Author,
The Constructed Nature of Race
We must start by acknowledging that the very racial categories we discuss, like "black" and "white," are socially constructed concepts that were actively created and enforced through oppressive colonial policies and violence. As the sources highlighted, there was no monolithic "white race" in early 17th century Virginia - that was a divide purposefully manufactured and inscribed into law to uphold certain power structures.
Barbara J. Fields, author of "Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life," illuminates how "racecraft" was a political process "of ascribing racial meanings to relationships that were indubitably social," rather than reflecting any true biological distinctions.
Perhaps take Theodore W. Allen's work, " The Invention of the White Race," that delves into how the "white race" was invented as a ruling class social control formation to protect agrarian capitalist interests. So when we discuss racial identity today, we must first recognize we are operating within an invented system designed for economic exploitation and domination of certain groups. These categories did not arise organically from genetic data or some natural order.
The Limitations of Genetics
Speaking of genetics, the references you provided rightly cautioned against using it as the prime determinant of racial identity or lived experience. As one source noted, genetic expressions and similarities between populations often simply indicate proximity over time - they do not inherently equate to meaningful categorical racial differences.
Citing genetics as the basis for something like Native American identity or belonging would be particularly fraught given how these were diaspora communities forcibly removed and fragmented from ancestral lands. Using genetics as the gatekeeper risks further dispossessing them from their heritage.
Moreover, the example you provided of "black children raised in black communities" as the representation of a racialized experience was overly reductive. The African diaspora encompasses a vast range of cultures, experiences, and socialization processes that should not be flattened into a singular narrative.
Racialization vs. Genetics
It is the social process of racialization, rather than genetic variants, that plays the primary role in constructing racial experience and identity. As your references highlighted, "black" and "white" were racial constructs enforced through brutality, laws, and ingrained social hierarchies - not natural outcomes.
So in many ways, lived experience and the socialization of racialized experience may be more relevant factors than ancestry or genetics when discussing racial identity. This provides important context as we evaluate controversies like the Elizabeth Hoover case through the lens of oppressed groups reclaiming their sovereignty over identities and belonging.
The Dangers of Appropriation
We need to more directly reckon with the insidious harms of cultural appropriation and dispossession that marginalized groups have faced. Simply focusing the debate on representation and inclusion does not go far enough.
There are legitimate fears that enshrining an individualistic "lived experience" basis for racial identity could open the door to further extraction, decontextualization and erasure of precious cultural elements and narratives. As your reader stated, it is one thing to appreciate and experience aspects of a culture - it is another to arrogate and redefine that culture devoid of its original context and stakeholder community.
This resonates strongly with the colonial histories and persistent traumas that Native American tribes have endured around land dispossession, forced assimilation, and attempted cultural genocide at the hands of settler colonialism. Their staunch defense of belonging and identity boundaries, while perhaps severe in Hoover's case, emanates from a justified desire to protect what has been systemically attacked for centuries.
Belonging vs. Heritage
One distinction that merits further exploration is the difference between belonging and heritage as it relates to racial/ethnic identity. I would invitee you to think about how belonging is more about acceptance and inclusion within a particular group, while heritage refers to provable ancestral connections that can be measured to some degree.
In the case of Elizabeth Hoover and her contested Native identity, it seems the Native American community drew a line suggesting her lived experiences facilitated a sense of belonging, but did not constitute a heritage claim to tribal membership. This points to the complexity of these two interrelated but distinct concepts.
For many Native nations, protecting legal/cultural belonging boundaries is an act of defending sovereignty and preventing further encroachment after centuries of having lands, identities and very existence forcibly undermined. While harsh in Hoover's case, it represents an assertion of self-determination over who gets to be a stakeholder.
At the same time, one could argue that Hoover's individual pursuit of Native cultural enlightenment and embodiment, even if based on inaccurate ancestral beliefs, represented an attempt to cultivate personal heritage connections, regardless of criteria for official tribal belonging.
Exploring where the boundaries around belonging and heritage should be drawn for different communities, and according to what parameters, is an important part of this larger dialogue. It forces us to wrestle with complex questions of identity, continuity and "authenticity" without resorting to rigid policing.
The Journey of Other Colonized Groups
We should all seek to explore the perspective on these nuances of belonging and heritage that may come from other global communities who have been shaped by colonial identity formulations and ethnic supremacy ideologies.
For many across the Indian subcontinent or Iraqi/Iranian plateau for instance, conceptions of ethnic and national identity have had to be reconstructed and reclaimed in the wake of British colonial boundaries and categorizations designed to divide and conquer. Defining belonging vs ancestry becomes highly situational and fraught.
Many immigrants arriving in North America in recent decades have also had to navigate questions of how ancestry, phenotype, lived experience, and outside perceptions interact to shape their racial/ethnic identity and sense of cultural continuity or belonging. Their journeys of self-definition provide relevant touchpoints.
Within various Latinx communities, there arelong-standing debates around indigeneity, mixed ancestry and complex relationships to Spanish colonial heritages and categorizations. Who gets to claim belonging to certain indigenous identities is fraught with generational trauma.
And among the diversity of Black communities, questions of ancestral heritage vs. culturally cultivated forms of ethnic belonging allow for nuanced conversations. Caribbean nationals, mixed-race individuals, and various African diasporic subcultures have had to navigate these identity terrains in complex ways.
So while the Native American example provides a particularly charged case study, we must resist treating it as an isolated experience. Looking across diasporas can reveal common human themes around heritage, belonging, cultural resilience and the lingering impacts of colonial rhetorics - all of which feed into our greater understanding.
Decolonizing Conceptions of Identity
At the core, this examination reveals how modern conceptions and boundaries of racial/ethnic identity are still deeply caged by colonial logics and power structures inherited from past oppressors. Our language, assumptions, and measures of legitimacy remain constrained by the very supremacist ideologies that dehumanized entire communities to begin with.
True decolonization of how we understand identity may require a more radical self-determination - where impacted groups themselves can engage openly in the spiritual, cultural and social labor of defining their own terms for heritage and belonging freed from external impositions.
This is perhaps why discussions of "lived experience" as the key determinant feel so fraught. While potentially democratic in a liberal individualistic sense, they open new vulnerabilities for extraction, misrepresentation and dispossession of what are profound collective identities and liberatory projects.
There are no easy solutions. But continually centering the voices and perspectives of those most impacted by colonial identity formulations is crucial as we explore this territory. Their epistemologies and first-hand embodied experiences must be our primary guides if we are to map a journey towards more holistic, democratic and reparative ways of facilitating identity.
> So in many ways, lived experience and the socialization of racialized experience may be more relevant factors than ancestry or genetics when discussing racial identity.
Studies on racial self-identification and cluster analysis of DNA have shown a more than 99.9% match. It would be quite tough for the lived experience of, say, adoptees, to top that.
I've gotten heartily sick of hearing "colonial" treated as a term of disparagement. My nation, the United States, was founded as thirteen colonies. It has had many accomplishments over the years, including landing men on the Moon. As far as I'm concerned, any grievances over colonial practices are minor footnotes.
Proud to be a fellow American 🇺🇸
Nothing wrong with being American
Many Thanks!
As far as I'm concerned, colonial practices seem to have evolved but conversation around identity, place, and belonging did not. I'm certainly glad American children don't work in factories any more but I also I don't think it's fair to say a nation's advancement and accomplishments make it perfect. There's still some kinks to work out and America will be in constant conflict with itself and origin story while people will bicker about one set of experiences being authentic and true and another complaining that they were here first. Why can't we all get along? Is America still the land of the free home of the brave for some or all? I haven't quite understood if pride in colonial identities extends to our societal conditions today. Is the answer for everyone to be proud of their American heritage and nothing else? Do we want to forget the ancestry that came before and say this is a new race, the race of the Americans? That's probably the easiest way to wipe the slate clean, and I think there are a lot of rules for who can be defined in that pool of American.
Many Thanks!
>I don't think it's fair to say a nation's advancement and accomplishments make it perfect.
That's fair. Personally, I'm simply putting the emphasis on the accomplishments. The USA _is_ a first world, industrialized nation. Our electrical grid _does_ function. We _did_ put men on the Moon. Enrico Fermi _did_ demonstrate the first chain reaction here.
>Is the answer for everyone to be proud of their American heritage and nothing else?
FWIW, I view myself as a retired programmer and hobby chemist, part of the traditions of the STEMM fields.
In any case the only way to be anti colonial in the US is to dismantle the US. Not the white structure whatever that is, but the nation as a whole if you believe that colonialism is bad.
Many Thanks! Yup. And that is not going to happen (or, at least, not for that reason or by that mechanism - dismantling via nuclear reactions would be a quite different event).
There’s a very easy solution. Forget about “decolonisation” and “racial narratives” and let people define themselves however the f**k they want
Are you employed by an institution of higher education, perchance? There’s the problem right there
I'm for it, just don't fight people over who is the real whatever. Higher ed...hell no, those dinosaurs will be extinct soon
Some other concluding thoughts...
The discourse around racial identity, lived experience, ancestral heritage, and the like is highly complex terrain to navigate, fraught with deep histories and personal resonances. As we reflect on the perspectives and contexts explored here, I would encourage you to critically engage with the following thought-provoking questions:
What assumptions or unexamined narratives around racial categories and ethnic identities have you internalized from dominant culture? How might deconstructing and understanding the manufactured, colonial roots of these concepts shift your viewpoint?
In what ways has your own lived experience of race been shaped by socialization, systems of oppression, and perceived belonging irrespective of genetic ancestry? How do you disentangle the two?
What does authentically cultivating one's heritage and a sense of ethnic/cultural belonging look like, particularly for communities impacted by diaspora, displacement and colonial identity formulations?
How can this be pursued with sensitivity?
How do you navigate the tensions between an individualistic conception of racial identity based on personal narrative, and a more collective sense of ethnic/tribal belonging defined by specific group stakeholders? Where is the balance struck?
Are there problematic assumptions or blind spots in how you may be equating or distinguishing the nuances between race, ethnicity, nationality and other identity markers? How can you better parse those distinctions?
What does it mean to decolonize your own perceptions and languages around racial identity? How can an anti-racist, anti-colonial lens be more fully embodied in these dialogues?
Whose voices and first-hand perspectives have you prioritized in shaping your current understandings of heritage, belonging and racial identity politics? Which perspectives are missing or need greater centering?
How can spaces be created for marginalized groups to engage in the open-ended work of redefining their own identity concepts and belonging-criteria freed from external constraints? What would that liberated process look like?
These are just some of the critical questions we must contend with as we strive to develop a more intersectional, historically-grounded and decolonized understanding of racial identity. The answers will be different for each of us based on our individual contexts.
I encourage you to lean into this exploration with openness, humility and care. Embrace the complexity and nuances rather than looking for convenient resolutions. Be wakeful to blind spots and power dynamics that may constrain your current perspectives. Most importantly, seek out and elevate the first-hand narratives of those most impacted by these issues as primary guides.
Interrogating our assumptions and unlearning internalized patterns around race and identity is crucial inner work. It requires vulnerability, a willingness to make purposeful repairs, and an acceptance that this decolonization process will be an ongoing, iterative journey. But it is a journey well worth embarking on as we seed more holistic ways of recognizing our common humanity beyond imposed categorizations. I wish you clarity and courage as you navigate your own identity evolution.
Here are some books, documentaries and other resources I would highly recommend:
Books:
"Racecraft" by Barbara J. Fields and Karen E. Fields - A seminal work deconstructing how race is a modern idea manufactured through social, political and economic motives.
"The Invention of the White Race" by Theodore W. Allen - Provides a historical materialist analysis of how the "white race" was created as a ruling class social control formation.
"How the Irish Became White" by Noel Ignatiev - Explores the process of how Irish immigrants to the U.S. were initially racialized as non-white, and the politics of their assimilation into the "white" identity.
"Black Skin, White Masks" by Frantz Fanon - A foundational text examining the psychological dimensions of racism and the politics of decolonizing the mind.
"The History of White People" by Nell Irvin Painter - Chronicles how the concept of a "white race" developed over time through acts of oppression, immigration and social construction.
Documentaries/Films:
"Race: The Power of An Illusion" (2003) - A powerful PBS documentary series interrogating the social, historical and pseudo-scientific underpinnings of modern racial categories.
"Ethnic Notions" (1987) - Marlon Riggs' essential film deconstructing how racist images and stereotypes about Black people were perpetuated through popular culture.
"Awake: A Dream from Standing Rock" (2017) - Powerful indigenous voices and perspectives from the Standing Rock movement against the Dakota Access Pipeline.
"Daughters of the Dust" (1991) - A poetic film exploring the Gullah/Geechee culture of the African diaspora and themes of ancestry, belonging and cultural preservation.
"I Am Not Your Negro" (2016) - Brings James Baldwin's works to life, dissecting the persistent realities of racism and struggles for belonging in America.
Other Resources:
Teachings and writings from Indigenous scholars like Vine Deloria Jr., Lee Maracle, Linda Tuhiwai Te Rina and others.
The "Seeing White" podcast series from Scene on Radio examining the social construction of white racial identity.
Works by Black feminist scholars like bell hooks, Patricia Hill Collins, Audre Lorde and others on intersectional identity.
The "All My Relations" podcast exploring the diversity of Native cultures, stories and communities.
Sources from ethnic studies departments, local community-based organizations and museums focused on first-voice cultural narratives.
Ah, Google Gemini, I didn’t realise they’d let you out of your cage yet
Claude takes offense to being compared to that troglodyte..
Ye Gods! _Was_ that an LLM, run at maximum wokescold??? I just googled
>"The Invention of the White Race" by Theodore W. Allen
and it seems to actually exist, so either Claude lucked out or it (and maybe other LLMs?) have gotten better at not hallucinating references.
Amazing! I thought for sure it was a University professor of a made up discipline
HAHAHA, this is the future is it not? I give Claude my outline and my notes, and it polishes it up.
Many Thanks! Interesting application!
Many Thanks!
Claude is probably the best one out there but I am concerned about alignment theory. No one has solved it. The human race has so many different histories and beliefs, how will control the LLMs and steer them to be accessible to certain groups while taking the path of least resistance to not inflaming culture wars with others. I think if anyone wanted to get rich today, that would be the problem to solve. Make it work like electricity.
Many Thanks! I've been playing with GPT4 (and, to a lesser extent, Bard/Gemini). I'm _mostly_ concerned about hallucinations and other reliability failures. I generally keep asking them chemistry questions, and they keep getting them wrong. E.g. here was a simple discussion of cerium chemistry https://chat.openai.com/share/7faacb6b-a487-494f-b0b7-4a071798fb1c . Amongst other things, GPT4 came up with this equation:
2CeCl4(aq)+H2(g)→2CeCl3(aq)+2HCl(aq)+Cl2(g)
which isn't even balanced. It pulls two chlorine atoms out of thin air.
I _do_ want the LLMs to faithfully follow their users' requests - but, first, they need to be more reliable. I want _factually_ correct answers, not _politically_ correct answers.
Thanks for this chat.
Re: AI Reliability - I honestly think that the accuracy issue will be solved in 24 months to be because they'll (e.g., AI manufacturers) feed it chemistry textbooks to help it stay grounded and ensure it double check its answers that it can verify not just generate an answer. My hot take, is that I wouldn't worry as much there.
On hallucinations, I think that will never be solved because we want these algorithms to hallucinate but only if it leads to clear answers. This is converse of giving AI something like digital ayahuasca where it goes off in search of larger answers like humans. So heck, sometimes hallucination is intentional. We that with people who take things to hallucinate, bottom line is I don't think it necessarily something you want to get rid of but rather have controls that keep it within bounds of our intentionality.
Anywho, highly recommend exploring and trying that equation on Claude, I don't mess with the other LLMs anymore unless they're local.
https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-3-family
Ignatiev is completely wrong. Irish were always legally white in the US, just like all other European immigrants. https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/2013/02/24/pathetic-that-this-even-has-to-be-pointed-out/ There were boundary cases like a south asian Sikh who argued he was Caucasian per modern race science (SCOTUS ruled the founding fathers were ignorant of race science, and thus he wasn't "white" by common sense definitions).
Who decides what white is or isn’t?
Legally speaking, the US government. South Asians qualified for a while, but then they lobbied to be lumped in with East Asians.
Ah lobbying, that's interesting. So if you can pay, you can play. That's probably how the definition has shifted over the years right? https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/10/16/us/census-race-ethnicity.html
The color of law is a good book if you're interested in how they actually defined the categories legally, because to be honest, it was all loosey-goosey back then and it kinda still is, that's all I'm saying, it's not as "black and white" as it seems.
Our host has written about how lobbying is not so simple as "pay to play":
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/09/18/too-much-dark-money-in-almonds/
But of course lobbying now is entirely different from the early days of the republic.
I would argue that whiteness as a property controlled by ruling class, has always been a moving target. Ever since its codification into law in 1670s. Laws need to be updated. Before 1670s, it’s a very dodgy idea. Did you know you could purchase whiteness at one point in time? https://repository.law.umich.edu/mjrl/vol3/iss2/4/
It makes me wonder if these examples we use need to be contextual to the time period they are presented in.
I think the specific example you use ignores that whiteness, at the time was congruent with status, and those European immigrants that you mentioned lacked that privilege and resource. Therefore they were unable to benefit from the systems that were in place at the time. So the way I interpret the reference is not referring to their physical appearance but their status. So while by popular definition our time they may have fit the criteria of what we now call, “white”, I would believe their lived experiences would have made them feel not white. Just a hunch.
Not just "by popular definition of our time", by the law of THEIR TIME. Racial discrimination is now illegal, but it was mandatory back then, and they were classified as white.
Your link is about Venezuela, and has nothing to do with Irish people.
You were somewhere in the vicinity of an accurate point about "status". It's often related to race, but it's a different concept. You are simply wrong that European immigrants were "unable to benefit from the systems in place at the time". Being legally naturalized was a benefit Dred Scott wished he had!
> I would believe their lived experiences would have made them feel not white. Just a hunch.
You don't know what it would mean for them to "feel not white". You weren't alive back then, and weren't in their shoes. They were officially white, and there weren't jokers like Ignatiev whose BS was lapped up by credulous ignorami back then, because everyone back then knew European immigrants were officially white. Did they feel different from other white people? Probably. People feel different from other members of larger groups they belong to all the time!
It's well known that the way they articulated whiteness back then was based on class/status, I'm pretty sure it wasn't as cut and dry . You didn't get free stuff, if you were poor and even if you were so-called white aka a new American, you'd still get the bottom of the barrel. I'm just pointing out some of those practices where you talk about Venezuela (and also Spain and Catholicism) most likely influence modern concepts and usage about race and status. I think they are still used incorrectly but that is its own discussion.
Just read about Irish American or Italian American history, you don't need to read Ignatiev, to know what it was like to be an "American" in the early days, and who benefited the most.
Library of Congress has some good resources about the Irish struggle.
https://www.loc.gov/classroom-materials/immigration/irish/
How Census has changed the definitions over the years..
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/10/16/us/census-race-ethnicity.html
If you went back then and told those immigrants about "articulated whiteness" they would be confused.
Latin America didn't have the one-drop rule. It's one of those things which is entirely socially constructed, but once done so has real effects.
Your LOC link oddly devotes most of its text to the Scotch-Irish. I don't know what your point was in linking to it. I didn't read the NYT one because of the paywall.
"I think the specific example you use ignores that whiteness, at the time was congruent with status, and those European immigrants that you mentioned lacked that privilege and resource. Therefore they were unable to benefit from the systems that were in place at the time. So the way I interpret the reference is not referring to their physical appearance but their status. So while by popular definition our time they may have fit the criteria of what we now call, “white”, I would believe their lived experiences would have made them feel not white. Just a hunch."
It seems like we need a conceptual category for people who don't have much money but can be of any race. Perhaps something like "poor people." But nobody cares much for class anymore, even self-identified Marxists. In all the discussion of race and privilege and disadvantage in Hoover's case, nobody has remarked on Hoover's own lower-class white background. From the NYMag article:
"Elizabeth Hoover, who is now forty-five years old, describes her childhood as “broke”—her father worked odd construction jobs and was periodically unemployed"
Honestly, I have no issue with Elizabeth Hoover. I’ve often wondered what does it take to become accepted in the different nuances of human societies. This practice of line drawing must be an exhausting exercise to keep up with.
I feel like just have issues with the larger conceptualization of categorical mistakes of race, class, privilege, wealth, etc., and how often they’re used interchangeably when they represent different arguments. It’s almost as if we all talk in ways as if these complex topics can be neatly linked into a simple equation. Yet, in active setting, people do tend to zero in on a single vector of a larger pattern, just as you rightly pointed out that nobody remarks on her class. How do we encourage more whole depictions of people? How do we prevent the great flattening of identity? I tend lose sleep over these questions..thanks for indulging my rants.
This is blurring two related concepts. Race is shorthand for shared ancestry. This is crystal clear when dealing with non-humans, and is commonly used with breeding domesticated animals and plants. Ethnicity is shorthand for a persistent (multigenerational) group of humans having certain attributes, some heritable perhaps, some not, like language, religion, traditions, lifestyle, clothing.
I agree with your judgement of Elizabeth Hoover and her erstwhile friends. The right course for her, once she found out her ancestry, was to cease to be a spokesperson or representative for the group in any way, and just live quietly in the background. Her "friends" have contributed to the weakening of social bonds all around.
As to the question of genetic clusters and "biological race," are the clusters "natural kinds?" If not, what is the significance?
An interesting example of lived experience is Barrack Obama, who had no connection to mainland American racial categories as a child and whose native culture is "international," according to his friends from Honolulu, Occidental, and Columbia, but adopted a black cultural identity after moving to Chicago and working as a community organizer on the Far South Side. Is Barrack Obama black?
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/david-garrow-interview-obama
How much crap is enough crap?
There is a Pan-African ideology, but I don't think it actually has much to do with African-Americans. Moammar Ghadaffi dabbled in it (after turning away from Pan-Arabism), but would legally be lumped in with whites in the US.
What are the bounds of the international concept of "blackness?"
Because Obama looked black. Meghan Markle on the other hand, or Rashida Jones would be considered white in many countries.
Black people are people with black skin. ...I don't know why people think it's more complicated than that. A person of Caucasian heritage who was melanistic due to a mutation would be designated as black by pretty much everyone (except African Americans, ironically).
The people with the darkest skin aren't Africans but Melanesians like Solomon Islanders. But they don't really have much uniting them with Africans and we already use the term "black" for the latter. Similarly, if we discovered a long-uncontacted population with paler skins than Europeans, we wouldn't grant them the term "white" regardless of how logical that would be.
The term "black" is also used for Australian Aborigines, who are unrelated to Africans but just as dark-skinned. If you talk about "blacks" in Australia then it needs to be clear from context which kind you're talking about.
Solomon Islanders or Papuans are closely related, and just as dark, but I've never heard of anyone calling them "black".
Another fun fact: in the early days of the Australian colonies the Aborigines were referred to as "Indians". The term "Aborigine" doesn't seem to have come along until the 19th century.
Perhaps they do talk that way in Australia, since there have been relatively few people of African descent historically. In the US "Asian" used to mean East Asian, while in the UK it still typically means "South Asian", whom they distinguish from, say, "Chinese".
Many Indians from the southern part of India are as dark as American blacks, nobody regards them as black in America.
Nobody regards them as black, but they certainly can get confused as black. In college I TA'd for a professor who was a Sri Lankan immigrant that was multiple times referred to as African American. Certainly he had darker skin then many American blacks (who often have a fair degree of mixed race in their background).
On the contrary, I think that very few would consider a melanistic member of the white race to be black or an albino member of the black race to be white.
"Consider for example the Jews."
I just ask if they make annual substantial donations to Federation?
That is an inside joke. If you understand it, you are probably Jewish, if, that is, you give to Federation.
As usual, I enjoyed reading this article, and agreed with most of what was written. I was initially sympathetic toward the plight of Elizabeth Hoover, until I realized she was a professor of anthropology, and in particular has an interest in critical medical anthropology. A quick survey of her publications suggests that she would probably be in the camp that is opposed to “cultural appropriation“ and believes in much of the nonsense of critical race theory. I wonder if she would be as sympathetic to somebody else in her situation if this hadn’t happened to her. I suppose, live by the sword die by the sword.
All this cancel culture reminds me the Third Reich. I once read a letter which some German officer wrote, which was like this:
"I learnt the terrible, previously unknown fact that half of my relatives on my father's side were Jews. I know that this does not disqualify me from serving in the Wehrmacht, but what about my membership in the NSDAP?"
> if somebody told me that somehow I wasn’t Jewish, I would need to re-evaluate my self-identity at least a little
The difference is that Jewish ethnicity is infinitely more welcoming than native American ethnicity because *anyone can convert*. Sure we don't *evangelize* - you don't *have* to convert. But if you feel like you're really meant to be Jewish, and you convert, then you're Jewish, end of question, no matter your DNA.
There's nothing like that for native Americans. You can live on the reservation and marry a native American and at most, that would make your kids native Americans. But not you. You would always be an outside colonizer.
End of question if you convert under the auspices of ultra-Orthodoxy, and that of course means a commitment to ultra-Orthodox belief (or to lying about it) and to ultra-Orthodox practice. Anything else, and you and your descendants (if you are a woman) will be liable to being presented as frauds, not just by ultra-Orthodoxy, but by anybody who does not bother to observe but sees halakhah as normative (e.g., most Israelis).
(I was of two minds about including "ultra-" in the above. The fact remains that US modern Orthodoxy is seen in Israel as being basically Reform, and hence invalid. (Secular) Israelis I've talked to don't really see Trump's daughter conversion as valid, for instance - in fact they consider it pretty ridiculous. OTOH, Trump is a useful enough ally of the Israeli Right that people don't comment on that openly all of the time (as they would if it had been a liberal president's daughter).
Do we really need to see proof that she benefited from affirmative action? Native American is hot hot hot, in the oppression Olympics. Also, it’s woke academia. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. She knew what she signed up for.
> There are some people who are genetically 100% Jewish whose families converted to Christianity centuries ago and don’t even know they have any Jewish connection.
This isn't plausible; without internal awareness of Jewish background, there is essentially zero chance that the families would have continued marrying only each other over the course of multiple centuries. Once they forget that they're Jews, they're going to start marrying Christians.
100% isn't possible, right. Relatively high percentages? There are stories about that in some Spanish islands - probably the one place where you would expect that to be marginally possible.
I think I ought to mention a short story that won both a Hugo and Nebula award:
"Welcome to Your Authentic Indian Experience™" by Rebecca Roanhorse
https://apex-magazine.com/short-fiction/welcome-to-your-authentic-indian-experience/
Audio version, read by Levar Burton: https://podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/revisited-welcome-to-your-authentic-indian-experience/id1244649384?i=1000539015806
> I definitely support 1 here. I think cultural appropriation is great. It produced a bunch of great works of art and nearly all good food. But I can understand why Native Americans don’t agree with this, and I don’t expect to be able to convince everyone of my position today.
It's not exactly an unusual position. Everyone who wants to project cultural power is aware that this is accomplished by getting other people to adopt your culture, not by getting them not to.
全世界都在学中国话
孔夫子的话越来越国际化
全世界都在讲中国话
我们说的话让世界都认真听话
Ah but the epitome of cultural power is when you force people to adopt your culture and then still get to tell them they're doing it wrong. Force us to rename Fraser Island to "K'gari" and then tell us we're pronouncing it wrong.
That isn't cultural power. It's a different kind of power. Cultural power is when you call the island K'gari and other people admire you so much that it makes them try to say K'gari too.
Well, when first stated, it doesn't sound bad, but when you have seen it in operation, (and thought about the gringo taco truck :)) that's different.
There's a principle of Natural Law which says standpoint theory can go pound sand.
Meanwhile, Buffy Saint-Marie has spent her whole life consciously lying about having Indian heritage. None of her Indian community care, since they already accepted her as being part of their tribe, genetic testing does not overrule that, and they all lived happily ever after.
I think it's important to make it clear that the "consensus" you're referring to in this post is the consensus of Westerners on Twitter. Even the same Westerners are likely to express very different feelings in real life.
required comment pointing to zack m. davis disputing the "categories were made for man" post, https://unremediatedgender.space/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions
Just a very small query: is there some confusion when talking about "real" Jews speaking or not speaking Yiddish? I believe Yiddish is a Hebrew/German mishmash now mostly spoken in Brooklyn and not to be confused with the ancient and revived in modern times Jewish language of Hebrew. (I started to say Ben-Yehuda "resurrected" Hebrew but then thought better of it.)
No. In the US, lots of elderly Jews speak Yiddish and lots of young Jews feel like they would be more "culturally Jewish" if they knew some.
What Scott said - and, while Yiddish stemmed from Middle High German ("High" meaning "Upper", including Bavarian) with Hebrew and some Slavic admixture, it had a healthy literary culture for about a hundred years; I doubt that poets writing in it would have appreciated its being called a "mishmash". Then there's the entire falsche Nostalgie thing, starting in the 70s, i.e., when native speakers started to die out; it encourages people to learn a couple of Yiddish phrases, and presents Yiddish as a bit of a humorous language - of course readers of Yiddish literature (there are still a few around - Hassidim are not in that group) resent that, for excellent and obvious reasons.
I'm white, but I've had many social interactions with Tlingit people, so I'll try to think about this from their perspective.
Tlingit society is matrilineal. I've seen Tlingit people claim that the United States government imposing its blood quanta system on them is racist because it's different from their own rules. If someone is 1/128 Tlingit by blood quantum, but they have an unbroken chain of Tlingit matrilineal descent, according to Tlingit tradition, they're obviously Tlingit.
I met a Tlingit guy who married an Athabascan woman. He wanted his children to be Tlingit. He couldn't have his own clan adopt his wife because Tlingit tradition doesn't allow intra-clan marriage, so he had to persuade another clan to adopt her. Their children will belong to the clan that adopted her, not his clan. According to tradition, his children will be obligated to treat members of his clan with special respect.
I've heard Tlingits talk about how proud they are of their Irish ancestors. Apparently, this is the appropriate way for Tlingits to talk about their fathers' clans, whether those clans are Tlingit or not.
Clan membership is a huge part of Tlingit culture. Each clan has its own traditions not found in other clans. In my opinion, it's not possible to be culturally Tlingit or have 'lived experience' as a Tlingit without belonging to a specific clan.
I don't see how an Elizabeth Hoover situation could happen with Tlingits. They pay a lot of attention to which girls/women are born or adopted into the clan. Generally, they should be aware of whether a woman belongs to their clan or not. I suppose there could be weird situations such as babies getting mixed up in a hospital at birth. My guess is that the tribal elders of the clan involved would decide such a case, and the elders of one clan might make a different decision than the elders of another clan.
By the way, in Tlingit culture regards cultural appropriation as an act of violence. If Tlingit Clan A wrongs Tlingit Clan B, Clan B might steal a tradition from Clan A. The Unangans once fought a war against the Sitka Tlingit, so they pirated some Unangan songs, which they still sing to this day to spite the Unangans. In the 19th century, after some white Americans did something wrong to some Tlingits (I think they broke a promise or treaty, I don't remember the details) the Tlingits appropriated some white American culture as an act of vengeance. By now, the Tlingits have figured out this isn't an effective way to retaliate against white Americans.
If someone wants to take a Tlingit tradition without offending them, the process is to get permission from the clan elders. I've talked to young Tlingits who are frustrated about their elders not being willing to share clan traditions more widely with outsiders, since they think it would help preserve their culture. Maybe when they grow old and become clan elders themselves they will be more open to outsiders borrowing their culture.
>The Unangans once fought a war against the Sitka Tlingit, so they pirated some Unangan songs, which they still sing to this day to spite the Unangans. In the 19th century, after some white Americans did something wrong to some Tlingits (I think they broke a promise or treaty, I don't remember the details) the Tlingits appropriated some white American culture as an act of vengeance.
IP-lawyers-at-arms? :-)
From what I've experienced myself and heard from others, the groups normally decried as intolerant--such as 4chan's /pol/, toxic gamers, and now white nationalists--are surprisingly tolerant: "I don't care who or what you are, as long as you also bash on ******s."
Yes, and they will surely continue to be tolerant once they take power.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_of_German_National_Jews
I’ve always found it funny that the consensus is pro transgenderism but anti transracialism.
But then again, I’m someone who is “racially ambiguous”. People have assumed I’m Moroccan, Yemeni, Brazilian, Indian, etc.
My mom is Jamaican — mostly of African descent but also part “Pakistani” (it wasn’t Pakistan back then, of course) — and my dad is Jewish, his mom was German, and his dad Russian.
My “lived experience” is that race is both biologically informed and socially constructed. For instance, in America I’m “black”, but in Jamaica I’m “coloured”.
The one-drop rule in American culture is a rather interesting thing. On one hand, it mitigates the prevalence of colorism as seen in Latin America and the Caribbean. On the other hand, it limits Americans’ ability to think about race in a grounded, genetically-informed way.
I think it took the transgender movement for society to get more serious about the innate differences between men and women (on average). A decade ago, it was common to hear progressive types deny biological differences in the sexes — among the most consequential and obvious facts of social life.
The feminist movement found talk of biological differences counterproductive, and it took transgenderism to break that hold on the discourse.
Perhaps a transracial movement can break the hold that antiracists have on the discourse; the party line of racial blank-slate-ism is clearly not helping “black and brown communities”. Time to try something else.
If this happened to an Orthodox (and Conservative?) Jew they would just be asked to go through a technical conversion and then they'd go on with their Jewish lives. Interestingly, the way this would be most likely to go wrong is that this hypothetical person, might take offense at the notion that something external to them could define their identity for them and then refuse to convert.
Yeah exactly. You can convert to Judaism. Depending on who you want to be accepted by - if you only care about reform Jews accepting you, you can do an easier reform conversion. If you want all Jews to accept you, you can do the slightly tougher orthodox conversion.
If you're already practicing Judaism, then the conversion isn't difficult because it's mostly just studying to practice Judaism.
There is no equivalent for ethnicities like native Americans, otherwise Elizabeth Hoover could just "convert" to native American and that would be the end of the issue. Instead she is being pushed out because ultimately, native Americans are a closed tribe and you can only be one by inheriting that status from at least one parent.
Interesting how one decides where the line is drawn within around an ethnicity. One parent? One grandparent? One great-grandparent? How much is enough?
I forget, did Scott talk about the "one-drop rule" in this piece....
Possibly any ancestor is enough if there's a paper trail to prove it.
But if you have ancestry with no paper trail to prove it, then that doesn't count.
One grandparent for native Americans. One grandparent to get an Irish passport too, as it happens.
I just want to point out that I don't think it's proper to say "halakhically Jewish according to Reform rabbis" as the Reform movement holds that Halakha is not binding and therefore as far as I'm aware their Rabbis don't make Halakhic rulings. This is not the case for the Conservative movement.
There are Reform responsa (as I found out when I came across a volume of them in a library), but they are advisory, not binding. "Fully" or "officially" would have been a happier choice of words than "halakhically". https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/reform-halakhic-texts/
The answer to this question actually is 1.5.
Stop caring so much about heritage, racial and/or cultural.
Just stop it.
I'm not kidding.
It's irrational that Scott cares so much about his family identity that he refuses to seriously embrace 1.5 merely because he enjoys caring about being Jewish.
I think you have reinvented the concept of “ethnicity”, and explained why (at least in Europe) we tend to talk about “ethnicity” rather than “race”. “Race” is usually taken as implying an acceptance of racial theories of how it all works (which are, of course, different in different cultures, but are entirely about the genetically-inherited idea), whereas “ethnicity” is usually taken as working in the complicated multi-dimensional way you describe.
Her friends were strongly incentiviced not to be "white person supporting native american colonial impostor". The transitivity of cancel culture reinforces it by skewing the experience of consensus reality
Conceivably you could have a Native American great-grandparent—or possibly even a grandparent who was Native American—but your genetic markers wouldn't show it.
Think of it this way. Each parent passes half of their DNA to you. This means that there’s half of your mom and dad's DNA that you did *not* inherit. And Inheriting half of your parent’s DNA does *not* mean you're inheriting half of each of your parent's ethnicity marker genes. The DNA you inherit is random. One or both parents may have ethnic marker genes that they didn’t end up passing down to you.
So, say one of your great-grandparents is Mi’kmaq and your other seven great-grandparents are of Western European origin—theoretically, you're 1/8th Mi’kmaq. But your Native American gene markers may have gotten lost in the shuffle. This would be less likely if there were dozens of Native American gene markers, but I suspect that genetic tests like 23andMe only use a few.
Hi, just chiming in that the 23ane test uses more than 600000 SNPs distributed across all chromosomes, it's not not really possible to lose those markers through random chance that quickly!
Yes, but how many of those markers uniquely define a Native American let alone a Mi'kmaq? There was a thread a few years back on Twitter about why 23andMe would show ethnic percentages that didn't match peoples' actual ancestry percentages. A 23andMe-er chimed in and explained it that way.
OTOH, this blog post suggests that it's at about seven generations back when we start having ancestors whom we share no DNA with...
https://gcbias.org/2017/12/19/1628/
Enough markers that you can definitely tell if your grandparent was Native American, although I don't think 23andMe do specific tribes. 7th generation (as in the blog post) I can agree that you can _start_ seeing some "loss" but you've got heaps of signal from your grandparent, even if they weren't fully Native American themselves.
Sorry, I don't mean to be snarky, I work in genetics and I just want to counter that stuff doesn't disappear that quickly!
I agree. You'd think that would be case, but this is the official line from 23andMe...
"It is important to note that even if an individual in your family tree was considered to be Indigenous American, your own DNA may not reveal the Indigenous American ancestry because each parent only passes down a random half of their DNA each generation."
That suggests to me that they're saving money and only looking for a few SNPs. But they also claim that they can distinguish between different subgroups within Native American populations. I'll have to shrug my shoulders at this point.
https://customercare.23andme.com/hc/en-us/articles/202906870-Can-23andMe-Identify-Indigenous-American-Ancestry
Maybe a bit unlikely quite that quickly, but much more likely then implied above. You don't inherit 600,000 SNPs independently, you get 23 chromosomes from each parent. That it is a much smaller set to be cleaving in half each generation. While recombination is a thing, it's not that common so you're still inheriting a rather small set of chunks, much closer to 23 then 600,000.
Good point.
Nice post. The only way for the woke SJWs to complain about this case REQUIRES that they subjugate any “lived experience” BELOW genetic reality. I don’t have strong feeling either way about that….but the point is these idiots need to pick a lane. The fact that they have to, is great. The fact that they have done so speaks of a principle that carries over into other parts of their reality. Now…I’m assuming these folks have principles….and can perceive reality…and that may be where I am mistaken.
Fewer comments like this, please.
I've long argued that many of the things we criticize as "cultural appropriation" are in fact bad! But they are bad for reasons aside from "one person taking cultural practices from a culture they aren't a part of".
Examples:
- Dressing up as a native american in costume. This is not bad because you're stealing the idea of a head-dress or whatever. It's bad because it's mockery. It's drawing a portrait of a real set of people as some kind of cartoonish thing, alongside dragons and wizards.
- Selling a spiritual practice you aren't educated in. This is basically lying. A word, like "guru" has specific meaning, and there is perceived, but difficult-to-the-uninitiated-to-identify value.
But when we're talking about artistic themes, styles of cooking, music, dress, whatever, I see it the same way I see remixing music. The original artist might not like it if you take their heartfelt love song and turn it into a techno bop. But in the abstract, I absolutely support your right to do so, and think the world is richer for it. All culture is copied. Just don't lie about the origins, don't try to confuse people, and don't mock people. And we already have words for these things: deception and mockery. There's nothing worse about "cultural appropriation" beyond that, because nobody "owns" culture.
"Dressing up as a native american in costume. This is not bad because you're stealing the idea of a head-dress or whatever. It's bad because it's mockery. It's drawing a portrait of a real set of people as some kind of cartoonish thing, alongside dragons and wizards."
I think I disagree with this. It shouldn't be different from (say) dressing up in a lab coat as a scientist.
It's true that there is an archetypal conception of "scientist" as a brilliant man with frazzled white hair who holds a bubbling test tube and shouts "Eureka!" which is a very exaggerated version of real scientists. But I think the archetypal conception has value. If we weren't allowed to think of scientists like this - or of forests with big primeval trees and wolves in them, or of businessmen with top hats and monocles, or of a mythical California full of beautiful beaches and tanned celebrities, or of a mythical library full of dusty old tomes and tweed-coated professors - then I think we'd be removing romance from the human experience in a tragic way. I don't know how to balance that with some people not wanting to be romanticized, but it doesn't seem obvious to me that the desire not to be romanticized should always win out.
In the sphere of children’s books, which is to say the only books most Americans will ever read in their lives, it has meant a shift toward dreary PSAs and Marxist-style tomes. Which I don’t think even Marxists really went in for? - from the few 20th century Russian children’s books I’ve ever seen. So yay us.
It's important to note that although Critical Race Theory uses Marxist dialectics and terminology, traditional Marxists don't get along with the CRT people. There have been some hilarious flame wars on the WSWS.org comment threads between the Fourth International Marxists (Trotskyites) and CRT people. The Trotties want to boil all history down to class conflict and oppression. While the CRT people boil history down to colonialization and racial oppression. The CRT people always end up calling the Marxists racists, and the Trotties get all defensive and huffy because their theory is color-blind (so they can't be racists!).
I only meant the term in the aesthetic sense, as in: we hate what is fun, beautiful, whimsical, etc.
It should be easy for doctrinaire Marxists, or even soft left socialists, to win that argument. If capital is on your side (see DEI) then maybe you are on the side of capital.
> the only books most Americans will ever read in their lives
So true, unfortunately.
Well, clearly this breaks down at some stage. A 16th century English playwright (say) might argue that this extends to the beloved theatrical archetype of the evil Jewish miser with a gag nose, a bright red wig, and devilish mannerisms. A blackface minstrel-show comedian might say the same thing about a comic black layabout with enormous lips. I don't think you would endorse perpetuating those costumes in the name of keeping romance in the world; so, surely, you have to grant that *some* silly costumes are racist/mean/offensive enough to be worth banning, despite the cost to our library of cultural archetypes. Reasonable minds can disagree on which side of the boundary Indian costumes sit, but the principle seems hard to deny.
Eh, who cares. If they want to make jokes in bad taste, that's their choice.
I mean. I care. Lots of Jewish people care. (And I imagine a lot of black people would care if minstrel shows were still widespread, as well.)
Red wig? Is red hair associated with Judaism in 16th C England?
Yes, very much so. It's a recurring element of the medieval iconography of Judas, and thus of the archetypal "evil Jew", and was stronger than ever in the Elizabethan era. As a quick pull from the Wikipedia page on Shakespeare's Shylock,…
> English Jews had been expelled in 1290; Jews were not allowed to return until the rule of Oliver Cromwell. In the 16th and early 17th centuries, Jews were often presented on the Elizabethan stage in hideous caricature, with hooked noses and bright red wigs.
Hmmm, yea, I'll take the point that "mockery" is a bit of a shallow description of what's going on. But I do think there is an important difference between varieties of the things we call "cultural appropriation", and I am quite sympathetic to the "dressing up as Indians" one. Perhaps you can help me describe the boundary. Returning to basic psychology for why people might feel bad about this sort of thing:
- People don't like to be disliked or looked-down on. Mockery is this, and I agree that not everyone dressing up as a Native American is doing this. (and it can be reasonably inferred by observers that they are not, etc.) So, bad example. Blackface may be much closer to "mockery".
- People do not like to be misunderstood. If the "archetype" is simply inaccurate not just in its shallowness, but directionally, then there's something that stings more about it. The archetype of scientist (which I am, professionally) is interesting, because while it is clearly an ideal (aside from the fairly flexible "man" part), it more or less matches what those who identify as scientists hope for themselves. I wouldn't hold a test tube undergoing an active reaction, but I'd totally shout "Eureka" if I had a breakthrough, and hope to have breakthroughs. The question of whether we _care_ if I feel bad about it aside, I don't feel at all bad about being associated with the romanticized Scientist, and I think most scientists don't either. I can contrast this to the experience of finding an "SF-style" cafe in Denmark. They seemed to think SF food was some combination of strange sandwiches, and burritos that was nothing like anything I've had in SF. I'm not THAT strongly identified with being an "SF person" so it didn't sting much, but it was vaguely off-putting. Perhaps the image we portray of natives in pop culture is in some way directionally different from how most natives today perceive themselves.
- People (sometimes) do not like to be essentialized, boxed-in, or trapped in an identity. I think this relates a whole lot to the content of your article. If I want to be an individual person, free to be unique in whatever way, it feels bad to see messages advertising me as some way, for a label I can't particularly escape. I get to choose whether I think of myself as a "Scientist". But the world and society and everyone tells me I can't choose whether I'm a "Native American". This relates to other people's comments about "branding". You're gonna care a whole lot about a brand, if you aren't allowed to not be that brand.
For whatever reason, I am sympathetic to all of the psychological discomforts surrounding identity above, but I am not at all sympathetic to "we own this art because it is from our culture, and it feels bad to see other people copy and change it".
Another framing could, as you do above, draw a metaphor to law. Law is concerned with ownership of cultural artifacts, but we feel different about them depending on what they are. Content and ideas are only protected for a relatively short amount of time. (copyright) or a very short amount of time (patents) However, brands (trademarks) are protected in perpetuity. Perhaps I feel that raw aesthetics (creating native-theme inspired jewelry) is more like an idea, whereas a costume is more like a trademark.
I think "mockery" should be generalized to "diluting the brand". People in a subculture often have an incentive to gatekeep to keep the posers out. The posers may benefit from adopting certain aspects of the subculture. But if they don't go all-in, the extant members shoulder negative externalities, regardless of the poser's intent.
That's only true if the brand is weak in the first place. Nobody cares if somebody dresses up like a posh Brit, because posh Brits are still the upper class of a first world country. Whereas the sorts of cultures that are always in "appropriation" dramas are barely hanging on has-beens at best, clinging to their mostly imaginary dignity for all they are worth.
Well, the restriction to punching-up seems specific to id pol. But I think of brand dilution as a wider phenomenon. One example I had in mind was Nintendo's notorious litigation against artwork, emulators, and Smash tourneys. It's clearly a case where a successful company with a strong brand is punching-down in order to protect its IP. Another example where the adherents are more involved might be how some Christians don't consider Mormons to be "real" Christians. Christianity is on the decline, but idk if I'd call it weak. And the word "poseur" per se is something I associate with the punk-rock scene when it was still emerging.
Right, I suppose I should amend, either weak or overwhelmingly strong. Nintendo (and Disney) can crush anybody who dares touch their IP in ways they don't like. Christianity, and posh Brits for that matter, also could at the peak of their respective powers.
I agree that "diluting the brand" is part of what's going on. The fact that some people are essentially forced to be part of the brand is very relevant as well. I care a lot more about perception of a brand if I don't get a choice in being identified with it in the eyes of others.
And whether an "appropriation" is more like a brand infringement versus a repurposing of an idea strikes me as quite an important. There's a big difference between "This IS native art" and "This is inspired by native art".
As the frontier closed, even as the final conflicts with the Indians were playing out - Americans (and *even some old Indian fighters*) were filled with nostalgia for it.
A few short decades further this became the most popular single subject for the new movie industry.
Children dressed up as cowboys, which they were not, and as Indians, which they were not. Schools chose mascots not out of mockery but affection for these figures that had passed into legend almost instantly. These were caricatures by their nature as all mascots are. There was no mockery in it. There was, obviously, no very deep knowledge in it either.
It’s fine to hate it more for this reason, if you like. The very small but influential activist Indian fringe obviously does.
I'm getting a little bit annoyed at Scott talking about "the consensus view" or something similar to mean the popular view among progressives (and/or in San Fransisco). It seems pretty clear that the importance of "lived experience" and of affirmative action is definitely not widely accepted among people generally, and (based on the record of public votes on AA) not even by a majority (almost anywhere). Statements like this just seem to be erasing the existence of conservatives, moderates, and everyone outside your left-wing bubble. I don't think that's the intention, but it seems to be the effect.
It's also arguably even unfair to progressives, a kind of weasel wording that just says "your group believes this" without any clarification on who that actually is, and without being supported by evidence or even being falsifiable. Even when it's clearly true, it seems like bad epistemology to me. There's, shockingly, a *lot* of these "everyone knows" statements around here ("progressives believe", "conservatives believe" even absurd things like "nerds believe") in an otherwise very data-focused and logic-focused community.
I think "the view of the Biden Adninistration", "the view of x% of people according to this poll", or even "the view of most of my Bay Area friends" would work a lot better here.
Separately, I find this post too accepting of this quasi-religious notion of "cultural appropriation". I have no clue what cultural appropriation actually is or why it's harmful. Every definition I've seen seems absurdly vague (unspecified and untestable references to "cultural practices", "power differentials" and God knows what else), and even vaguer about what's supposed to be bad about it. It harms an Indian person to see white people wearing Indian dress (in a non-mocking way) because...? I have no sensible answer to that question.
I'd rather people not give respect to this term, or use it without quotation marks as if it's a coherent thing, without providing or linking to a well-defined definition.
Other than those things, great article!
While I generally agree with the sentiment behind this post, I think there is a dimension particular to the native culture that needs to be addressed.
The initial investigation into Hoover’s background seems to have come from a colleague, who wrote her an email about the breach of trust with this snippet:
“This is what I was always told, this is how I was raised, I never thought to question it?
You are a professor of Native studies. You make your entire living and career off of being Native. You have a responsibility to know your own family story. Every Native community I have entered into folks immediately ask who my family is and where I’m from by way of greeting. If it’s true you never questioned your parents, I wonder how you’ve been asked who your family is and where you’re from throughout your whole life and never stopped to wonder who your family actually is. Where they are actually from.
There are also signs that show you did know the story wasn’t true. You’ve slowly erased your tribal affiliation from your bios online through the years, the parenthetical after your name stating Elizabeth Hoover (Mohawk/Mi’kmaq) has disappeared, you didn’t offer any kind of deep positionality in your book”
It seems to me, based on this reading, that the communities she interacts with takes lineage and family names/history very seriously - to the point of using family lineage as part of casual identification.
I can’t help but assign a bit more culpability to Hoover’s situation. If the cultural norms were in fact clear enough that she “knew she fucked up” when she found out and still tried to hide it - I can understand the feeling of betrayal that her colleagues and community may feel as a result.
All the other commentary about race and identity being a hard to define fractal object that falls apart in the toxic space of cancel culture parlance is correct though, and I find it interesting to note that the emailer actually concurs:
“The pretendian hunts of the current moment are a mess. They are harmful to those of us, like me, who are actual Indigenous people who code as white and have grown up disconnected because of settler colonialism. They are harmful to folks with complicated family stories and adoptions and estranged family and force many of us to share things about our families that we shouldn’t have to.”
Link to the email here : https://nativeappropriations.com/2023/05/a-letter-to-elizabeth-hoover.html
It is so surreal seeing Scott Alexander mess up and accidentally write a post criticizing a straw man, because he spends the entire time *continuing to ask the right questions at the exact same rate he normally does*
Scott wrote:
> You can do cluster analysis on a bunch of genomes and circle the nice, legible shapes representing Europeans, Africans, etc.
Yes, but the genetic distance between sub-Saharan African populations such as the Bantu and San is roughly the same as between Europeans and Asians. But we lump Bantu and San together as one race, while we split Asians and Europeans into two races. And if you look at the tree of genetic groupings that Cavelli-Sforza mapped out, there are actually *eight* distinct genetic clusters in modern Homo sapiens: African, Caucasoid, Northeast Asian, Arctic, American, Southeast Asian, Pacific Islanders, and Oceanian. So contemporary racial terms *are* sort of arbitrary. It would be more accurate to define humans into eight races.
I think you should have a look at some more modern science than Cavalli–Sforza. We know a lot more now than we did three decades ago.
AFAIK, there has only been extra splitting within the eight basic C-S groups since then, and the C-S population cladogram has held up as our knowledge of the human genome has become more detailed. For instance, we now know that Oceanian populations have up to 8% Denisovan genome, while no other non-Oceanian groups (except maybe Tibetans?) have any Denisovan alleles.
If you have links that refute the C-S cladogram, I'd love to see them. I've followed human genetics pretty closely since I left grad school in the 80s, but I admit that some of what I learned may be confounded by more recent research.
I don't have any links, but consider e.g. what we now know about South Asians being a hybrid of a West Eurasian and an East Eurasian population, where Cavalli–Sforza described them as being a part of a West Eurasian clade.
Do "we" really do that? I'm pretty sure that Africans themselves are more than aware of such differences, whereas those who never even heard about them clearly wouldn't have much reason to care one way or the other.
For once, I broadly agree with most of what's said. Except the problems that start from here.
"But I place a decent amount of value on being Jewish..."
Then why did it take only a paragraph before Scott called himself "white"?
Well, I know the reason, it's because neo-liberal bubble heads consider Jewish to be some kind of weird subset of white, the Ur-Schrödinger's-minority. When you want to signal status as a minority, you're Jewish. When you want to signal status as an ally, or deflect blame, you're white. This tendency has been pretty catastrophic for real Jews, of which I count myself. It reads as political and racial subterfuge, and looks to be clear evidence of the "dual loyalty" charge that anti-semites use, along with dual citizenship.
To me, Scott's white. To be Jewish is to believe the things that Jews believe. The law is a consequence of that. To act out Jewishness without the belief would be acceptable, right up until you start following another religion, which I accuse Scott of doing. Then you're being deceitful, and after a while most people won't consider you Jewish regardless. If you do it, and then waver on this identity when it suites you rhetorically, then I think you're actively malicious. To rhetorically act as if your Jewishness is some kind of precursor to your new religion that has literally nothing to do with it, then you're also blasphemous.
But what do I know? I'm just a Karaite, and thus I am so non-Jewish to the normal person as to be unworthy of mention by everyone who ever brings up the question.
It's not just "neo-liberal bubble heads" who consider Jews (*) to be "white"; I think that's been pretty much the consensus view of pretty much everyone who ever cared about who was or was not white. The Confederate States of America, who cared more about whiteness than just about everyone, had an openly Jewish Secretary of State. The Apartheid-era government of South Africa, with its extensive body of law as to who was "white" or "colored" or "black", classified the Jews as "white".
It is also true that non-Jewish white people have at times discriminated against Jews, sometimes very harshly. Just as non-Irish white people have discriminated against the Irish, or non-Italian white people against Italians, though usually not as persistently. This is only confusing to people who think "ethnic discrimination" is defined as something that can never be done to white people.
Scott is correct to call himself both "white" and "Jewish" in the sense that those words are used by most of the English-speaking population. If you want to say that his Jewishness is insufficiently pure for your tastes, that says more about you than it does about Scott.
* Or at least Ashkenazi Jews
The historical analysis is true, but the what I said still holds. I am aware of Judah P Benjamin. You might recall General Order no. 11. We can agree, historically, what counts as an "other" has varied in time and place and circumstance.
But I am speaking of the now, in this political circumstance we live in, as determined by anti-semites who are the people I actually worry about. If I sit down and listen to say, Ryan Faulk, and I were to ask him his thoughts on this, he would probably say that when Jews do this equivocation between White and Jewish, it is precisely because they are as a group, stoking hatred against White people in order to deflect blame from themselves, as Jews are not White and as I pointed out, and what in fact actually happened, the switch to "White" as a descriptor only happened once Scott had to take on a potential criticism. He did not say after all, "...I as a Jewish person, have no right to criticize the Mi’kmaq Indians’ membership policies."
All this is a separate argument from the "is Scott insufficiently pure for my taste?" question. When I see Jews do things that could feed into my problems as a Jew, obviously I might point it out if relevant, the same way I've seen black people criticise other black people for, to use a more allowable phrase, acting too ghetto. When I talk about how others view Jewishness and Whiteness, that is a racial argument I see made by other people.
The "Jewish purity" question, as you put it, is mainly the typical fighting regarding levels of liberalness and orthodoxy, rather than a racial question. Hence I started off talking about it by saying "To me". When Ethan Klein commented that Ben Shapiro should be first in the gas chambers in the next holocaust, my own first thought was of course Ethan Klein would say something like that, he's not really Jewish, he's only a "cultural Jew". Ben Shapiro himself would give a fairly mushy answer on this question, but he has accused Bernie Sanders of mostly the same things I'm accusing Scott of (minus the argument that Anti-semites notice this and use it as evidence of Jewish treachery).
It is the case that you can still count as Jewish and be off the path as they say. The only reason Scott slips past being a Jew altogether in my eyes is my accusation of apostasy. Hence it is even more irritating to see him "do the thing".
>right up until you start following another religion, which I accuse Scott of doing.
Could you elaborate? Which other religion?
Scott is a Rationalist. Rationalism is a cult. Not all cults are bad, and as far as cults go, Rationalism is relatively benign, if still incoherent.
I am perfectly aware of Scott's defence strategy here. He claims that Rationality is only a religion insofar as everything is a religion. Unfortunately for Scott, this argument is based on a very Rationalist (and generally Liberal) understanding of what a religion is. A religion is not a wicker basket of beliefs and actions. Not even a wicker basket of certain kinds of beliefs (on the afterlife, on the soul) and actions (rituals, festivals, clothing). Scott doesn't understand religion as a concept. You can see this when he says baffling things like, paraphrased, "The Shia Sunni split is over something that doesn't matter," when it is in fact the second most important thing in all of Islam, right under the createdness of the Koran. He doesn't understand this because he thinks religions are just wicker baskets. A wicker basket can hold any number of arbitrary things, and so the difference between Shia and Sunni is merely a choice in leadership over a society, rather than who is to lead people towards Allah's command after the death of the literal final prophet of Allah. So to Scott, what does it matter, what leader you pick? It could be anybody, the choice is arbitrary.
And in totality, this is why Rationality itself is a religion. Religions are all encompassing transcendent systems. Religions start off with extremely fundamental assumptions that then trickle down and encompass absolutely everything about one's worldview. Rationality is incoherent, but it still has base assumptions about what Rationality is and why it is valuable and what it applies to, and these assumptions colour absolutely everything about how a Rationalist not only sees the world, but acts within it.
For example, why does Scott defend Polyamory so stringently? Because as a Rationalist, he thinks "rationally" about it and believes others are behaving irrationally towards it. Or possibly that he's missing their rational argument (itself another belief that extends from Rationality). Rationalists don't have a good grasp of what things are or why, (Have you noticed how often lately in blogs, Scott laments his confusion about something everybody normal finds completely obvious, like in this post?), because a fundamental Rationalist assumption is that there is no foundational objective viewpoint, there is only what follows "rationally", and rationality is defined as only Instrumental and Epistemic, with no regards (or probably knowledge of) to the fact that this definition is itself instrumental and not epistemic. And so what ends up happening is they make really bad arguments in support of polyamory, and have really strange beliefs about it and a host of other things.
This is how any religion works. You start with some very small handful of base assumptions and they cascade into informing almost everything about an entire culture. Comparatively few things end up being arbitrary. And I doubt even Scott would deny that the Rationalist Community is a community with a culture. He'll just say that Rationalism is more like bowling than Islam, because he literally can't tell the difference between a game with a fairly arbitrary set of rules, and a religion.
Many Thanks!
>Not even a wicker basket of certain kinds of beliefs (on the afterlife, on the soul) and actions (rituals, festivals, clothing).
Hmm... That is kind-of how I view religions. ( And it is the absence of these _kinds_ of beliefs within rationalism that makes me, like Scott, view it as not a religion. )
I see your point about
>Religions start off with extremely fundamental assumptions that then trickle down and encompass absolutely everything about one's worldview.
and am sympathetic to the attempt to consistently derive consequences from a small set of starting beliefs?/axioms?/commandments? , though I tend to see religions as usually having inconsistencies internally.
But "encompass absolutely everything about one's worldview" sounds like an overreach. Did any religion say anything that either predicts or contradicts Maxwell's equations? Most knowledge is empirical. Aren't religions typically silent on most such questions?
Let's talk about Islam again.
Are you aware of the Mu'tazilism/Ash'arism split? These two groups asked the question, "Is the Koran created?" The Mu'tazilites said yes, the Ash'arites said no. As I said in my last post, this is the most important question in Islam.
Why? Actually think about it for a second. The Koran exists. If the Koran was not created, it is eternal. If it is eternal, it is not separate from Allah. Which makes sense, we already assume the Koran is Allah's Word, and how can His Word be separate from Him? That means the Koran is in fact a direct physical extension of the one true God. And God is perfect and eternal and singular and has a will, and all these things are God, and the Koran is now a physical expression of that that was dictated by the final prophet, Muhammad, so that us created beings could know God and His commands, which are the most important thing to know.
And if all that is the case, what good is your so called "empiricism"? It's good for nothing is what it is. Far from being silent on the issue, the Ash'arites say that philosophical, empirical, and reasoned observation of the world is at best, a waste of time, and at worst, outright Haram. Everything important about how to live life is in the Koran, because obviously God would not neglect something important from His Word. Even more, Ash'arites say that all physical laws are direct extensions of Allah's will, as this is what the Koran says, and we've already stated philosophy is probably Haram. There is no such thing as "Maxwell's equations" outside of Allah's direct will, which He may change at any moment. You learning them is pointless in the light of this, or hubris and thus a sin against God.
The Mu'tazilites thought differently. For them, the Koran is an object in time, and thus not eternal. Not being eternal, it is not a direct extension of Allah. Not being a direct extension of Allah, we are free to assume that not everything is in the Koran, that there is more to life than Kalam and Fiqh. And so we may include philosophy, which then includes reason and what we now call science. Like the Koran, the world is created and a thing in time, and exists outside of the direct Will of God (a position that Ash'arites view as a denial of Allah's Power and Will). And so your Maxwell's equations have a place.
Except the Mu'tazilites never got that far. For hundreds of years early on in Islam, Mu'tazilites were the more populous. But then the Ash'arites came, and have long since won the argument. Mu'tazilism is equivalent to Satanism in the eyes of contemporary Islam. Where do you think that Islamic Golden Age went, and why are Muslims like they are now? Because one answer to the question on the Createdness of the Koran won out, and it trickled down into denying the usefulness of science.
Do you think that this pathway was itself somewhat arbitrary, that it could have been otherwise? I would say you'd be wrong on that. As I said, religions don't put things into the wicker basket. Everything follows from their original assumptions, because given X assumptions, only certain things logically follow.
The broadly Liberal view of religion is of the wicker basket, like I said. But this is just not what religions are, and were never considered to be until roughly the 17th century. The modern concept of Science and its accompanying Empiricism is an outgrowth of Christianity specifically, it is not an object to put in or out of the wicker basket. There is an ideological reason why Science came from the West, because in Christianity, the study of nature, God's "hidden book", was considered an explicitly active good thing and an avenue to understand God better.
This is also why Rationalism, and Liberalism, and Modernism, and all the modern little cults and religions that people don't realise are religions, are all incoherent and collapsing all around us. Remember what Nietzsche tells us. Which is pretty much exactly what I've said. Concepts like equality, freedom, actual reason, and science, are all direct products of Christianity, for they followed from the ideas that there is a God, that this God created the world, that the world is good, and through study of that world we may know Him better. And so Nietzsche then tells us that through science, born of Christianity, we killed God and reject Christianity, and now God is dead, and your Maxwell's equations have no foundation because you don't realise you've killed the source of those assumptions which bore them. It is the exact opposite of religions being "typically silent on most such questions."
Many Thanks for your detailed reply!
>Except the Mu'tazilites never got that far. For hundreds of years early on in Islam, Mu'tazilites were the more populous. But then the Ash'arites came, and have long since won the argument. Mu'tazilism is equivalent to Satanism in the eyes of contemporary Islam. Where do you think that Islamic Golden Age went, and why are Muslims like they are now? Because one answer to the question on the Createdness of the Koran won out, and it trickled down into denying the usefulness of science.
Ah! I had not remembered the names of the two factions, but I had remembered that there had been a rift in Islam where basically the good guys lost, and they shafted themselves, ending their golden age.
Actually, a whole bunch of deductions in their reasoning are wrong, but I'll note one particular one.
>And God is perfect and eternal and singular and has a will, and all these things are God, and the Koran is now a physical expression of that that was dictated by the final prophet, Muhammad, so that us created beings could know God and His commands, which are the most important thing to know.
Even if there _were_ an intelligent creator, and it had preferences, we are mortal neural nets. What we see is what we get, and what we see is a world structured by physics, at most extremely indirectly influenced by any hypothetical creator. Even if it _had_ preferences, they _don't_ _matter_. They don't affect how the world works. If there were a god, and it issued commands, the world looks like a structure where those commands are not enforced, so they are dead letter laws. There is no point in even _looking_ at them, save to note that reality doesn't follow them, while there _is_ a point in looking at physics. Not only are they not the most important thing to know, they have _zero_ importance, in and of themselves. ( Now, due to religions and ideologies having followers, it can be necessary to try to predict how the followers will act, but that is orthogonal to the accuracy of their religion or ideology. )
>The modern concept of Science and its accompanying Empiricism is an outgrowth of Christianity specifically, it is not an object to put in or out of the wicker basket. There is an ideological reason why Science came from the West, because in Christianity, the study of nature, God's "hidden book", was considered an explicitly active good thing and an avenue to understand God better.
Yes, that is part of the historical path to the sciences. IIRC, this is also why we call what we discover in the sciences "laws", when they could just as well have been called "patterns" or "regularities".
But historical paths do not constrain what the sciences can predict, or can be applied to. Electric circuits work for everyone who builds them, not just for the Christian civilization that was (mostly) responsible for finding the equations that predict their behavior. If all religions went extinct tomorrow, people would still study electrical engineering, and still find it valuable. It is _real_.
Deleted previous comment because for some reason, they posted double. If it happens again I'll just leave them up.
"Even if there _were_ an intelligent creator, and it had preferences, we are mortal neural nets"
Everything from here doesn't make any sense at all. What does "neural nets" add to this conversation? Ancient peoples didn't know what a neural net was, you could just stop at the word "mortal". You don't actually find a "neural net" in the realm of direct experience. "Neural net" is a metaphor, the way that things like "energy field" are metaphors that have only the barest similarity with fields of direct experience, like fish nets and grain fields.
Beyond that, I want to ask about one thing you say here.
"There is no point in even _looking_ at them, save to note that reality doesn't follow them, while there _is_ a point in looking at physics."
How does reality not follow them? What is the point in looking at physics? How did you find that out, and what is the argument that supports these claims?
The real question is, how did you write all that without realising that, far from showing deductions in Ash'arite (or my presentation of it) logic being wrong, you didn't make an argument at all? You just said a bunch of stuff that sounds absurd on its face.
"Yes, that is part of the historical path to the sciences. IIRC, this is also why we call what we discover in the sciences "laws", when they could just as well have been called "patterns" or "regularities"."
You seem to have missed the point entirely here. To mention, and this time quote, Nietzsche.
“Regularity” in succession is only a metaphorical expression, as if a rule were being followed here; not a fact. In the same way “conformity with a law.” We discover a formula by which to express an ever-recurring kind of result: we have therewith discovered no “law,” even less a force that is the cause of the recurrence of a succession of results. That something always happens thus and thus is here interpreted as if a creature always acted thus and thus as a result of obedience to a law or lawgiver, while it would be free to act otherwise were it not for the “law.”
In other words, you can rename it all you want, the name doesn't change the thing you're talking about, and what you're talking about stands as nothing once you jettisoned the assumptions that supported it in the first place. It is irrelevant that you can make baubles consistently. Everybody at every time period could make baubles consistently, it is no proof or evidence of anything to note that baubles have gotten more clever as time goes on. Nor is it evidence that you're learned anything, much less that this is important in the first place. To quote Nietsche again.
"'The mechanical interpretation': recognises only quantities: but the real energy is in the quality. Mechanics can therefore only describe processes; it cannot explain them."
The Ash'arites at least had an explanation! The processes are result of the direct and constant Will of God, literally Willing them to be so at all times. We know this because the world continues to exist rather than blink out of existence. We don't expect the world to blink out of existence because God is consistent, and also He is Just, and thus won't abandon or deceive us. Should the world end, we have Faith there was a reason for it, and for the same reason, Faith supports the continuity of the processes. And also the Koran says so. And we know the Koran is trustworthy because it is the direct Word of God, uncreated and eternal.
Obviously you don't agree, and I don't agree either, but if you are to disagree so strenuously, you might want to at least understand the kind of the thing we're talking about here in the first place.
> Even if there were an intelligent creator, and it had preferences, we are mortal neural nets. What we see is what we get, and what we see is a world structured by physics, at most extremely indirectly influenced by any hypothetical creator. Even if it had preferences, they don't matter. They don't affect how the world works.
Huh? I'm pretty sure I get this, and I'm not even religious. To try and translate, it's a question of alignment. We need to self-modify our neural nets to align with the will of our creator, and the book (whichever it is) is a tool that our creator provided to us for this purpose. (There may be other means, depending on the religion. And some religions put an emphasis on practice, but "we are what we do".) There's more to the universe than the physical world we can touch, and in particular, there's life after death. And what happens after our death to the patterns of our neural nets - our souls - depends on how closely they are aligned with God.
This is the type of cases that make non-Americans like me feel that in some sense, the US has gone to a very... weird... place. The claims that Scott builds across the article are extremely intuitive to basically everyone living here (Israel) and were obvious to me the moment I read the summary of the story. Just a sort-of FYI to Americans.
Israel probably has a natural immunity to woke-ism, by virtue of being populated largely by HATEFUL COLONIAL OPPRESSORS. I’m joking, but I’m not joking. Seriously, it’s alarming to those of us in the West who have sympathy for Israel to see the condemnation of Israel, sympathy for terrorist groups, and spread of bizarro thinking in our countries. There’s a reason Scott chooses his words carefully in his meticulous dismantling of it (he’s been burned before)
I agree with you, but I think about this in different terms. Living here is, in a sense, a constant reality check. As a country, it is common for us to have to choose between the lesser of two evils; and have a plethora of concrete problems to solve, so there is no need to imagine new ones for ourselves.
It also helps that Israelis are very straightforward and upfront (e.g., sometimes to the point of rudeness). If you don't walk around eggshells around everyone and it is completely okay to discuss politics in the workplace (or at least in some, if not most), I think it's hard to develop the negative attributes of wokeness.
Sounds like the old quote - Hard times make strong men, strong men make good times, good times make weak men, weak men make hard times
Exactly, great use of the quote! I just hope we get to those good times eventually :)
You are absolutely correct. The US has gone to a very weird place. I hope we'll be able to find our way back before too long.
Honestly, as someone watching kind of from afar, not being American, I'm puzzled by the discussion you seem to have over there (which also start to happen more and more where I live). But the more I read about this, the more I get convinced that "cultural appropriation", as a concept, is just thinly veiled racism. It's as if some people would like to be racist, but happened to grow up in a context where racism was frowned upon. And now they finally found a way to live their preference without having to deal with the push back ...
I have yet to hear just one good argument for the "cultural appropriation" concept. Let alone one which isn't inherently racist ...
Maybe, but I think the other side of this is that people are viewing culture -- or perhaps shallow signifiers of culture -- as collectively held intellectual property. When I spent a lot of time in the Bay Area, decades ago, I was amused to notice that most Japanese restaurants and sushi stands were run by people from, or whose ancestors were from, Guangdong province in China and were speaking Cantonese among themselves. I haven't heard that Bay Area Japanese restaurants went bankrupt in large numbers as people rejected that cultural appropriation. Did nobody notice? Or is it only appropriation when white people do it? Does the fact that the sushi was really good matter? If there are no 'california rolls' in Japan, is it considered wrong to make or eat them?
I can certainly see this kind of gatekeeping being the root of the sentiment. But any way to actually determine who gets to use this intellectual property, and who doesn't, is necessarily racist at its core ...
My impression is that it's still only a small minority who get worked up over cultural appropriation - even among liberals - but it's one of those things where the people who care, CARE A LOT and make a fuss about it while their opponents just shake their damn heads.
I think the cheongsam dress incident was a good example. Even most Chinese people didn't think celebrating Chinese culture was a crime.
At about the same time that happened, I came to England to visit relatives and they took me to a Mexican restaurant where they made us all wear sombreros. It was fun! In America, we would all be afraid that someone, somewhere would get angry even though we all thought it was fine.
I may be off-topic, but I wanted to share a kind-of external point of view. I'm from France, and as an independent observer, the USA has a really weird relationship with "race" (I put this in quotation marks because the french literal translation is incredibly racist). I know it's because of the history of the United States, which is very loaded on this topic to say the least. But it really is weird to see every American obsessing over it, dissecting what it means to be or not to be from a certain group, all the policy and culture around it... Like this post, or a lot of the comments. It feels weird to see a topic that's almost absent (or at least really different) from my point of view take so much importance on your side of the Atlantic.
Of course, France has a huge problem with racism, with the police, employment, access to a good education and equal opportunities, poverty, ... Also, we don't have the same deep ties with slavery but we have a pretty deep history with colonization. But the concept of categorizing people into "race" is really outlandish for most of us, we talk more about country of origin, social class, etc. In no formal interaction with the institutions you will see a question about race. (I think it's even illegal to do so, but I'm not sure).
Anyway, I'm rambling a little, but the main point is : the whole "race" concept as seen from an American doesn't exist in a big part of the world.
(Side-note : as USA is a huge cultural influence, this concept is starting to popping up more and more in France. It has its advantages, as putting a spotlight on racism, but also drawbacks, as the cultural differences between our two countries are really strong on this topic)
"nice, legible shapes"
I disagree. If you removed the color information in those PCA pictures, what you really would see is two elongated orthogonal blobs that are not even disjoint. In other words, it is a continuum. In panel A it is especially egregious, the switch from AA colored circles to unspecified circles is abrupt and looks like an arbitrary result from availability of labeling, not a legible cluster that the reader would be able to identify without access to the labels. Even with label information, most of the blobs appear to overlap.
Perhaps there is other analysis that would support the point better (am not a geneticist, maybe there are phylogenetic trees), but these analysis would support better an interpretation like, there is variation and structure (that presumably reflects the evolutionary past) but the point where the line is drawn _between groups_ appears arbitrary.
Correct, and furthermore, this article misunderstands the consensus objection to treating “race” as a biological fact in Homo sapiens. No one denies the grouping of certain phenotypical clusters (which would be akin to denying common skin/eye colors, etc). The problem arises when these phenotypical groups are used as proxies for “races,” which has a specific meaning in biology that is not met by these groups within our species. The recognition that race is not real (in humans) - but phenotypical groups are - may sound like semantics, but this is a good faith argument, not an attempt to confuse anyone. Might be a good subject for another article.
Also worth noting is that native Americans practicex assimilative raiding. Raising white, or other, kids as part of your tribe was 100% a thing. They were accepted as full members.
This look into the pretendarian phenomenon by Ed West is fantastic
https://www.edwest.co.uk/p/the-unbearable-whiteness-of-being
How many people would you guys say still view "cultural appropriation as a bad thing? I've lived outside of the US since 2008, when the idea was still new, and most people thought it was fine, and I watched as the consensus turned against it. But it seems like I hear about it less often now. What's the current trend?
I cannot find the article, but I read about what happened to one poor young woman in the USA. Part of the story begins when her Black middle class parents went to the adoption agency and picked out a healthy brown baby girl and brought her home and raised her. This is the part of the story that worked out well -- she is the 'apple of their eyes' and they couldn't be prouder or happier with her. And she loves her parents. When the time came, she went to university, and her university gave a certain amount of money to Black students who applied for it for being Black. It was probably dressed up a bit more, but that is what it amounted to. And she applied and got some. One can argue that handing money out to the middle class is not the most effective way to spend the revenue, but that's the way the system works, and nothing she did was underhanded in any way. All was well and good until she got interested in her genetics, and took a test -- I think from 23 and me -- which indicated that her ancestry was most likely from the Dominican Republic with a recent infusion of Spaniard-from-Spain. People from the DR, no matter how dark skinned, mostly insist that they are not Black, but Dominican. She made the mistake of telling some friends about her surprising result, and one of them decided to tell the university, and the university decided that she had defrauded them and needed to return the money. That still didn't satisfy many people who wanted her expelled from the university even though there was no one claiming that there ever was any intent to deceive or defraud. And who would be guilty in such a case of the fraud? Her parents, who also didn't know about her genetic background? The adoption agency, which may not have known much either?
Her conclusion -- besides being really glad that she is majoring in one of the hard sciences -- was that a substantial part of the population really, really, really like being cruel and nasty to other people. They absolutely look for opportunities to be as nasty as they want to be. Some of them only want to be a little cruel. Some of them want to be as cruel as they possibly can -- as long as society supports them in their right to be cruel. And this, she concludes, is the real reason that real racism persists -- they provide socially acceptable people to be cruel to for the cohort that wants permission to be cruel, in such a way that the bullied cannot escape.
She found it interesting that she faced anti-Black sentiment 'just another Black grifter' as well as anti-DR sentiment from Blacks who didn't want to accept her 'fraud! fraud!'. Meanwhile people from the DR said that genetics are not everything -- she's not Dominican. If she had tried to assert that she was Dominican she thinks that the pushback would have reached cruel levels there as well. Because the commonalty is the cruelty. And she thinks that we should do away with the concept of race, to the greatest extent possible, because no matter what other considerations there are, the primary purpose is to provide an outlet for people to be cruel to and scapegoat others.
In the meantime she has transferred to a different university.
If you find a link to the article, share it; it's an interesting (and touching) case.
This reminds me of "A Light in the Forest", a book I had to read in middle school. In the story, a white infant was kidnapped and raised as an native american, but is "rescued" (against his will) as a teen. In the middle, he's still resisting the white man. But he also ends up assimilating certain aspects of white man's culture without realizing it. At the end, he gets excommunicated from both societies.
I think I was a little too young to engage with the book intellectually, at the time.
"...a substantial part of the population really, really, really like being cruel and nasty to other people. They absolutely look for opportunities to be as nasty as they want to be. Some of them only want to be a little cruel. Some of them want to be as cruel as they possibly can as long as society supports them in their right to be cruel."
Very true. And a main reason why it matters who gets to be Head of State in a country. The people a Head of State hates, are the people it is risk-free for others to hate.
It's interesting that you bring up "Planet of Cops", given that Freddie gets very angry and dismissive whenever people point out the extremely hard-to-miss analogies between transracialism and transgenderism.
The Saami people lives in the northern parts of the Scandinavian peninsula (including in parts of Northern Finland and nearby Russia). There is a reasonably close resemblence between Saami and Native American situations so maybe the Swedish legal definitions of who is Saami can be of interest.
To be able to register as a Saami under Swedish law requires two conditions:
1. You need to see yourself as a Saami.
2. You need to speak or have spoken the Saami language in your home. Or be a (legal, adoptions are fine) decendent of the first or second generation of someone who has spoken Saami in their home or is or have been registered as a Saami.
So the legal definition is a combination of a cultural one and a genetic one and as a non-Saami without a Saami genetical relationship you can become a Saami but it is quite burdensome. (And in that respect a bit like converting to judaism, not something done on a whim).
Sounds more like a linguistic one than a genetic one. Presumably there are a fair few people who are genetically Saami, and who consider themselves Saami, but whose parents or grandparents switched over to speaking Swedish, so the person didn't grow up speaking any of the Saami languages and may not have managed to learn in adulthood, but as long as there are enough other Saami around who have become monolingual Swedish speakers but still maintain a distinctive culture, the average person would think of them as Saami even if the Swedish state doesn't.
As long as the switch to Swedish was in their parentes or grandparents generation, that is still fine with the Swedish state.
The problem is for those whos ancestors switched earlier than so.
There is a simple explanation as to why the White Nationalists are more tolerant than other groups: There is nothing to be gained by being White. You only give up any chance at getting Affirmative Action benefits as well as the amorphous social benefits that come with being part of a minority. In fact, the more Whites there are, the more the burdens of affirmative action are spread, whereas more minorities means that the benefits of AA are spread more thinly. The incentives to have strong or weak barriers to entry are obvious.
So there is a simple option to solve this whole issue: Stop discriminating against and debasing Whites. Stop giving tangible and intangible benefits to non-Whites. If there is nothing to be gained from being non-White, there is no point in having "hard-and-fast rules" and we can go back to "letting communities make decisions".
Also, a minor point:
"An 18.001 year old has a relationship with a 17.999 year old (who claimed to be 18) and is prosecuted for statutory rape."
There is a solution to that called Romeo and Juliet laws. They allow some age difference if both parties are close to the cutoff point.
Also: legally, you're not getting less than 1/365 == 0.0027 yrs resolution.
I think this is your best post regarding current cultural mores and the nature of "race". It really did explore with great wit and insight the current ....how shall we put it .... "intricacies" (which are mostly to do with fabricated outrage concerning perceived slights against particular cultural groups which have been granted "special protection against criticism", for the purpose of political and financial leverage) of cultural identity and membership. This site really is a beacon of intellectual exploration. Thankyou.
>This is weirdly tolerant (okay, aside from the Jewish conspiracy thing) compared to anyone in the Hoover story. In Bizarro-America, the only people who don’t think people’s value as human beings depends on their genetically-determined race are the white nationalists!
Seems weird not to offer the most obvious explanation: white nationalists are losing and can't afford to be picky about allies, various minority groups are winning in the relevant sense and must gatekeep against people who are unambiguously allies but threaten to dilute the spoils of victory.
"Or you accept that some well-intentioned people who tried to build art around their identity group will retroactively be vilified as colonizers, through no fault of their own, after their 23andMe results come back."
This isn't such a problem if people recognize that this is in fact the rule. It was harder to do in the 20th century but these days, hospitals can run a genetic test on every baby delivered, and then like some kind of young adult fiction dystopia, inform the parents what cultural group their child has been assigned to based on its immutable characteristics. No one has to be surprised any more, we can carefully study and record everyone's race, noting it in a database that controls which jobs people are allowed to access, and this will be progressive somehow.
Descent is not especially important to many Native communities, because they have strong traditions of adoption. But personal connections are important. If you read the Hoover story closely you see that people keep asking, who are your Native connections? Who are your kin? Where are your relatives? In this sense tribal identity is not some vague category like "American," but a matter of personally knowing people within the community; in this model, community is not imposed by above via rules, but built up via personal ties between people. Hoover had none and never tried to build any. That is the "lived experience" she is missing.
There is no question that groupings exist on the basis of shared genes that are more likely to be found together within such a group, and given the relative isolation before international travel became easy, this is in no way surprising. We can call those groups races or use some other term. So far we have simply described what is, and that cannot be wrong. The problem comes when you use that knowledge in an unkind way - to denigrate or lessen a particular group. I see those who say races do not exist as being against that kind of usage, and they mean well. But there are circumstances where the facts must be acknowledged eg when a particular group is relatively resistant to the effects of a drug, such as ACE inhibitors in those of recent African ancestry. Life gets a lot trickier when we see differences between the groups, such as the well-documented IQ differences. We must not make assumptions about individuals, who may be outliers within their group, but shall we even mention that the differences are known to exist? I am uncomfortable mentioning it, and some will say I should not do so. But it is hard to pretend that something discovered does not exist, even in a good cause, such as promoting social cohesion and harmony. I have no answer to that.
If we are going to start caring about IQ differences, we should skip the racial bullshit anyways and just go straight to equal opportunity eugenics.
OK but this post would be stronger if the author acknowledged the overwhelming force of "Who, Whom?" in these discussions: That the motivating forces are almost entirely white guilt and anti-white resentment, and if you take "hatred of white people and whiteness" out of the equation, the whole thing collapses.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who,_whom%3F
"The fact is, we live according to Kendi's formula: Kto–kogo?: will we knock them, the white supremacists, flat and give them (as Kendi expresses it) the final, decisive battle, or will they knock us flat?"
> Natives don’t want other people competing for the limited number of good affirmative action jobs reserved for them, of which “professor of Native American studies” is an especially clear example.
Reading this, I came up with an heuristic hot take: if your academic job is restricted to people who are themselves instances of the field it claims to study, it is a bullshit field.
It works quite well:
There are male gynecologists, so gynecology is not bullshit.
Nobody cares if the worlds leading expert on the Neanderthals has herself Neanderthal ancestry, so the study of early hominids is not bullshit.
Biologists would probably not reject an AGI as a professor, so biology is not bullshit.
There are computer scientists which are not cpmputers, CS is fine.
Open minded theology, which is fine with having atheist professors, is fine.
Narrow-minded theology, which rejects atheist professors, is bullshit.
Sport science, which fails couch potato students, is bullshit (at least as an academic subject).
Feminist studies is bullshit to the degree to which it rejects cis-male professors, which I would guess is rather high.
Same for $MINORITY studies.
Medieval English literature does not expect its practitioners to be Englishmen/women living in the Middle Ages, thus it is real.
There are some corner cases: I would expect that there are few deaf students who succeed in studying music theory, and few blind people who care for art history. Either would be more disadvantaged than a history professor specializing in the Roman empire who can't read Latin. I am willing to bite that bullet: studying music safely contained in a sheet, or with an oscilloscope is academic (though it does not sound fun), taking advantage of the fact that you have ears and a brain which can be emotionally moved by music is not academic. The latter would of course also apply to literature.
Heh. I'm going to tell an entomologist friend of mine that their work is inherently appropriative and oppressive because they're not an insect themselves. Let's see if I survive. :-)
> I kind of imagine each of these definitions - religion, culture, genetics, etc - as an axis in concept space, and the category “Jew” as a hypersphere drawn around the exact typical Jewish person, whoever that is.
I think we can be more precise here. We have a pretty good understanding of how artificial neural network based classifiers work (beautiful example here: https://playground.tensorflow.org). It seems reasonable that our brains do something similar when it comes to organizing visual inputs in hyper dimensional feature space. This would also remove the need for a platonically ideal Jew.
This also seems like a better metaphor than the tails coming apart for diverging political views. Our parents give us training data by pointing at things and saying "good" or "bad" and we build complicated classifiers to predict this. Most people receive similar training data, but if you extrapolate the classifiers to areas where data is sparse or nonexistent, they diverge.
I haven't read all the comments, but I've seen talk elsewhere about some indigenous Americans disliking the idea that tribe membership is determined by DNA rather than by connection to the community.
"Connection to the community" is vague, but membership by DNA ignores human relations, and the latter might be more important.
I wonder how many of the people who signed that letter were Mi'kmaq Indians.
Yeah I'm betting no Mi'kmaq. I couldn't read the New Yorker article, but the summary sounds like cancelling from academia. Which has stopped surprising me any more.
Isn't the explanation much simpler?
Both the far-Left and the far-Right are racist and sexist, just towards different groups. Both want to use violent means to achieve their goals and have little respect for the idea of judging each person as an individual. If you're an 'associate professor researching Native American food sovereignty', your social circle consists entirely of the far-Left, so you shouldn't be surprised you're sent to the guillotines at the first opportunity, just like millions of people got sent to the Gulags back in the USSR. Luckily we still have a Constitution and a court system, so Professor Hoover will get to keep her head on her shoulders, but the far-Left will do everything in their power to make her suffer for her non-existent crimes.
While I do have sympathy towards Professor Hoover, I feel like she's the victim of her own choice to associate with people who's ideology is evil and corrupt. I can likewise be sympathetic to the wife of a gangster who gets beaten up as retribution for her husband's misgivings, while at the same time acknowledging that maybe she should've avoided that kind of company in the first place.
"Someone does their surveying wrong and builds their casino two feet over the California/Nevada border, and has to demolish it and start over because gambling is illegal in California."
This is very close to the actual story of the Pheasant Lane Mall in Nashua, New Hampshire where a surveying error caused the builders to have the mall extend 6 feet in to the state of Massachusetts thus subjecting the entire building to Massachusetts sales tax negating the advantage of building in tax-free NH. I tweeted about it here: https://twitter.com/corey_lanum/status/1620798517748068352
Instead of demolishing and starting from scratch, they just hired a construction crew to lop off the offending bit of the JC Penney that had crossed state lines.
I suggest you stop using the word race. In Norwegian we don't use it in relation to humans anymore. Though we still use it for dog breeds. At the same time most Norwegians acknowledges that there are average genetic differences between populations. Though we could plausibly redefine the word with the recent advances in genetics, doing so would be challenging. It just has too much baggage
I suggest you stop using the phrase city centre. In Norway the whole city is centre.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/07/18/the-whole-city-is-center/
My ego is definitively more on Simplicio's side. However when these silly word fights lead to real loss then I'd rather avoid them. These are not good faith rational actors we are dealing with
"In Bizarro-America, the only people who don’t think people’s value as human beings depends on their genetically-determined race are the white nationalists!"
Actually ... there are many more groups living the bizarro 'your type doesn't belong.'
You look to see there are White Nationalists, yet fail to see there are Mexican Nationalists ... Mexican Nationalists living in America pining for the restoration of Atzlan, the legendary Aztec homeland in the north. This group in California is called La Raza (The Race), they are Mexican Supremacists. Then there are Black supremacists, French Supremacists, and even Jewish Supremacists.
Think about your thought processes that require you to have a racial enemy that you can look down your nose and wag your finger at.
When there's a nebulous category boundary and we want to know which side a data point lies, the question is: what is the disguised query? If we want to know if something is really a blegg [1], why do we want to know that?
ACX readers and Freddie deBoer readers are also categories with a strong overlap, so I think this take [2] isn't news to some of us: Henry George once said (as far as I remember) "if ten men are chasing every nine jobs, the result is misery". Academia relies on ten people chasing every one tenure-track post, so that the other nine can be turned into adjuncts. Claiming to be more Native than you really are gets you an unfair advantage in that race - quite apart from the fact that no self-respecting college these days would hire a white person as a professor of native studies in the first place.
No-one seems to stop and ask whether the whole adjunct system is a dumpster fire (except people like Brett Deveraux [3]). After all, it keeps the money flowing. So I'm definitely on "at least 95% point 2." in section IV - point 1. is valid elsewhere, but as far as the struggle for limited tenure-track posts goes, point 2. all the way. Most things about academia in the anglohypersphere these days, and all things relating to wokeness in academia, are downstream from economic incentives.
However, for the bit at the ende of section III, I would like to offer an alternative 4th explanation. Woke is many things, but one of them is a Kegan stage 3 affair through and through - at least the way that Chapman [4] uses the stages. It's there in the text: "'who I am' is 'how people feel about me'". You are native if the native community feels that you belong there (which also suggests there's an implicit path to conversion - if enough people feel you're in, then you're in).
And from Chapman's footnote 11: "[stage 3] mostly doesn't even notice logical contradictions, and isn't bothered by them when it does". Pointing out the contradiction, as this article does, is at least stage 4 thinking!
Chapman's post contains a few more quotes that, to me, perfectly describe the problem space here - "Living up to what other members expect from you is good by definition", or "Fulfilling the role consists largely in having the correct feelings." or "In practice, you choose on the basis of whose feelings you feel most strongly at the moment you are forced to decide. This is often whoever happens to be there at the time, or whoever is best at displaying intense feelings. "
Hoover went from the native community feeling she belonged, to feeling she didn't. Genetics and lived experience only matter insofar as they might or might not sway the community's feelings. There's no need for logic anywhere in this process.
[1] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4FcxgdvdQP45D6Skg/disguised-queries
[2] https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/academias-pretendian-problem-stems
[3] https://acoup.blog/2023/04/28/collections-academic-ranks-explained-or-what-on-earth-is-an-adjunct/
[4] https://vividness.live/developing-ethical-social-and-cognitive-competence
Jews (at least Zionists) are colonizers. Native Americans are colonized. The comparison doesn’t fit. One part of colonization is some portion of the colonizers appropriate colonized identities for their own personal benefit. It’s a deep topic that isn’t addressed in this post.
Is there a reason you said "Jews (at least Zionists)", rather than just "Zionists"? Because I think it's going to be a hard sell that non-Zionist Jews are, as a class, colonizers. But you really seem to want to make that connection, as if you believed that "Jews" and "Zionists" were basically synonyms (but didn't want to get called out on it).
Yes. The blogpost is specifically addressing Jews not Zionism. American Jews are also colonizers. Zionism is causing the most present harms.
Who have American Jews colonized? American white people generally have colonized, well, America, which caused no small amount of harm to the Native population. But American Jews specifically, have generally shown up after the fact, when colonization is over and done with.
Or is this the lame definition of "colonize" where all land is rightfully owned by the last nonwhite group to have occupied it, no matter how much brutal violence they used making their claim, and any white person who ever lives on that land is a "colonizer" even if they came there peacefully many generations after anything the rest of us would regard as colonization?
Colonization didn’t just happen in the Americas, and a version of it is still ongoing today. It doesn’t even always involve total displacement of native populations- the Americas are the exception.
Take a look at a map of us military bases and us regime changes. Some Jews alongside many other ethnicities have been involved in the ongoing process of colonization.
If there were no affirmative action, there would be a lot less incentives for people to fake their ethnicity. Why does a country has quotas for people? Look where it got Lebanon.
I think there's two issues I see with this post and the conclusions that follow.
I don't think it's clear at all that people did/would have no problem with someone of ⅛ indigenous ancestry claiming to be indigenous, benefiting from that claim, doing academic work speaking for indigenous people, and wearing traditional clothing. Especially when it had no influence on the conditions of her upbringing other than being brought to some cultural events etc. I think this controversy would have probably happened in a pretty similar way eventually either way, and the fact that she lied about it probably just added to it.
The other issue I would take with the reasoning of this post is that it equivocates being exposed to some indigenous culture/friends with what is typically fully meant by the idea of "lived experience". Lived experience would typically emphasize things like being treated in a bigoted way by others due to how she's perceived, potentially being subjected to intergenerational traumas and economic hardships due to treatment of indigenous peoples. There's no exact criteria but I don't think her experience would typically qualify In the ways that typically matter to people making those distinctions.
You use as an example, "An 18.001 year old has a relationship with a 17.999 year old (who claimed to be 18) and is prosecuted for statutory rape." I find this hilarious because I've always lived in states where the age of consent is 16, and so I've been vaguely aware that because the age of consent is 18 in New York and California, *lots* of writers assume that it is 18 "everywhere". A sort of cultural myopia of the most urban areas.
Racists may say ‘If you see a Jew in the mirror looking back at you, that’s a problem; if you don’t, you’re fine.', but having grown up in Iowa, where Jews look white, I'm emotionally incapable of considering Jews to be non-white. Indeed, US Jews who emotionally distinguish themselves from other Americans, or at least other US whites, cause me to smile and nod to humor their delusion. (This is ignorance of the full complexity of ethnic distinctions on my part, but it also makes me incapable of being a true anti-Semite, so I'm careful to not try to straighten it out.)
> Um. I think if she was trying to “reconnect with her roots”, and felt some kind of deep spiritual attachment to Mi’kmaq culture on that basis, I would feel pretty bad telling her she couldn’t and she was a poser and an imperialist and the tribe should refuse to interact with her.
I feel like, if a completely random white person decides they want to "connect to native american roots" and goes and attends some Pow-wow's, that's fine actually. Making friends with people from different cultures, and sharing that culture, is absolutely ok.
Now if someone comes along to oggle at the quaint and curious customs of the natives like they are some sort of zoo, that is bad and impolite.
But ultimately, it's the decision of individual natives for who they want to be friends with.
Even if she was being blatantly condescending and imperialist, it's not your place to tell the tribe not to interact with her. I would predict that the tribe wouldn't want to interact with her. But if they do, it's not a problem.
If Alice and Bob want to be friends, the situations where anyone else should intervene to stop them are rare and special. And "Cultural appropriation" isn't a good reason.
Libertarianism. You are welcome to appropriate any culture you feel like.
Scott rightly points out the incoherence of Hoover’s detractors and ex-friends. The whole conversation is much more driven by vibe than anything else and rests upon a foundation of shifting sands.
I’m a racial elimintavist, not because it’s impossible to rigorously defend a genetic concept of race, but because the baggage and brand saturation of the *word* “race” is unsalvageable on any timescale worth talking about. And attempting to cleanse it of its cancerous associations would be so much wasted effort, because most people use the word in a totally ad hoc way: they say “race” and then immediately change the subject to culture, ethnicity, class, region, nationality (etc.) to suit their argumentative needs, without realizing they are doing it. Hence the incoherence.
I also like that Scott invokes Yudkowsky’s “cluster structure of thingspace,” which reminds me of “Race As A Bundle Of Sticks,” a framework and methodology for designing studies of race proposed by Maya Sen and Omar Wasow in 2016. Instead of a set of “immutable characteristics,” it explodes the bundle (thingspace-cluster) into a disaggregated list that includes traditional things like genes, region of ancestry, skin color, and social status/power relations; but also less common ones such as dialect, wealth, neighborhood, religion, diet, class, and [social] norms. The fact that a little monosyllable even CAN house all of that inside of it is exactly the problem, and it’s why I think people should just be as specific as they can when they talk about this stuff, even genetically—e.g. hundreds of haplogroups vs. 5-to-7 big out-of-Africa clusters.
I understand—though don’t often feel—the desire to police the borders of social categories based on a shared “something.” Especially for instrumental purposes. Spivak coined her term “strategic essentialism" to describe intentionally brushing aside differences and diversity within a group for the purpose of promoting shared goals via a shared identity. That makes sense to me pragmatically as a political technique. I can see it as a useful way of forming political coalitions, which don’t need overall conceptual coherence to achieve specific material goals. But I wish, very naively, that people would just get off the ride there and return to normal civic life once the coalition has had its tractable demands met.
Alas..
I think the "Jewish hypersphere" (which already sounds like its own conspiracy theory) idea is a good way to think about this sort of thing, but an additional factor was just touched on: in a lot of fields you can gain status by taking someone else down.
Wow, what a horrible story. Honestly I would find it hard to blame her for lying either, considering what happened to her once the truth came out. Why is this so high-stakes?
W/r/t to the main topic, I find myself feeling a little bad for the professor, having their identity and culture ripped away from them. She's actually giving away things that brought her joy and meant a lot to her because she feels she has no right to keep them, and that's just crazy. I'd like to say you should define yourself by what you do and not the group characteristics of people who do it, but in cases like this the activities are meaningful in large part because of the group that performs them, so there's no easy answer here. In a hypothetical world where only Irishmen were rugby coaches, and you made coaching rugby your life, then found out you weren't really Irish, it would seem crazy to be expected to hang up your whistle and give up the thing that drove your entire life -- but in the world where that was true, there almost certainly would be historical reasons that only Irishmen did that, a different character to the fraternity of coaching, uniquely Irish rituals around the sport linked to their shared history etc..
On a later topic, I want to note my disagreement with your assessment that "it’s more important to have hard-and-fast rules enforced by the government in a supposedly unbiased way; in others, it’s more important to let communities make judgments using their own vague social norms." You rightly point out that juries and judges are supposed to act as the common sense bulwark against strict rule enforcement, but in 20 years of crimlaw practice as an attorney I can tell you that prosecutors and cops have to make a dozen judgment calls every day that are no different. Sheriffs and prosecutors are elected, and have to reflect community social norms when they enforce the law, and I wouldn't have it any other way. People complain about prosecutorial discretion, but that discretion is the reason the 18.001 y/o having consensual sex on a date with the 17.364 y/o isn't getting charged with stat rape when somehow a cop finds out (although another reason is that under your hypo you gave him an affirmative defense of mistake of age, that would be applicable usually for victims over the age of 14 or 15.) None of the people who claim to want totally unbiased mechanical application of the law by the government's cops and prosecutors would actually like the world that results from that, even assuming that judges and juries still apply local norms and common sense at the end of the process.
> People complain about prosecutorial discretion, but that discretion is the reason the 18.001 y/o having consensual sex on a date with the 17.364 y/o isn't getting charged with stat rape when somehow a cop finds out
Well there was Genarlow Wilson, but I guess you're always going to get a few outliers.
I think what's missing from this discussion is that a large part of modern Native American identity is opposing or contrasting White identity in some way, although it may be implicit in most circumstances. That's why most people see an entirely racially White person claiming to be Native as inauthentic. There are Native American tribes in some parts of the US whose members have intermarried over the years with Black descendants of slaves, and as a result appear very similar to Blacks. What would the reaction be if a person believed themselves to be a member of one of these tribes, under similar circumstances to those described above, but was later revealed to be 100% Black, with no Native ancestry? I suspect the reaction would be different, as Black and Native identities are not seen as so opposed.
The reaction from White or Black people?
What are your thoughts on what the respective reactions would be?
>a large part of modern Native American identity is opposing or contrasting White identity in some way
<mild snark>
So tribes that were lethally hostile to each other in centuries past finally have a common enemy? :-)
</mild snark>
I'm not a part of the Native American community, but I can't recall a single instance in modern times of two different tribes signaling that they were opposed to each other. You are correct of course that that was not historically the case. I have also never heard anyone object that it is not politically correct to refer to the group as a whole as 'Native Americans' rather than by their individual tribes. I will stand by my conclusion that in the modern US, Native Americans have a common identity, at least as far as how they interact with the non-Native population, and that identity includes contrasting themselves with White identity.
Many Thanks! And I'm not objecting to the cohesion, just mildly amused. Uniting in the face of a common opponent is a pervasive theme in human history. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3j20voPS0gI
Nice thanks. Re: footnote 2, one could make the argument, that the white supremacists are coming closer to Dr. Kings dictum, 'of judging a person by the content of their character, and not the coding in their genes.'
While there are many white people who think they are some low fraction native, there are few who also have Hoovers level of childhood involvement. Yet out this very select group, a prominent activist arose. The same happened with Rachel Dolezal and the even smaller group of wtb-"transracial" people. This level of success is strong evidence that the universe considers them white; who are we to disagree?
It's orthogonal to the points you are making, but "lived experience" also does not do (IMHO) what its proponents want it to do...
Let's switch to a different case, one with which almost all of us are familiar, namely gender, romance, and the confusions of teen (and post-teen) years.
So I go to a party and meet Alice who, as is her way, holds forth about how much men suck and how, for example, "none of them want to date her because her boobs aren't big enough". I hold my tongue, even as I am thinking "I've only known you ten minutes and already I hate you; maybe the issue here is not your boobs?"
So we have here a situation where
- no male wants to date Alice because she is a whiny complainer,
but
- she has built up this story in her mind that it's all because of shallow men who care only about boob-size.
She is impervious to logic on this point – we can point out that plenty of other women with small boobs (but decent personalities) get married; we can point out that plenty of women with large boobs (but awful personalities) remain single.
But, apparently, Alice prefers the claim that it's all about boob size, ?presumably? because this doesn't require any work whatsoever on her part.
Now repeat this story in various other contexts: Leroy who didn't make the Glee Club, Andrea who didn't make Science Club, etc etc.
It's extremely easy to claim that you didn't achieve X because of <ism>, especially when you're egged on by family and friends to this interpretation.
Is this a *lived experience* of <ism>?
It's a lived experience of treating <ism> as the reason for all your problems, sure, but is it actually evidence of <ism>?
And of course this is going to become a self-reinforcing cycle. The people who insist on <ism> as the sole cause of their issues are going to gravitate to complaining about <ism> rather than working on becoming a better singer, or learning more physics, or asking people what said people find most grating about their personality and trying to fix that. And are going to, as a result, find more and more rejection as they advance in life because they never work as hard (or at all) on the actual issue of whatever it is they care about, compared to people who don't gravitate to an easy excuse.
It's easy to live in a prison of your own construction – god knows I have family members who are doing this right now.
I don't know what we do about this, once we have pointed out to these people the inconsistencies and self-serving biases in how they analyze the world and their interactions with it. But I no longer consider especially strong evidence about "the world" as opposed to evidence about the person.
I’m pleasantly surprised that Scott is able and willing to articulate the batshit insane, incoherent, cruel racial doctrine of woke religious ideology. Will he be able or willing to bring the same clear-sighted analysis to bear on the cult’s even more insane, incoherent and cruel doctrine of “gender identity” and the non-existence of biological sex categories? Only time will tell.
As for Dr. Hoover: judging from the titles of the publications on her c.v., she sounds pretty woke. Which is to say: all of the papers appear to be premised on the mystical nature of “racial” (in this case, “native”) identity and its magical ability to cause oppression even in the absence of any demonstrable disadvantage experienced by those who hold the identity. Thus, Dr. Hoover appears to be a member of the elite who used her position to actively advance the mystical religious doctrine that those who hold the “native” identity (including, she would have us believe, herself) are oppressed simply by virtue of holding this identity. And that those who do not hold this identity (including, as it turns out, herself) are, perforce, oppressors. One can’t help but recall the words of another religious mystic about what happens to those who live by the sword.
Associating yourself with anything related to cultural identity is like walking a tightrope between the Twin Towers, that's why the people who do it are considered great performers.
I wonder if Hoover has a record of pitchforking others for her “crime”…
I feel like edge cases are a lot more common than people think. For example, one time I met an East Asian-looking guy who was from Réunion and a native French speaker. Depending on which criteria you look at, he could be considered "French", "African", or "Asian". (Or "American", I guess, since he moved to the US).
Another time I met someone who identified as "mixed race" due to being half Jewish, half Iranian, even though both halves are classified as "white" in the American racial system. Then again, they're also both non-central examples of "white", and he presumably had a different cultural upbringing than the modal "white" person.
<mild snark>
>I feel like edge cases are a lot more common than people think.
Well, it is a high-dimensional space, and volumes in high-dimensional spaces have the bulk of their volume near boundary surfaces... :-)
</mild snark>
I actually never thought of that point before. In real life, everything we deal with is 2d or 3d, so it's easy to forget that our physical intuition doesn't apply the same way to higher dimensional data.
Many Thanks!
Great point. Very useful in the debate about "intersectionality" also.
Many Thanks!
I think the most salient aspect of this series of events is the semantic attempt to differentiate “lived experience” from just plain “experience”.
LIVED experience?
As opposed to what? UN-LIVED experience?
The use of redundant superlatives like this betrays inauthenticity, & is - almost without exception - a hallmark of the unvirtuous.
Woke reliance on buzzwords - or virtue-signalling phrases such as “lived experience” - tells you all you need to know about the sincerity of those wielding them.
I think your naturalist/materialist/individualist philosophy is causing you to conflate 'genetics' and 'parentage' in a way the people involved may not.
For example, consider the situation from the perspective of the great grandmother ("She's dead and has no perspective" is not how everyone thinks about such things). In one case there is some specific definitely-a-native woman who would be/is proud of her great grand-daughter and wanting her to be accepted in the group, and in the other case there isn't. This isn't genes, it's something much closer to 'lived experience'... just not Hoover's experience.
Or, consider a couple who for some reason want to and are legally allowed to genetically engineer their foetus, changing just enough genes to match those of members of some other race such that the child looks like that race and would be called that race by 23andme etc.
Great article but the chart makes no sense to me.
There was a chief in Canada who was, biologically, white (and looked it). He'd been adopted by the previous chief. As he put it when asked these questions, 'I used to get beat up at school for being Native.'
This is one of those things where there's not really a clear answer, and the major problem is probably the acting like there is.
I co-sign your conclusion.
People have a choice (in theory, at least) of being generous of spirit or precious and exclusionary.
Those who feel at peace and who do not live in fear tend to extend generosity. Those who feel threatened and see the world as a zero-sum experience tend to draw lines.
In a society rife with white biases and systemic racism, there should be many examples of people doing the opposite - pretending that they are white while genetically being not white. Presumably, some of these people would do it sloppily and would be outed and shamed at some point. I cannot remember any stories of this kind in the last 20 years. If there were not any such cases, something must be missing from your explanations, as all of them try to apply race permutation invariant reasoning to a situation which is clearly not permutation invariant.
...How the hell do you pretend to be white? If you look white, you're white. No one these days is out there trying to argue that Irishmen aren't white.
Same way one pretends to be Native American or Black. "If you look White you are white" is a very common position today, but is not self evident and it was not true under e.g. Jim Crow laws.or Nuremberg laws These days, probably, just a few Nazis might not share it. This is just another example of the asymmetry I am talking about.
One post earlier, you were talking in the present tense and saying "I cannot remember any stories of this kind in the last 20 years". When someone calls you out on your mistake, you don't get to invoke things that stopped being true half a century ago.
I will happily acknowledge my mistake but I am not sure what this mistake is in this conversation. I think we all agree that if someone looks white and says they are white 1) almost everyone today except for a few weird Nazis would accept them as white 2) that was not the case in the past. Also 3) for other races, e.g. Blacks and Native Americans in modern US is perfectly OK not to accept someone as their own based just on looks and self-identification.
Is that really true on America? Aren’t Hispanic people considered non white regardless.
It depends on whether you're talking about colloquial race categories or the census definition.
That’s a weird statement in the US where Hispanics are thought of as a different category from white (hence the white hispanic label - Hispanic being a qualifier). White, but a different white. And even then most Hispanics are thought of as non white informally, although that may be changing.
I'm mixed race but have always identified as white. Does that count?
One other point is that a lot of discrimination is based on what you look like, not what you write down on a form. And there's no way to avoid the former, whether you want to or not. It's entirely possible for pro-white appearance based discrimination to coexist with anti-white "what you write down on a form" discrimination.
I hope you are not living in constant fear of being outed and publicly shamed as non white. My point is that outing you like that would be a very weird thing to do and no one except for literal Nazis would contemplate that.
In case you didn't see my edit, here it is again:
One other point is that a lot of discrimination is based on what you look like, not what you write down on a form. And there's no way to avoid the former, whether you want to or not. It's entirely possible for pro-white appearance based discrimination to coexist with anti-white "what you write down on a form" discrimination.
That's a completely fair point. Many forms of discrimination exist based on many attributes and they work in different directions for different people and in different contexts.
Race may be *largely* socially constructed, but the projection of racial categories into “white” vs “non-white” is 100% a social invention, and a highly toxic one at that.
This is a great point and I think it can be applied successfully as a heuristic. Incentives are everything. Reminds me of the book “the underground girls of Khabul” which documents the widespread phenomena of women living secretly as men in Khabul, where there is obviously a huge disadvantage to being a woman. I’m half Mexican and half European (mostly Irish and Scandinavian). I present white but my name is clearly Hispanic. I always identify as Mexican because I perceive it advantageous to do so. This same heuristic might also apply to the greater prevalence of MtF transitions in the West.
Most categorical descriptors regarding sociological and biological distinctions of humanity involve arbitrary boundaries at some point. Mixing DNA percentages with genealogies often complicates nice clean delineations. Fashion loves to meld widely disparate textiles, designs, and stylings, yet narrowly "ethnic" patterns worn by non-members is seen as cultural appropriation. Picasso definitely "appropriated" African masks and sculpture, while denying he'd done so, purely to elevate his creative reputation.
An interesting life that might be culturally appropriated, is found here:
https://sweetfootjourneys.com/the-created-life-of-charles-eagle-plume/
Despite his dubious genetic heritage, the mystery man lived a long life, profiting off Native creations, yet also building a significant historical collection that was passed on to CSU after his death, and it may be his good fortune, to have died before the culture police could have paid him a visit.
Scott here writes about the «patrolling the (group) border» complex/problematique. If you study this as a social scientist, it is fruitful to separate out these four sub-questions:
(1) Who are the border guards?
Do everyone both within and outside the group agree on who the border guards are, or not?
And: Do the border guards agree among themselves, or not?
Plus: How are eventual disagreements concerning who should be the border guards, resolved? Including: by whom? By some sort of mutual adjustment (how?)
Or are the issues related to who are the border guards, decided by some authority that everyone involved accepts/respects?
If so: How was that authority established, and how is its authority maintained?
And: To which extent is all the above stuff in constant flux or not?
(2) What criteria do the border guards use?
Are the criteria for who is inside and outside the group clear to all the border guards, or do they disagree?
Are the criteria the same across time, or do they shift?
If they shift over time: How do they shift?
(3) What sanctions do the border guards use toward those who are deemed to unduly have gained access (or unduly have avoided being included – see below under (4))
Social sanctions (naming and shaming), economic sanctions, legal sanctions, others?
How are the sanctions carried out? And by whom?
(4) What are the benefits, or the bad stuff, awarded those who are deemed to be inside the group?
a) If good stuff, what kind of good stuff? Social recognition and status, economic rewards, privileged access to desirable positions, other?
b) If bad stuff: Social ostracism? Social stigma? Economic and other discrimination? Increased risk of being unprovokedly attacked? Killed?
Finally, for anyone interested in these increasingly important border patrol – issues, I warmly recommend the 1984 German move Die Wannseekonferenz (free on YouTube, with English subtitles). There is a quite advanced discussion early in the movie about the relative weight of genetic and cultural Judaism. Also notice the debate about the Mischlingefrage (half-breed question), concerning if German half-Jews should also be sent to the ovens since the German blood has been soiled, or if “the German blood is strongest”, implying that they should be let off the hook:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9Ug_MXToEE
…Prepare for these discussions, as tribalism & identity politics fastens its ideological grip. Hopefully mostly related to the distribution of good stuff rather than bad stuff, but who knows.
>Do everyone both within and outside the group agree on who the border guards are, or not?
Cool! So construction of each group induces construction of a group of border guards too.
>Or are the issues related to who are the border guards, decided by some authority that everyone involved accepts/respects?
And they recurse! :-)
...yes, and all groups necessarily have borders. And how these borders are defined, maintained and patrolled, by whom & how, is a good way to study social (including ethnic, race and gender) groups. Sort-of following the sociological tradition after the great sociologist/social psychologist Erving Goffman.
Sometimes the state enters to institutionalise and operationalise group borders (as illustrated by the Nazi race laws and the debate at the Wannsee conference, or when deciding who shall have the right to vote in ethnic-based parliaments), but not necessarily. Influencers in social media, editors & journalists in newspapers, leaders & workers in NGOs (including in "social movements"), the Cool Girls in high school, and so on and so on, can all be thought of and analysed as border guards.
Many Thanks! Yes, those are all useful aspects to study. The behavior of the border guards operationalizes the effective definition of the group.
"The behavior of the border guards operationalizes the effective definition of the group."
...good nutshell-way to put it.
Many Thanks!
There are different forms of cultural appropriation, and it's annoying to group it into one category
1. There's stuff like fusion food which is completely inoffensive to all but the extremists
2. There's the intentionally offensive which some are against, and others are for because they are bigots who like the comedy, and others who are not bigots but still enjoy comedy
3. There's unintentionally inoffensive. If someone goes to a Halloween party in a "Jew costume" which consists of writing the tetragram on their forehead, it is offensive regardless of whether it was intended to be offensive.
And of course a whole host of other varieties. I get annoyed when people group all of these things together because some are good, some are reasonable, and some are bad. But I also am sympathetic because categories are made for for man. Diverse things group together even if they don't form a true category.
This is the same how I feel about race. Yes, genetics correlate in ways that allow you to find factors. But factors are real in a statistical sense, not in an essentialist sense. So yes it makes sense to talk about a "black race," but also it really doesn't given that there is more genetic diversity in Africa than there is between Africa and Europe. So is race genetically real? Kind of?
Is it considered wrong for 8 yr old kids to play cowboys and Indians in 2024? I'm not from the US, genuine question.
I've never heard of anyone playing "cowboys and Indians" in the present day, but I think it would be considered offensive in most of the country. But you could just call it "cops and robbers" instead, or any other number of names.
Interesting, thanks.
Yes I think so. It was funny to see it in the Korean movie Parasite.
Community is more than just about you: it can include family. If someone's grandma knew yours, and went through the same problems and was part of the same group, you can be adopted into a community on that alone. If that grandma didn't exist then of course that community might feel betrayed. Ideas like genes and race don't need to come into it at all.
Based on earlier posts, I feel like Scott understands enough of the human condition to understand this, which is why this post feels like an unsympathetic attempt to dunk on how 'irrational' identity politics are.
You’re just making his point stronger
I think this article misunderstands the definition of cultural appropriation. Usually it's defined as, specifically, perpetuating harmful stereotypes about a culture you don't belong to. This is contrasted with the "cultural appreciation", which essentially means what it sounds like. This article treats a superset as if it was its subset.
Imagine if I (I'm asian btw, but pretend I'm not for this analogy) started an article by saying "asians are inferior" but continued it with "asians are statistically shorter, and I think short people are awesome!". How would an asian feel?
This is 100% not the definition of cultural appropriation.
Huh, I was pretty confident on this definition until you pointed it out. It turns out various dictionaries define it differently.
Some sources agree with me:
> Google (Oxford Languages): "the unacknowledged or inappropriate adoption of the customs, practices, ideas, etc. of one people or society by members of another and typically more dominant people or society."
> Britannica: "Cultural appropriation takes place when members of a majority group adopt cultural elements of a minority group in an exploitative, disrespectful, or stereotypical way."
While others don't (necessary) agree:
> Cambridge: "the act of taking or using things from a culture that is not your own, especially without showing that you understand or respect this culture"
> Merriam-webster: "appropriation | to take or make use of without authority or right"
I learned the former definition because it's a part of the current Ontario curriculum, but I understand if Canadian language quirks don't parse well to people in the bay area. The use of the word "Indian" for example, as referring to an indigenous person, is almost ubiquitous in the US but considered extremely offensive in Canada: probably because the government over a century kidnapping, torturing, and killing indigenous children.
These issues just seem like the inevitable consequences of cultivating a group identity. Now, maybe this is a hot take, but my instinct here is to question the necessity of group identity in the first place. Sure, it was very useful for societies that wanted to win at Imperialism, but aren't we trying to move past that?
[there's a logical leap here where I'm suddenly trying to explain what the world might look like if we had a healthier model for building an identity in the first place, probably because I'm anticipating that my take will strike people as somewhat nebulous?]
I'm imagining a world where there's a clear distinction between what you do and who you are. You're a person who practices medicine professionally, you're not a doctor. You're a person who does illustrations for a living, you're not an artist. So that when people ask what you do, you won't be tempted to respond with "I'm a fireman!" Instead, you'll say that you're employed as a fireman. That way you're not automatically associating/identifying yourself with firemen 'as a group'.
This seems like a weird distinction that I've failed to properly articulate, and it will probably strike people as me advocating for the deconstruction of identity as a concept, but I think - maybe - I'm really only targeting extrinsically substantiated/derived forms of identity.
I think, for me, cultural appropriation is analogous to copyright. I'd like to protect artists, but copyright seems like a suboptimal way to do so, so I want a different mechanism. However, that doesn't mean I want people to violate copyright (especially groups with vastly more power, like big companies) before we collectively switch, because it does protect the (largely poor) artists.
I want to protect cultural minorities, but cultural appropriation seems like a suboptimal way to do so, so I want a different mechanism. However, that doesn't mean I want people to start appropriating culture (especially groups with vastly more power, like big companies) before we collectively switch, because it does protect (largely poor) cultural minorities.
In situations where the power dynamics are flipped,I become much more lenient, because I don't see them as a moral imperative but as an imperfect coordination mechanism.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/02/world/canada/canada-men-switched-at-birth.html
I haven’t seen anyone else linking this, but it’s as clean a case study as you can ask for: two men — one of Ukrainian descent, one of Native descent — who were switched at birth and didn’t learn what happened until they were in their 60s. Their reactions are notable — memorably, the one who learned he was genetically Native but had grown up in an affluent white home began to pursue tribal benefits for his kids.
I think the intuition that Filipinos have no racial category is interesting and true and has deeper valances
> it seems kind of bad if your whole life can be retroactively invalidated by getting the wrong results from a 23andMe test
LS: "No... No... That's not true... That's IMPOSSIBLE! My lived experience is as the son of a navigator on a spice freighter!"
DV: "Search your feelings, especially that throbbing pain where your hand used to be. I can create NEW lived experiences so vivid that they INVALIDATE your previous life."
LS: **falls from a great height**
I do think the appropriation argument is a slightly separate one.
I wouldn't actually say appropriation is awesome. It depends on the size of the culture and the cultural heft of its practitioners.
Imagine being, say, a Gnome in a city that mostly speaks Common and Elvish. An elf claims that they know Gnomish and teach elves and humans, but they're completely wrong. Unfortunately, there's only like 4 Gnomes and like 30000 elves and humans, and the Gnomes can't educate people faster than the fake Gnomish Speaking elf can teach fake Gnomish (especially since they simplified fake Gnomish to be easier for elves and humans to learn). By the end of the year, everyone "knows Gnomish" and they're correcting the Gnomes on grammar and pronunciation.
This is a non-issue if there's a whole country of Gnomes somewhere and humans speaking fake-Gnomish get there and instantly realise that their Gnomish is fake and illegible to true Gnomish speakers.
So this is the difference between, say, Noongar (Western Australian Aboriginal language) vs Cantonese. Cantonese is in no danger of being mis-taught by white people, but Noongar is. And this is significant because you'll lose specific knowledge encoded in the language. Back to the Gnomes, if there are 8 specific varieties of gems that Gnomish makes distinctions for, but Elvish only understands 3, the complexity of gemstones understood by gnomes will be lost if true Gnomish gets replaced by fake, elf-generated Gnomish.
This is an argument for having strong norms against appropriation of small cultures, especially cultures with a history of forced assimilation. For this woman, this doesn't apply - I don't doubt that she was taught genuine customs when she thought she was Native. I also don't think this should have happened to her.
But yeah, something weird does happen to people who are part of small cultures. I'm Chinese, and not particularly invested in it, but I can afford to not invest in my background - there's approximately 1 billion of us and millions of people speak my languages, so it's not my sole responsibility to pass down the torch. If I stop speaking Cantonese or Hakka, the language is not going to go extinct.
This is not true of someone who knows a language with very few living speakers, like a lot of the Aboriginal Australian languages, or Maori in the 50s, then it's quite a lot of pressure!
I don't have to take up the many performance, art, food and ritual activities in my culture or personally know about them. There's enough people for someone else to get really invested in it and bring it to the next generation. I can take my pick of what I like (food) and learn it to whatever level. But if my culture only has 80 people alive, or 12? That's a lot of pressure.
Like, imagine being the last person alive who can make a macaron, or speak German. Imagine being the last ballet troupe that still exists. That's the state of a lot of smaller endangered customs are in (and it makes them vulnerable to bad actors to capitalise on the rarity - if I claim a butter cookie is a macaron, and people don't know any better, I can charge macaron prices for them. People will try my "macarons" then go, what's the point of preserving that? They're just butter cookies! So that's an issue in native art and craft)
I don't know the story, but have trouble feeling much empathy for her given what was explained, because, while I consider it unjust, it also have a very strong vibe of "punished by what they preached" (Not sure how the saying goes in English, but I am quite confident such a saying exists), which is maybe the most common cause for being happy about the misfortunes of others. At least it is for me...
Had she another career, even one where she benefited from native american status (Casino owner for example), I would sympathize.
But here, she made her academic career in native american studies, basically being a gatekeeper and shaper of the (toxic) consensus that is now her downfall....kind of a mild version of Torquemada burning at the stake. It depend a little bit on the branch she was in academically, did she push for more strict consensus or a a more universalist approach?
I think "there is a biological component to races" is the equivalent of "your waifu is not real and you will die alone" in my circles: it's true, everybody knows it's true, it's just considered a very rude thing to say. This is linked to a second taboo against the idea that intelligence is connected to genes.
See, there's no real thing as superior or inferior races in nature, if you live and breed you're good enough for the evolution fairy. Problem is that we're not nature, so we pesky apes went and decided what makes a race superior. Unfortunately, it's intelligence. And unfortunately, that's also linked to genetics.
(Thought experiment: Consider race A that is substantially smarter, and race B that is substantially taller, stronger, faster, happier, more beautiful, longer-lived, and able to shoot psychic lasers out of their brains. You'd want to live as B, but you'd know there's a certain je ne sais quoi that makes A "better". As an aside, this is the backstory of Warhammer 40k).
So, despite both being true, we ended up cornering ourselves into never being able to say "races are partially genetic" and "intelligence is partially genetic" at the same time, without going down a slippery slope that ends with "...and that's why we should bring back human zoos".
People who dedicate themselves to truth, naturally, say both parts out loud and are surprised when others ask "wait, you're into human zoos?" They aren't, they just live in a kinder world where your mind has no bearing on your value as a person.
(I mean, no matter how you look at it, Henry Cavill beats me in height, talent, wits, sex appeal, and number of Warhammer minis. This doesn't mean I'm inferior as a person compared to him, or deserve less rights than him. If you used my genes to create a Walliserops-strand of humanity, they wouldn't deserve any less rights compared to the Cavillborn Primarchs, either.)
Still, the truth tribe's views don't reflect society's unspoken rule that smart ape = good ape, and it's much easier to make a couple bits of info taboo instead of changing our entire collective mindset, so here we are. The "no links between ethnicity and genetics" standpoint becomes more sensible when you evaluate it as a kludge: It's not intended to be true, it's to account for a minor conflict between "all races are equal" and "some genetic traits are better than others".
Accordingly, Native Americans get to consider biological factors when deciding on racial belonging, because they aren't hostile to this compromise, while anyone else gets the full Sleeping Tiger treatment. To its credit, I think the kludge works more or less as intended, and it reminds me of how Kuhn's paradigms accumulate edge cases until a new, more consistent paradigm comes knocking. Maybe we won't need to keep the lie once we shift to a kinder society.
I have two points in response to this.
The first, re: defining race - I think race is socially constructed in its entirety, and I think one of the mechanisms for "constructing" it can be "genetics", and one can be lived experience, and one can be tendency to wear specific types of clothing, etc.
My position on race is very much informed by the fact that I am "white" in some places and "not white" in others. Race is not some trait I have that other people observe or fail to. It seems instead to be some trait people choose to give me (or not) in a given interaction. If I can change regions and suddenly I become a member of a different race, that makes the genetic component of this seem pretty irrelevant to understanding the situation.
The nonsense surrounding identification / lived experience / etc. strikes me as one where you can replace [minority membership] with [experience of oppression], which is why certain minorities "get" to do this and certain other minorities "don't get to do this".
There is an interesting BBC documentary about black Americans moving to Ghana, no longer being othered on a daily basis, and saying things like "I'm not a black woman in Ghana, I am a woman in Ghana". This makes sense to me. Their genome didn't change. Their "membership" did. It stopped getting renewed on a daily basis by racists.
On the grounds of "cultural appropriation", my position on it is that it's people trying to apply copyright law logic to culture. I broadly oppose copyright law as it is typically enforced, and think that it's pretty shitty. I mean, if you think about Disney being theoretically able to sue a Hawaiian kid for writing and then trying to sell her Moana fanfiction... It seems very straight-forwardly fucked up to me. And there are many instances of this kind of thing, where copyright law systematically helps the powerful fuck over those with less power, such that the maintenance of dying myths from people whose livelihoods are being destroyed is not really compensated and legally protected, but the "reading of it, bastardizing it to sound cooler to foreigners, and then selling it to a big company" of those myths is compensated and legally protected.
But the answer to that is abolish modern copyright regimes and replace them with something saner (if nothing else, bring back the 28 year term), not "pretend literally every cultural anything is vaguely governed by the warped echo of copyright law in the Zeitgeist.
The problem with saying race is socially constructed is that while it's true on a reasonable interpretation that interpretation makes the claim totally without any impact.
I 100% agree that it's a social process that picks out the groups a given racial term applies to. But that's kinda trivial. It's a social process that picks out the class of things the term "electron" applies to as well.
Ok we can go one better and point out that not only do we decide what the term applies to via a social process it's one that's relatively arbitrary (doesn't pick out some kind of principled scientific concept like negative charge or even species). But that's still almost all of our normal words. That's how we decide what vegetable means, what flower means (in normal speech not botanically) and even what fish means (not a scientific concept... claddistics says we are fish).
Ok, so black is a word like fish -- it's picked to serve our needs (eg what kind of food we want to eat) not those of a hypothetical Vulcan biologist. But so what now? I mean that's the normal kind of word why would you even make a point of it. No one goes around saying fish are socially constructed.
Unfortunately the usual reason ppl (outside some narrow academic contexts) want to say it's socially constructed is to categorically head off claims like: black people are genetically more/less intelligent or the like. But that's just fallacious reasoning.
I mean on average fish are genetically disposed to be more likely to have a swim bladder than random creatures right? Or scales? And d
I'm all for abandoning the idea of 'cultural appropriation'. It seems totally incoherent and the cases of cultural appropriation seem to be rarely exposed by the 'appropriatees'. It seems to me that minority cultures are usually totally unbothered by outgroup use of their food and clothing and cultural ideas. Rather, it just functions as a way for progressive white people to guilt and criticize and limit the behaviors and expressions of other white people in order to demonstrate virtue. It's perhaps the dumbest idea ever generated by the modern Left... and that is surely saying something.
https://jmpolemic.substack.com/
The situation is worse than it seems: Ethnic origin and culture are pretty much orthogonal to each other (though some of the ethnonationalist twitterati seem to disagree). So, as soon as you have people who left their place of genetic origin to move to another culture, your correlations break down. Then again, this describes America, where a lot of people celebrate a cultural heritage they derive purely from ethnic heritage which under different circumstances ("race") they would deny exists. Somehwere in America there is probably a bunch of liberals who simultaneously claim that race doesn't exist, while celebrating their Ukrainian heritage that they only know from books written in English.
If further family history analysis showed that two completely unrelated great-great-grandparents of hers were native would that make everything better?
I am not sympathetic to her, and you miss one of the most important issues here: there's a long history of white people pretending to be Native American for reallllyyy nefarious purposes: stealing reservation land and rations, weird Confederacy dead enders dressed up in Cherokee cosplay because the Confederacy and the Cherokees both fought the feds.... It's not cultural appropriation in the benign sense of "oh cringe white ppl think Indians are cool and accidentally disrespect their culture in the process"; it's intentional theft from Indians. Someone who is as immersed in Native culture as she became would know about this and should have questioned their ancestry from the start given the mysterious circumstances.
This seems wholly irrelevant. It's a conceptual point being argued - just conjure a pretend person with the needed qualities. And before you have a notion of what it means to pretend to be native American you first need to settle on what it means to be native American.
The problem is that either you need to say:
1) If you are descended from an unbroken biological line if Caucasian European stock w/o any adoptions you are definitionally not native american even if your great grandparents lied to your grandparents and everyone else so you've been raised as part the tribe your whole life.
2) Race isn't a matter of genetics so it doesn't matter that all your great grandparents were completely white. If the successfully tricked everyone so the last 3 generations were raised believing they were native Americans in tribal culture that makes them native Americans.
The motives of those great grandparents might affect how we feel about the situation but presumably not the racial classification.
No one who was lied to like this was raised as part of a tribe. The tribes are onto the schemes. At most, they got super into native american culture thinking they were reconnecting with their roots.
You can't legitimately argue this issue from just abstract principles. The history here is relevant and no one who claimed Native heritage from good motives would miss it.
It's a hypothetical!! Imagine the grandparents were supervillains with mind control rays.
It's irrelevant if it actually happened.
To paraphrase a wise man, "I count as White anyone who looks White, acts White, and fights White."
It could be said that this model can apply to gender too.
I think this article fails to differentiate between the different kinds of lived experiences. If one of this woman’s parents had been raised in a native home and it turned out she wasn’t genetically native it would seem different to me. But her lived experience was that of an outsider connecting with her roots, not that of a person living her culture.
My dad is Mexican American and my mom is white. I think most people can tell I have that heritage. But I’m not close with my dad’s family and even I feel like my lived experience with the culture is often more akin to that of an outsider. Someone who doesn’t even have that is not living her own culture. She’s just not. I don’t actually think that she necessarily did anything wrong here and I don’t take issue with a lot of the conclusions. But I find it disingenuous to pretend that she meets the bar for lived experience when that isn’t what lived experience means.
usually, if some genetic data can cluster so clearly, authors had filtered some famous anomaly.
I think a fourth option is that, in the native american case specfically, part of the reason being native american is important is that it's a marker of having been disadvantaged by the polices the US government has adopted towards native americans historically, and someone who didn't actually have native acenstry wouldn't have suffered from those disadvantages (perhaps hence why they could become a proffessor.)
Another reason that being native american by blood could matter, is that the rules for group membership require an induviudal to be a child of another group member - but this is compatable with genetics not being the defining characteristics because adoption is also an acceptable way of gaining group membership.
Maybe a final reason is that being a native american means having access to an inheritance which has to be passed down to children (although again not neccarsily biological children.)