Old anti-racists just bloody fade away

Posted by Guessedworker on Tuesday, 21 November 2006 18:45.

Steve Jones, the professional professorial race-denier and friend to snails in and out of the Labour Party, has been guiding the insufficiently universalist Telegraph reader away from harmful thoughts.

Stevie-baby is an interesting case. All through his career he has exemplified the triumph of leftist politics over scientific integrity. But as the haplotype blocks relinquish their secrets it is becoming much harder for him to operate. These days he mostly confines himself to soft targets.

He first came to my attention in the late 1990s when BBC Radio 4’s “Today”, always keen for a bit of white-race baiting, regularly turned to him for expert wiseacreage. He was just required to mouth a few pieties, condemn racism and genetic determinism and kill off all complaint with a few forbidding words like “chromosome” and “mytochondrial”. The listening audience, presumably floored, was left to embrace the nearest wonderful human being in any skin colour but white.

It’s strange how memory dances around the detail, but I remember one “Today” interview from the late 1990s involving Jones the Gene and an expert, unusually, from the other side of the argument. The subject was the then-imminent effort to crack the human genome. I heard the broadcast while on the return leg of the morning school run. I can remember being caught in traffic in Seaford at the time - not an intellectually stimulating environment. But I was certainly stimulated when Our Steve’s opponent, whose name I do not recall, caught him cold with a straight right, “The race debate is over,” he said, “Our side is proved to have been right all along.”

I braced myself for a response of massive scientific authority from the Welsh One. There was none. The left’s field day with RDNE had come to an end.

Not long after this the BBC’s favourite geneticist disappeared from “Today”, to be replaced – woundingly, one would think - by Richard Dawkins. Now none but an obsessive like me will remember the very political, very strong statements he used to make. I rather suspected that discretion had got the better of him. The advancing wave of genetic science was leaving him and his anti-racism behind. More caution in public pronouncements might have seemed a pretty good idea.

And he intimates exactly that in the Telegraph article. See if you can spot the dozen guilty words.

He has also provided himself a bit of insulation space to his old Marxist or near-Marxist mentor Richard Lewontin, of whom he has written with deceptive fondness:-

Lewontin excited me about science more than anybody else has ever done. He did the same for lots of people. If you trace the family tree of evolutionary biologists in the world, a suspiciously large number of them lead straight back to him. He has been pivotal in the subject.

He’s sometimes a pernicious influence, though, in the sense that Marx or St. Augustine were. They may both have been wrong, but life would have been a lot less interesting if they hadn’t been around. At least they forced people to think about their ideas. Dick is an evolutionary gadfly, attacking whatever the dogma of the day might be. He’s the embodiment of the idea that science is the art of the disprovable. He’s destroyed lots of ideas, and that’s a useful thing to do. He does it superbly, but science needs more than iconoclasts. It needs some people — hacks, like me — to build the icons up, even if their fate is to be knocked down by the Lewontins of this world.

Lewontin, who is 80 next March, probably understands his protégé’s need for intellectual patricide perfectly well. He will be more dismayed that the left-of-centre denial game staggers on so uncertainly. Prof Mollusc’s contribution in the Telegraph is pretty much par for the course these days. It comes down to two words: Yes but ...

Here, if you read down a bit, is the “yes”:-

How fish twist the racial tale

On Monday I speak at the London Race Convention 2006, an event that marks the 30th anniversary of the Race Relations Act. Relations among the various peoples of Britain are not perfect but are better than in many places and the Act has no doubt done something towards that end.

One speech will be given by the French minister for equal opportunities, Azouz Begag. His nation, unlike ours, takes a determinedly republican attitude to ethnicity: you are French, or not, and nothing else matters. I agree, in the sense that if there is one subject that should be irrelevant to racial politics it is biology.

The attempts in the 1970s to use our limited knowledge of human difference as an alibi for anti-racism struck me as quite wrong: certainly it seemed that most genetic changes across the world did not fit with traditional ethnic groups – but what, many biologists asked, if the story changed as science moved on? Would that give the green light to prejudice?

Well, science has moved on a lot since then, and DNA technology now shows a small but emphatic split between Africa and the rest of the world. It also reconstructs the escape from that land-mass, which happened surprisingly recently.

And here’s the “but” ...

A consensus based on genes and fossils agrees that our ancestors stepped out of their native continent only 60,000 years ago (100,000 years after their origin). Africans are more diverse than others because of the bottlenecks the rest of us went through as we crossed the globe. Even so, overall differences are small and, like it or not, we all remain cousins, more or less, under the skin.

But what about the hue of that useful organ itself, with its social, political and legal implications? The story of skin colour has begun to emerge in black and white (or, as usual in biology, in several shades of grey) and it contains some real surprises.

... Whatever caused Europe’s whiter shade, in almost all Europeans the local and pale version of each skin-colour gene sits within a lengthy segment of DNA that, unlike most of the genome, is almost identical from person to person.

That pattern suggests that each mutation only happened once and was so useful that it dragged along its near neighbours on the same chromosome as it spread. There has not yet been time for natural DNA shuffling as generations succeed each other to break up the long strings of material on either side of each new change.

Estimates of dates, based on what we know about the speed of such genetic rearrangement and the rate of mutation in the surrounding bits of DNA, suggest that the white European variants arrived surprisingly recently.

... That in turn suggests that Europeans were dark-skinned for much of their history – which means that the earliest French cave-painters and perhaps even the modern Britons who followed the retreating ice into these islands 13,000 years before the Race Relations Act retained their African colour.

Will the discovery that the first Frenchman and the first Briton may each have been black influence the debate around racial politics, or the differing views of nationhood in France and England? Somehow, I hope not.

So, sans the time telescopics, the only “small” differences and the general universalist apologia all we have here is Jones focussing on skin colour, alone among the innumerable determinants of difference. The implication is that skin colour is

the

big thing with people like us. If evil racists can’t gesticulate towards it, their wild ravings can’t infect the minds of decent white folks. Perhaps Jones thinks that the more narrowly he can define our arguments the more easily he can dispense with them.

But they are not narrow.

There are innumerable phenotypic differences including intellectual, sexual, parental, civilisational and other behavioural differences. They include the small matter of conflicting EGIs. They accompany the claims of history, the rights of occupancy and of common justice - the right of we distinct peoples to live by our own will as we choose.

All this is reason enough to distinguish the “other” and even to distrust him. There is nothing Jones nor any other Labour Party member can say to alter this universal parameter of human nature.

The RDNE argument was lost back in the late 1990’s, like the man said. The denial staggers on. But it is as it always was: not science but a political deception. In any event, it won’t be made whole again by an argument based on gene frequencies that existed in Europe tens of thousands of years ago, but don’t exist now.

Tags: Race realism

Comments:

Posted by Melba Peachtoast on Tue, 21 Nov 2006 19:43 | #

Snails darling? The man is a snail expert? If memory serves that Gould chap was a snail man himself. Co-inkies? Not even my wallies are gormless enough to believe THAT.

Posted by Bo Sears on Tue, 21 Nov 2006 21:54 | #

I don’t quite understand how Steve Jones is an anti-racist or a race denier. It may be a difference in how the terms are used on each side of the Atlantic.

The PC police have defined “racism” in the USA as meaning acts of prejudice, exclusion, hatefulness, and bigotry by the diverse white Americans against any others. All the others are held to be guiltless of “racism” although they can be successfully labeled prejudiced, exclusive, hateful, and bigoted.

That’s why arguments about “racism” as expressed by others are so fruitless, while arguments about bigotry and hatefulness are so fruitful. White Americans have a terrible time getting this distinction.

That’s why we always use “racialism” as a substitute for “racism.” And we use “left-wing racialist” to mean an anti-white racist.

But how is Jones an anti-racist or a race denier? He lives and breathes race, it’s just the left-wing variety.

Posted by Andy Wooster on Tue, 21 Nov 2006 22:40 | #

Not quite. What you call “racialism”, the PC Police refer to as “racism”. J.P. Rushton, Charles Murray, and Arthur Levin are all labeled “racist” for merely talking about race differences. This leads to your next point:

To be fair, it is a very tricky distinction. One needs to really pay attention to see the sleight of hand that’s going on, and most white Americans just don’t have the lucidity to do this. “Racism” is a janus word, one with contradictory definitions. This is obviously a good thing for “left-wing racialists”, who thrive on obfuscation. It allows them to equate someone who says “Let’s kill all the niggers” with legitimate scientific research into racial differences, such as Rushton’s studies of brain volume. A higher degree of precision in language could definitely be a tremendous boon to whites.

My question to you is whether using the term “racialist” will make a substantial difference for our side when the dominant culture defines “racialism” as “racist”? The other alternative I see is to work on “reclaiming” the word “racist”. I.e. “Yes I’m a racist, in that I don’t deny manifestly obvious group differences or their significant implications regarding life in a multiracial society. A racist is a perfectly natural and healthy thing to be.”

Posted by Fred Scrooby on Tue, 21 Nov 2006 23:20 | #

“I agree, in the sense that if there is one subject that should be irrelevant to racial politics it is biology.”

Translation: “I’m a moron.”

Right, looks like Svy’s got the exact gist of the business down perfectly there. Not clear what’s left to say after that ...
______

Melba hi, it’s nice to see your spirited self again in the threads. I imagine you’re keeping the quadrangle in good repair? Wombats, platypi, rock wallabies, one-humped dromedaries, dingos, and Tasmanian Devils all treating you well, I trust? (or was it the two-humped Bactrian variety you have down there? ... I forget ...) Enough eucalyptus for all those koala mother-and-baby pairs we always see in those nature photos? (not to mention plenty of mangoes for your own needs? ...—your countryman JJR was a huge fan of mangoes, as you may recall ... mangoes and sugar-cane pith if I remember right ...) Do watch out for crocs, and ... DON’T go near any sting rays ... PUH-LEEEZE!

Posted by Matt O'Halloran on Wed, 22 Nov 2006 11:29 | #

Watch Steven Pinker in the States and Robert Winston in Britain. They are both more prepared—as popular handers-down of the day before yesterday’s scientific consensus—to toy with race realism. They, not ‘Steve’, will soften the blow when the public finally demands an audit of the Huxley/Montagu bill of goods it’s been peddled for 50-60 years.

There are two wedges whose thin ends are now being gently but persistently hammered into the official consensus of negation:

(i) Sex (sorry, ‘gender’—must wash my mouth out) differences. The feminists rode the patriarchally-imposed, don’t-really-exist horse hard for a few years, took a spill on the molehill of reality and have been somewhat of a laughing stock ever since. The notion of inbuilt and intractable biological stumbling blocks to gender identicality, as opposed to equity, reasserted itself quickly. Common sense and science linked arms again and young women now say ‘Of course I’m not a feminist, but…’.

(ii) Medicine. This daft epoch’s obsession with bodily wellbeing, its fascination with diets, cures and deadly threats, will make more patients insist on race-specific treatment. So goes the thrust of medicine towards genetically based diagnoses and cures, and the insurance companies’ constant fine-tuning of risk evaluation.

Lawsuits by aggrieved patients given less than optimal treatment by fatheaded colour-blind docs will put the R-word in the headlines. And it won’t stop at the neck; already reported systematic variations in such conditions as alcoholism, schizophrenia and suicide between those of, ahem, different hues are creeping out of the learned journals into pop-science.

Dr Steve will have his work cut out: not enough fingers to plug all the holes in the great dyke of Biodiversity Denial, I fear. We’ll know things are changing when the young generation, of both socially constructed genders, prefaces its conventional wisdom with ‘Of course I’m not a racist, but… Oh well, perhaps I am, but we’re all racists now, aren’t we?’

Meanwhile as an EU member we have to suffer the importation, duty-free, of niaiserie from Paris to Cardiff:

“I agree, in the sense that if there is one subject that should be irrelevant to racial politics it is biology.”

And if there’s one subject that should be irrelevant to mathematics, it’s arithmetic.

Many a burning Peugeot and Renault daily commemorates the wishfulness of M. Begag’s notion of nationality.

Posted by Fred Scrooby on Wed, 22 Nov 2006 15:15 | #

“if there is one subject that should be irrelevant to racial politics it is biology.”

That’s a classic example of the logical fallacy known as “begging the question,” according to which the person is assuming what he’s purporting to be proving. What a display of brazen stupidity by a bold-faced moron.

Posted by Bo Sears on Wed, 22 Nov 2006 20:56 | #

Andy asks, “My question to you is whether using the term “racialist” will make a substantial difference for our side when the dominant culture defines “racialism” as “racist”? The other alternative I see is to work on “reclaiming” the word “racist”.”

1) “Racialist” as a term makes a big difference in discourse when it is characterized as “left-wing racialist.” We have found that term to be eminently useful, and not rebuttable based on the strange protective definition of “racism.” But we do think it is the prefix “left-wing” that makes the difference.

2) Words, definitions, and meanings are shifting faster and faster these days, and it seems that this annoys us, the vibrantly diverse white peoples, more than anyone else. We call this the “name game” and it is a reality.

One minute “Oriental” is okay, the next we find that “Oriental” is only okay if applied to cuisine and rugs. One minute “black people” is okay, the next we find that only “African American” is okay.

We vibrant whites are not stupid, surely we can surf the wave with the others who create this stuff. I’ve often told friends that “European American” will eventually be taken over by our Semitic friends, and we’ll have to choose another name…no one understands this, but it will happen. [That’s the reason we are experimenting with “vibrant diverse white American peoples” or some variation thereof even though we prefer “European Americans.”]

It’s a wild world, and names and labels are not going to stay put…they’re all in play and only adroit players will be able to ride the waves. Even the word “Jew” is undergoing a change to “non-Arabic Semite” so this afflicts everyone.

This raising of naming to a new meta-naming issue is just a way to sow confusion in our ranks. Remember when we just used to be “Americans” (for those in the USA)?

But what really matters is taking this information to the outside world and verbally smacking around people who smear our children.

Posted by Benjamin on Thu, 23 Nov 2006 13:07 | #

The term racist has been used so much it has conditioned a negative connotation and encompasses way too many meanings(endowing all of those meanings with a negative connotation)...If “racist” means wanting to exterminate or enslave other peoples then i agree thats bad and the word ought to have a negative connotation.If “racist” means acknowledging that there are differences between groups and wanting to keep your ethny pure then damnit im a “racist”,but i dont think that deserves a negative connotation.

Posted by Fred Scrooby on Thu, 23 Nov 2006 16:27 | #

Benjamin’s getting it.

Posted by Don Reynolds on Sun, 24 Dec 2006 05:51 | #

Drawing a distinction between “racists” and “racialists” does not seem to offer much hope in clarifying its use. Those who use the word (often) do not seem to be too concerned with such fine distinctions.

As a practical matter, maybe a better approach may be to observe how the word is actually used in society by two (or more) groupings…..

What we may refer to as the left, use the word “racist” only to refer to their opponents in political controversies. The seem to understand that different races actually exist, indeed, they insist on categorizing everyone as one race or another, even more importantly than age or gender. However aware the left seems to recognize the existance of different races, they strenuously insist that such groupings not be used in any way. They work hard to study the differences in the races and then protest if any of that information is used to refine social customs, mores, or statutes. They claim to profess a color-blind society at the same time they file lawsuit and petition based solely on the fact that the plaintiffs are of one race or another, or are affected because of their race, or are disadvantaged because of their race. The left also refuses to discuss any remediation of racial differences, accomodations (other than the surrender of the predominant race), or even to admit that one race may be better suited for basketball and another better suited for mathematics.

What we may refer to as the right uses the term “racist” very seldom, since they are the true proponents of a color-blind society. Their application of the “racist” term is somewhat more limited, specifically in two areas: (1) a term they sometimes use to describe themselves, and do so without the negative connotation, and (2) a term used to describe any program, activity or statute that deliberately favors the minority race over the predominant race.

Both the left and the right freely admit that different races exist. The left insists such information should not be discussed in public, unless in the context of promoting those minority races. In a given locale, it is as if such minority races are near extinction and must be protected and strengthened in the contest with the predominant race. Like conservationists, they wish all races to thrive equally and survive. The right sees different races in much the same varieties as dogs or horses, each with specific capabilities and degrees of usefulness. In fact, the value of each race, like dogs and horses, is derived in large measure by the need for those abilities and strengths. Survival of the those most fit, would seem to be the rule. Useless races, unable to contribute, unable or unwilling to adapt to changing conditions, are not very valuable. It might be possible to keep one or two as pets or make friends with a select few but on the whole not very useful, particularly when taken outside the venue where they might perform well.

Therefore, I must conclude that no sort of precise language would ever be possible, common between the left and the right. Were we to refine it for our own use, the other side would still not understand our use of the language.

Posted by Al Ross on Sun, 24 Dec 2006 07:02 | #

Anyone who is pro-White is a racist.

Posted by Kurt on Fri, 13 Jul 2007 02:01 | #

If he’s anti-white, then he’s not a true race-denier. A true “race-denier” is someone who accepts ALL humans as equals, even those with fair skin. They also condemn affirmative action… ‘cause if race doesn’t exsist, then that means affirmative action’s meaningless.