Racism is the belief that one race is superior to all others.

Just because one person is more intelligent than another, does that make them superior?

I think there is a whole lot more to a person's value than their intelligence.

No.

We generally measure intelligence with IQ tests. They’ve been criticised, but I don’t think anybody has developed any better-accepted measure of intelligence. Most of the argument that intelligence is race-linked is based on the comparative IQ scores of test subjects classified into different racial groups. Most of the argument against is based on claims either that the racial classifications used are meaningless, subjective or irrelevant, or that the IQ tests themselves are not objective measures of intelligence, being culturally biased, or both.

But leave aside for the moment the criticisms of IQ tests, and assume that they are a reliable measure of intelligence. Assume also, for the sake of argument, that discriminating against the less intelliegment is ethically justifiable.

If we wanted to discriminate against the less intelligent we could do so simply administering IQ tests, and discriminating based on the results.

If we discriminated against (say) black job applicants on the basis that black people, as a class, have lower IQ scores than the population at large, then (a) we would be discriminating against those black people who have high IQ scores, while (b) we would not be discriminating against non-blacks with low IQ scores. Race, not IQ, would determine how each person was affected by the discrimination. This would be discrimination on the grounds of race, not on the grounds of intelligence. Anyone discriminating on the basis of skin colour and claiming to justify this by reference to race-linked IQ results, while ignoring actual IQ results, would quite obviously be lying.

A fundamental principle of equality ethics is that I am entitled to be treated by reference to my own characteristics, not the characteristics of the group to which I belong. It is demonstrably true that women, as a class, take more sick leave/personal leave from work than men. Nevertheless nobody is entitled to discriminate against female job applicants, as a class, for this reason. It is demonstrably true that far more men than women are convicted of child sexual abuse offences. But if I, as a man, were refused a job as a teacher on this ground, I would be outraged. Similarly, even if it were true that people from race X score lower, on average, in IQ tests than the population at large, as a member of race X I would expect my application for a job to be judged according to my IQ score, not the average IQ score for my race. (And, even then, I would expect my IQ score to be taken into account only to the extent that it was relevant to the job concerned.)

I've often thought the original Australian Aborigines are stone age people.
Most of the successful ones have a lot of European blood in them.
Did the Aborigine culture have a counting system or a written language?
Were shelters built, crops grown and animals domesticated?
I think now we've paddled ourselves up a creek without a paddle because of our pretence that they can cope with our culture in a big hurry when it has taken thousands of years for us to arrive at the same point.

arry,

Then I must admit to being a racist under that definition; I firmly believe that the human race is superior to all others. The definition of a race is that they are capable of breeding with all others of the opposite sex within their race. If they come across another similar group and find that they can dilly-dally with them and procreate and if, after a suitable time, the offspring can breed then the two groups belong to the same race.

There may be an argument because some groups of humans cannot easily breed with each other but these exceptions don't alter the general rule.

Horses and donkeys are a good example of race; they can breed but their offspring, mules, are infertile. So horses belong to a different race than do donkeys. Draught horses and miniature ponies can have fertile offspring but only if the little stallion is given help, usually in the form of something to stand on and the big mare is patient. The reverse is not possible for obvious reasons.

Um, the original European people were stone age people as well.


So do most of the unsuccessful ones. Those of wholly aboriginal descent are a minority among Australian aboriginals.


There’s not much point is picking particular characteristics of European culture and pointing out that they are not characteristic of Aboriginal culture. All that this shows is that Aboriginal culture is not European.

Aboriginal culture was well-adapted to Australian society and environment for about 40,000 years. It was singularly ill-adapted to the encounter with European culture in the last 220 years or so, but we could equally say that European culture was singularly ill-adapted to the encounter with Aboriginal culture. Europeans systematically misunderstood what they encountered in Australia, and they acted on their misunderstandings and regarded themselves as entitled to use force, even deadly force, in reliance on their misunderstandings. Since European power was greatly superior, the negative consequences of European misunderstandings of Aborginals were very much greater than the negative consequences of Aborginal misunderstandings of Europeans.

Since Europeans in Australia have greater numbers and superior technology, European culture rapidly came to dominate. The impact of this mutual misunderstanding has therefore been disproportionately born by Aboriginal Australians, who are profoundly affected by the dominance of European culture. (I dare say the stone age Europeans had an equally dismal experience when they first encountered societies which had mastered the art of working iron and forging bronze.) As a result the learning curve has been steeper for them; it is probably true today that, on the whole, blackfellas understand whitefella culture – even if they don’t necessarily entirely share it –better than most whitefellas understand blackfella culture.

I think the definition you are referring to applies to animals, not humans.

When I said the "original aboriginals" I meant those dating to back to the arrival of Captain Cook.

All human life is sacred and has equal value. By saying the aboriginals are stone age people doesn't diminish their value. I know Europeans did ignorant and cruel things in earlier times and there is no excuse for it.
The reason I wrote the post is because I think sometimes there's a refusal to recognise facts, and a desire to mystify, by romancing about the dreamtime culture etc. To talk about them being well adapted to the Australian environment, when we have as wide a range of climates here as any other continent, tropical, meditaerranean, desert and alpine is disengenuous.
European culture went well beyond mere adaptation to environment; Plato, Mozart, Galileo?
The two cultures are not just "different". One is more evolved than the other.

To be honest, Christine, what bothered me in your original post was this:

“I've often thought the original Australian Aborigines are stone age people.
Most of the successful ones have a lot of European blood in them.”

The implication here – though I accept this may not be what you intended to say – is that it is a European genetic inheritance (“European blood”) somehow fits people for a more “advanced” culture than a stone age culture.

This is completely wrong. Stone age culture in Australia lasted for between 40,000 and 80,000 years, and came to an end with European settlement. However stone age culture in Europe lasted for about 2.6 million years. There’s nothing in that comparison to suggest that (indigenous) Europeans are somehow more apt to develop post-stone age culture than (indigenous) Australians.

Europeans developed – eventually – a post-stone age culture in response to their environment. Australians didn’t, but that wasn’t because they were less apt for such a culture. It was because their environment wasn’t suited to it. Europeans had crops capable of cultivation, and animals capable of domestication and of pasturage on those crops, and so they developed settled agriculture (though it took them about two million years to get to that point) from which all else flowed. The Australian environment lacks this happy combination of farmable crops and domesticable animals to eat those crops.

When Australians did encounter a post-stone age culture, there were certainly stresses in adapting to it and engaging with it. But on the whole it went a lot more smoothly than the corresponding process seems to have gone in Europe. To take one example, within a comparatively short time after European settlement, there were plenty of aboriginal Australians who were competent, indeed highly skilled, at horsemanship, an activity which would have been absolutely inconceivable to their grandparents. By contrast, when Europeans were first exposed to horseriding cultures, they were completely incapable of understanding what they were seeing, and they developed the myth of the centaur in an attempt to explain it to themselves. So far as we can tell, about two thousand years passed between the time the early Europeans encountered horseriding societies and the time it took them to start horseriding themselves.

Culture is not genetic; it is entirely environmental. It is true that aboriginal Australians did not spontaneously develop a post-stone age culture, but there is no reason at all to suggest that this is because they were in any way unable or unfit. They lacked the environmental conditions which led to this development elsewhere; it’s as simple as that.

hi Peregrinus, I agree with most of what you said and laughed at your comment that European people were also stone age people at one time. Very good.

But I do not believe that culture is purely environmental. If you put a person aged thirty or whatever age into another environment, that person would not change 100% culturally. This was the original justification for taking aboriginal babies from mothers as young as possible, to bring them up as "white" and better people. I believe there is some inherited tendencies involved. Aboriginal people taken from their mothers close to birth would agree with me I think. Another example are babies born with male sex organs who later on in life, believe they are female. Despite being brought up "male", they have this innate need to be treated as female.

This takes us to the nature vs. nurture argument of course which is off topic so I won't go any further.

No, of course not. But that is because they have been shaped by the environment in which they grew up.


. . . which was, of course, a disastrous policy. But that’s not because of any genetic incapacity for white culture; it’s because the children concerned were black, were always going to be treated as black by white Australian culture, were always going to know they were black, were always going to know that the people raising them were not their parents, were always going to know that they did have parents and relatives who were unknown to them, and were always going to experience personal dislocation, abandonment and identity issues. Similar issues can arise – though often less acutely –in intraethnic adoptions (i.e. children being adopted within their racial/ethnic group).


Well, maleness or femaleness is not a matter of culture, though how we treat men and women (and therefore the experience of being male or female) certainly is. But, though the psychological basis for gender identity disorder is not well understood, it’s not thought to be genetic, since the people concerned often have an unambiguous genetic identity. There’s no reason at all to think that it’s inherited, so far as I know. It may be environmental, in the sense of exposure to certain influences (maternal hormones) in the womb, but I think that’s more of a speculation than a fact.

Samuel makes a good point, that race (as a division of humanity) is basically arbitrary. The genetic differences which account for different skin colours – a typical marker of race – are not more extensive or more profound than those which account for different eye colours, or different hair colours. Yet for reasons of our own we attach enormous significance to skin colour, and none at all to eye colour.

There’s enormous genetic variation within races – much more so than there is between them. As a person of European descent, I may have a great deal more in common, genetically speaking, with an aboriginal Australian than I do with someone else of European descent. True, the genes which control skin colour, certain facial features, etc I do not share with the aboriginal Australian, but as against another European I may not share genes which control height, hair colour, body type, lactose intolerance, a predisposition to hypertension and the ability to curl my tongue. Yet we arbitrarily treat skin colour as the genetic marker which constitutes a distinct “race”.

There’s no particular reason to expect a correlation between skin colour and intelligence, any more than between eye colour and intelligence. Even if such a correlation were established, it wouldn’t justify treating black people as less intelligent than white people (or vice versa, if that was how the correlation worked). If we wanted to identify the less intelligent people, we would still do that by measuring their intelligence, not their skin colour.

I am of European descent but I have ancestors from all over Europe from Spain and Italy in the South to The Scandinavian countries and Germany and Poland in the North (and probably from Russia), from Hungary in the East and Ireland and Scotland in the West.
These are only my known ancestors but there is a fair chance that I have Negroid ancestors from any of the European countries that were under Rome, along with Egyptians, Greeks and any or all of the Semites who similarly served the Roman Empire (plus any others who were looking for a job). We all have 2 parents, 4 grand parents, 8 great grand parents and so on, doubling each generation unless there is a bit of inbreeding* or crossing further back. In 20 generations we have over 2 million ancestral positions. Europeans are the least 'pure blood' of any group of humans.

*Excepting 'double cousins' who all share the same grand parents because siblings from one family married siblings from another family.

Peregrinus wrote:

Culture is not genetic; it is entirely environmental.

In my last post i attempted to make the point that a person has aspects of themselves which is partly based upon environment (nurture) and partly on one's genetic makeup (nature). I see culture as a mix of both. In my example using the removal of aboriginal children from their parents and attempted integration into "white" culture, I don't think it has been proven that it failed only due to bad nurturing. I am certain that some aboriginals and others believe it also failed because Australian aboriginals have a different innate affinity for the land and such like. A different culture. I am not stating that is proven either, but just that it appears to me that the culture of a person depends upon their genetic makeup and their upbringing, not solely one or the other

I am not arguing the action of putting aboriginal children within "white" culture was good or bad, that aspect is not in question here.

It is apparent that I have not been very clear with my example on gender either. Let me restate my point in another way, in very simple terms.

Surely we can agree that genetics does have a major factor on the gender of a child. X and Y chromosomes and all that. The culture of a child does also depends upon their gender. Male and female culture is different, therefore culture is partly dependant upon one's genetic makeup.

In a like manner, the groups of various people have a cultural aspect or characteristics or behaviour which is inherited. If genetics determine height or skin colour or quality of eyesight or even hair colour, that changes one's behaviour and this over time becomes integrated into the culture of those groups of people.

So, my point is simply that culture is not solely dependant upon environment. Culture depends upon genetics and environment.

Your statement that "Culture is not genetic; it is entirely environmental." is incorrect based upon my argument above. Culture is not entirely environmental.

Sex – being male or female – is a matter of genetics. However it is not a matter of culture; if it were, we would have to say that moss, ferns, etc have culture. <i>The different way in which we treat</i> men and women is a matter of culture, but not a matter of genetics. There is nothing in our genes which requires us to treat them that way.

By the same token, being black or being white is a matter of genes, not culture, but how blackfellas and whitefellas treat one another is a matter of culture, not genes.

We may well have a culturally-determined reaction to genetic fact, but that doesn’t mean that the culture depends upon the genes. The culture, in fact, is the determinant here, not the thing determined.

Peregrinus wrote:

Culture is not genetic; it is entirely environmental.

Culture is not entirely environmental. Genetic makeup significantly influences and changes culture. In our culture, we restrict the reproduction of sexual mature men and women who are mentally very disadvantaged. This cultural fact changes the future gene pool of our society. In Australia we also employ medical techniques to enable normally sterile people to reproduce. So, again our culture changes the genetic makeup of our society.

Another example is that in China, the culture in the eighties was to encourage single child families; this resulted in many female babies being disposed of, with the result that there are now more native males in China than females. The fact there are more males than females in China has changed the culture of finding a sexual partner in that country.

Genetic makeup impacts culture and culture impacts genetic makeup and on and on. These factors cannot be treated in isolation.

Our genetic makeup has evolved simultaneously with culture and evolved both our gene pool and culture to where it is today. I recommend the book "The Selfish Gene".

If culture is entirely environmental then if a female child was brought up entirely by males, only experiencing male culture, that that child would adopt the male culture, and her genetic makeup would be irrelevant? If we tried it with an animal, the animal wouldn't adopt our culture either.

And to return to the actual question, I seem to have drifted off topic a little, it is possible to differentiate the characteristics of a race and another race. It is not ethical generally to exploit these differences for one's gain. I meet many people from Japan and South America. Apart from appearance, I can state that the majority of Japanese are much quieter and more respectful than the South Americans who have a much stronger sense of fun, laughter, in your face'dness and rhythm. This is due to their genetic makeup (rhythm, music appreciation and artistic ability is not gained from environment - I speak based on experience here) and culture.

Of course, a person from Japan can have more rhythm than a person from South America. One cannot define an individual's characteristics by race, one can only make generalisations which do not always apply.

So, to answer the original question directly, racism is the abuse of differences due to race. Racism is not the fact of being aware or understanding racial differences. There is no principle of equality, everyone treats others differently based upon their genetic makeup and culture and past experiences. I do not know two people who are equal.

As I think I have mentioned before, ideally we should treat everyone as a unique individual and every decision as a unique decision, but we do not have the time or knowledge to do so and so we must make some assumptions based upon prior experience. In my case, I treat Japanese and South Americans differently because I expect the South Americans to be more in my face and the Japanese to be more respectful and be reluctant to tell me if they do not understand something. So, I dig deeper with the Japanese. I don't believe this is racism because it is not for my benefit, but it is me treating different races differently.

And in this global world, racial differences are getting smaller. The world is a melting pot.

I happily accept that culture affects genes, Airzone, which is what all your examples point to. And you don’t have to point to exceptional or isolated cases to show this. In the mainstream of all or almost all societies are conventions and sometimes even laws about who we may or may not marry. This clearly affects the genetic inheritance of those societies.

But the claim that I am objecting to is that genes affect culture. This is true only to the very limited extent that a particular genetic fact may evoke a particular cultural response – e.g. if you are a woman, in many societies you cannot be a priest. But the genetic fact doesn’t dictate or determine the response, as is shown by the fact that there are other societies in which women can be priests, yet others in which only women can be priests, and still others where there are no priests at all. There’s no sense, therefore, in which this particular aspect of a society’s culture is determined by genes. We might speculate about why different societies have different rules about priesthood, but the different is not determined by the differing genetic inheritances of those societies.


No. A female child reared by males will be treated by the males as a female, whateve rtreatment that may mean in her culture, and so she will learn that she is a female, will regard herself as a female and will experience and learn the implications – in her culture – of femaleness.

If she were reared by people – male or female – who thought she was a male, and who treated her as a male, she would indeed adopt male culture and function as a male. (Until, that is, her physiological development made it plain that she was a female, whereupon the way she was viewed and treated by others would change, and she would probably suffer a severe identity crisis.)


There’s no evidence at all, on a societal level, that things like rhythm, music appreciation or artistic ability are genetically determined.

This may be true for individuals. There, for example, an inherited, and probably genetic, disorder which affects gross motor skills and leaves those affected unable to dance in time, to catch a thrown ball, etc. I have it myself, and have passed it to my daughter. But it occurs in all ethnic groups at more or less the same rate. And, even without identifiable factors like this, we all know that some people are naturally good dancers and some aren’t. It’s possible, but by no means a certainty or even a likelihood, that this is due to as yet unidentified genetic factors.

But this doesn’t account for differences in rhythm, artistic ability, etc, between different ethnic groups.

We also know that different ethnic groups can adopt one another’s cultures, and in fact historically this has been extremely common. To the extent that culture is genetically determined, it should be impossible. Conversely, we know that groups which are genetically indistinguishable can develop markedly different – and sometimes antagonistic - cultures


Indeed. But what is missing from your argument is any evidence at all that the general cultural differences between Japanese and South American people are genetically determined, or indeed any reason at all for thinking that this is so.


Yes, but on the basis of their differing cultures, not their differing genes. Race is, in fact, a cultural construct. Japanese and South American people are of different races not because they have differing genes – there genes may in fact be very similar – but because we have chosen to treat them as being of different races. What leads us to do that is the cultural differences between them. (Mostly. Prejudice occasionally enters into it.) But we have no reason to think that these are genetically determined, and a good deal of reason to think that they aren’t.

Thank you, I am glad we agree it is true that genes affect culture (have influence, are partly determined by) ... even if it is only in a limited extent.

I think everything is limited anyway, nothing is absolute ... sorry, I had to put that in!

What's so bad about prejudice- everyone seems to hate it, yet nearly everyone discriminates. Humans are tribal 'them vs us' creatures who like to make (often artificial) distinctions between people, based on our pattern-forming nature. Equality has to be brainwashed in, and then another way to divide people will be formed anyway. As society has decreased it's racial prejudices, it has increased it's prejudice towards obesity, appearance and the white underclass (trailer trash, chavs, bogans etc.). People love to hate- equality is impossible without brain changes.

Furthermore, for the groups who can't safely be targeted in public (minority races, gays in some places etc.), people make the same prejudicial statements and just call it ironic and say it is hsowing the prejudices of others.

Equality just isn't true as well. An old lie has sirculated for too long now- that people can be different but still equal. It would take a miracle of quantum physic s for this to happen- whenever there is a difference, hoever slight, it changes a person, with even the smallest difference giving one person a slight advantage. For two athletes who are deadlocked in all obvious ways, one wins eventually as small differences affect their abilities (see Federer Vs Nadal on many occasions). People can be approximately equal, but wherever there is a major difference, like gender, it will create a vast array of inequalities, which we can only hope balance (but which generally don't).

Finally, prejudice defines who we are. It gives us our tribal identity, and even the person who follows Voltaire's 'Prejudice is what fools use for reason' shows a prejudice against low intelligence, extra-rational thought and the prejudiced. Not all prejudiced people are close-minded and lazy anyway, studies show that exchange students report increased prejudices after living with other cultures. Many say they believe in equality until they have to live with the 'others'.

How many of you 'open-minded lovers of equality' actually live around minorities, or are you in a comfortably middle class setting? Do you treat your minority people subconsciously as 'Mr Minority'- a way of showing how liberal you are? If you do practice what you preach, is it because you are a minority member who has something to gain from equality, while you let prejudices against other groups thrive?

I've experienced some prejudice, I've given out some, but I regret not having given out more. Life is all about who's vicitimising who, and the only people who don't abuse others are those who can't find anyone lower down the social food-chain to pick on. Look how the Israelis enjoy oppressing Palestinians after centuries of taking it (I'm not saying Israel is necessarily oppressive, just that many of its citizens are extremely prejudiced and abusive to Arabs). Look how nerds love to turn on jocks if they become successful. I'm a good actor and fitted mainly into the jock category through image manipulation, and through ruthlessly humiliating people if it helped maintain my image, even when I didn't want to turn on them. However, I suffered for the times I didn't quite pull it off. I won more than I lost though and I enjoy being better than others. Who doesn't? But at least I'm honest. Life is dog-eat-dog and everyone needs a cat to kick.

The climate is only one aspect of the environment. Being well "adapted" can mean various things. If the purpose of humanity is to develop art, philosophy and science, then it seems that the aboriginals had not achieved this purpose well.

Others, however, believe that we have evolved in such a way that our psychology is adapted to an environment much like that of the aboriginals and that citizens of a modern society such as ours suffer from friction between their psychology and their actual environment.

This is unverifiable, but it is important to keep in mind that there are assumptions at play when we try to judge the quality of a society. Is a modern European society superior to a hunter-gatherer society that is more egalitarian and has more leisure time?



Is it possible that certain genes have an effect on culture? Yes, but the study you mentioned suffered from severe biases. To then suggest, because of that study, that aboriginal Australians have a gene that someone gives them greater "affinity for the land" would be unjustified extrapolation. It would be better to try and directly identify the differences in genetic make-up and point out the differences which might make it difficult for aboriginals to integrate (the differences are more likely to deal with superficial things). When we do not have proper evidence, it is better to assume nothing.

I see no reason to believe that our conception of property has a genetic basis.

The main concern today is the cultural problems that aboriginals face, such as the domestic violence and drug abuse. Does this have a genetic basis? Perhaps, but I have no reason to believe this. I do, however, have reasons to believe that these reasons are social, which would explain the similarity between the problems that aboriginals face in different parts of the world: Japan, Canada and Australia, three countries which are far apart, all have genetically different aboriginal populations which suffer from similar problems.