From: topp8564-AT-mail.usyd.edu.au
Date: Sat,  1 Mar 2003 09:19:15 +1100
Subject: Re: AUT: Re: Basque


On 1/3/2003 5:17 AM, "Harald Beyer-Arnesen" <haraldba-AT-online.no> wrote:

> So to the following << 'races' (which as Thiago correctly
> pointed out, obviously do not exist in biological or
> cultural terms.) >>
> 
> Races do not exist. Period. But the notion of such do.
> And these notions are wedded to biology -- to some-
> thing you supposedly intrinsically are, and are born as,
> and not merely something you do. There is a slippery
> path to this from other forms of chauvinist generalizations,
> but it is still an important difference.
> 
> Harald
> 

We have to be careful with this one. I put 'races' in scare quotes because the 
loaded, common concept of race certainly doesn't reflect any meaningful 
biological or cultural reality.  (Raving racists in fact end up inflating the 
concept of race so much it stops meaning anything - such as those crazy 
Southerners who blabbered on about the "Yankee race" or my own grandfather, who 
used to say that all the races in the world were there in his hometown: 
protestant, catholic, italian, german, polish...")

But on the other hand, you really don't want to deny the reality of human 
genetic diversity, and the fact that there is meaningful similarities at the 
population level. So, few Aborigines have my blood type, B+, and practically no 
one except some Aborigines gets two full sets of wisdom teeth. Practically 
nobody in Ghana has blonde hair, though in Norway the story is very different. 
The Sami and other circumpolar peoples are shorter and stockier, the Nuer are 
tall and slender... etc... At the cultural level, you and I don't feed our 
children our semen to have their bones grow faster,  marry cross cousins or 
classify tools as persons, though these are, or were, common amongst some PNG 
cultures.

The problem is what you make of this stuff. Growing up in Brazil, I can admit 
that whenever a black kid comes near me I take a defensive posture. It is 
practically a reflex, and it is very hard to get rid of it. Recently, I got 
lost in Porto Alegre and ended up in a dodgy suburb - I had just gotten off the 
plane and so I had a strong English accent on my Portuguese and was as white as 
I could become thanks to being stuck in a library for three years. I had the 
equivalent of an entire month's middle class income in my pocket. I felt pretty 
insecure. To ask for directions, I went to the nearest elderly white person. I 
didn't even realise my selection until afterwards. Why? I suppose that using 
skin colour to navigate social hierarchies becomes second nature. But only a 
mad person would suggest that the problem is the skin colour rather than the 
social hierarchies.

Or that the social hierarchies reflect a *hierarchy* of human genetic 
diversity. That's the stupid notion. 

Thiago 
















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