New Lies For Old
| AR Articles on Ancient History |
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| The Roots of the White Man (Part I) (Nov. 1996) |
| The Roots of the White Man (Part II) (Dec. 1996) |
| Our Wandering Ancestors (Mar. 2000) |
| New Lies for Old (Jun. 1997) |
| Search AmRen.com for Ancient History |
| More news stories on Ancient History |
Whenever you get into a debate, you can almost always tell your opponent is hiding something when he starts piling up new arguments for his position in place of the old arguments you’ve already refuted. In the debate over IQ and race, this happens frequently.
First the argument was that IQ tests were culturally biased. But new IQ tests showed that the more you control for cultural bias, the larger the IQ differences between the races. Then it was claimed that intelligence really can’t be tested. But performance on IQ tests matched performance in school, academic tests, and professional success. Then they said “intelligence” doesn’t really exist anyway. But intelligence is a concept that human societies have always recognized and would find it hard to abandon. Finally, the most recent argument has been that “race” doesn’t really exist, that it’s only a “social construct.” Now even that defense of egalitarianism, an increasingly common one, is starting to shrivel.
But the shriveling isn’t happening without a good deal of last-ditch egalitarian resistance. On April 17th, The Washington Post reported in a front page story that archaeologists have now found remains of quite a few prehistoric pilgrims to North America whose skeletons are – well – “Caucasoid” (see AR, January and April, for reports on “Kennewick Man”). This is a problem for two reasons.
In the first place, as everyone who has seen the Eisner version of “Pocahontas” knows, Caucasians were invaders who stole the country from the “First Americans”– namely the North American Indians, who, as Post staff writer Boyce Rensberger put it, “all resembled today’s Asiatic peoples, popularly called Mongoloids.” (Popularly? When was the last time you heard someone in a bar referring to Asians or Orientals as Mongoloids?) If the “First Americans” or “Native Americans” were really Caucasian, then maybe Mr. Eisner will have to remake his movie and a lot of textbooks will have to be rewritten. But more of that problem anon.
First, how could scientists tell the skeletons were Caucasian rather than Mongoloid? Identification, says the Post story, was “based on a scientific technique called craniofacial morphometric analysis. It involves detailed study of the shape of the skull and face, using a sophisticated method called multivariate analysis. In some cases, more than 60 different dimensions of a skull are measured and compared with comparable dimensions considered typical of specific racial groups.”
But if race doesn’t really exist, if it’s just a “social construct,” how can you identify the race of a skeleton? Mr. Rensberger (or his editors at Egalitarian HQ) tried to handle the difficulty manfully and sensitively. Here is their solution:
“Most anthropologists agree that races, as most people use the term, are socially defined groupings with no scientific definition. No physical traits are exclusively the property of one race or another. Still, anthropologists agree that certain combinations of measurements, chiefly of the face and skull, can be used to determine whether individuals belong to one population [!] or another. This is true primarily for groups [!!] that have been separated geographically for thousands of years.”
Now in the first place, the above paragraph has nothing to do with the news content of the story. It is inserted purely for ideological instruction, to let readers know that the Post has not signed up with the Bell Curve boys who believe that race might really exist after all. Back in the good old days of the Soviet Union, Pravda probably had lots of paragraphs just like it. But in the second place, whether Mr. Rensberger or his editors realize it or not, they have just told their readers that race really does exist. It exists, not as a social construct or as “socially defined,” but as an objective fact of nature.
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As J. Philippe Rushton notes in his Race, Evolution, and Behavior, “The view that race is only a social construct is contradicted by biological evidence. Along with blood protein and DNA data … forensic scientists are able to classify skulls by race.” (p. 235) As behavioral geneticist Glayde Whitney wrote in AR (March, 1997), “it has already become obvious that there are substantial genetic differences between the races. It is trivial to identify unerringly the race of any individual, including mixes of various races. This fact should forever dispel the myth of racial equivalence. Fashionable nonsense to the effect that race is a social rather than a biological phenomenon is clearly and demonstrably false.” Race, in other words, is a genetic construct, a natural construct, and social definitions have nothing to do with it.
The discovery of the Caucasoid skeletons in North America lets a lot of skeletons out of the scientific and journalistic closets, and some “scientists” whose job it is to guard those closets don’t much like it. As the Post was careful to point out later in the same story, “Some anthropologists reject the Caucasoid label for the prehistoric skeletons.”
Daniel Grayson of the University of Washington, for one, says that using the word “Caucasoid” “raises ‘a red flag, suggesting that whites were here earlier and Indians were here later.’ “Professor Grayson adds that using “the word,” as the Post refers to the term Caucasoid, “implies that the ancient peoples who reached the New World were like today’s Europeans or American whites.”
Well, this is obviously getting out of hand, and it brings us to the second problem raised by these ancient skeletons. Somebody might say that the Europeans who arrived after 1492 weren’t such aggressive invaders after all, that they might even have had some right to come here since their ancestors were here at least as early as “First Americans.”
Hence, the Post is quick to point out that “some other anthropologists” (who remain unnamed) note, “the ‘apparently Caucasoid’ skeletons may represent a physical type that was not ancestral to today’s Europeans… . In other words, the scientists say it is possible that it is only a coincidence that the ancient skeletons have features that resemble those of Europeans.” Well, that’s much better, because, you see, even though race doesn’t really exist and is only a social construct, the prehistoric Caucasoids who came here were not of the same race as the later Caucasoid invaders.
Obviously, the white people who came to this continent 9,000 years ago didn’t establish any political or cultural claim to the continent for modern whites, regardless of whether they were “ancestral” to them. Neither does the presence of Mongoloid ancestors of the modern Indians establish any political or cultural claim for their modern descendants. The claims of each group are based on what their more immediate ancestors contributed to the making of what is today American civilization and the American nation, and it ought to be fairly obvious that the modern European races (excuse me, I meant “population groups”) had a bit more to do with that than the Kwakiutls and the Ojibwas.
But another obvious point is that modern racial egalitarians can’t bear to look at the evidence from comparative anatomy and molecular genetics that now prances before their eyes, and they have to resort to the most grotesque ideological and linguistic contortions to preserve the egalitarian myth that race doesn’t exist. Newspapers like the Post and some scientists like (apparently) Professor Grayson are always happy to enlist themselves in the preservation of such myths, to the point that both science and journalism are imperiled. If the trend continues we might as well give the country back to the Caucasoids.
(Posted on February 16, 2005)