Talk:Race (human categorization)/Archive 18

message: Rikurzhen, I question your adding "Platonic" to modify essentialism.  Certainly Plato offered an essentialist theory -- but so did others.  Aristotle's ontology is essentialist but based on a very different epistemology than Plato's.  There are many different kinds of essentialisms and I do not see why we need to modify the term (I either do not understand or do not agree with the reasons you suggest above).  If you had some document in which Linneaus actually appealed to Plato, you will have convinced me.  But how do you know he wasn't essentialist in an Aristotelian or in some other way? Slrubenstein 20:52, 2 Feb 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: According to immanent realism, there are universals in the spatiotemporal world quite independently of language and the mind. The existence of these universals, further more, is not dependent upon there being Platonic universals existing outside the spatiotemporal world.
Well, I think the essentialism being rejected is both "Platonic" and "immanent realism."  For example, creationists believe t hat there is a real thing called "horse;" God created it the way it is ("God brought forth living creatures according to their kinds  ("kinds" being like species).  Darwinianists understand the category (or "kind" or "species") "horse" to be fundamentally a statistical phenomenon; actual horses are the result of mutable frequencies of particular genes.  This contradicts both of the types of essentialisms you mention. Slrubenstein 19:01, 3 Feb 2005 (UTC)

text: I really don't think that they were arguing against immanent realism since that philosophy seems to have emerged in the late 1960s. From my reading, the contemporary alternative to immanent realism is nominalism. There doesn't seem to be anything in the discussion of race that would favor immanent realism over nominalism -- the question of which is whether universals exist or only particulars exist -- but I could be missing something. The immanent realists seem to have a very fine-grained spatiotemporal concept of kinds (universals/types) as things that can come into and out of existance depending on what particulars exists in the world, rather than the eternal/transcendental view of Platonism/creationism/etc. --Rikurzhen 19:33, Feb 3, 2005 (UTC)
I appreciate your desire to avoid anachronism, and, since I am not really familiar with the philosophers to whom you refer, I have to defer to you.  But one point/question: is it just the name (immanent realism) and the philosophical study that are new, or is it re ally the idea itself that is new?  Isn't it possible for scientists to have shared assumptions about reality and their objects of study long before philosophers gave a name to those assumptions?  In any event, my main point is that pre-Darwinian scientists were probably essentialists in non-platonic ways. Slrubenstein 20:08, 3 Feb 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Plato? 

message: First of all, the primary article on "race" should be about the clearest current definition(s) of that word.  For example, the US Census defines "race" by self-identification on a Census form.  When you measure "whites per capita" it is a well-defined number the utility of which may be in doubt but which nevertheless has scientific validity simply because it is well defined.  Another clear current definition of "race" is Fst.  Even Lewontin has used this definition, if for no other reason than to attempt to debunk its scientific utility (note I did not say validity).  These valid definitions should then link to separate articles focusing on their respective subjects.
Secondly, the history of confused definitions of 'race' have relevance here precisely as the confused definitions of 'heat' have relevance:  we may be interested in the ways people get confused about the concept of 'heat' -- as, for example, phlogiston -- but it is intellectually dishonest to try to saddle the best current definitions of 'heat' with the entire history of humanity's errors in the struggle for truth -- and that is true even if there are some folks who still hold to the phlogiston theory.  A prime example of the violation of this is the arcane reference to Platonic "essentialism" at the start of the article as though it has current relevance. Jim Bowery
:I regard your relationship with Stormfront edia%3AVotes_for_deletion%2FJewish_ethn ocentrism&diff=10057125&oldid=10056558 as problematic in terms of you attempting to influence this article's contents. I'll be accused of argumentum ad hominem, but such arguments are sometimes valid. SlimVirgin 22:45, Feb 12, 20 05 (UTC)
::My counter argument is as always that there is a built-in bias on "race" which trumps any supposed counter-bias arguments.  You cannot deny that in an environment where the government enforces a particular viewpoint that people who may be active in promoting alternate viewpoints may have to be allowed to contribute to articles in which they are interested.  Claims of neutrality are always more suspect than are the motives of those who profess non-neutrality but never more so than when the government is throwing people in prisons over the issue. Jim Bowery 23:30, 12 Feb 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Not in this case.  The fact that Jalnet2 keeps insisting that some people accept the essentialist notion of race is evidence enough that some still do.  In any event, to say that evolutionary scientists have come to reject this view is an accurate statement and violates no standards of good writing. Secondly, the claim that the article should be about the "clearest" definition violates our NPOV policy, as what is "clearest" depends on one's point of view.  NPOV requires that we provide accounts of all major, credible views -- even if the result is several definitions of race.  The notion that self-identity has scientific validity because it is clearly denied is simply not so.  For one thing, there is considerable data concerning contradictions in how people self-identify.  Also, what does it mean to be "scientifically" valid?  The example of self-definition given above is explicitly political, as it reflects the US census.  It is no surprise that people in other societies define race differently, and that scientists (as opposed to politicians and policy-makers) have other definitions.  In this context, the US census definition is by no means "the clearest." Slrubenstein   |  Talk  23:00, 12 Feb 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Jalnet2 is not a citable authority.  Come up with a cite of someone who has provided an operational definition of "essentialist race" that is currently used by some received authority and I'll retract my statement about essentialism.  Otherwise it belongs in the same place with regard to the race article as phlogiston occupies with respect to the article on heat.  Secondly, as to what does it mean to for a definition to be scientifically valid is simply this:  It is clear enough to be reproducible?  Self-identification is open to doubts only to the extent that people answer one way at one time and another way at another time but this is hardly a serious practical problem in terms of reproducibility.  Fst is open to doubts only to the extent that measurements of gene frequencies and resulting calculations are not reproducible.Jim Bowery 23:30, 12 Feb 2005 (UTC)

text: You ignore my point.  I know of no one who has an operationalizable essentialist definition of race.  This is one reason scientists have rejected it -- which is exactly the point made in the article (scientists have rejected it).  I do not see why you are spending so much time criticzing one sentence of the article.  My mention of Jalnet2 was only in response to your suggestion that it is arcane and lacking relevance.  I did not mention Jalnet2 as a citable source -- I mentioned him as an example, to show you that people still exist who believe in an essentialist view of race.  That is reason enough for the article to devote one entire whole sentence to informing readers that scientists have rejected this view.  I do not see any grounds for your suggestion that the sentence does not belong in the article.  As for "clear enough to be reproducible," you can go ahead and believe that if you want.  I know of no scientist who would agree. Slrubenstein   |  Talk  23:57, 12 Feb 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I addressed your point when I said "it [essentialist race] belongs in the same place with regard to the race article as phlogiston occupies with respect to the article on heat."  Furthermore I'm not criticizing just one sentence but the structure of the entire article in its obsession with paper tigers while there are serious conflicts going on about race.  As for "scientists" you know -- if they think Reproducibility isn't the touchstone of science then they aren't scientists at all. Jim Bowery 00:17, 13 Feb 2005 (UTC)

text: No, you misunderstand what I said.  I said reproducible definitions were scientifically valid.  As for paper tigers, you just raised one with me by saying that I said scientifically valid definitions were sufficient to in themselves for science.  Of course I didn't say that, and of course the article is chalk-full of paper tigers because you are a dominant presence in the writing of the article. Jim Bowery 02:03, 13 Feb 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: The Article Should Be Normalized 

message: copied from Talk:Validity of human races, where it won't be noticed, for consideration here --Rikurzhen 16:40, July 11, 2005 (UTC)
As it stands, this is just a repeat of the race article, which is essentially a mish-mash of arguments over paper-tigers.  The article titled "race" should be retitled "Human race folk taxonomies" and the main article on "race" should limit itself to numerical taxonomy of human races.  To do otherwise is to engage in strawman argumentation over the concdept of race akin to saddling the article on "heat" with a long, drawn out argument over historic conceptions  like phlogiston and relegating discussion of the statistical definition of heat to an article titled "validity of heat".  Its intellectually dishonest POVing to structure a topic with the least consilient concepts saddling the primary article.Jim Bowery 02:19, 11 July 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Invalid article 

message: This is my first exposure to wikipedia so please excuse any formatting or procedural difficulties. I have a few suggestions for the future revision of this article (I thought they should go up for discussion instead of me making changes to a well-established article):
1. I think the first sentence of this article needs to be revised. A 'race' is not population of humans but a term used to describe populations of humans. Although this is perhaps overly sensitive, it more both accurate and more sensitive to the controversial nature of the concept.
2. Given how Wikipedia's style is supposed to reflect all points of view without distilling controversy into separate sections (see section on words to avoid Words to Avoid), I would argue that the two sub-articles entitled "validity of human races” - found under the heading “20th- and 21st-Century debates over race” - and “contemporary views on race” – found under the heading Summary of different definitions of race” - should be integrated into the main article. Separation of these topics, particularly the former, lead to the idea that what is in the main article is not as contentious as what is in the sub-article. Furthermore, many of the points in the sub-articles are either redundant or important enough to me included in the main article. 
3. Although I do not have an immediate solution, I think the article also fails to distinguish between the concepts of “usefulness” and “validity” in dealing with ‘race’. Just because the category of ‘race’ may be usefully employed in social or medical research does not directly mean that it is a valid taxonomic category (according to most social or biological standards). Social scientists often use the category of ‘race’ to discuss issues of inequality or racism, but this does not negate the fact that clear-cut and indisputable racial categories are a convenient fiction. 
4. I think that the twenty-year old survey cited in Lieberman et al. (under the heading “The current disagreement across disciplines”) is hopelessly out of date, and even during its time, the negative formulation of the question can lead to confusion of responses. At the least, I think reference to it should be removed. More pointedly, I think that it should be replaced by a more accurate representation of current scholarship (which has been leaning away from ‘race’ as a valid category for awhile now). I will try and provide citation for this in the near future, but one might, for example, take into consideration the 2004 Nature supplement on “Genetics for the Human Race”Nature. On a related point, much of this article seems to suggest that “hard” scientists still respect the concept of ‘race’ while “soft” (read social) scientists may or may not agree with it; I do not think this accurately represents the opinions of the scientific community. More on this to come. (--Ove 19:13, 28 August 2005 
:Thank you for contributing. It would be helpful if you could sign up for a user name. The process is relatively painless. This will help us communicate with you. Once you've done that, it's also standard practice to "sign" all of one's comments. There is a button (second from the right) above the edit text box which will automatically insert a code that will be substituded for your signature. Also, thank you for numbering your comments. This isn't always done but it is very helpful. --Rikurzhen 18:16, August 28, 2005 (UTC)
:Quick responses -- 
:1. in some deep corner of WP style guide (that i can't find right now) is the request to not start articles with "x is a term which describes y" because arguably all articles would have to start with that formulation. that is the reason why this article has not chosen that form.
:2. if those articles can be reincorported into this article or refreshed in such a way as to bring them up to a more useful standard, that would be great. i started contemporary views on race as a Q&A-form article to distill information into a easy to read form but haven't had occasion to finish it.
:3. those are separate but related questions. i hadn't thought they were inappropraitely mixed, but let's look at that.
:4. be careful about applying indiviudal intuition when making editorial judgments. in my experience with the literature on this topic, terminological differences are a significant source of appearance of disagreement about this topic. this is one of the reasons why this article beings with a distillation of various definitions of "race". for the sake of thinking about this topic, it may be sufficent just to consider two different means of the word: (A) a particular category/taxonomic system (e.g. the 19th century  negroid-caucasoid-mongoloid or the US OMB census categories) that's predicated on a mix of social and biological markers; and (B) a set of related category schemes that divide humans into arbitrarily many populations on the basis of geographical ancestry. Typically (A) is the sort of thing being referred to in claims against "race" and (B) is the sort of thing being referred to in claims in favor of "race". Sometimes the same individual is make both claims in the same paper (see the commentary from Bamshad in the latest issue of JAMA). prior discussion about the Lieberman et al survey has been that it helps more than it hurts by demonstrating that just talking about "race" without the qualification of a definition will give very different results depending on who you ask. --Rikurzhen 19:45, August 28, 2005 (UTC)
::1. Two points. a) After seeing may more Wikipedia articles, I think it is definitely appropriate to change the wording as I have suggested. Many other articles use the same or similar style, especially articles that deal with controversial topics (see for example Caucasian race, negroid, caucasoid, global warming, Third World, gender, etc.). b) I cannot find any Wikipedia style policy that prohibits this usage.
::2. Agreed. I do not have time right now either.
::3. They are inappropriately mixed because there is controversy over the scientific validity of racial groups/classification but there is no real controversy over the fact that 'race' has real consequence. This is related to the fact that one can study 'race' without believing in its biological validity. 
::4. Still no time to look up citations, but I have a few comments.. a) I admit I was hasty to advocate the removal of the Lieberman et al. study, but I do think that a more recent survey, if available, could be used to supplement the section. This said, I also think that Lieberman et al.’s intent with their study is not reflected here. Comparing the use of Lieberman et al. in the article to an extract from the abstract (see below), it is not their intent to show that many scientists agree with the concept of ‘race’ as such, but to show how many scientists fail to take into account the problematic nature of the concept. This emphasis does not come through in the article. 
:“We propose continued use of the concept for some infrahuman species, while abandoning its application to Homo sapiens. For those biologists and anthropologists who continue to use the concept, scientific accuracy can be achieved by the presentation in lecture and text of the following ideas: first, consensus among scientists on the race concept's utility and accuracy does not exist; second, there is more variation within than between so-called races; third, discordant gradations due to natural selection, drift, and interbreeding make consistent racial boundary lines impossible to identify; fourth, past use of the race concept has had harmful consequences; fifth, the most precise study of human hereditary variation maps one trait at a time; and sixth, racial labels are misleading, especially as most populations have a cultural designation.” 
::b) I think the terminological issue you raise is important (although I am not certain your examples are totally unrelated as the term ‘race’ cannot, in any context, be removed from its politically-charged connotations). I think this issue, however, highlights my point about the inferences of the article (which seems to automatically validate some positions while relegating other to controversy – as if the whole thing were not controversial). Consequently, I would argue that the controversy of ‘race’ itself, and not any of its potential or assumed biological usages, should be the main focus of this article (back to point 1). The potential of ‘race’ as a valid type of scientific classification should be debated after a discussion of its historical and contemporary usage (and effects) in folk taxonomy(ies) - because ‘race’ is indisputably a folk taxonomy but a debatable scientific classification (inasmuch as scientific classification is not itself a type of folk taxonomy). I realize that I have not yet suggested how this could be accomplished, but it would definitely entail combining the sub-articles about race (or relegating the biological debate to its own sub-article). Thoughts?--Ove 22:24, 4 September 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Suggested changes 

message: There is a new review paper in Am. J. Hum. Genet. about race and genetics research. Of particular note is the copyright: This article is in the public domain, and no copyright is claimed. Here's the full text from the publisher's web site. If that's not publically available, I'll post it in my user space. --Rikurzhen 08:04, August 30, 2005 (UTC)
User:Rikurzhen/NHGRI-race-review-2005 --Rikurzhen 18:52, August 30, 2005 (UTC)
:I've copied the relevant material from this public domain text into the article. We should merge it with the existing text. Overall, this should be fairly easy, as the sections mostly match. --Rikurzhen 09:12, 17 September 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: A little harder than I thought: I've moved that project to User:Rikurzhen/race --Rikurzhen 04:11, 18 September 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: And so if anyone wants to help, please join in. --Rikurzhen 17:49, 19 September 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Finished with the rough work, I moved the text back to the main article. --Rikurzhen 06:41, 20 September 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  The Use of Racial, Ethnic, and Ancestral Categories in Human Genetics Research 

message: This may be a featured article, but it worries me because of its failure previously to have emphasised the political, rather than scientific, nature of the concept up front. There is a massive, and continuously expanding, amount of  evidence from population genetic research that shows this. [For example, Cavallli-Sforza, who initiated the Human Genome Diversity Project, has published many scientific papers in this area, while popular books such his Genes, Peoples and Languages, and Steve Olsen's Mapping Human History, present many of the relevant data and ideas in popular form.] mitchellanderson
:Cavalli-Sforza, more than any other scientist in the 20th century, established that human races are biological and not political. Cavalli-Sforza published some political statements to the opposite effect, but his political statements, as much as anyone else's, are irrelevant to the scientific implications of his work. --hitssquad 05:45, 5 September 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: mitchellanderson, by virtue of the fact that this is a featured article, you must realize that it has undergone intense scrutiny in the past. the claims you've introduced wrt "race" being a poltical rather than scientific term are written in a way that they violate WP:NPOV, a fact which at least one editor tried to correct. clearly your claim is controversial and thus it cannot be stated as an unattributed matter of fact. please correct this. --Rikurzhen 05:46, September 5, 2005 (UTC)
Dear amateurs - I'm afraid that this only goes to show how little you know: "my" claim is only controversial in the sense that the world being round is controversial; not everyone would agree, although anyone who understands the relevant concepts would. An outline of the arguments was contained in my amended intro, actually, and I simply cited Cavallli-Sforzan as one of many genetics who have published evidence for this. On the converse, there are no studies that indicate some human group is completely seperable from others, genetically (although there are clearly plenty of non-scientists, including people with various kinds of prejudice, who believe this); there is always far more genetic overlap than difference. [And humans are not separable from other forms of life, although they are of course a distinct species.] If you want to see the data for all of this, then I could suggest you type relevant terms into PubMed and retrieve relevant recent papers published in decent journals (Science, Nature, nature Genetics, AM J Hum Genetics, etc.). I know that WP isn't a science text, and I'm learning that that's part of the fun... I won't bother reverting your b******t. Best wishes, mitchellanderson
Don't respond. --Rikurzhen 02:02, September 7, 2005 (UTC)
See this link for the proof--68.216.187.22 22:23, 12 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  political 

message: i've given the interested editor a lot to work with. see the to do list. --Rikurzhen 06:44, 20 September 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I have been having a terrible time getting on Wikipedia lately to make edits, so I am taking a short breather till they get the hardware or traffic issues or whatever it is settled. Jokestress 07:08, 20 September 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: It's been a pain. I copied the text off line to edit it. I've got a conference this week/end and won't have much more to add. --Rikurzhen 08:24, 20 September 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  to do 

message: maybe useful, but not appropriate for the intro: --Rikurzhen 16:17, 28 September 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  contribution by 143.109.91.61 

message: Is the detail of this section of appropriate amount? My personal main interest of reading about 'race' is to learn about physical adaptations of humans that have occured in various enviornments, and I'd guess that many others feel the same way, though I could be wrong. But if I properly read the section, I see skin colour being the only real subject, and answers no questions to the wonders of a differing body build in very cold climates, for example. (Or skills in living in steep places, like in Nepal. Or different blood chemistry of generations that have lived in high altitude. Etc....) Peoplesunionpro 02:02, 22 October 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: That would make a nice addition. (Note that section was recently added.) There's also an article on Human variability. --Rikurzhen 03:02, 22 October 2005 (UTC)

text: an article in The Scientist on this topic  --Rikurzhen 08:28, 25 October 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Detail level of 'Physical Variation in Humans' 

message: I just took this from the intro materials:
I have moved this here for discussion, both as a possible copyvio and because it needs a citation and a typo fixed prior to inclusion. Jokestress 23:54, 12 November 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: These pictures also reflect a classification of races that most evolutionary scientists reject.  At best, they represent a view that was popular through mid-twentieth-century, though even then losing scholarly support.  To put this even close to the beginning of the article is to take a huge step backwards. Slrubenstein   |  Talk 00:08, 13 November 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Image addition 

message: Original paragraph:
In the United States since its early history, Native Americans, African-Americans and European-Americans were classified as belonging to different races. But the criteria for membership in these races were radically different. The government considered anyone with "one drop" of "Black blood" (or indigenous African ancestry) to be Black. In contrast, Indians were defined by a certain percentage of "Indian blood" due in large part to American slavery ethics. To be White, one had to have "pure" White ancestry. These differing criteria for assignation of membership to particular races had relatively little to do with biology and far more to do with White supremacy—the social, geopolitical and economic agendas of dominant Whites vis-à-vis subordinate Blacks and Native Americans—and racism. At the time, Blacks were valuable commodities as slaves; and Native Americans, whose vast lands were the ultimate target of acquisition in a doctrine of Manifest Destiny, were subject to marginalization and multiple episodic localized campaigns of extermination.
Comments:
1. That “the government” (the king? the colonial planter gentry?) enforced a one-drop rule in the early colonial period is in error. As explained in the Wikipedia article on the one-drop rule, the notion of invisible blackness dates from the early 20th century.
2. The last two sentences of the original paragraph could possibly be salvaged by rewording them thus: “Before the Civil War, Blacks were valuable commodities as slaves. After the Civil War, Native Americans, whose vast lands were the ultimate target of acquisition in a doctrine of Manifest Destiny, were subject to marginalization and multiple episodic localized campaigns of extermination.” But this would make the two sentences irrelevant to the topic at hand (the determination of people’s “racial identity”).
FrankWSweet 15:19, 1 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: These are interesting comments.  I may have written the original version of this paragraph but have not followed it and it seems to me that someone at some point made changes that are unsupportable.  The point about one-drop for Blacks and blood-quanta for Indians is this: the one-drop of blood rule expanded the black population, a source of labor either as slaves or share-croppers.  The blood-quanta rule shrank the Indian population, freeing up land they occupied.  The general point is that different ways of constructing race had to do with different forms of subordination.  Are we on the same page? Slrubenstein   |  Talk 17:20, 1 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: We are definitely on the same page. The only problem I had was the timing of the two phenomena. The ODR spead to the South only after the Civil War and then thoughout the nation (and was made statutory) in the 1910-1930 period. Hence, it could not have been related to slavery. Your thought that the ODR was designed to expand the population of share-cropping laborers is a hypothesis that I respect (and discuss in chapter 21 of my book, Legal History of the Color Line). My own thinking, however, is that the ODR was intended to provide an ideological underpinning to the notions White "racial" purity that supported and justified the Jim Crow wave of terror and oppression. I suspect that its swelling of the Southern labor force (which at the time was leaking northwards in the great migration) by shifting the Lower South's color-line darkwards was a felicitous (to the planters) side-effect. In any event, I really would like to see those two sentences put back in, since they are so important. I just could not figure out how to relate them to the notion of ideological Whiteness. Feel free to take a whack at it.FrankWSweet 17:56, 1 December 2005 (UTC)

text: If we are on the same page, I really encourage you to rewrite the paragraph accordingly.  It sounds like you are much more knowledgable on the history -- my only sources are Gerald Sider's Lumbee Indian Histories and an article by Fields on blacks(which I no longer have a copy of in my posession).  Can you take a whack at it?  I see NO connection to ideological whitness, whatever that means, unless it means that compared to blacks and Indians, "white" is, or has been, an unmarked racial category in American culture.  Do you think that is what it means?  I really encourage you to try your hand at incorporating this stuff into the paragraph (or making it clearer) and getting rid of the ideological whiteness. Slrubenstein   |  Talk 18:13, 1 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Okay. I rewrote the entire argument that the late-19th-century divergence between Indian blood quantum and Black ODR was economically driven. The problem, as I mentioned, is that the argument as originally written bases the economics of the ODR on slavery. But the ODR emerged after slavery was dead (to say nothing of the fact that slave status was strictly matrilineal and was indpendent of "race" other than that biracials were presumed to be free under the law). So I tried to re-cast Sider's argument more in line with my interpretation of Barbara J. Fields's famous essay, "Ideology and Race in American History," in Region, Race, and Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of C. Vann Woodward, ed. J. Morgan Kousser and James M. McPherson (New York: Oxford University, 1982). Specifically, I couched it in terms of sharecropping rather than slavery. This weakens Sider's argument a bit, so I added a comment that other historians do not see the ODR as economically driven.FrankWSweet 21:38, 1 December 2005 (UTC)

text: You must mean Oliver Cromwell Cox, who wrote Caste, Class, and Race: A Study in Social Dynamics (1948). That might be a good idea. He was Trinidadian, you know. His most interesting writing was a semi-semantic argument with Allison Davis, Burleigh Gardner, and W. Lloyd Warner who wrote Deep South: A Social Anthropological Study of Caste and Class (1941). The debate was whether the U.S. "race" notion was comparable to the Hindu caste system. To my mind, his greatest contribution was to show that the Hindu system (with which he was intimately familiar since childhood) was unrelated to phenotype, thus making it a poor analogy for the U.S. "race" notion. The bad news is that he insisted that Hindus willingly accept the caste into which they are born (a point that I doubt the Harijans or Achutas would swallow). Let me see if I can come up with a NPOV summary of their debate, since all involved agreed that U.S. "race" (or caste) was independent of class. (In the U.S., in contrast to Latin America, even a Black millionaire is still Black.) FrankWSweet 17:03, 2 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  "Race" in the United States 

message: There are 18 talk archives (though one is apparently AWOL).  Article has been much expanded from this version, overall apparently positive.  I note that some section headings are capitalized inappropriately (not proper nouns).  The sections "The Social Interpretation of Physical Variation" and "20th- and 21st-Century debates over race" have no content; the sections "Race and intelligence" and "Race in biomedicine" are stubby.  Why do we have sections specifically devoted to Brazil and the US, but no other countries?  These bits should maybe be spun out to Race in the United States or Racial perceptions in Brazil or something.  The "see also" section is too long and unneeded.  There are many references (not necessarily a bad thing) -- are they all cited specifically somewhere in the article?  Switching to footnotes would be nice. Tuf-Kat 22:30, 25 November 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: [[WP:FAR|Featured article review]] of December 8, 2005

message: Abstract:
Previously, we observed that without using prior information about individual sampling locations, a clustering algorithm applied to multilocus genotypes from worldwide human populations produced genetic clusters largely coincident with major geographic regions. It has been argued, however, that the degree of clustering is diminished by use of samples with greater uniformity in geographic distribution, and that the clusters we identified were a consequence of uneven sampling along genetic clines. Expanding our earlier dataset from 377 to 993 markers, we systematically examine the influence of several study design variables—sample size, number of loci, number of clusters, assumptions about correlations in allele frequencies across populations, and the geographic dispersion of the sample—on the “clusteredness” of individuals. With all other variables held constant, geographic dispersion is seen to have comparatively little effect on the degree of clustering. Examination of the relationship between genetic and geographic distance supports a view in which the clusters arise not as an artifact of the sampling scheme, but from small discontinuous jumps in genetic distance for most population pairs on opposite sides of geographic barriers, in comparison with genetic distance for pairs on the same side. Thus, analysis of the 993-locus dataset corroborates our earlier results: if enough markers are used with a sufficiently large worldwide sample, individuals can be partitioned into genetic clusters that match major geographic subdivisions of the globe, with some individuals from intermediate geographic locations having mixed membership in the clusters that correspond to neighboring regions.
Synopsis:
By helping to frame the ways in which human genetic variation is conceptualized, an understanding of the genetic structure of human populations can assist in inferring human evolutionary history, as well as in designing studies that search for disease-susceptibility loci. Previously, it has been observed that when individual genomes are clustered solely by genetic similarity, individuals sort into broad clusters that correspond to large geographic regions. It has also been seen that allele frequencies tend to vary continuously across geographic space. These two perspectives seem to be contradictory, but in this article the authors show that they are indeed compatible.
First the authors demonstrate that the clusters are robust, in that if sufficient data are used, the geographic distribution of the sampled individuals has little effect on the analysis. They then show that allele frequency differences generally increase gradually with geographic distance. However, small discontinuities occur as geographic barriers are crossed, allowing clusters to be produced. These results provide a greater understanding of the factors that generate the clusters, verifying that they arise from genuine features of the underlying pattern of human genetic variation, rather than as artifacts of uneven sampling along continuous gradients of allele frequencies.
This is a great resolution to the Rosenberg (2002) vs Serre and Paabo (2004) debate that (IMHO) lies at the core of the current debate over human genetic diversity. Published in an open access journal, so check it out, and then let's update the article. --Rikurzhen 08:38, 23 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: The importance to this article is that we've used Rosenberg et al (2002) and Serre and Paabo (2004) to explain some of the meaningful scientific controversy surrounding human genetic diversity and now we can add the findings from Rosenberg (2005). Once I get a chance to scrutinize the new article more closely, I'll add this to the discussion, or someone else can chip in. --Rikurzhen 21:16, 23 December 2005 (UTC)

text: "Markers of interest"? I'm looking for this, but can't find it. Can you point me in the right direction? I recall from the 2002 paper that between group variation was only 3-5% for their 300+ marker set by their analysis and closer to 15% by another group's analysis, which is at or below average for the whole genome. --Rikurzhen 21:30, 23 December 2005 (UTC)

text: If I understand Frank Sweet correctly, he is pointing out (among several other things, I acknowledge) that claims about race depend not only on onme's methods, but the uses to which the study is put/its intended use-audience.  I think this is a very important point not only because in my experience it is true, but because it also would be very helpful to readers who lack a strong background in evolutionary biology or even science, to understand why scientists may legitimately vary in their understandings of "race" (and, as a byproduct, give them more insight into the way science actually works - which is not always or only the pursuit of pure knowledge through the use of an ideal scientific method).  I think this is worth being clear about.  Anyway, Merry Chrismas, Happy Hannukah, Happy Kwanzaa, and a Happy New Year to you all, Slrubenstein   |  Talk 22:58, 24 December 2005 (UTC)

text: Frank, not much time, too busy having fun. But on one point, I think you are clearly mistaken. You write that disease patterns do not correlate either with actual (invisible) genetic admixture of Americans nor with actual ancestry of Africans and West Indians. If this were true, then mapping by admixture linkage disequilibrium would not be possible. However, it has in fact already been applied successfully. --Rikurzhen 05:48, 26 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Sorry. You are right and I am wrong. What I meant to say was that not all disease patterns that reflect ethnicity also match up with ancestral continent of origin. Some (cystic fibrosis, Tay-Sachs, sickle-cell, etc) obviously do. My point was simply that Risch's team identifies the "race" of their subjects via a questionnaire, not by admixture mapping. This is why they list "Hispanic" as a distinct "race" separate from White and Black, and why they find that the Hispanic "race" has its own distinctive diseases. In fact, as I am sure you know, Hispanics are simply a genetic mixture of African and European with more or less Native American depending upon what you mean by "Hispanic" (more Native American and less African in Chicanos, more African and less Native American in Caribbeans). Incidentally, I think that you may misunderstand what is meant by "linkage disequilibrium." For a layman's explanation, see the paragraph starting "The third argument comes from molecular anthropology" in Passing#The_Factual_Reality_of_Black-to-White_Passing1. For more details, see the section "The Percentage Rate Has Remained Relatively Steady over the Years" in the article The Rate of Black-to-White “Passing”. -- Frank W Sweet 17:16, 26 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  very important new paper 

message: A hell of a lot of work has gone into this page, by the looks of it, so i don't wish to blunder in and change anything without running it by the 'residents', but a recent paper (which made the cover of Science) may inspire an update of the 'Physical variation in humans' section:
* . 
To summerize the paper, a novel gene identified in a zebrafish pigmentation mutant led to the human orthologue that appears to resolve between 25 and 38% of the European-African difference in skin melanin index. The polymorphism turns out to be ranked second among over 3000 ancestry informative markers on the Hapmap. Moreover, in contrast to the Harding, 2000 paper on Mc1r, the 'European' allele has strong evidence for positive selection (consistant with the vitamin D hypothesis). I'm sure the implications for the concept of race based on skin colour is obvious. I'm happy to work it in if there is general consensus, but i'm sure there are people out there more familiar with this article that could do a better job. Rockpocket 06:46, 7 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: No one is really do much work on this article at this time. You should go for it. --Rikurzhen 03:47, 15 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Potentially relevent publication? 

message: S, I just reverted a revert of yours.  I do NOT object to the material that you want kept in the article.  I DO object to its placement.  The article makes it clear that at different scales, and for different practicioners, "race" can have limited but obvious utility.  The material I reverted illustrates just this point.  In short, I think the article already makes the point, and makes it in a more appropriate place.  If you feel that more can and should e said on this matter, I do not object but it should go in the appropriate place, namely here  or here  or in this general section (race in practice) create a new subsection on forensic anthropology and add more material. Slrubenstein   |  Talk 16:03, 7 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I think the material is nice for being quantitative. I assumed that someone objected to the figure and removed it for that reason. While I don't know whether the figure is correct, it seems at least plausible (80% accurate geographic placement of a person based on facial measurements - which have started to be recorded on passports in Germany, to make another point for its relevance here). It's also balanced in that it mentions that one criterion cannot be considered sufficient. - Samsara 16:51, 7 January 2006 (UTC)

text: fair enough.  Frankly, I think the article already makes this point anyway, Slrubenstein   |  Talk 18:07, 7 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  explanation of revert for Samsara 

message: Those "Hispanics" would better be described as Amerindian/Mestizos - as Hispanic is more a linguistic and cultural category. - Unsigned by 157.157.213.14 at 15:40, 16 January 2006
:Possibly, but "Hispanic" is the term used by various U.S. government agencies for racial and ethnic categorisation in different contexts. I've been through the article, and it is very careful to point to both the problems and value of such categories and to use the terms "racial", "ethnic", "cultural" etc where appropriate. Paul B 15:07, 17 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Why is "Hispanic" there? 

message: QUOTE "Michel Foucault showed the popular historical and political use of a non-essentialist notion of "race" used in the "race struggle" discourse during the 1688 Glorious Revolution and under Louis XIV's end of reign (See above)."
I've read a lot of 17th century English history and even some Foucault but this paragraph is news to me. In fact, it seems like bullshit - there were many factors in the 1688 Glorious Revolution but 'race', however constructed, wasn't one of them. Someone should either provide a source for this, or delete it.84.68.89.192 20:29, 17 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: The passage is referring to Foucault's arguments about the use of claims about conflicting ethnic identities developed during the English civil war - particularly about Anglo-Saxon peoples suffering under the "Norman yolk". These were later articulated in 1688 as arguments about native/natural English freedom being violated by "foreign" cultures. "Race" in this context implies lineage and ethnicity. The claim is that these arguments about clashes between ethnic groups were the foundation for the more "essentisalist" race discourses of the 19th century. It's a bit marginal to the subject of this article, since the concept of "race" here is very loose. Paul B 01:08, 18 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Foucault, race and the Glorious Revolution 

message: this new one is more correct and contains 2 racial divisons which were not on the prevois picture
pleace note that these pictures are not copyrighted and very old.
:I've moved the image to a more appropriate location. I think it's useful to have an image representing this "classic" anthropological subdivision, but it would be highly desirable to know its source. All you say on the image file is that it's on "a lot of websites". Does it come from an anthropology textbook? Paul B 16:59, 18 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I think they are from a anthropology textbook, i found those five images and put them together using a graphics editor. It might be from a book called "the origin of races" from the 1930s but most of the copies of the book have been burned due to the fact that most of it's info was incorrect, but any ways these pictures are not copyrighted that's for sure.  Digitalseal 17:11, 18 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: You mean Carleton Coon's book? That's from a little bit later than the 30s. It's still in academic libraries. Paul B 17:17, 18 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Well, i'm not sure if it's from that book. according to the site i found them on it's not from any book just from some photographer. I haven't find any info about these pictures being copyrighted though. Digitalseal 17:25, 18 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: It is from Coon. I'll label it accordingly. Paul B 17:40, 18 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text:  All right then, is it than safe to use the image? no copyright issues? Digitalseal 17:50, 18 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: It's difficult to say. Coon was obviously using "library" images. They are not very likely to be the work of a single photographer, nor is copyright likely to be enforced. Paul B 18:02, 18 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text:  ok, And thank you for the help, I am a complete newbie to Wikipedia = ) Digitalseal 18:05, 18 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  i replaced the race mugshots 

message: This article needs to be shortened--It is 4 times as long as recommended.  The section on origin of modern humans, including the multiregional, and out of africa is a good candidate for removal--it is all well covered in the single-origin hypothesis and  multiregional hypothesis articles and is, moreover, rather remote from the subject of race.  I propose to shorten it to a sentence or two.  
The other section that needs to go, I think, is that on race in brazil.  While interesting, one has to wonder, why brazil?  Why not Guatemala, iceland, China, or the former soviet union?  They all have interesting stories, like brazil.  There is, for many countries, including brazil "demographics of __".  I propose to remove this section too.DonSiano 17:17, 8 February 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: The section on Brazil is not about demographics, on the contrary, it reveals how the social construction of race makes demographic statistics concerning race misleading.  Why Brazil?  Because it is a classic case-study in the social contruction of race, and it is easy to provide a verifiable source.  It is only an example, but we need an example, especially one that reveals a construction of race quite different from that of the US (or UK or other English-speaking countries). Slrubenstein   |  Talk 14:28, 9 February 2006 (UTC)

text: As to cutting the section on the origin of modern humans - I think Rikurzhen, who put a lot of work into that section, should chime in before we make any decision. Slrubenstein   |  Talk 14:34, 9 February 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Well, yes the Brazil case study section in Race is not demographics and there is little overlap with the article on the demographics--they compliment one another, I show a contrasting approach to boot.  Perhaps we should consider moving it there.  On the modern humans section the overlap is quite extensive and a better case can be made for removing most of it as redundant.  I won't do anything if there is not a good consensus, but the article does now seem quite long and some things should be moved to other articles, surely.  Any other ideas?DonSiano 14:47, 9 February 2006 (UTC)

text: I suggest using Wikipedia:Summary Style for any section that is too long. This involves moving material from this article to a (new?/different?) one and leaving a short summary here. It has been attempted at Race and intelligence. --Rikurzhen 17:42, 9 February 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Well, now that it is done,  I'm not convinced now that the merge of the two articles, "Race", and "Validity of Human Races" that I did worked out all that well. The "Race" article is now quite long, a bit of a mish-mash, and shortening it significantly may be quite difficult to do with any sort of consensus.  Perhaps we should just return to the articles as they were before the merge.  Any thoughts?DonSiano 08:45, 10 February 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: This article is too long

message: When speaking about the differences of race wouldn't it be better to not use racial terms to describe the various groups of people. It is fine when referring to what was done in the past historically or explaining how the terms white or black correlate to events disproving race or the concept of race. However when explaing a point, wouldn't it be more apporpriate to use the terms European or African. To do otherwise implies a POV of the writer that is stating that the writer considers a group of people to be of a certain race. In addition to uses the terms white or black by the editor or author is in itself the practice of racism by the definition of the word. Making the writer or article editor a racist. --Gnosis 22:58, 23 March 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: There may be a few excpetions, but I don't see any major misuse of the terms 'white', 'black', 'European', or 'African' in this article. Most of the times 'white' and 'black' are used is in reference to people's self-identification or in reference to the concepts themselves. --Rikurzhen 23:15, 23 March 2006 (UTC)

text: African-American is only "more aceptable" if the passage in question is exclusively about America. Paul B 01:47, 27 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Racial POV in Race Article 

message: The section on the analogy between dog-breeds and races seems problematic. I've done a provisional cleanup, but more work needs to be done here of the passage is to stay. I don't see any objection in principle to making this comparison if it can be shown to be useful, but we have to be careful and accurate. Ideally we need citable data on the analogy, and the arguments pro and con regarding it. Paul B 12:46, 24 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Breed/race analogy

message: Removed table claiming that Race (historical definitions) comprised Australoid, Mongoloid, Caucasoid, Negroid, Congoid, and Malay. If anyone can find a historical work that lists these specific "races" I would agree to put it back. -- Frank W Sweet 19:10, 29 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  See Also