America’s Make-Believe Racial Categories

I just finished reading "The Lunacy of U.S. Racial Categories," by Rich Lowry of the National Review.

I completely agree with Lowry, having just heard David Bernstein discuss his new book on Coleman Hughes' podcast: Classified: The Untold Story of Racial Classification in America. I'm currently reading Bernstein's book and I've already read Bernstein's amicus brief filed in the Harvard affirmative action case, in which he makes a mockery of America's "racial" categories. Here's an excerpt from NR article:

It’s not just that colleges and universities discriminate on the basis of race, ethnicity, and national origin. They do it badly. This is one of the themes that emerged in the oral arguments at the Supreme Court in the Harvard and University of North Carolina affirmative-action cases last week.

The racial categories that the schools use are completely bonkers, an arbitrary mess mostly left over from the work of federal bureaucrats in the 1970s that can’t withstand the slightest scrutiny.

The administrators who rely on these categories are beholden to senseless and unscientific distinctions — they aren’t even competent or rational racialists. . ..

As the Bernstein brief notes, the Hispanic category “includes people whose ancestors’ first language was not Spanish and who may have never spoken Spanish. This includes immigrants from Spain and their descendants whose ancestral language is Basque or Catalan. It also includes indigenous immigrants from Latin America whose first language is not Spanish, whose surnames are not Spanish, and whose ethnic and cultural backgrounds are not Spanish.

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Richard Nisbett: Intelligence mostly varies due to the environment, not genes

The dominant hereditarian view of intelligence holds that intelligence is mostly fixed by the genes. Richard Nisbett has dismantled the evidence on which the hereditarian theory is based. In his new book, Intelligence and How to Get It, Nesbitt argues that the twin studies on which the hereditarian view is based are deeply flawed. The main problem is that the adoptive homes in which those separated twins often find themselves are uniformly enriched learning environments. Nisbett's book was reviewed by Jim Holt of the NYT Book Review:

Nisbett bridles at the hereditarian claim that I.Q. is 75 to 85 percent heritable; the real figure, he thinks, is less than 50 percent. Estimates come from comparing the I.Q.’s of blood relatives — identical twins, fraternal twins, siblings — growing up in different adoptive families. But there is a snare here. As Nisbett observes, “adoptive families, like Tolstoy’s happy families, are all alike.” Not only are they more affluent than average, they also tend to give children lots of cognitive stimulation. Thus data from them yield erroneously high estimates of I.Q. heritability. (Think: if we all grew up in exactly the same environment, I.Q. differences would appear to be 100 percent genetic.) This underscores an important point: there is no fixed value for heritability. The notion makes sense only relative to a population. Heritability of I.Q. is higher for upper-class families than for lower-class families, because lower-class families provide a wider range of cognitive environments, from terrible to pretty good.

What does Nisbett's book have to say about race and intelligence? That the differences among the "races" are not genetic. Evidence in point: The "racial" IQ gap has been shrinking. "Over the last 30 years, the measured I.Q. difference between black and white 12-year-olds has dropped from 15 points to 9.5 points."

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The enemy of my enemy

I see lots of upside to Al-Qaeda's use of a racial slur to demean President-elect Barack Obama.  Perhaps these racial slurs will wake up some of those rabid Palinites who thought that Barack Obama was doing the bidding of Al-Qaeda all along. Consider, also, that many conservatives are xenophobically patriotic.  …

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