Thursday, February 03, 2005

What you see is what you get

Liberals have a negative attitude to race. They believe that we are human because we can create who we are through our own will and reason. But race is not something we can create for ourselves: it is something fixed, biological and inherited.

So, liberals wish to rule out race as something that influences our lives. They have two basic options for doing this. First, they can claim that race doesn't exist and is simply a social construct. This is the "race-denial" position. Second, they can admit it exists but then insist that it not be allowed to count.

The problem for the liberal race-deniers is that it goes against observable reality to claim that there are no races. Most people can readily identify whether a person is racially caucasian, or African or Asian.

So, it comes as no surprise that a recent study has found that the race a person identifies with matches with remarkable accuracy their distinctive genetic makeup. The Stanford University research, published in the American Journal of Human Genetics, is the largest study of its kind. It showed that there was only a tiny 0.14% error level in which race a person identified with.

So observable reality is right after all! If you believe that you are racially European or Asian or African it's almost certainly the case that that is genetically what you are. It's the idea of race being merely an artificial social construct which is ... an artificial social construct.

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