Language, Race, and Man

"Man belongs neither to his language nor to his race; he belongs to himself." --Ernest Renan

Nation, Race, and Individual

"Nation and race do not coincide; there is no nation of pure blood. All peoples have arisen from a mixture of races....

"[T]he concept of race, in the sense in which the advocates of race policy use it, is new, even considerably newer than that of nation. It was introduced into politics in deliberate opposition to the concept of nation. The individualistic idea of the national community was to be displaced by the collectivist idea of the racial community."

--Ludwig von Mises, Nation, State, and Economy, 1919

Can There Be Only One Race?

I'm old enough to remember this 1960s Lay's Potato Chips commercial. (Hell, I'm almost old enough to remember when plays were in black and white!)  In the commercial a man (Bert Lahr, the cowardly lion in The Wizard of Oz) faces a challenge from the devil, who has a bag of Lay's: "Bet you can't eat one." "That's absolutely absurd," Lahr says; of course he can eat one. After enjoying the chip he says, "I'll have another," to which the devil says, "Oh no. I said just one. Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha...."

Admittedly, this is a long and winding road to my point: there can't be only one race. Most people believe that human beings come in different genetic models: black, white, Asian, and a couple more. (Of course one can believe this without hating anyone.) But biologists and geneticists know better. There are no significantly distinct genetic groups of human beings that correspond to skin tone, hair texture, or other such visible features. Individuals within one grouping of superficially similar persons can have more genetic variation among themselves than they do with individuals in other superficial groupings. (We all are of African ancestry, though for some it's more recent than for others.) As Barbara and Karen Fields discuss in Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life, the idea of race grows out of the discriminatory practice of racism, not the other way around. In other words, the double standard people used in the treatment of others itself generated the justificatory concept of race. It's like witchcraft.

Does it follow from this that, as humane people like to say, there's only one race, the human race? I don't think so. In this case 1 = 0. Leaving aside the biologists' technical genetic concept of race (which has nothing to do with appearance), a concept of race would be useful only for making distinctions. But if there is only one race, then by definition, there are no distinctions to make. Therefore, one equals none. 

We already have a perfectly good biological category for distinguishing human beings from other animals: species. So we have no need for the category of the human race. "Race" is worse than superfluous. It's dangerously divisive.

Black History Month?

If a Martian social scientist were to visit America, he surely would assume that Black History Month had been concocted by racists. And he'd be right -- for a racist qua racist need not bear ill will toward a particular group. What makes someone a racist is the very concept of human groupings, in this case, persons of African ancestry. In other words, what all racists have in common most fundamentally is the scientifically baseless idea that the species homo sapiens is divided into three (or more) segments that differ significantly at the genetic level. Like so many things we "know," this one ain't so.

The myth of race is what Barbara Fields and Karen Fields call "racecraft," and yes, they do mean to analogize it to witchcraft (Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life). What most people, benevolent and malevolent, mean by race could not differ more from what biologists mean by race. As the Fieldses write:

Race in today's biology is not a traditionally named group of people but a statistically defined population: "the difference in frequency of alleles between populations (contiguous and interbreeding groups) of the same species." Unlike the units of bio-racism, these populations are not held to be visible to the naked eye [emphasis added], or knowable in advance of disciplined investigation. [Link added. The internal quote is from Anthony Griffiths et al., Introduction to Genetics.]

Racecraft saturates the language of even well-intentioned people, which is why the Fieldses' book is so damn important.

TGIF: The State Fuels Identity Politics

Anyone with an ounce of good sense knows that destructive identity politics is run amuck in America and elsewhere. All incentives these days seem to go in one direction: toward identifying oneself as a member of an aggrieved group supposedly due compensation through government action -- of course at the expense of people who had nothing to do with the grievance. The actual perpetrators (if any), like the actual victims, tend to have long departed this world.

Where real victims and perpetrators are still on the scene, grievances ought to be handled on an individual basis with due process, rather than through pressure-group pandering.  But we may justifiably wonder why innocent taxpayers should bear the consequences for offenses their rulers committed.

Like so many things, identity politics, as the name itself tells us, would be little more than an annoyance if the U.S. government didn't have nearly plenary power over society. But it does have it, and so the politicians and bureaucrats and their pressure groups have profited immensely from dividing us into racial, ethnic, national, and other sorts of groups. This sows the ground for social strife that harms us all.

At different times and places, such classification has been used to enslave, otherwise harm, and even exterminate despised groups; at other times, like now, it's been used to distribute taxpayer money and other benefits to politically favored groups. This stimulates people outside the government to game the system in order to win advantages at the expense of others. Incentives have consequences.

Another potential effect is to provoke a backlash from the majority that bears the burdens of favoritism. This adds yet another layer of resentful identity consciousness to the volatile mix. No one should want to see a society torn apart by racial, ethnic, or similar conflict. Too much depends on social cooperation and the benevolent toleration that underlies it.

Identity politics should be especially objectionable in a country ostensibly founded on freedom and individualism. Treating human beings as interchangeable members of racial, ethnic, or other groups is execrable collectivism.

Now imagine that the government's categories constitute a crazy quilt of arbitrariness, caprice, and pressure-group pandering. Wait -- you don't have to imagine it. You can see it in contemporary America.

What began in the late 1970s as an effort to make record-keeping consistent across government departments has since morphed, contrary to stated policy, into a political device to treat Americans differently according to their race and ethnicity. The goal was to distribute such favors as government loans, contracts, hiring, and college admissions to aggrieved group members. Differential treatment was even applied during the COVID-19 pandemic. It was all justified in the name of righting past wrongs, that is, using discrimination to counteract previous earlier discrimination, real and imagined. (As Thomas Sowell has demonstrated, statistical disparities are not in themselves evidence of discrimination.)

Because of the government campaign to define those groups, it's now impossible to fill out any kind of form or application without being asked to identify one's race, ethnicity, "gender" (whatever that may mean today), and "sex assigned [sic] at birth."

Thus we should thank David Bernstein of George Mason University's Antonin Scalia Law School, author of Classified: The Untold Story of Racial Classifications in America, for ripping away the veil of this horrendous and ridiculous system. The story he tells would be hilarious if it weren't pernicious and illiberal. As he points out in this lecture, although the government warned decades ago that the categories had no scientific foundation and were not to be used to determine "eligibility for government programs," that is exactly what happened. The obsession with these arbitrary categories extends even to medical research, which is crazy, not to mention dangerous.

In his talk Bernstein provides lots of examples of absurdity. For example, the category Asian includes Americans descended from national groups that have very little in common, such as Filipinos, Japanese, and Pakistanis. While Indians (from the subcontinent) are classified as Asian, the related Afghans are classified as white, as are Arabs and Iranians. (You can see how this could wreak havoc with medicine.)

One might think that the classification black or African American is justified for government consideration because many black Americans are descendants of American slaves and victims of Jim Crow. But how would that justify including Nigerians who freely immigrated more recently and who are doing quite well?

The category Hispanic also makes little sense. By what standard does an American directly descendant from Spaniards qualify for government favors? Americans with roots in other European countries get no favors. The Spanish came to the New World not as victims but as conquerors, so whence the victimhood? You might think that Hispanic was meant to designate the mixed Spanish and Portuguese Indians from south of the border. But if that's the case, why aren't they simply classified as Indian? Bernstein explains: that category was reserved only for Indians with roots in North America above the Rio Grande, including Canada. Expanding the category further would have unacceptably spread the benefits too thin. So pressure groups opposed it.

If the government was forbidden to dispense benefits to particular individuals and groups, it would lose the opportunity to use the arbitrary classifications that Berstein documents. On the other hand, if some reasonable classification is useful to document government mistreatment of particular groups, I'm confident that civil liberties watchdogs will find a way to handle it.

Racial and ethnic classification is a territory best kept off-limits to the state. Have we learned nothing from history?

 

TGIF: Racial Polarization Is Poison

Be they "left" or "right," those who agitate for racial polarization seem to have no sense of the harm they could do to everyone in our society. As the wise Glenn Loury would say, they are playing with fire. By polarization, of any kind, I mean more than merely a vigorous disagreement over issues or even basic principles. That's fine. Rather, I mean something dogmatic, obsessive, and fanatical, in which virtually everything in the world is seen through a single lens and everyone is expected to act and speak in a certain way, with stern consequences for the noncompliant.

It can happen in politics, but it is becoming especially common with race, where some would have us interpret virtually everything through a racial prism. This is more than simply unfortunate; it threatens what the ancient Greek philosophers and later philosophers such as Spinoza -- whose 389th birthday (Nov. 24, 1632) we marked this week -- held to be the good life for human beings; it's the conception of life in which being virtuous is seen as constitutive of happiness, or better: eudaimonia, and not separate from happiness or merely means to it.

Racial polarization threatens this not just in the obvious way, namely, with the potential holds for violence. I'm thinking of the more subtle way: through the narrowing and undermining of all sorts of social cooperation.

Formulators of the original (classical) liberalism, which has been refined into the libertarian political philosophy, took to heart what the Greeks and their intellectual descendants emphasized, namely, that we human beings are inherently social animals. Some went even further to note that, as reason- and language-bearing creatures, we thrive best when surrounded by people who exhibit their rationality in the fullest sense, not only as a tool to judge means but ends as well. Only in such a milieu can we live in ways most proper to rational animals, that is, with reason always in the driver's seat. This entails, among other things, dealing with people through argument, persuasion, and consent rather than command, manipulation, and force.

A key way that social existence promotes individual flourishing is cooperation, which augments our otherwise weak individual capacities. While no collective brain exists, liberal society creates something analogous to it. As a result, we each gain access to an incredible volume of knowledge -- moral and otherwise -- any morsel of which we might never have thought up or encountered while living alone or in small groups during our limited lifespans. The marketplace of ideas is an example of this process that benefits us all beyond measure. In this day when free speech and free inquiry are increasingly under assault from reckless elements left and right, this would be good to remember.

The benefits of the broadest possible social cooperation are also abundant in the material realm. The early liberal political-economic thought demonstrated that living in isolation was to live in abject poverty. No one was better at pointing this out than Frédéric Bastiat, the 19th-century French liberal. In the opening chapter of his unfinished magnum opus, Economic Harmonies, he wrote:

It is impossible not to be struck by the disproportion, truly incommensurable, that exists between the satisfactions [any] man derives from society and the satisfactions that he could provide for himself if he were reduced to his own resources. I make bold to say that in one day he consumes more things than he could produce himself in ten centuries.

What makes the phenomenon stranger still is that the same thing holds true for all other men. Every one of the members of society has consumed a million times more than he could have produced; yet no one has robbed anyone else....

We should be shutting our eyes to the facts if we refused to recognize that society cannot present such complicated combinations in which civil and criminal law play so little part without being subject to a prodigiously ingenious mechanism. This mechanism is the object of study of political economy.

If this was true in 1850, what would Bastiat say about our time? Think of all the things we have access to in the developed world, even those of modest means. (The people of the developing world want the same, which shows the cruelty of so-called climate policy, which would raise the price and reliability of energy.) The point which shouts from Bastiat's passages is that we have much to lose if social cooperation were to break down or even narrowed. Society is exchange, as the liberals hammered home on many occasions. "Society is concerted action, cooperation," Ludwig von Mises wrote in his grand treatise, Human Action, which he was tempted to call Social Cooperation, another name for specialization through the division of labor and knowledge.

Need more be said about the threat from racial and other deep polarization? To invoke another original liberal, Adam Smith famously wrote that the division of labor is limited by the extent of the market. The fewer the people with whom to cooperate, the more primitive the division of labor. And the more primitive the division of labor, the poorer we are. That should require no elaboration.

When social distrust is sown among groups, particularly on the basis of spurious identity considerations, a great deal of what we value but take for granted is put at risk. This doesn't mean that America's history of slavery, Jim Crow, and less formal forms of racism can't be taught and discussed frankly. They must be. But the cost will be unspeakably severe if frank conversation about the past and even aspects of the present transmogrify into polarization, hatred, and distrust.

Good people everywhere should speak out against polarization. Think about what we all have to lose. And once it's lost, there may be no getting it back.

The Crisis in Civil Rights

My old friend Bill Evers and the Independent Institute have assembled a useful reader's guide to the civil-rights issues of our time: race, police brutality, anti-Semitism, and poverty. Check it out here.

For Gates and Against the Police

Professor Henry Louis Gates was perfectly justified in being pissed at the cops who ordered him out of his own home. The police sergeant who cuffed and arrested him for disorderly conduct, after he knew who Gates was, was retaliating against him, a black man, for not showing proper deference to a representative of the State. How dare he yell at a policeman who treated him like a street thug? I side with Gates.

Conservative Hypocrisy -- What Else Is New?

I can't stand hypocrites. I can't stand conservatives. But I repeat myself.

Last night Sean Hannity, one of the the heavyweight thinkers at Fox News, went after Barak Obama for being a member of the Trinity United Church of Christ. The Church advocates a "Black Value System," which among other things calls for a commitment to the black community. Hannity suggested that such a commitment is "separatist" and that if a white church used the same kind of language, it would be rightly condemned. Hence, he said, there is a double standard. (Tucker Carlson of MSNBC earlier did the same riff.)

A typical conservative cheap debating point. Where's the separatism? Conservatives love it when Bill Cosby (properly) berates fellow blacks for not disciplining their own community. But when Obama voices a similar position, it's seen as separatist at Fox News. Is this because Obama is a threat to Republican presidential aspirations?

More fundamentally, Hannity's suggestion that the white and black contexts in America are equivalent is absurd on its face. Given the two different histories -- one of domination, the other of subjugation -- there is no double standard involved. Ayn Rand would call this "context-dropping."

I can't t see that radical libertarians and conservatives have anything significant in common.

Jesse Jackson: Keeper of the English Language

John Ridley:

The big news coming out of this meeting of minds [between Jesse Jackson and Michael Richards] is that Jackson, as supreme leader of all things black, has launched Operation N-word Freedom, a campaign to liberate the nation (finally!) from the dreaded N-word. Jesse now challenges all black people everywhere to "give our ancestors a present." No, not the gift of elevation though education and hard work. Jesse wants us to stop using hurtful words.

Jesse wants this?

Jesse Jackson, the same cat who once referred to Jews as "hymies" and New York as "Hymietown"? This same guy who denied it when the statement was made public, kept up the denial after the journalist who reported his slur had his life threatened, and only under immense pressure finally admitted that, well, perhaps he'd made a slip of the tongue? Twice?

And he wants to lecture us regarding the usage of hurtful words?

I am all for having open and intelligent discourse on the word "nigger." What I am wholly against are hypocrites who sling hate in private, then smile to us while they lie, telling the rest of us that intellectual debate is closed.

Sorry, Mr. Jackson, but the America I support through paying taxes in my over-inflated bracket allows me not to bow down automatically to your linguistic fatwas. Not all of us quake and quiver before mere words.

Read the rest of John Ridley's Los Angeles Times op-ed, "No More Edicts, Jesse," here.