Sunday, January 28, 2018

Human categorization for basic Bros

I'm not saying the following system is the best possible way to categorize humans, but it's sure better than the evo-psycho bro methodology which is NO methodology except for pure. social. construction.

My system accounts for the interconnections between human bodies and human societies, something that evo-psycho bros cannot be bothered with. At all. And it's their job - or should be - to use rigor in their profession.

In my system there is a difference between race, ethnicity and ancestry.

(Unfortunately the Blogger interface makes it impossible to create a quick and neat and reliable table in HTML - I will switch to WordPress one of these days -  so the table below is a graphic. I do have the HTML version online here. Although the only real advantage is the live links in the HTML version.)



Most of the information is derived from Wikipedia so this table isn't meant to be taken literally, but rather as a demonstration. I don't actually know what the 23andme report says for any of the individuals being studied here.

And unlike evo-psycho bros I believe in more than just "self-reporting" when determining someone's heritage.

You can easily see the problem with self-reporting with someone like Rachel Dolezal, who appears to believe she is at least partially black. She's quoted on her Wiki page describing herself as "African American, Native American, German, Czech, Swedish, Jewish and Arabic." And the self-reporting is also an issue with many Americans who don't know that they have some other "color" in their DNA. For example many "African-Americans" like Michelle Obama go along for years or for life not knowing about their white ancestors - but it's certain that many "African-Americans" do have white ancestors, thanks to all the slave-raping that went on. And it turns out that plenty of "white" Americans have some other "race" in their DNA.

And of course we are all, ultimately, Out of Africa, which is why I included "Broadly Sub-Saharan African" in all three individual profiles. It showed up in my 23andme report too.

And many Americans think they have Native American ancestry, as Obama and Dolezal each claim. Many of them are wrong - my maternal grandmother always claimed we had a Native American woman in our ancestry but one of my maternal cousins and I, using two separate genetic analytic companies,  came up with no evidence of such ancestry.

There is also the issue of the one-drop rule in the United States. Which obviously came about because your ethnicity was a reliable marker of whether you were a slave or not, and would enable free men born in the United States to be kidnapped into slavery, as the historically-based movie 12 Years a Slave recounts.

The one-drop rule was especially useful to the Euro-tocracy when it came to the offspring of slaves. No matter how obvious it was that some children of slaves were fathered by men of European descent, children of enslaved women would remain slaves thanks to having any African heritage.

The moral aspect of this is rarely acknowledged: slave owners allowed their own children to remain slaves thanks to their children's partial African ancestry.

And thanks to the one-drop rule, even though Barack and Michelle Obama and Rachel Dolezal have white ancestors - and nothing but in the case of Dolezal (not counting out of Africa) - all three are considered black - well were considered black in the case of Dolezal before her parents ratted her out. But Dolezal was able to pass for black for years in spite of her light skin. Thanks to the one-drop rule. She made an effort to "look black" and people, even black people believed her.

So in spite of this insistence that race is real, and the obsession with comparing "black" and "white" intelligence on the part of the evo-psycho bros, I have yet to find a study of black/white intelligence that bothered to test its subjects for actual genetic ancestry. Instead they rely completely on self-reporting. I emailed Brian Boutwell's mentor (one might call him recruiter - I will get to that later in this series) Kevin Beaver and asked him:
When you look at data according to “race” what genetic testing do you use on study participants to determine their “race"? It’s been shown (23andMe) that some self-identified African Americans have a significant percentage of European ancestry and vice-versa.
And his response was:
In all of my research, I have analyzed secondary data which has only included self-identification of race/ethnicity.  As a result, I was never able to examine ancestry based on genetic testing.
This did not surprise me at all. Especially considering evo-psycho bro Razib Khan's very strange reaction to a 23andme report that made its way into the NYTimes. I will address that next.