September 21, 2019
There are allegations spreading throughout the Social Ecology community that I am a racist and white supremacist. This is partly my fault in bringing up a discussion of an infamous book, The Bell Curve, and partly due to the misunderstanding, prejudice, and disagreement among humanities intellectuals and medical researchers on how race concepts are used in genetics and medicine, especially medical genetics.
Any discussion of race online is at best a precarious venture and at worst, a disaster. The current view among most humanities scholars and some leftist scientists is that race is a myth, an illusion, race isn’t real, it has no biological basis, and as one recent article put it, “the concept of race is a lie”, “there are no races, only racists”, and “there is only one race, the human race.” Let's look at this.
I was trained in the medical sciences and worked for several years in a medical genetics lab. I am now a medical writer and I often report on studies that look at variations in disease in different race/ethnicities. Go to PUBMED and key in “race ethnicity genomics disease” and you’ll find hundreds of them. As you will see, race indeed has a role in medicine.
It is common in multiethnic population genetic studies to recruit subjects using the Self-Reported Race and Ethnicity (SRE) questionnaire, developed by the US Census Bureau. Subjects are then grouped into racial categories by researchers, who often use complex computer algorithms and genetic admixture analysis to tease out which alleles (genes) are more prevalent according to ancestry (ancestry or population is the preferred term nowadays). Critics of this method state that race is a poor proxy for genetic ancestry and should be abandoned. But even though race isn’t “real” per se, in a biological sense, studies have shown a very close link between SRE categories of race/ethnicity and ancestry, sometimes with only 0.14% inaccuracy. Others less so. The debate in the medical journals continues, but as Esteban Gonzalez Burchard, a human geneticist at UCSF told me, the SRE and concept of race/ethnicity will probably never be abandoned because it is such a useful tool in research. It leads to the discovery of genes responsible for disease or response to pharmaceuticals in various populations and, rather than harming minorities, as critics assert, it improves the health of minorities. The SRE is not used out of any racist or “race realist” intentions; it is only a tool. That is why you see so many studies reporting results in terms of race/ethnicity.
In an interview I had with Dr. Burchard, he said he gets it from both humanities scholars and white supremacists. He has shown clear links in asthma prevalence in Puerto Rican Latinx with a large component of African ancestry. He has even identified the genes that cause that sensitivity and his work has benefited thousands of minority patients who suffer from asthma. You can learn more about his work here.
So, does his work advance the goals of white supremacy? David Duke thinks so because he called Burchard to congratulate him on proving that race is grounded in biology. And he gets abuse from critics, who claim that “race-based medicine is bad medicine” or his work represents “the molecularization of race.” I don’t know a single scientist who thinks that way about Burchard, or Neil Risch, Hua Tang, Noah Rosenberg, or Y. Banda, or any of dozens of researchers who use race/ethnicity/ancestry concepts in their work, to good effect.
My point is that in the academic literature, the race issue is still a debate, with scholars sounding in on each side, with different views from a variety of disciplines. There is no right or wrong in this debate, only differences of opinion and interpretations of the data. The issues remain unsettled and the debate is surely to continue for years to come. What disturbs me is that my medical colleagues are now being accused of practicing "race medicine." (Read the comments by doctors and medical students to see how wrong the journalist got it. Bias before facts.)
Unfortunately, I presented these ideas on the ISE discussion list and was accused of being a race realist and a racist, and told to stop posting. (Admittedly, I posted too much.) So I left the list, realizing that this is just too hot a topic for the ISE, which as far as I know, has no members trained in biology or medical science, let alone medical genetics. I have never met one.
Then I made a mistake by bringing up The Bell Curve on a Bookchin Facebook list, which, in small part, is about race and IQ (two chapters, to be exact). I listened to a podcast discussion between Sam Harris and Charles Murray, one of the coauthors of the book, and came away thinking that the book may not be as racist as critics have made it out to be. (I have since read further and find the authors’ policy ideas to be reprehensible, akin to social engineering. I do not recommend the book other than as an exercise in learning how legitimate research on intelligence can turn it into “race science” and hierarchy.) But bringing this topic to a Social Ecology forum is like walking into the Vatican, waving a copy of The God Delusion, and asking people what they think.
I have to come to agree with Slate writer, William Saletan, who once defended The Bell Curve, that the race-IQ debate is undiscussable in public; it is futile, and it only generates heat, not light. Even though most of the book's critics have not read the book, it has developed a widespread reputation of being a racist work of pseudoscience. Once rumours begin to circulate, the truth becomes more and more obscured and before you know it, people label for what you are not.
So what's my position on race? Pretty much the same as Harvard geneticist, David Reich, which is:
1. “Race” is fundamentally a social category — not a biological one.
2. There are clear genetic contributors to many traits, including behavior.
3. Present-day human populations, which often but not always are correlated to today’s “race” categories, have in a number of instances been largely isolated from one another for tens of thousands of years. These long separations have provided adequate opportunity for the frequencies of genetic variations to change.
4. Genetic variations are likely to affect behavior and cognition just as they affect other traits, even though we know that the average genetic influences on behavior and cognition are strongly affected by upbringing and are likely to be more modest than genetic influences on bodily traits or disease.
5. The genetic variations that influence behavior in one population will almost certainly have an effect on behavior in other populations, even if the ways those genetic variations manifest in each population may be very different. Given that all genetically determined traits differ somewhat among populations, we should expect that there will be differences in the average effects, including in traits like behavior.
6. To insist that no meaningful average differences among human populations are possible is harmful. It is perceived as misleading, even patronizing, by the general public. And it encourages people not to trust the honesty of scholars and instead to embrace theories that are not scientifically grounded and often racist.
As for genetic differences in IQ according to race, geneticist, Neil Risch, who directs the Institute of Human Genetics at the University of California, San Francisco says it's all speculation. In an interview with Ta-Nehisi Coates, he said,
In other words, any views on the basis of race and IQ in The Bell Curve are exaggerated claims based on speculation, and thus rejected by the great majority of intelligence scholars.
As for genetic differences in IQ according to race, geneticist, Neil Risch, who directs the Institute of Human Genetics at the University of California, San Francisco says it's all speculation. In an interview with Ta-Nehisi Coates, he said,
"As far as genetics goes, if you have identified a particular gene which clearly influences a trait, and the frequency of that gene differs between populations, that would be pretty good evidence. But traits like "intelligence" or other behaviors (at least in the normal range), to the extent they are genetic, are "polygenic." That means no single genes have large effects -- there are many genes involved, each with a very small effect....
"So, in my view, at this point, any comment about the etiology of group differences, for "intelligence" or anything else, in the absence of specific identified genes (or environmental factors, for that matter), is speculation."It is worth reading the whole interview.
In other words, any views on the basis of race and IQ in The Bell Curve are exaggerated claims based on speculation, and thus rejected by the great majority of intelligence scholars.
So to those who think I favour a race realist definition of “race” (using scare quotes now), I hope this puts that assumption to rest, unless you considers Dr. Reich, Burchard, and Risch to be race realists. If you do, I don’t know what to say. I disagree.
As for The Bell Curve, I’m sorry I brought that up and I offer my mea culpa. It has no merit as a serious work of scholarship and, indeed, discussions on race and IQ have no place in Social Ecology. Let the legimate intelligence scholars work it out.
Finally, I want to say that in the thirty some odd years I’ve identified as a Social Ecologist, I’ve resisted getting involved in identity politics, which Murray detested, and those who have known me throughout that time know I am not a racist. Frankly, I think the race issue—whether it is real or not or some variation in between—is peripheral to the main goals of Social Ecology, which is to fight hierarchy (including racism) at every opportunity and to promote a truly communalist society.
I am very active in spreading the ideas of communalism, especially in my home province of Québec, and I am a staunch Bookchinite at heart. Ask anyone who knows me well, and they can attest to my egalitarian and non-racist views. And I regret that this unfortunate event came to pass.
Bruce Wilson
