((Note: "The Race FAQ" is a FAQ about race in general, and is not
concerned with the group calling itself, in Spanish, "The Race" (La
Raza)-Bret.))


The Race FAQ

By Steve Sailer

"This was another tumultuous week in the science wars over race.

bulletThe Times (both London and New York) ran articles claiming that
James Watson was genetically one-quarter non-white. Yet anyone with a
basic knowledge of American racial history who bothered to look at the
first half dozen pages of Watson's new autobiography, Avoid Boring
People, which includes photos and detailed information on his
ancestors, would realize that this assertion by the Icelandic firm
deCODE genetics is wildly unlikely.

bulletThe New Yorker printed an essay by Malcolm Gladwell on race and
IQ that contained such an egregious libel of Charles Murray that the
magazine posted a humiliating apology and retraction.

bulletFar more importantly, a landmark paper [Recent acceleration of
human adaptive evolution John Hawks (PDF)] by five scientific
heavyweights on the implication of the newest genome research--that
evolution sped up as the races moved away from each other--was
published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences:
evolution has been speeding up since the races began splitting apart.

Genetic anthropologist Henry Harpending of the U. of Utah explained
that over the 40,000 or so years since humans left Africa:

"'Human races are evolving away from each other,' Harpending says.
'Genes are evolving fast in Europe, Asia, and Africa, but almost all
of these are unique to their continent of origin. We are getting less
alike, not merging into a single, mixed humanity.' ...

" 'Our study denies the widely held assumption or belief that modern
humans ... appeared 40,000 years ago, have not changed since and that we
are all pretty much the same. We show that humans are changing
relatively rapidly on a scale of centuries to millennia, and that
these changes are different in different continental groups."

"The increase in human population from millions to billions in the
last 10,000 years accelerated the rate of evolution because 'we were
in new environments to which we needed to adapt,' Harpending adds.
'And with a larger population, more mutations occurred.'

So, it is a good time to step back and try to understand the
underlying concept of race. Here's a Frequently Asked Questions [FAQ]
list about how to think about race. It's a non-technical introduction
to this topic that so confuses Americans.

Q. Why do you talk about race so much?

A. Most human beings talk about race a fair amount. I write about it.

Q. Why do people care about race?

A. Why do people care about who their relatives are? Maybe they should
care, maybe they shouldn't. I'm not here to preach morality. But
people do care, so it's important to understand the implications.

Q. What's race all about?

A. Relatedness.

Race is about who is related to whom.

Q. Do you mean a race is a family?

A. Yes, an extended family. (To be precise, a particular type of
extended family, one that's more coherent over time than the norm, a
distinction I'll explain below.)

Q. Race means family? I've never heard of such a thing!

A. It's remarkable how seldom this concept essential to understanding
how the world works is mentioned in the press. Yet, in my Random House
Webster's College Dictionary, the first definition of "race" is:

"1. A group of persons related by common descent or heredity."

Q. If races exist, then, pray tell, precisely how many there are?

A. How many neighborhoods are there in the place where you live?

For some purposes, an extremely simple breakdown into, say, City vs.
Suburbs is most useful. For other uses, an extremely detailed set of
neighborhood names is helpful: e.g., "The proposed apartment complex
will aggravate the parking shortage in Northeastern West Hills."

Similarly, racial groups can be lumped into vast continental-scale
agglomerations or split as finely as you like.

For instance, should New World Indians be considered a separate race--
or merely a subset of East Asians?

Every system of categorization runs into disputes between "lumpers"
and "splitters." Whether lumping or splitting is more appropriate
depends upon the situation.

Q. Isn't race just about skin color?

A. That's a simplistic verbal shorthand Americans use to refer to
ancestry. Nobody really acts as if they believe race is synonymous
with skin color.

Q. What do you mean?

A. Consider the golfer Vijay Singh , who during 2004-2005 became the
only man in this decade besides Tiger Woods to be the number one
ranked player in the world. Singh, who was born in the Fiji Islands of
Asian Indian descent, is much darker in skin color than Woods.

Singh is at least as dark as the average African-American. Yet, nobody
in America ever thinks of Singh as black or African-American. There's
an enormous industry that celebrates the triumphs of blacks in
nontraditional venues such as golf. But Singh's accomplishments
elicited minimal interest in the U.S.

A 2007 article, for example, asked where are all the black golf
champions who were expected to emerge in the wake of Tiger Woods's
first Masters championship in 1997. It never mentions the blackest-
skinned player on tour, Singh ... because we're not actually talking
about skin color when we use the word "black," we're talking about sub-
Saharan African ancestry.

Q. Aren't we all related to each other?

A. Yes, that's why we're "the human race."

Q. If we're all related to each other, how can one person be more
related to some people than to other people?

A. How can you be more related to your mother than you are to your
aunt? Or to my mother?

Q. If races exist, how can somebody belong to more than one race?

A. If extended families exist, how can you belong to your mother's
extended family and to your father's extended family?

Q. How many races can you belong to?

A. How many extended families can you belong to?

Consider Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's children. Clearly, they are part
of the Schwarzenegger clan via their father and grandfather. But they
are also part of the Jadrny extended family through their father's
mother. Yet, they also belong to the well-known liberal Catholic
Shriver tribe through their mother, Maria Shriver, daughter of Sargent
Shriver, the 1972 Democratic Vice-Presidential candidate. And, they
are, famously, Kennedys, because their maternal grandmother is Eunice
Kennedy Shriver, the sister of the late President.

Q. So, everybody belongs to four extended families?

A. You could keep going beyond the four grandparents. The
Schwarzenegger kids, for instance, are also Fitzgeralds, because they
are the great-great-grandchildren of John F. "Honey Fitz" Fitzgerald,
the mayor of Boston.

Q. So, your family tree just goes on out to infinity?

A. No, it eventually turns increasingly in on itself, as you can see
it must from the basic arithmetic of genealogy. This tendency to turn
back in on itself is the reason that racial identity exists.

Q. How does the math work?

Assume 25 years per each generation in your family tree. Go back 10
generations to the 1750s, and you have 1024 ancestors.

Go back another 250 years to the 1500s and you have 1024 times 1024
slots in your family tree; call it a million. Back to the 1250s and
you have a billion openings. (Were there even a billion people alive
then?)

And back in the 1000s, 40 generations ago, you have a trillion
ancestors. Yet there definitely weren't a trillion people alive then.

Q. So, where did all my ancestors come from?

A. They did double duty, to put it mildly.

Q. So my family tree doesn't extend outward forever?

A. At some point in the past, the number of unique individuals in your
family tree (as opposed to slots) would start to get fewer in number,
ultimately forming a diamond-shaped rather than fan-shaped family
tree. Genealogists label this "pedigree collapse."

Demographer K.W. Wachtel estimated that an Englishman born in 1947
would have had two million unique ancestors living at the maximum
point around 1200 AD, 750 years before. There'd be a billion open
slots in the family tree in 1200, so each real individual would fill
an average of 500 places. Pedigree collapse would set in farther into
the past than 1200.

Q. Wait a minute! Are you saying my ancestors married among
themselves? So I'm inbred???

A. Yes. It's mathematically certain. There just weren't enough unique
individuals alive.

Q. Ooh, yuck!

A. I suspect that the American distaste for thinking about inbreeding,
even when it's so distant and genetically benign as in this English
example, is one reason why our understanding of relatedness and race
is so deficient.

Q. What does this have to do with race?

A. Pedigree collapse reveals how the biology of race is rooted in the
biology of family. We can deduce from the necessary existence of
pedigree collapse that while everybody is related to everybody else in
some fashion, it's more genealogically significant to note that every
person is much more related to some people than to other people. Even
a Tiger Woods can identify himself as being of Thai, black, Chinese,
white, and American Indian descent, but not of, say, Polynesian, South
Asian, or Australian aborigine origin.

Pedigree collapse is how extended families become racial groups. A
race is a particular kind of extended family--one that is partly
inbred. Thus it's socially identifiable for longer than a simple
extended family, which, without inbreeding, disperses itself
exponentially.

Q. Can racial groups merge?

A. Over time, yes. Think of the term "Anglo-Saxon." The Angles,
Saxons, and Jutes intermarried until they lost their separate
identities. (The Jutes even lost their name.)

Similarly, the official ideology of Mexico is that whites and Indians
have merged seamlessly into La Raza Cosmica, "The Cosmic
Race." (African Mexicans play the role of the forgotten Jutes.) The
reality is different, but the mestizaje propaganda isn't wholly false.

Q. But race is just identity politics!

A. Well, there's a reason that identity politics are a big deal.
However you feel about all the various kinds of identity politics, you
need to understand them.

People tend to organize politically around some aspects of shared
identity, but not around others. For example, language and religion
tend to be politically salient, but not handedness. No politician
fears the Lefthanders Lobby, because left-handedness is distributed
too randomly throughout the population.

Sex can be politically relevant, but it frequently turns out to be
less important than feminist activists hope. As Henry Kissinger
supposedly said, "No one will ever win the battle of the sexes;
there's too much fraternizing with the enemy."

Relatedness or race is typically the single most common dimension
along which people align themselves politically.

Sharing relatives gives people more reason to trust each other--for
instance, Jared Diamond notes that when two strangers meet on a lonely
and lawless jungle path in New Guinea, they immediately start a far-
reaching discussion of who all their relatives are, looking for
overlap so they can be more confident the other person won't kill
them. Similarly, organized crime families typically have real extended
families as their nuclei because relatives can trust each other more
when outside the law.

Further, blood relatives are more likely to share other potent
"ethnic" identity markers, such as language and religion.

Q. But, if we're all part of the human race, then why don't we always
act that way?

A. Because we're not, currently, under alien attack. Throughout his
Presidency, Ronald Reagan, to the alarm of his less-imaginatively
insightful aides such as Colin Powell, repeatedly pointed out that the
differences between the Superpowers would seem insignificant if Earth
was under assault by hostile flying saucers. Reagan, for instance,
told the UN in 1987:

"I occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would
vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this
world."[Address to the 42d Session of the United Nations General
Assembly in New York, New York]

But little green men are not threatening us at present, so we compete
against each other in the meantime.

And relatedness (i.e., race) is the most common dimension along which
people cooperate in order to more effectively compete against other
groups politically.

Q. Isn't race just a social construct?

A. Relatedness is the most real thing in the world: mother, father,
baby.

Q. But, don't different societies have different rules about who is
considered to be related to whom?

A. Yes. Indeed, every culture comes up with a way to deal with the
exponential unwieldiness of family trees.

For many purposes of daily life, you have too many relatives. The
sheer numbers of ancestors, distant cousins, and potential descendents
you have expand out beyond any manageable boundaries. The amount of
relatives you'll send a Christmas card to might be larger than the
number you'll volunteer to cook Thanksgiving dinner for, but, still,
there's got to be an end to everything.

Many cultures have devised rules to limit who counts as a relative for
the purposes of, say, inheritance. English aristocratic families
didn't want their land holdings divided up into unimpressive and
inefficient parcels, so they followed the rule of primogeniture,
passing the claim to be of noble blood down through the first-born
son, with latter-borns falling out of the aristocracy within two
generations. For instance, Mr. Winston Churchill was the first-born
son of Lord Randolph Churchill, who was the second-born son of the
Duke of Marlborough. That seems awfully aristocratic to us plebian
Americans, but by English law, he wasn't a peer because his father
wasn't first-born. And thus, to Winston's political benefit, his
parliamentary career was spent in the House of Commons rather than the
House of Lords.

The Chinese treated sons more equitably, but almost completely ignored
daughters.

In contrast to these attempts to nominally define down the putative
number of relations, many Middle Eastern cultures have come up with an
actual biological solution (of sorts) to reduce the number of
relatives: cousin marriage. In Iraq, half of all married couples are
first or second cousins.

Q. Why?

A. One reason is this: If you marry your daughter off to your
brother's son, then your grandchildren/heirs will also be your
brother's grandchildren/heirs. So, there is less cause for strife
among brothers. Cousin marriage helps make family loyalties especially
strong in Iraq, to the detriment of national loyalties.

Q. Do you ever want more relatives?

A. For many political struggles, the more the merrier.

Ibn Saud, who founded Saudi Arabia in the 1920s, consolidated his
victory over other desert chieftains by marrying 22 women, typically
the daughters of his former rivals. Thus, today's vast Saudi ruling
family represents the intermixing of the tribes, which has helped it
survive in power for 80 years.

On the other hand, the wealthy Syrian Jews of Brooklyn, with few
political threats hanging over them here in America, don't need blood
relations with other power centers, so the community fiercely
ostracizes anyone who marries outside it.

Or, political entrepreneurs can attempt to widen or narrow their
followers' working definition of who their relatives are by rhetorical
means. For example, in the 1960s, black leaders encouraged African-
Americans to call each other "brother" and "sister" to build
solidarity.

Q. In America, wasn't there a "one-drop rule" for determining if one
is a minority?

A. For blacks, yes: for American Indians, no. Herbert Hoover's VP,
Charles Curtis, was famous for being 1/8th Kaw Indian. Being a little
bit Indian added glamour to his image.

Indian nations have the right to set ancestry minimums (generally, at
least 1/4th) required for legal membership in the tribe, and they
often police membership with a vengeance.

Q. Isn't all this outdated?

A. Both blacks and Indians are standing by the traditional
definitions, because it's in their interests.

Ever since Congress allowed Indian nations to each own one casino in
the late 1980s, many tribes have been expelling racially marginal
members to increase the slice of the pie for the more pure-blooded
remainder. That's because the main benefit of belonging to a tribe--the
rake-off from a single casino--is finite.

In contrast, black and Hispanic organizations have backed broad,
inclusive definitions of who is black or Hispanic because the rake-off
from being black or Hispanic--affirmative action quotas--is indefinite
in magnitude. The larger the percentage of the population, the larger
the quota, and the larger the number of voters who are beneficiaries
and thus supporters.

Q. So cultures change their definitions of who deserves to be a
relative?

A. Not just cultures, but individuals change their definitions to fit
their needs at the moment.

For example, right before the Battle of Agincourt, King Henry V needed
all the loyal relatives, real or exaggerated, he could get, so
Shakespeare has him address the English army:

"We few, we happy few, we band of brothers

For he to-day that sheds his blood with me

Shall be my brother".

On the other hand, once the bloodshed was over, King Henry probably
wasn't inclined to let his old yeomen archers come over and hang
around the palace whenever they liked as if they were his actual
brothers.

Q. So, leaders can persuade their followers to see themselves as more
or less closely related?

A. Yes, but the more they follow existing genealogical fault lines,
the more likely they are to succeed.

Q. What's an ethnic group?

A. The Census Bureau draws a sharp distinction between race and
ethnicity, stating that individuals of Hispanic ethnicity can be of
any race. The way the federal government uses the terms can be
formalized like this:
bulletA racial group is a partly inbred extended biological family.

bulletAn ethnic group is one defined by shared traits that are often
passed down within biological families--e.g., language, surname,
religion, cuisine, accent, self-identification, historical or
mythological heroes, musical styles, etc.--but that don't require
genetic relatedness.

Q. Can you give an example?

A. The difference is perhaps easiest to see with adopted children. For
example, if, say, an Armenian baby is adopted by Icelanders, his
ethnicity would be Icelandic, at least until he became a teen and
decided to rebel against his parents by searching out and espousing
his Armenian heritage. But racially, he'd always have been Armenian.

Q. If races exist, doesn't that mean one race has to be the supreme
Master Race? And that would be awful!

A. Indeed it would, but no race is going to be best at everything -
any more than one region could be the supreme master region for all
human purposes.

For example, a mountaintop is a stirring place to put a Presidential
Library. But if you want to break the land speed record in your rocket
car, it's definitely inferior to the Bonneville Salt Flats.

Q. Okay, what does it all mean?

A. It means it's time for our intellectuals to grow up. The world is
what it is. Making up fantasies about it, and demonizing scientists
such as James Watson, just makes reality harder to deal with."<<

[Steve Sailer (email him) is founder of the Human Biodiversity
Institute and movie critic for The American Conservative. His website
www.iSteve.blogspot.com features his daily blog.]

http://www.vdare.com/sailer/071216_race_faq.htm (Who's computer is this?)