Another Collapse

nomadthethird

more issues than Time mag
Again, this makes a lot of sense to me.

But the only thing I would note is that although this fact, in the grand scheme of things, is plainly contingent and metaphysically meaningless, it does provide fodder for a racialist taxonomy. In modern and post-modern times, such taxonomies have, at their intellectual bedrocks, always tended to return to Darwin.

To continue playing the Devil's Advocate, you can easily see the culturally-relativist racialist (he need not, I guess, be an actual racist) saying: "I know perfectly well that the global distribution of genetic traits is completely environmental, based on rational evolutionary algorithms, and so on... but this contingency has nonetheless delivered a world of genetically-distinct races."

In order to be truly successful, the racialist needs to solder biology (and especially, the biology of a racial taxonomy) and culture together somehow. This is not impossible, since there is no hard and fast separation between culture and biology to begin with - culture too deals in biological matter - adrenaline, serotonin, and so on.

Clearly, we are quite a long way here from simplistic ideas about Blacks & Jews and Arabs. On the other hand. we are not too far from colonialism. More philosophically, the vital question here seems to be: How do you handle difference? What abstractions is it appropriate to make from difference? And this is of course a very old question.

What do you think of Derrida on difference and differance and all of that? I'd think you'd like Margins of Philosophy...
 

waffle

Banned
Again, this makes a lot of sense to me.

But the only thing I would note is that although this fact, in the grand scheme of things, is plainly contingent and metaphysically meaningless, it does provide fodder for a racialist taxonomy.

It was the very framing of your question, it's racializing presuppositions, viz "the varying genetic susceptibility of different "races" to diseases, which is a biological fact" which provides such further fodder. I provided a simple example to demonstrate how 'race' and the susceptibility of such imaginary constructions to disease, is not a biological 'fact'. Racism and race are, of course, a pathological displacement of class antagonism ...

To continue playing the Devil's Advocate, you can easily see the culturally-relativist racialist (he need not, I guess, be an actual racist) saying: "I know perfectly well that the global distribution of genetic traits is completely environmental, based on rational evolutionary algorithms, and so on... but this contingency has nonetheless delivered a world of genetically-distinct races."

Why the need to construct, if not perpetuate, such a fantasy racist?

Yes, difference is a very old problem, but I remain doubtful that the many problems associated with it can be dealt with via a reactionary bio-cultural identity politics, much less by a demented racializing metaphysic.
 
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