Friday, November 23, 2007

VI - The Establishment IS Reviving Eugenics

In all the glib and uninformed references to race that dominate the popular culture, there is always MUCH more un-interrogated social custom than application of science. While skin colour is certainly genetic, perceived race based on skin colour is not. Consequently, skin color is not very useful in medication efficacy studies unless the genes controlling the response to beta-blockers also control skin colour (or the genes are closely linked).

The Black American population is predominantly African and European genetically, and can include someone who is genetically 80-90% European with a skin color running the earthshades gamut of the really big crayon box. Across the Americas one is compelled to ask whether skin colour is a useful proxy for the proportion of African and European heart-disease alleles present in an individual. Until there are genetic tests for the real genes behind the drug response, drug trials have no business staking pseudo-scientific racial claims.

Obviously African and European descent provide somewhat different respective genetic backgrounds. The tragedy for American healthcare, politics, and science is that one of those differences is color, and it is next to impossible for the deductively crippled American psyche to get past that. As Denmark Vesey would say, this is all about marketing. From a marketing perspective, a very great deal of negative baggage has been associated with the brand "Black". Quoting Earl Dunovant;
Everything in America is looked at through, measured in terms of, categorized and stored by race. So we know you have thoughts and opinions about us. Then we look at everything the society produces that depicts us. We consider that to be tangible evidence of the collective attitude. So now we know that the collective opinion of our race is negative.

This is a competitive disadvantage, and when our abilities are immediately discounted to the degree that we can be made to fit people's preconceptions as a tactic, we feel the tactitician and the one who executes the tactic is racist. When the tactic succeeds, we feel those who hold the preconceptions that were played on are racist.
This is precisely the tactic and the negative branding of Blackness that has been ongoing in America for centuries. The great tragedy is that in 2007, at the convergence of a new and astonishing genetic science and technology, we are compelled to grapple with the mental illnesses and social pathologies of an archaic and unjust society. In my opinion, a conscious effort is being made and supported by elements of the U.S. elite to infect the new genetic science and technology with a particularly pernicious and decidedly unscientific form of negative Black branding. In support of their efforts to project racism into the future, these elites have enlisted the rationalizing support of pseudoscientific racists whom they're confident the overwhelming majority of Americans will not carefully investigate for themselves. This is purely and plainly racist propaganda.

Tinkerbell the race fairy might say something along the lines of this;
If you look at the way that science is twisted and abused in current American debates on climate change and creationism, it's impossible to feel that a public debate on the reality of race will be conducted in a spirit of disinterested longing for truth.
But I don't stutter or guard my words like that.

This is why I put up a five part overview of the EVIL history of racial pseudo-science in America as it pertains to racist superstitions regarding genetic determinism in behavior and intellect. Those who don't know about the past, are bound to repeat its mistakes in their future. Those who governed in the past are bound and determined to do everything in their power to continue governing in the future, and this is what brings us to this unfortunate discussion.

Thirty or fewer genes control for skin color.

How many tens of thousands of genes are implicated in central nervous system structure and function?

Is there any correlation between the small cluster of genes that controls for skin color - and is clearly the result of sexual selection* - and the other gene clusters among the tens of thousands implicated though as yet undiscovered which control for nervous system, metabolic, and immunological structure and function - all of which structuro-functional complexes effect intelligence and behaviour?

*(except in the United States with its very unique population genetics history);

It is this second vast and undocumented set of gene clusters that fascinate the racist elements of the U.S. Establishment - because they're looking for an excuse, a rationale for the evil and unjust social policies that have dominated American life, past, present, and by the looks of this undertaking - future.

Racial pseudo-scientists and their racialist supporters won't know enough to say anything scientifically credible for a very long time - because they won't have any idea which genes are involved and even whether these genes cluster. This is true of disease, healthcare and racially targetted medicine, and it's that many more time true of genetic determinism, behavior and IQ.

These facts notwithstanding, the NY Times and Slate.com have each published a series of articles drawing from the blogs of ill-informed people who do not warrant respectful attention in the case of the Times, and in the case of Slate - a conservative commentator draws from both racist blogs and a hardcore racist pseudo-scientist backed by strategic capital going back to the Nazi era.

Slate and the New York Times are supposed to know better. Because I know that they know better - this leads me to one inescapable conclusion. Decision makers at these two media giants have decided for whatever reason to editorially back the reintroduction of racist pseudo-science into the public and political discourse.

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