Race in Mind: Race, IQ, and Other Racisms

Rating:
Summary: Thinking Intelligently about Raciality
Review: In this clear, concise, and well-written book, Alland provides his readers with a measured, thoughtful and compelling critique of historical and contemporary theories about the supposed genetic basis for group (i.e., racial) differences in social achievement and intelligence. Alland begins by providing the reader with a refreshingly accessible treatment of evolutionary theory, Mendelian genetics, and their relevance to current discussions about the social construction of race. As a professor of cultural anthropology who also has substantive training in physical anthropology, Alland is able to problematize taken-for-granted assumptions that reify and naturalize racial categories with recourse to faulty understandings of natural selection, heritability, and speciation. His convincing explanation of race as "a flawed concept" helps to ground his critique of its usage in biased scientific and pseudo-scientific studies (by the likes of Carlton Coon, Arthur Jensen, Cyril Burt, Leonard Jeffries, J. P. Rushton and others) that purport to 'prove' (i) that there are statistically significant differences in intelligence between racial groups (for Burt, the IQ groupings were class-based) and (ii) that those differences are due to genetic (and not environmental) factors. With a careful reading of these highly publicized studies and their epistemological presuppositions, political biases and methodological flaws, Alland undeniably shows that these attempts at operationalizing, geneticizing and racializing intelligence say more about the political interests of these scientists than anything else. What makes this book so useful (I have advised some of my colleagues to think about including it in their courses on the anthropology of race) is that Alland is able to show the linkages between and among seemingly disparate spheres: afrocentricism, social constructionism, genetics, evolutionary psychology, physical anthropology, linguistic ideology, archeology and fossil-naming, biological determinism, culture of poverty arguments, sociobiology, and even census-categorization. Alland illustrates just how all of these fields/spheres have a role to play in the international drama that is irrational racial thinking. Moreover, Alland takes these scientists and their theories seriously enough to carefully delineate why environmental explanations still offer the most compelling ways to understand group differences in social performance.

Rating:
Summary: Why do we need race?!! A clean sweep of erroneous thinking
Review: It's interesting that universally we have lived with the idea of race and have identified individuals as belonging to a specific race yet positions taken by some leading experts in the fields of anthropology, genetics, and biology hold that race is biologically meaningless. I consider myself a liberal and like to think of myself as race-blind in my daily life but Alland's book shook my foundation, turned my head around and really caused me to question the validity of race. I was inspired to pursue Alland's notion that race is a false concept. I could find only two reasons for keeping the concept of race alive.
One reason is a controversy that exists in the medical community about the usefulness of race as a designation with regard to diseases and drug responses. I found an editorial published by The New England Journal of Medicine, Volume 344:1392-1393, Number 18, May 3, 2001 entitled Racial Profiling in Medical Research, by Dr. Robert S. Schwartz. Dr. Schwartz attacks the references to "race," "racial groups," "racial differences," and "ethnic background," that occur in two articles of that same issue of the Journal stating that these references offer no plausible biologic justification for making such distinctions. Dr. Schwartz maintains that attributing differences in a biologic end point to race is not only imprecise but also of no proven value in treating an individual patient. This is in contrast to Dr. Neil Risch, a leading population geneticist from the Department of Genetics at Stanford University School of Medicine, who argues in Categorization of Humans in Biomedical Research: genes, race and disease, Genome Biology, Volume 3, Issue 7, published July 1, 2002 that self-identified race is useful in understanding ethnic differences in disease and in the response to drugs. Dr. Risch views Dr. Schwartz's position as derived, not from an objective scientific perspective, but rather from historic and current inequities based on perceived racial identities and the resulting sensitivities in such debates. However, Dr. Richard S. Cooper, et al, in Race and Genomics, The New England Journal of Medicine 348:12, March 20, 2003, warns that promotion of a drug for a race-specific "niche market" could distract physicians from therapies for which unequivocal evidence of benefit already exists. Dr. Cooper states that there is no doubt some important biologic differences among populations and molecular techniques can help to define what those differences are. Some traits, such as skin color, vary in a strikingly systematic pattern. The inference does not follow, however, that genetic variation among human populations falls into racial categories or that race, as we currently define it, provides an effective system for summarizing that variation. The confused nature of this debate is apparent when we recognize that although everyone, from geneticists to lay persons, tends to use race as if it were a scientific category, with rare exceptions, no one offers a quantifiable definition of what a race is in genetic terms. So, it would be far better to identify and type the important biochemical/molecular markers rather than relying on the unscientific quantity of race. Alland's summarizing of the work that has been done in the past and relating it to current research is awesome.
The second reason for keeping the concept of race alive is in the area of discrimination in employment and, as in the U.S. Supreme Court's recent decision, for admission purposes into our universities. Alland quotes W.E.B. DuBois, "I very early got the idea that what I was going to do was prove to the world the Negroes were just like other people." Alland then writes, "Dichotomously, until we have full equality of opportunity, until the barriers of de facto racial segregation are broken down, and until racial stereotyping evaporates, we face the dilemma of continuing to recognize 'race' in order to eradicate." Beautiful! I wish everyone would read this book!

Rating:
Summary: Painless Treatment of a Difficult but Important Subject
Review: What I liked most about this book is that it allowed me finally to understand the argument that the races we think people are divided into don't really exist. This claim was always puzzling to me, since people obviously vary by skin color and facial features, for example. But Alland explains, about as clearly as possible, how there are many more genetic features of humans and that, if you looked at different ones, you'd get completely different "racial" groupings. This seems like an important lesson.
Race in Mind is also pretty even-handed. Alland goes after a professor of black studies whose ideas about "blacks" and "whites" are as scientifically bogus as those of the more typical (i.e., "white") racists.
The book has an extended and very interesting discussion about racial differences in IQ test achievement. I came away completely skeptical that these differences have anything to do with genes.
I found the historical discussion of early theories about the evolution of races less interesting. On the whole, though, the book is a very readable consideration of questions that often come up in debates about our social problems.