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> This leads to the view that "black people were more criminal" -- no, there are no such thing as "black people". I am confused by this sentence. If there is n

> This leads to the view that "black people were more criminal" -- no, there are no such thing as "black people". I am confused by this sentence. If there is no such thing as black people — and I can understand the reasoning that would lead to this conclusion, — then what is meant by the daily application of the word (black students, black Americans, black and brown community, etc.)

mjburgess 5y ago
There is such a thing as ancestry (coming from a similar historical geographical location) which leads to common features (eg., skin color). However, eg., if you take all people labelled "black" around the world, you'd find as different ancestries between them as-if you had taken "black and white". ie., the label "black" isn't a particular ancestry, nor even similar ones. "Black" is something invented somewhat recently (early modern period) which was initially a hypothesis about there being human subspecies and there being such a thing as a "black people". This hypothesis is false, and it really took knowing about evolution in the 19th C., and genetics in the 20th, to see why. Today then "black" is many things but perhaps best understood as a social caste which has been historically invented and reinforced by state institutions and latterly by culture. It's a bit like "working class" and a bit like "tall people" and a bit like "a nationality". In the sense its blends a political grouping (class) with a physical signifier (skin color), and it is something its people identify with ("I am X"). The key issue here is that there can be no "racial dataset", in that as a scientific hypothesis races don't exist -- and as an ethical constraint, we ought never act as-if they did. So we have these dual constraints on our theory-building and on our data collection: a scientific one, and an ethical one. These are not constraints that can ever be deduced (induced etc.) from a merely statistical analysis of data -- and thus (2) is not (1). (Consider, eg., that by the state creating and reinforcing a "black race" it induces commonalities between people labelled by that category. So if you actually collect data on "black vs. white" in any country, you will find "the categories you are looking for" -- precisely because youve induced these differences. It is in this sense statistics alone cannot tell you anything.)

mjburgess 5y ago

There is such a thing as ancestry (coming from a similar historical geographical location) which leads to common features (eg., skin color). However, eg., if you take all people labelled "black" around the world, you'd find as different ancestries between them as-if you had taken "black and white". ie., the label "black" isn't a particular ancestry, nor even similar ones. "Black" is something invented somewhat recently (early modern period) which was initially a hypothesis about there being human subspecies and there being such a thing as a "black people". This hypothesis is false, and it really took knowing about evolution in the 19th C., and genetics in the 20th, to see why. Today then "black" is many things but perhaps best understood as a social caste which has been historically invented and reinforced by state institutions and latterly by culture. It's a bit like "working class" and a bit like "tall people" and a bit like "a nationality". In the sense its blends a political grouping (class) with a physical signifier (skin color), and it is something its people identify with ("I am X"). The key issue here is that there can be no "racial dataset", in that as a scientific hypothesis races don't exist -- and as an ethical constraint, we ought never act as-if they did. So we have these dual constraints on our theory-building and on our data collection: a scientific one, and an ethical one. These are not constraints that can ever be deduced (induced etc.) from a merely statistical analysis of data -- and thus (2) is not (1). (Consider, eg., that by the state creating and reinforcing a "black race" it induces commonalities between people labelled by that category. So if you actually collect data on "black vs. white" in any country, you will find "the categories you are looking for" -- precisely because youve induced these differences. It is in this sense statistics alone cannot tell you anything.)