racist rhetoric

[Gabriella Modan]

On Fri, 8 Sep 2000, Larry Gorbet wrote:

> Ronald Kephart <rkephart at unf.edu> wrote:
>
> >And in any case, Celso has beaten me to to the
> >punch with the above, which for me defines the root of the problem I
> >have with much of evolutionary psychology, and indeed much of
> >psychology in general.
> >
> >The hypotheses that these folks construct about "race" and
> >"intelligence," or "race" and whatever, seem to always accept folk
> >categories ("race," "intelligence") as analytic categories. For
> >example, they take "black" and "white" to be real biological
> >entities, they look at some "IQ" test scores, and conclude that they
> >have found genetically determined differences between genetically
> >determined groups on a genetically determined trait.
>
> This characterization of evolutionary psychology is outrageously
> inaccurate.  What Kephart has done is take the views of a *minority*
> of evolutionary psychologists and attributed them to all.  In other
> words, he has very inaccurately stereotyped, presumably based on
> those who get the most media publicity?  Of the half dozen or so
> folks at my institution I might call evolutionary psychologists (in
> departments of anthropology, biology, and psychology), exactly zero
> accept, for example, the biological category of "race" for modern
> humans.
>
> If anybody out there believes what Kephart has written, what evidence
> supports your view?
>
> - Larry
>

Maybe Ron's characterization of evolutionary psychology is inaccurate (not
knowing any evolutionary psychologists, I can't speak to this issue), but
it is *exactly* the characterization which is promoted in Brown's article
on Salon.com.  So Larry, why do you go out of your way to criticize Ron's
characterization, while you neglect to raise this criticism of the article
itself, or respond to Celso's original critique of the article, since
you've been encouraging us to participate in this discussion based on what
the article says.  As John, Rudi, Celso and Ron have already stated, the
text we've been discussing promotes both stereotypes and inaccurate
science (race as a biological/genetic category), without deconstructing
either later on.  Furthermore, Ian's excerpting of the beginning of the
article in his message on this list in order to prompt us to read the
article is the same marketing strategy that Brown, the article author,
uses.  Given that the questions ("Are Blacks genetically programmed...")
are problematized neither in Ian's message nor in Brown's article itself,
to my mind reading the article doesn't provide a particularly different
viewpont from which to engage this discussion, so I don't think whether or
not someone's read the article turns out to be relevant to the points
we're discussing.

Galey Modan