2008 Woodie Awards
Culture or race?
Jon Petersen, Collegian Columnist
Issue date: 12/4/08 Section: Editorial / Opinion
The history of race and racism in America is so intertwined with its national identity that whenever demographical differences between races exist and come into question, whether in income, intelligence, loan approval rates or crime statistics, race and racism can always be used as a firm position on which to argue for the causes.
There tends to be two historically significant reasons for why race has been seen as an important factor in such things; particularly discrimination and natural inferiority.
The former idea, that minorities did not have the ability to perform at the same level as whites by nature, was predominant in the beginning of the 20th century. It was during the latter part of the century that outright discrimination of minorities by whites became a more accepted principle.
To even scratch the surface of the claims that race plays the predominant role in such matters as genetics is to show some of the fatal flaws in it. European immigrants to the United States in the early 20th century tended to score lowly on the IQ tests during the time of the First World War, on the same levels as white mountaineer children.
In the oncoming decades and generations, it was the case that the descendants of Jewish immigrants tended to show dramatically different test results, along with greater increases in net worth and education, during a time when they also had very little intermarriage.
The Jews have started out at relatively similar levels to the other immigrant groups, but progressed more quickly than others. Such a difference cannot be described as because of race, and as such it is at least equally as hard to see it as a result of racism.
If racism were to have stopped merely according to the country the people were born in, then there shouldn't have been such differences between the groups. The differences between the people then would most likely be based on culture, while the skills, practices and behaviors of those groups, with race playing little, if any role.
There tends to be two historically significant reasons for why race has been seen as an important factor in such things; particularly discrimination and natural inferiority.
The former idea, that minorities did not have the ability to perform at the same level as whites by nature, was predominant in the beginning of the 20th century. It was during the latter part of the century that outright discrimination of minorities by whites became a more accepted principle.
To even scratch the surface of the claims that race plays the predominant role in such matters as genetics is to show some of the fatal flaws in it. European immigrants to the United States in the early 20th century tended to score lowly on the IQ tests during the time of the First World War, on the same levels as white mountaineer children.
In the oncoming decades and generations, it was the case that the descendants of Jewish immigrants tended to show dramatically different test results, along with greater increases in net worth and education, during a time when they also had very little intermarriage.
The Jews have started out at relatively similar levels to the other immigrant groups, but progressed more quickly than others. Such a difference cannot be described as because of race, and as such it is at least equally as hard to see it as a result of racism.
If racism were to have stopped merely according to the country the people were born in, then there shouldn't have been such differences between the groups. The differences between the people then would most likely be based on culture, while the skills, practices and behaviors of those groups, with race playing little, if any role.
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Ed Cutting
posted 12/04/08 @ 10:32 AM EST
The academic in me must object a few things that were glossed over. First, there was not one unique country/country or even race in Africa. So when people came from Africa to America these were peoples of different races. (Continued…)
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